Ascendancy After the ability and militia updates are finished, we'll be opening up a beta channel for live balancing - Updated Gladiator Art - Updated Secutor Art - Updated Endurance Art - Updated Nebula Art - Mesh point cleanup on Fruoro - Fixed an issue causing crashes at game start - Ability changes for Peltast (combine Emergency Shielding/Escape Velocity), Endurance (Comm Jammer Buffed), MC90 (Shield Aegis is passive), Resilient ability buffed, Altor repair reverted from AoE, Power to shields buffed for all ships, MC80B reflective shields buffed per level, Executor Fear Aura/Weapon Overload buffed (21 Abilities Remain to be Reworked)
Fall of the Republic - Planet selection events and name text finished (this is a more tedious thing than it sounds like) - Planets and traderoutes all set up for first GC (106 planets, no Hutt Space) - Scales and speeds adjusted for all infantry - Ground tactical camera adjusted
Imperial Civil War - Infantry (including civilians) all rescaled, speed adjusted - Fixed TIE Crawler driftiness - Nebula & Endurance art updated - Espo Walker ingame - Grumby given a Bulwark III for CSA - Hapan pop caps fixed - Camera adjusted for ground combat
In this series of updates, we're going to look beyond what's immediately planned for 2.3 and talk about some of those broader goals for different elements of the mod. To start us off we'll be taking a look at two related areas of the mod which offer some interesting possibilities but remain underexplored- the Unknown Regions and the Empire of the Hand.
While the main focus of Imperial Civil War is the collapse of the Empire into its various successor states (including the New Republic) as they attempted to reunite or establish themselves as the main galactic power, part of what we attempt to do with our mods is represent the broader galactic situation and allow people to explore that as much as possible, with as many different groups as possible- essentially, we try to approach with as much of the Total War or Europa Universalis/Crusader Kings/Hearts of Iron style as the engine will allow us. Although it doesn't receive as much attention in the various works that make up the EU, and in-universe it isn't explored as much, the Unknown Regions make up a significant portion of that galaxy. Within the mod we currently only cover that via the Empire of the Hand which, while being an interesting group in many ways, doesn't represent the entirety of what was going on in the region during this period. In fact, they spent most of their time busy dealing with the various threats within the Unknown Regions, while in the mod their only option is to immediately invade the Known Galaxy. This is an area which we've always wanted to expand on, and it's something we're going to look to do in future releases. The Empire of the Hand as a faction, while some aspects are interesting or unique, also have a lot of rough edges (to put it nicely) and need a lot of work to bring them up to par, which we'll talk about first.
Ssi-Ruuvi ships in Thrawn's Revenge II: Ascendancy
The Empire of the Hand "The Empire that Senior Captain Thrawn is carving into the evil that pervades our worlds is not the Empire you chose to leave. His is an Empire of justice and dignity for all beings. His Empire is one we gladly serve. One we are willing to die for." - Vaantaar
As a faction, the Hand offer some unique and interesting units, but there are also many places where they currently fall flat. For one thing, since they tend to have some of the oldest models, a lot of their units need and will be getting some level of visual upgrade to bring them into line with the newer assets. Since the hardest parts of making their units tends to be coming up with a suitable design more so than the actual modeling, instead of having a specific release dedicated to updating them like we've been doing or will be doing with the other factions, their updates will happen across a few different releases. In 2.3, we will also finally be releasing their Intego Battlecruiser, which, at 2200 meters is the largest ship in their fleet. We were originally hoping to put it into 2.2 (and it can be used in current versions of Ascendancy, our Sins of a Solar Empire mod where you can see some of this content already) but we felt like its design still needed a lot of work. The current version, before the updates, can be seen below- the general shape will be remaining, but a lot of details have changed since those pictures were posted. Final pictures should hopefully be coming soon. On ground, every unit will be redesigned, and most importantly, rebalanced. Ground as a whole is being rebalanced and reworked in the mod in 2.3, however in 2.2 there are a few units in the EotH, especially the Megamaser Tank, which remain obscenely overpowered. In 2.3 we're rebalancing every part of ground combat, so that will all change, but they need art updates as well. Unlike with their space roster, their ground roster redesign is one we hope to do all at once; this is currently planned for 2.4, but specifics may change. Overall the roles for their units will remain the same, but we'll be bringing them away from the Lego Tanks aesthetics they currently tend to have.
While there are plenty of other story or research mechanics we'd like to add or flesh out more for the Empire of the Hand, something else we will be working on with their unit updates is nailing down exactly where their units are coming from, which will be more important as we flesh out the Unknown Regions as a whole. The Empire of the Hand comes from a few different backgrounds- Imperial, Chiss, local designs, and combinations of those. The units in their buildable roster aren't directly Imperial in origin, so we'll be trying to group the rest of their roster into the other categories. Some will be labelled as designs coming directly from the Chiss Ascendancy (as many assets and personnel were funneled directly to the Hand from them), some as designs made by the Hand itself or one of the various member species, and some as the fusion of Imperial tech with another one of those groups (this one is more straightforward- for example, the Clawcraft and Star Destroyer variants like the Chaf and Ascendancy).
