Quoting RespawnedTitanL10,
I don't see any Lua exposed in this game. Might have been a change of plans with that, e.g. the engine might support Lua, meaning it can be configured with Lua, but Lua wasn't used for Sins.
The entity files don't allow for Turing-complete computations within. You can call some of the predefined tests (i.e. defined in the C/C++ code) for conditionals, but you can't put arbitrary conditionals in the entity files and there's basically no looping within those either, except again for limited flavors like periodic actions.
I have some experience modding games that support Lua (DoW2 in particular), but there's a substantial difference in the number of units one typically has there vs. Sins. Implementing (or altering) even one ability that's used by a swarm of frigates, e.g. LRF cluster missiles via scripting like Lua could easily cause performance problems in a game like Sins.
This is incorrect unless you're talking about an individual entity file. Buff chains are very much Turing complete. While you can't do things in the traditional way, you can do anything you want if you're willing to be insane about it. You just have to build a virtual computer from scratch.
You've always been able to make logic gates (back in Vanilla, it was just stupidly complex, requiring IIRC seven buffs just to simulate a single transistor, let alone an actual gate). Back when they added actually allowed proper conditionals, things simplified a ton. At the bottom of this post is a picture of how to make logic gates with them. I've integrated logic gates into mods several times and even made a four bit adder once.
I've actually considered on several occasions writing a program that would offer a GUI for the creation of gratuitously complex buff chains. I won't for Sins I because it's too close to the end of its life cycle, but if Sins II uses the same buff system and doesn't allow scripting, I'd do it without question. Writing that adder was an absolute nightmare. It filled up two full sheets of notebook paper just to diagram the whole thing out before I started work on it. Such a program would have let me do it in about five minutes. It'd be about like this only with the ability to save the project and to export it as buff files.
EDIT: wow... that picture brings back memories... What makes me happiest about when I made that picture and the adder was that I made them before I'd ever taken a system architecture class, so I literally re-invented the computer from scratch without reference or help.
