The memory management improvements will indirectly cause some performance improvements but its not fully multi-core yet. The full list of detailed changes are here: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/478243/page/1

I also have to ask this.  Being a modder of this game for the past 8 years (has it been that long already???) this has always been an issue, and what holds mods like 7DS and other huge mods back from their full potential.  Mods have kept the shelf life of Sins going and going, with players actually buying the game just to play the mods (yes I have proof).  

Having multi-core support and bigger than a 4GB ram limit in 2016 is A MUST.  Sins needs to compete with all the AAA titles being released these days, with insane graphics and the latest DirectX support.  We modders, and gamers are still passionate about Sins, and we want to see it keep going and going.  There is NOTHING like Sins right now, not exactly.  The new "space" games released this year have tried, come close, but not the same mechanics.  Sins needs to up the game to BURY these other titles and keep its life going.

I am sure everyone who reads this agrees with me, the core game engine needs and refresh, and needs to be able to take advantage of today's PC technology.  Hopefully you are all working feverishly on this all these many years.  Talks of Sins 2 and the like have been flying for years now, so hopefully this happens somehow, either in a Sins 2, or another update or DLC.

Know this Blair, we are behind you, and will support you.  We love you guys and the game you have made...just keep it alive.  Also, that link you provided just takes you back to this thread again, so an updated link would be appreciated.

If I or my team can be of any help, in any way, don't hesitate to contact me.

DANMAN

Oh moderators are again active on this forum, seems to be we are finally moving towards Sins 2

I'll look into splitting it up into 3 options. The cost of running militia shouldn't be too high as they are less complicated than other units (computationally) but some people want to be able to pick and choose different features for each match anyways so I'll see what I can do.

Quoting Blair Fraser,

reply 5

The "yet" is not to suggest multi-core is coming but I'm not saying it isn't coming. All I can say we are actively working and looking at all the options to move the Sins franchise forward - technology and gameplay-wise. The memory management upgrade is just something I was able to easily integrate into the older code base and I had tested a fair bit. 

Thanks for the support AND thanks for the link fix

Blair, you are both a scholar and a gentleman.  My dealings with you have always been great.  It is SOOO good to have you and the team active again.

And I have one thing to say about your reply:  YEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just what you said, is enough to keep me going on, and I am sure other modders will agree.  Thank you, thank you for these words, and for even thinking about keeping this beloved franchise alive.  Just please remember us modders out here when you make changes / updates / life changing decisions

We're here to support you guys!

DANMAN

So I take it this DLC comes recommended? Its been a long time since I last played Sins but it seems tempting...

I've encountered a buglet with modding the Militia that can spawn via the Gameplay.constants.

If a frigate with strikecraft is added to the outlawSectorsData.spawnShips that unit will not create strikecraft if it's associated to a human player.

The AI Player outlaws appear to have the smarts to create strikecraft. 

I'm assuming their's some logic tied to how Players have to manually choose which strikecraft to build??? Is there any way to have outlaws associated with the player to automatically build strikecraft like AI player outlaws do?

Awesome 

I have to say that's perhaps the strangest modding request I've ever heard of.

Thanks I picked this DLC up before reading what it was.  I must say Soase is my favorite game of all time.  

Would it be possible to have the militia that spawn vary based on planet owner's race? For example, if a player is Advent and controls a rampant militia spawning planet, for the planet to spawn Advent ships instead of TEC ships. This would be helpful both for vanilla, as research benefits these ships and thus is biased towards the TEC, and for modders with crazy ideas.

A second request would be to have RuinPlanet buffInstantActionType be changed to one similar to ClearRecordedDamage and ChangePlayerIndexToNeutral. Here is an example of the existing AbilityRuinPlanet modified for such a change. The current version, while adding a function that was previously not possible, is nevertheless fairly limiting, as it can only be used in Ability files and not in Buff files.

(edit): sorry for the wall of text. That ended up way longer than I thought it would when I started hammering away at my keyboard

I did a lot of experimentation into the AI's surrender behavior years ago, and while I haven't repeated my tests in the latest version of Rebellion I have no reason to believe it's categorically changed. The reason I did those tests (besides my own curiosity) was because my experience was very different from the conventional wisdom: I find that the AI waits much too long to surrender and should have thrown in the towel considerably earlier.

In my tests I found that there are two factors that dominate the AI's surrender behavior: the size of your fleet, and the size of its fleet. Everything else doesn't seem to matter, or if it does the level of weighting is too low to be noticeable. Note that fleet size is determined by the amount of command used; the quality of those units, or even whether they are under construction does not factor in.

If you can keep your fleet size small enough, the AI will literally never surrender. As one of my tests I boxed in an AI on a dead asteroid while keeping my fleet very small and eliminated all of its units and structures while camping on that asteroid. It refused to surrender, and activities like colonizing more planets, increasing my income, researching technologies, and building starbases seemed to have no effect. I then started building units and the moment I queued up enough it surrendered. I've also seen this the other way around, particularly with cruel and vicious AI's, where the AI has a huge number of units queued up at its factories but since I'm killing them faster than it can build them the backlog of queued units just grows bigger and bigger. The AI will refuse to surrender in these cases (since its command usage is very large) but the moment you blast its factories or the colony hosting them it surrenders on the spot because it didn't actually have that many units.

Notably this behavior is irrespective of the size of the scenario, and seems to give more weight to absolute rather than relative difference in fleet size. Smaller scenarios with faster completion times tend to have smaller fleets, and with such small fleets the AI is incredibly stubborn and refuses to surrender well past the point at which it would have reasonable to do so. Meanwhile, on large multistar scenarios it will often throw in the towel just because it can't afford the size of fleet it wants. The AI's difficulty also plays a huge role; lower difficulty AI's are much more likely to fall into an economic death spiral due to upkeep and be unable to maintain the fleet size they want. Higher difficulty AI's, vicious particularly, seldom have this issue and are much less likely to surrender before they are beaten down to their last factories.

However, I took one more step in my analysis: I provoked dozens of AI surrenders in all kinds of different scenarios. Different difficulties, scenario sizes, game lengths, player counts, and strategies on my part. I also reloaded several of these to compare how different behavior on my part affected its surrender (fleet size was the only thing I found to matter). I checked the replays and looked at the AI's current position and evaluated whether surrender was reasonable. In every case, I found its position was unsalvageable. In fact, in almost every case it should have made its last stand long ago and it was well past the point of having any reasonable chance of turning around its losing position.

My verdict then was that the AI's surrender behavior was, if anything, a bit too conservative. The bigger issue was that the AI starts acting very timid when it's outgunned. This causes it retreat from its front-lines and simply cede territory to the player. While this isn't necessarily a bad move, the AI is relatively inflexible and has no realistic way of turning this sort of situation around. As it loses planets its economy suffers enormously (since the AI gets most of its income from tax and extractors) and as it retreats it often loses units to bombers, meanwhile it's constantly blowing cash on new starbases and replacing units. When the AI finally does surrender, it feels arbitrary. The AI doesn't die with a bang but a whimper because it just runs and runs until it finally surrenders because of how outgunned it is, when it really should have made its last stand long ago.

Overall, I can understand why the developers wouldn't do anything about this. AI's are complicated and there's every chance they could make things worse. Short of an option to remove surrender behavior altogether I don't see any reasonable course of action for them at this point. However, I do find it to be quite an interesting topic.