The Intego as it currently appears in Ascendancy
The Unknown Regions
"The gulfs of space are not home to us and neither are the barren worlds. The worlds of fire and the worlds of ice are not home to us. Where oxygen burns and water flows, where carbon bonds and ozone protects—there we plant our roots. The seed of our species is fertile; all we require is the soil in which to plant it." - The Keeramak
While the Empire of the Hand currently starts off controlling everything in the Unknown Regions in the mod, they were in fact trying to combat various threats of different sizes the entire time. It's impossible to represent every little group they would have come across due to lack of information in universe and a limitation to what can put put in game, but we do intend to try to put in some of the more major players in the region at least- ideally, given enough time and resources, we'd like to have entire galactic conquest scenarios based within the Unknown Region. Because these updates are about covering future content, here's a quick look at the major groups we'd like to represent, focusing on those which had bigger impacts or the most opportunity for fleshing out. Keep in mind, all of this is only prospective, and not necessarily set in stone; certainly not content being worked on immediately, though we do have some idea of different phases in which they could be implemented. The ability to do the factions and species listed below will depend on resources as we complete stuff, and keep in mind that being represented doesn't necessarily mean being their own faction- some would be, but some will also be represented through the Independent Forces faction (though with suitable assets) similar to how the more minor Warlords currently are in 2.2 (ie Antemeridias, Elrood). Some may even be in the running to be playable under the right circumstances.
Chiss Asendancy - The official government of the Chiss, based on Csilla, and arguably the most influential group in the Unknown Regions.
The Killik Colony - An insectoid hive-minded species which originated on Alderaan and migrated long ago to the Unknown Regions.
Ssi-Ruuvi Imperium - A faction of war-mongering religious fanatic reptiles
Vagaari Empire - Slaving Nomads
Nuso Esva - A warlord whose forces became one of the first targets of Thrawn's campaigns into the Unknown Regions, on the edge of the known galaxy, and connected parts of Thrawn's Unknown Regions conquests to the known galaxy.
Again, this isn't quite coming in 2.3, just a rough outline of some of the ideas we have for fleshing out parts of the mod which currently aren't especially fleshed out. All of it ultimately depends on resources. Some, like the Chiss and Ssi-Ruuvi, we have some considerable amount of work done on already, so they're more likely to show in some form sooner than later. That will do it for our first Vision of the Future news post, all of this will be expanded a bit more as we get closer to the specifics, so hope you're looking forward to that. As usual, I'm running preview playthroughs regularly on my YouTube channel, Corey Loses if you want to see some of the changes in action as they happen. The current Greater Maldrood playthrough is currently wrapping up, and I'll be moving onto the CSA playthrough at the start of December.
We've shown off a little bit in terms of feature changes being made in 2.3, but it's time for us to take a look at the new playable faction being added to the mod, the Corporate Sector Authority
As always, if you prefer to see these news posts in video form with some (very early) footage of the CSA and their units in action, I've done a video version of the news post on Corey Loses:
Leader: Executive Officer (ExO) Capital: Etti IV
Historical Overview
"CSA attorneys can find a loophole even when there isn't a loop." - Klin-Fa Gi
The Corporate Sector originally began as an administrative division at the end of the Tingel Arm within the Galactic Republic, 490 years before Yavin to mediate disputes between corporations and the galactic governing body. This allowed corporations to acquire large swaths of space which were allegedly devoid of sentient life, though this often proved to be untrue and caused many armed conflicts between the original inhabitants and the new corporations. During the Clone Wars, the Corporate Sector would largely support the Confederacy, however some companies remained at least nominally loyal to the Republic. This group formed the Galactic Corporate Policy League, which supported Palpatine in his bid for power within the Republic. Over its existence, the Corporate Sector seemed to gain some increasing level of self-determination, with some level of independence having been gained in fact if not in law by 27 BBY. Under the Empire, the CSA would buy up significant amount of Clone Wars surplus, including the entirety of the Corporate Alliance's remaining assets and other CIS equipment. It was also expanded to up to 30,000 systems under the Empire, and soon after the Declaration of the New Order by Palpatine, the Corporate Sector officially organized into the Corporate Sector Authority, which was granted a significant level of autonomy even under the Empire. Many citizens who tried to flee the Empire, hoping for a better life in the CSA would quickly find that the CSA could be equally draconian. After Palpatine's death, the CSA attempted to remain neutral and sell to both Imperial and New Republic clients, although many in the New Republic felt the CSA to be as bad as the Empire, or worse. Despite these attempts, the CSA found themselves under the thumb of Warlord Zsinj for the year before his death, and Grand Admiral Makati died fighting to keep the CSA territory under Imperial control.
The CSA in Thrawn's Revenge
"The Corporate Sector is completely by the book, and when they feel they are right, according to that book, there is no stopping them." -Reen Irana
While we've added several new playable factions over the years, all of these have been Imperial splinter groups since the first release with the New Republic and Empire of the Hand. The CSA is the first of a few upcoming factions which breaks that trend and offers the chance for us to work on not just a set of more unique rosters, but also opens us up for a few other new gameplay mechanics within these playable factions which we'll be going over as we continue with previews. With the CSA, this will generally mean some some different interactions with corporations and mechanics based upon their leadership. As a military-surplus based faction there is still quite a bit of overlap with the existing factions in their space roster, however on land an entirely new roster within the mod has been added using a mix of the Clone Wars surplus and the equipment of the Espos, a very well-armed police force within the CSA Security Division. The CSA will be playable in several existing galactic conquests, including all eras of the era progressive GCs, as well as being the focus of another more local galactic conquest, focusing on their conquest by Zsinj, as well as the events leading to Makati's death.
Thrawn's Revenge has always focused on making our own assets rather than using free released or otherwise collected assets, but many of the assets for the CSA are being developed in cooperation with Phoenix Rising, another EaW mod made by one of the Thrawn's Revenge developers, Evilbobthebob. If you want to check out the CSA in that mod, you can do so by clicking here.
