If you like Star Wars there's Requiem and Sins of a Galactic Empire. The former adds the Alliance and Empire while keeping vanilla gameplay and factions, while the latter is a total conversion (i.e. gets rid of the stock factions). There's also 7 Deadly Sins, which has the Empire along with several new factions and features. For Star Trek there's Sacrifice of the Angels 2, which is a total conversion, like SoGE.

The link Ryat posted is also a good one to look at.

Yeah, I did notice that there were 2 Star Wars mods.  Thanks for explaining the differences.

Does installing a total conversion mod affect the way the normal game plays?

If you mean in the context of the vanilla game, e.g. if you can play vanilla independently, then no mods do not effect the vanilla files and you can turn them on/off at a whim. If you mean the game's gameplay then yes, to an extent. Things like computer AI are very hardcoded and far beyond the reach of modders, and thus cannot be changed.

Yes, depending on the mod I'd say there are some pretty radical changes Zombie. The warhammer 40k mod got rid of shield mitigation, SoGE uses weapon ranges to completely rewrite the tactics book, it looks like Dawn of Victory is trying to implement a supply system among other things. We may not be able to completely overhaul culture but it doesn't take much for a Total Conversion to radically alter how the game plays.

Thus, if you like your standard Sins gameplay Requiem is probably the best Star Wars mod, if you want something really different that tries to fit the sometimes illogical mess of Star Wars cannon as best as possible, try SoGE. Or both of course.

To me those are all balance changes to the game and may or may not be construed as radical but I get what your saying. Basically all I'm saying is the total conversions may completely rebalance the game which in some cases even allows for different tactics as you noted but they still have the same core components of research labs, extractors, 3 resources named however (credits, metal, crystal), research mechanics, weapon and damage mechanics, etc. This in turn makes the mods easy to pickup and play because they all have a common core to them.

And from what I understand Dawn of Victory is only renaming core game components and balancing them differently from the core game which is cool and nothing I'm opposed to. Manpower=credit, Material=Metal, Depot=Extractor, Supply Base=Refinery. I think these changes will be pretty interesting to help differentiate the mod from it's siblings but doesn't really change the mechanics they are implemented on.

No, but IMO presentation and how you are encouraged to use those mechanics are far more important than the mechanics themselves. I do think some of these total conversions are sufficiently different to have a learning curve of their own, even if they are constructed from the same materials. After all, the vast majority of RTS games have research, a population cap, many have hero units, trade structures etc., but that doesn't mean you can pick up Sins and immediately know what you are doing after playing homeworld or starcraft.

A wise recommendation

As the person who implemented nearly the entirety of the resource model (and the damage model, and the research model...) I'd disagree. The system in DoV may have the same underpinnings, but its effect on gameplay is significantly different, for a variety of reasons:

- Resources serve entirely different roles. Resource collection in Sins revolved around pushing for specific planet types to fill the holes in your economy. DoV invasion is focused on territory control and to a lesser extent disrupting supply lines. For example, one of our maps has three players starting out in the middle on moon home planets, who then can take branching paths outward with a series of small moons with depots and a large defensible colonizable moon every 4 or so in. This means that if a player busts through the large moon's defenses, they can then shoot all the way up through to the next large moon and have effectively gained a significant production advantage.

- The black market has been entirely removed.

- Different resources drive different production. Industry is passive and allows you upgrades and basic frigate production, but materials are required for new ship production, first very little but later on much more significantly. The resource model punishes players who turtle, because depots are so prevalent and accessible, vs. having to colonize a planet and build extractors. Depots can also be stolen from enemy gravity wells - wiping out the local PDB and light shipyard and stationing a frigate or two around an enemy depot is a significant difference in time investment than bringing in siege vessels to bomb the shit out of it in vanilla.

We have no research labs or planet-based extractors and the 2-resource system + doctrine points, research mechanics, weapon and damage mechanics are unquestionably foreign vs. their Sins counterparts. I haven't played the LOGH mod but I've heard it's pretty different as well.