Roster Overview
(Green denotes the unit is fully implemented ingame, yellow that it's nearly done)
Space Unit Roster Lucrehulk | Invincible | Bulwark Mk III | Bulwark Mk I Recusant | MTC | Gladiator | Neutron Star | Dreadnaught | Dauntless | Victory-I | Victory-II Etti Light Cruiser | ILH-KK Citadel | Gozanti | Nebulon-B | Marauder Authority IRD | Preybird | Authority IRD-A | #2 Warpod | Mankvim-814 | T-Wing | Skipray Blastboat
We've shown off a little bit in terms of feature changes being made in 2.3, but it's time for us to take a look at the new playable faction being added to the mod, the Corporate Sector Authority
As always, if you prefer to see these news posts in video form with some (very early) footage of the CSA and their units in action, I've done a video version of the news post on Corey Loses:
Leader: Executive Officer (ExO) Capital: Etti IV
Historical Overview
"CSA attorneys can find a loophole even when there isn't a loop." - Klin-Fa Gi
The Corporate Sector originally began as an administrative division at the end of the Tingel Arm within the Galactic Republic, 490 years before Yavin to mediate disputes between corporations and the galactic governing body. This allowed corporations to acquire large swaths of space which were allegedly devoid of sentient life, though this often proved to be untrue and caused many armed conflicts between the original inhabitants and the new corporations. During the Clone Wars, the Corporate Sector would largely support the Confederacy, however some companies remained at least nominally loyal to the Republic. This group formed the Galactic Corporate Policy League, which supported Palpatine in his bid for power within the Republic. Over its existence, the Corporate Sector seemed to gain some increasing level of self-determination, with some level of independence having been gained in fact if not in law by 27 BBY. Under the Empire, the CSA would buy up significant amount of Clone Wars surplus, including the entirety of the Corporate Alliance's remaining assets and other CIS equipment. It was also expanded to up to 30,000 systems under the Empire, and soon after the Declaration of the New Order by Palpatine, the Corporate Sector officially organized into the Corporate Sector Authority, which was granted a significant level of autonomy even under the Empire. Many citizens who tried to flee the Empire, hoping for a better life in the CSA would quickly find that the CSA could be equally draconian. After Palpatine's death, the CSA attempted to remain neutral and sell to both Imperial and New Republic clients, although many in the New Republic felt the CSA to be as bad as the Empire, or worse. Despite these attempts, the CSA found themselves under the thumb of Warlord Zsinj for the year before his death, and Grand Admiral Makati died fighting to keep the CSA territory under Imperial control.
The CSA in Thrawn's Revenge
"The Corporate Sector is completely by the book, and when they feel they are right, according to that book, there is no stopping them." -Reen Irana
While we've added several new playable factions over the years, all of these have been Imperial splinter groups since the first release with the New Republic and Empire of the Hand. The CSA is the first of a few upcoming factions which breaks that trend and offers the chance for us to work on not just a set of more unique rosters, but also opens us up for a few other new gameplay mechanics within these playable factions which we'll be going over as we continue with previews. With the CSA, this will generally mean some some different interactions with corporations and mechanics based upon their leadership. As a military-surplus based faction there is still quite a bit of overlap with the existing factions in their space roster, however on land an entirely new roster within the mod has been added using a mix of the Clone Wars surplus and the equipment of the Espos, a very well-armed police force within the CSA Security Division. The CSA will be playable in several existing galactic conquests, including all eras of the era progressive GCs, as well as being the focus of another more local galactic conquest, focusing on their conquest by Zsinj, as well as the events leading to Makati's death.
Thrawn's Revenge has always focused on making our own assets rather than using free released or otherwise collected assets, but many of the assets for the CSA are being developed in cooperation with Phoenix Rising, another EaW mod made by one of the Thrawn's Revenge developers, Evilbobthebob. If you want to check out the CSA in that mod, you can do so by clicking here.
Roster Overview
(Green denotes the unit is fully implemented ingame, yellow that it's nearly done)
Space Unit Roster Lucrehulk | Invincible | Bulwark Mk III | Bulwark Mk I Recusant | MTC | Gladiator | Neutron Star | Dreadnaught | Dauntless | Victory-I | Victory-II Etti Light Cruiser | ILH-KK Citadel | Gozanti | Nebulon-B | Marauder Authority IRD | Preybird | Authority IRD-A | #2 Warpod | Mankvim-814 | T-Wing | Skipray Blastboat
Before we begin, as usual I've posted a video version of this update on Corey Loses, covering both this update and the CIS heroes in the last one. Fall of the Republic preview playthroughs will also soon start joining the Imperial Civil War ones currently going on on the channel:
It's been some time since the last FotR update, but while most of the public posts have been about Imperial Civil War, there's been a lot of work going on in the background with Fall of the Republic. In this update, we'll be going over the core hero roster for the Galactic Republic in 0.5. Our goal with this version was to get a relatively similarly-sized core hero roster for the CIS and Republic- there'll be more to come later (including more Jedi), but these are either the more major players in the time period, or they fill a particular niche that the faction needs and otherwise lacks. Part of our focus is also to expand some of the standard fleet elements of the time, which tend to receive a bit less focus next to all the Jedi, so you'll see a few more obscure captains and admirals in both factions, especially characters who would later play a much larger role in the Imperial or Post-Endor period, keeping connections between Fall of the Republic and Imperial Civil War.
"For the Order and the Republic, I will give anything and everything, including my life." - Mace Windu
There are probably two specific areas where people will notice characters missing which they may want, specifically Jedi and Clones since they tend to involve more work. Again, several of these will likely be added in future versions, but the way we chose who's there is pretty straightforward- whichever characters are most universally present, or prominent, or would appear most in potential story missions got added. For Jedi, we also ran a poll on our forums for three of the slots we felt had a bit more leeway, and picked the three most popular from that, which are the last three heroes on this list. They probably won't surprise anyone.
Palpatine - Galactic, Ground (Post-Order 66) Also known as Darth Sidious, or The Senate, Palpatine was the final Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic before his reorganization of the government into the Galactic Empire. He began consolidating his power by orchestrating the invasion of Naboo and ensuing Separatist Crisis and Clone Wars as a whole from behind the scenes, secretly leading both belligerents.
Yoda - Ground Despite his small stature, Master Yoda was one of the most wise and powerful Jedi in galactic history. He served as the Grand Master of the Jedi Order at the time of the Clone Wars, and was one of the few Jedi who managed to survive Order 66, despite his failure to kill Palpatine in a duel in the Senate chambers.
Mace Windu - Ground, Space: Delta 7/Eta 2 Mace Windu was one of the most skilled swordsmen in the Jedi Order, having pioneered his own variant on the seventh form of lightsaber combat, which he called Vaapad, and remained the only practitioner of the form who did not fall to the Dark Side. He led the Jedi at the Battle of Geonosis, and served with distinction in many battles of the Clone Wars
Obi-Wan - Ground, Space: Delta 7/Eta 2 The Padawan of Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi was distinguished and accomplished Jedi who served with a dedication to the principles of the Order throughout his life. Despite an aversion for fighting and a famously calm demeanor, he was a skilled warrior who throughout his career fought each of Sidious' Sith apprentices, managing to best both Darth Maul and Darth Vader, but being held back by an apparent and understandable inability to recognize that falling into giant shafts and lava after the removal of multiple limbs are not necessarily fatal experiences.
Anakin - Ground, Space: Azure Angel/Eta 2 Anakin Skywalker was arguably the strongest Jedi to serve in the Clone Wars in terms of raw power, however he was often held back by his impulsive and rash nature. In addition to his Jedi powers, he was an exceptional pilot and mechanic.
Plo Koon - Ground, Space: Blade of Dorin A veteran of the Stark Hyperspace War before serving in the Clone Wars, Plo Koon was also the Jedi Master who discovered the young Togruta Ahsoka Tano, eventual Padawan of Akanin Skywalker. He was killed during that business on Cato Neimoidia.
Delta Squad - Ground Comprised of Boss, Fixer, Scorch and Sev, Delta Squad was an elite commando squad which undertook dangerous and specialized missions for the Grand Army of the Republic. Although a mission to Kashyyyk ended in the disappearance of Sev, Delta Squad continued to serve into the Imperial period.
Wulff Yularen - Space: Venator-class Star Destroyer, Resolute Although his primary interest was in the field of intelligence gathering, Wullf Yularen served in the Clone Wars as the Admiral in charge of Anakin Skywalker's fleet, despite a strong difference in style between the two as commanding officers. Following the Clone Wars, Yularen remained in service to the Galactic Empire, serving primarily in the Imperial Security Bureau, and was ultimately killed in the destruction of the Death Star.
Gilad Pellaeon - Space: Acclamator-class Assault Ship, Leveler Gilad Pellaeon served for seven decades in the Republic and Imperial navy, beginning his career in the Republic's Judicial Forces and eventually becoming the captain of a combat-oriented Acclamator variant, the Leveler, during the Clone Wars. though he was a talented naval officer, he was primarily prevented from promotion to the admiralty because of a tendency to womanize. After Palpatine's death, he served various Imperial leaders until finally and reluctantly taking the mantle for himself, leading the Empire into peace talks with the New Republic.
Wilhuff Tarkin - Space: Venator-class Star Destroyer A member of the rich Tarkin family from the Eriadu aristocracy, Wilhuff Tarkin's family was responsible for early pushes to create a united Republic military, a movement lead several decades before the Clone Wars by Ranulph Tarkin. Wilhuff used his significant economic and political clout within the Seswanna Sector as governor to support Palpatine, and served as an Admiral in the Clone Wars before becoming the first Imperial Moff.
Terrinald Screed - Space: Victory-class Star Destroyer, Arlionne An early political ally of Senator Palpatine, Screed was a commander in the Judicial Forces prior to the Clone Wars where he lost an eye fighting pirates. During the Clone Wars, he was the commander of Victory Fleet, a fleet comprised of the first Victory-class Star Destoyers and following their victory over the Bulwark Fleet of Dua Ningo, he became the commander of the Coruscant Home Fleet as Vice Admiral.
Jan Dodonna - Space: Victory-class Star Destroyer, Victory Prior to the Clone Wars, Dodonna fought within the Sttark Hyperspace War. As a captain in the Clone Wars, he commanded one of the Victory Fleet taskforces opposite Terrinald Screed. He was particularly adept at managing logistics and siege tactics.
Jace Dallin - Space: Dreadnaught-class Heavy Cruiser, Mersel Kebir Another veteran of the Stark Hyperspace War, Jace Dallin eventually became the commanding officer of the Rendili Home Defense Fleet. He fought against his planetary government's attempts to cooperate with the Confederacy during their occupation of Rendili, and following the formation of the Empire, was executed by Darth Vader for his loyalty to the Jedi.
Shoan Killian - Space: Venator-class Star Destroyer, Endurance Killian was a traditional Admiral who was captured by the Separatists in a surprise attack on his flagship during a visit from the Clone Youth Brigade. Although he tried to reason with the young Boba Fett to secure his release, he was eventually rescued by the Jedi.
Barton Cobourn - Space: Venator-class Star Destroyer, Triumphant, Arquitens-class Light Cruiser, Hand of Justice Coburn was a highly disciplined Admiral within Republic Navy during the Clone Wars, where he was paired with Plo Koon. He, Koon and Clone Commander Wolffe were responsible for the planning and execution of some of the most dangerous and difficult missions of the war, including operations at Lola Sayu and Kadavo.
Poll Winners:
Kit Fisto - Ground, Space: Delta 7 A Jedi Master who joined the Jedi Council during the Clone Wars for his exemplary service, Kit Fisto was a Nautolan from Glee Anselm who engaged in lightsaber combat with several strong enemies throughout the war, including General Grievous and Assaj Ventress, both of whom few survived encounters with other than Skywalker and Kenobi. He was part of the task force led by Mace Windu to arrest the Chancellor, where he was killed when the Chancellor revealed himself to be a Sith Lord.
Shaak Ti - Ground A Togruta from the planet Shili who had joined the Jedi Council in the years before the Clone Wars, Shaak Ti participated in many key battles in the Clone Wars, and during the war was responsible for killing one of count Dooku's Dark acolytes, Artel Darc and survived a duel with General Grievous. She was responsible for the protection of the Jedi Temple, and managed to escape it during Darth Vader's attack.
Aayla Secura - Ground, Space: Delta 7/Eta 2 A Twi'lek trained by Quinlan Vos, both her and her master survived their own falls to the dark side before returning to the light and earning her knighthood. She was one of the Jedi who survived Geonosis before going on to serve in various battles in the Clone Wars, most notably Felucia, where she was executed by her forces during Order 66.
That's it for today's post. As I said near the start, we have some other options and idea for heroes for future releases, so if you notice someone missing, feel free to suggest them, but don't worry- much like ICW, our goal is to approach the mod in smaller chunks to make sure we're able to do releases in reasonable timeframes. Our next news post will be this Friday, looking at the CSA faction profile for Imperial Civil War.
I have started a new playthrough on Corey Loses taking a look at the Greater Maldrood as we make our way through the changes coming to 2.3. We'll mostly be looking at some changes to the galactic map and updates to ground balancing as we go, and checking out some new art assets along the way! New episodes will be up Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays.
For our first feature video preview of 2.3 (it'll also apply in Fall of the Republic: Thrawn's Revenge III ) , we're taking a look at the new ability to select starting eras for progressive galactic conquest scenarios.
Every Monday, on Corey Loses, we'll be doing live mod work at 5pm EST, tonight's will be more work on the era selection system, setting up the remaining progressive GCs to use the new feature.
Sins of a Solar Empire received an official update which broke the main menu, so we've released a quick patch to address that. Thanks to Gul/STAIII for showing me what was different.
While not a massive change, I've started going through and adjusting some of the stats on fighters. Here's a quick look at what some of the upcoming fighter stats are for ICW2.3, FotR 0.5 and some other stuff. A few are missing since I only took one screenshot and it's a pretty long list.
Like I did throughout the development of 2.2, I'll be doing preview playthroughs showing what's going on with Imperial Civil War 2.3 (and Fall of the Republic ) on my YouTube channel, Corey Loses. The first of these series has started, looking at the start of 2.3 development and the Eriadu Authority. The first episode can be found here:
With 2.2.5 wrapped, we've started to move onto the next full version of Imperial Civil War (and Ascendancy / Fall of the Republic, but their time will come). As we ramp up production, we thought we'd give a brief overview of what the main focuses are in 2.3. As always, if you prefer video versions of news posts, you can see that just below. The information in the written and video versions is the same.
...Priorities...
"Neither Syndic Mitth'ras'safis nor I is unsympathetic toward Commander Mitth'raw'nuruodo. We wish only to protect him from his own excesses" - Admiral Ar'alani to Jorj Car'das
While we're happy with the results of 2.2, we know there are a lot of areas we still can and want to significantly improve it, across the board. One of the main things we decided in 2.2's development, however, is that once we had it as a basis, we would need to do a better job prioritizing how and when we would approach each aspect in order to avoid the time it took for the complete overhaul that 2.2 turned out to be. 2.2 took over 4 years, but it also involved a significant reworking of every galactic conquest, a ton of the art, and basically everything else. Rather than tackle everything at once, with 2.3 and subsequent versions, we intend to choose smaller areas to focus on, and for broader projects, to split them up into milestones so we can have slightly smaller but more focused and frequent releasesl. 2.2 also involved a lot of reworking behind the scenes to make certain things a lot easier to work on and more modular, so a good amount of that 2.2 development time should continue to pay off into 2.3, Fall of the Republic and any other future versions or projects.
What follows is not an exhaustive list of what's coming, but it should give a decent idea of what you can look forward to in the next version.
...Factions...
"The Corporate Sector is completely by the book, and when they feel they are right, according to that book, there is no stopping them." - Reen Irana
With 2.3 and subsequent versions, rather than try to do major changes for all factions at once, we've instead chosen to focus on individual factions to receive most of the focus for new or redone units. For most releases, this will mean either a new faction being added and another one receiving most of the new and redone content, or two factions receiving the new/redone content when we're not adding a new playable faction. We'll also choose one faction for whom we plan to flesh out a lot more story missions and events for galactic conquest, and one or two galactic conquests where we plan to flesh out all present factions' stories. This isn't to say nobody else will receive anything in these releases, just that we're specifically directing our attention to a more narrow subset. Each section will get its own news post covering exactly what's included in it as we go.
New playable faction: Corporate Sector Authority New unit focus: Eriadu Authority New story focus: New Republic GC story focus: Bacta War / Thrawn Campaign
...AI...
A lot of the major AI changes only started coming into the mod towards the end of 2.2's development aside from some tactical changes that Pox and I were working on, but evilbobthebob has brought the galactic AI a long way in terms of focusing its production and aggression. There will continue to be changes to the AI throughout 2.3 as well. A primary focus of this will be continuing to divide ship roles beyond what exists already so we can get the AI to more effectively build diverse fleets- not all frigates are meant to do the same thing, nor are all capital ships, so the more we can make distinctions between them and more effectively control AI fleet compositions.
With 2.2, we also tried to make the AI play for the most part within the same rules as the player, depending on difficulty. With 2.3, for those who want a much more challenging experience, we want to introduce some extra optional levers to make games more challenging throughout, and maintain some resistance for longer. This will, again, be completely optional, so those who prefer to fight on a more level playing field will be able to continue on with the more fair pre-existing difficulty levels.
...Ground Overhaul...
"General, prepare your troops for a surface attack." - Darth Vader
With 2.3 we plan to begin some of our ground overhaul changes. In future versions we have a number of basic mechanical changes that, if they work out, would significantly change how ground combat works in EaW, but that's a bit more long term. We're going to be starting off by working on fleshing out the pacing, unit roles, damage modifiers, balance and all of those factors within the existing mechanics of ICW ground combat. Alongside this will be some art reworks to props, map textures and existing ground vehicles to improve the aesthetics of ground combat, but this generally means that, except for what gets added to new factions, we generally will not be adding new vehicles in the next version or two. We'd rather focus our resources on getting what's there right and expanding from that than continue to add things in which make it more complicated to make the more basic changes. Once we have everything set up, it'll be easier to add new units within that.
So that about covers it for the overview- again, that's not an exhaustive list of what we're working on, but it does cover most of the main focuses. We'll have more specific updates covering the specific sections as we go, and as with 2.2, I'll be running preview playthroughs throughout development on my Youtube channel, Corey Loses (https://www.youtube.com/coreyloses), starting with an Eriadu Authority playthrough in Art of War next week.
We've updated both ModDB and the Steam workshop version of the mod to 2.2.5, which for ModDB means all previous updates since 2.2 are now included as well. If you have the Steam version, it will already have automatically updated.
- Multiplayer GC Support Added: Thrawn Campaign available as New Republic and Imperial Remnant - New VO for dozens of units, across all factions - Yevetha Re-Enabled in GC and Skirmish - Empires at War and Black Fleet Crisis GCs Re-Enabled - Several tactical maps added or updated for galactic conquest planets - New Skirmish map: Smuggler's Ring - Some updates to ingame tech tree dialog screens - More AI tweaks, should fix AI skirmish issues with upgrading and building units - Squadron count changes for several EotH ships (reflected in all tooltips) - Hapan fighter spam nerfed - Added a fix to prevent infinite loops causing game freezes when returning to galactic from tactical battles. - Removed ground spawns from space-only planets for Yevetha in progressive GCs - Stat display supported in mission log for all GCs and factions - Added plot elements for building Wedge in the Lusankya for all applicable GCs, changes to Rogue Squadron spawns. - Fixed issue where Carnor's era change speech would happen at the same cue as Palpatines (era changes would go on unaffected though) - Removed Eri Palle - Event added for Sil Sorrannon's revolt in BFC, which removes Yevethan heroes if you take too long winning the GC - Fixed NR starting credits in Crimson Empire and Shadow Hand - Fixed issue where Normal was getting more bonuses than Hard in some ways - Fixed Ashik, Pellaeon, Skipray FoW reveal for Skirmish - All EotH units have full stat readouts in text tooltips. Will be applied to other factions in 2.3 after feedback. - Standardized Z-layers for ships of the same class (still randomized) - Artillery health from 300->100 (MPTL, SPMAT, Plasma Mortar - More ground units switched to hardpoints for inaccuracy checks - Miy'til, TIE Raptor and ARC-170 lasers brought into line with other fighters - TIE Defender health 25 -> 30, Shield Refresh 1 -> 3, added flyby sound effects - Yevetha plex soldier icon changed - Fixed Kariek ground map causing a crash - Fixed Megamaser Texture
2.2.5 Patch Overview - Coming June 28th We'll soon be releasing 2.2.5, which we hope will be the last major patch necessary for 2.2, after which we'll be moving on to full production for 2.3 (more information on that later). Below is an overview of the major changes coming in the patch. The manual will be releasing with it, available as a separate download on ModDB and included within your steam workshop files if you subscribe there. The ModDB download will be updated with the new changes and all previous patches.
- Multiplayer GC Support Added: Thrawn Campaign available as New Republic and Imperial Remnant - New VO for dozens of units, across all factions - Yevetha Re-Enabled in GC and Skirmish - Empires at War and Black Fleet Crisis GCs Re-Enabled - Several tactical maps added or updated for galactic conquest planets - New Skirmish map: Smuggler's Ring - Some updates to ingame tech tree dialog screens - More AI tweaks, should fix AI skirmish issues with upgrading and building units - Squadron count changes for several EotH ships (reflected in all tooltips) - Hapan fighter spam nerfed - Added a fix to prevent infinite loops causing game freezes when returning to galactic from tactical battles. - Removed ground spawns from space-only planets for Yevetha in progressive GCs - Stat display supported in mission log for all GCs and factions - Added plot elements for building Wedge in the Lusankya for all applicable GCs, changes to Rogue Squadron spawns. - Fixed issue where Carnor's era change speech would happen at the same cue as Palpatines (era changes would go on unaffected though) - Removed Eri Palle - Event added for Sil Sorrannon's revolt in BFC, which removes Yevethan heroes if you take too long winning the GC - Fixed NR starting credits in Crimson Empire and Shadow Hand - Fixed issue where Normal was getting more bonuses than Hard in some ways - Fixed Ashik, Pellaeon, Skipray FoW reveal for Skirmish - All EotH units have full stat readouts in text tooltips. Will be applied to other factions in 2.3 after feedback. - Standardized Z-layers for ships of the same class (still randomized) - Artillery health from 300->100 (MPTL, SPMAT, Plasma Mortar - More ground units switched to hardpoints for inaccuracy checks - Miy'til, TIE Raptor and ARC-170 lasers brought into line with other fighters - TIE Defender health 25 -> 30, Shield Refresh 1 -> 3, added flyby sound effects - Yevetha plex soldier icon changed - Fixed Kariek ground map causing a crash - Fixed Megamaser Texture
I've also begun a multiplayer preview playthrough on Corey Loses, which you can watch here:
On June 8th, Thrawn's Revenge hit its 12th anniversary, so we're doing an update series to mark the occasion for all of our current projects. We started with Ascendancy Thursday, then Fall of the Republic yesterday and finally, today we'll cover Imperial Civil War. These will all have a video and a written component, though unlike usual, these will cover different things. You can follow the links below to get between all three updates when they're released:
Today we're going to be talking about what's coming in 2.2.5, but first, we're also going to be doing a developer livestream on Corey Loses at 2pm EST, which you can watch on either youtube by clicking here or twitch by clicking here. We're still not sure how many of us will be able to attend, so we'll basically be answering questions and talking about the mod while playing some skirmish matches, or playing some older versions depending on who's available.
...2.2.5 Overview...
We're approaching the fifth patch for 2.2, and that means a few things. For one, this patch will mean we update the regular download. Uploading the individual patches has been somewhat problematic, so we've left it as is, as the alternative was to re-upload the entire mod every couple weeks, which we think people would generally be opposed to. With this news post, we're only going to be covering the changes from 2.2.4 to 2.2.5, so if you play the GoG or disk version of the mod as opposed to the Steam Workshop version, you can check out the change notes here for all the previous updates.
Major Changes & Fixes
Added: Multiplayer Galactic Conquest Because of the lack of multiplayer support for certain features integral to Imperial Civil War, it's taken a fair bit of work to get things setup within the mod to where we can do a multiplayer GC. Unfortunately, MP will always be a lot more limited than singleplayer, but we should be able to start getting in a few scenarios. We'll be starting off with a converted version of the Thrawn Campaign, with the Empire vs New Republic, and then we'll do individual releases of additional MP GCs designed around the other factions. Because the era system can't be used properly in MP and having multiple factions really just means a lot of autoresolving (there's no way around that), MP galactic conquests will ahve to be designed mostly from scratch, but the goal is to have at least one scenario playable for each faction in the long-term (Fall of the Republic will obviously be a lot more simple for this.
Added: Faction Stat Chart Empire at War has a helpful graph ingame which shows the relative strength of factions, their economies, and the amount of planets. The downside is that it only shows the factions which use the Rebel, Empire and Zann Consortium coding, which in the mod means Empire, NR and EotH. While we can't change this directly, evilbobthebob has added an entry to the holocron which will display these stats in numerical form for whichever factions are present. You can see what it looks like below.
Re-Added: Yevetha, Black Fleet Crisis, Empires at War Upon release of 2.2, there was a bug present with the Yevetha where, if they were invaded, there was a chance that the game would crash. Because of this, we patched them and the GCs with them as a focus out while we looked for a fix. While we're not 100% sure yet, we believe we've tracked down the issue. We've noticed an error which the game throws when attacking a faction in the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th or 21st faction slots, regardless of how the faction is set up. The downside, if this is the real culprit, is that we can't fix it directly, however the upside for now is that we can remove the faction dividers and get the Yevetha and some other minor factions out of the danger zone. It does mean we may have to change some future faction plans, but we've also been in contact with Petroglyph about it, so they may be able to point us in the right direction.
Fixed: Post-Battle Freezes There's also been an occasional issue reported where the game can sometimes freeze coming out of a tactical battle. This seems, based on the reports and our own testing, to be related to the transaction manager that tracks things like boarding and single-unit retreat, where the game gets stuck in a loop in the script and can't get out of it. We're pretty confident we can track down the issue and resolve it from there.
Voiceovers Wheyloffle has been hard at work implementing the VOs submitted since we put out the call for voice actors before release, and as a result we're going to have dozens of fresh new voices in the patch, for all factions.
The Manual Slornie's also been working on updating the manual with all the 2.2 content to get it ready for release. This will be uplaoded with the 2.2.5 version, as well as a separate standalone pdf.
Translations While these won't be directly included with the 2.2.5 download, but we've finally got a system set up to make translations simple, painless and allow multiple people to collaborate on any given language translation. Several people have contacted us over the last few months about it, so if those people or anyone else who wants to help can either message me on Discord ( Corey on https://discord.gg/t3WJugG ) or email ThrawnsRevenge@gmail.com, we'll get you set up. We can't promise any specific languages since it depends on who volunteers, but we'll hopefully be able to get a few going.
...and more. There's been plenty of other smaller changes going on, including balance, AI updates, bug fixes, and even a few new maps by Rogue and one by myself that I've been making on livestreams. After this patch, we'll be moving on from 2.2 and getting the new content for 2.3 underway, including the Corporate Sector Authority, Assertor, and much more. That's also when you'll starts eeing a lot more about Fall of the Republic. I'm going to be moving early next month, so I don't want to give a solid release date just yet, but we'd love to get the patch out before then.
That's gonna do it for now. Before we go, we want to thank everyone for their support over the last 12 years. It's been a long journey, but we hope we can keep raising the bar in the mod and exceed the expectations people have set for us.
Hello everyone! On June 8th, Thrawn's Revenge will hit its 12th anniversary, so we're doing an update series to mark the occasion for all of our current projects. We started with Ascendancy yesterday, then Fall of the Republic today, and on Saturday we'll cover Imperial Civil War. These will all have a video and a written component, though unlike usual, these will cover different things. You can follow the links below to get between all three updates when they're released:
I've done an early preview gameplay video as part of my 12 hour livestream on Corey Loses, which you can watch below. While we still have plenty left to do, this was basically just to give an idea of how far along we are in terms of organization and some assets. There's still a lot of balancing to be done as well, but you can see some of the new assets like the CIS Lucrehulk Battleship and Vulture Droids that weren't in ICW, as well as a few explanations of content and some Q&A throughout the video. This was the last hour of a 12 hour stream, so it's probably not my most coherent video, though. Once we're a bit farther along, I'll do a full preview playthrough with each faction, like we did with ICW leading up to 2.2.
We Could be Heroes: CIS...
Next up, we have the CIS hero roster heading into the first release. Our goal with this version was to get a relatively similarly-sized core hero roster for the CIS and Republic- there'll be more to come later, but these are either the more major players in the time period, or they fill a particular niche that the faction needs and otherwise lacks. Part of our focus is also to expand some of the standard fleet elements of the time, which tend to receive a bit less focus next to all the jedi, so you'll see a few more obscure captains and admirals in both factions, especially characters who would later play a much larger role in the Imperial or Post-Endor period, keeping connections between Fall of the Republic and Imperial Civil War.
"The best of all would be the strongest student, yes? Wisest? Most learned in the ways of the Force? Best of all, Dooku would be! Our greatest student! Our greatest failure." - Master Yoda
Count Dooku - Ground, Space: Providence-class Carrier/Destroyer, Lucid Voice A powerful jedi who began to lose faith in the Order after the Battle of Galidraan in the Mandalorian Civil War, Count Dooku, also known as Darth Tyrannus, is a Sith Lord who serves as the de facto political leader of the Confederacy of Independent Systems. Under the guidance of Darth Sidious, it was Dooku's work which united the various disaffected corporations and blocs within the Republic to form the CIS.
General Grievous - Ground Space: Recusant-class Light Destroyer Space: Subjugator-class Heavy Cruiser, Malevolence Space: Providence-class Carrier/Destroyer, Invisible Hand
General Grievous was a Kaleesh warrior who was cybernetically enhanced after a bomb planetd by San Hill and Count Dooku on his shuttle left him near death. In the Clone Wars, his cybernetic enhancements and training by Count Dooku allowed him to wield lightsabers, which he used to great effect, killing multiple jedi and collecting their lightsabers as trophies. Most importantly, Grievous also served as the first Supreme Commander of the CIS forces, united what was previously a very fractious and disorganized military and allowing it to effectively challenge the Republic for much of the war.
Assaj Ventress - Ground Assaj Ventress was a powerful Dathomiri Dark Jedi and acolyte of Count Dooku, hoping to be his Sith apprentice. Over the course of the Clone Wars, she fought Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker multiple times. After a command by Sidious that Dooku kill Ventress, fearing her growing power, Ventress returned to Dathomir and planned for revenge against Dooku.
Sev'rance Tann - Ground Tann was a Chiss Dark Jedi who left Chiss space to join Dooku's forces in the Clone Wars. Despite being a skilled warrior, she was killed on Krant only a month into the Clone Wars by Jedi MAster Echuu Shen-Jon
Sora Bulq - Ground Sora Bulq was a Jedi Master famous for his skill with a lightsaber, although he fell to the dark side after helping Mace Windu develop his Vaapad form. He was captured by Count Dooku, and then served as a secret agent of the Sith Lord, attempting to cause discord within the Jedi Order before becoming the leader of Dooku's Dark Acolytes.
Viceroy Nute Gunray - Galactic As the Viceroy of the Trade Federation, the Neimoidian Nute Gunray was one of the highest ranking political leaders within the Confederacy and a sitting member of the Separatist Council.
Emir Wat Tambor - Galactic Like Nute Gunray, the Skakoan Wat Tambor was a member of the Separatist Council. He was also the Foreman of the Techno Union, and Executive of the Baktoid Armour Workshop. Baktoid was responsible for the manufacturing of many of the separatist forces' designs, including various types of battle droids and starfighters.
Admiral Trench - Space: Providence-class Dreadnought, Invincible Commanding one of a few massive Providence Dreadnoughts within the Separatist fleet, Trench was was a Harch and seasoned Admiral under the banner of the Coporate Alliance, and then the CIS.
Admiral Pors Tonith - Space: Munificent-class Star Frigate, Corpulentus A Muun banker and admiral from the Banking Clan, Pors Tonight was a capable commander, although he often overestimated his own capabilities. Relatively early into the war, he was captured by Anakin Skywalker.
Captain Canteval - Space: Munificent-class Star Frigate, Profit A Muun captain, Canteval was in charge of CIS operations on Taloraan whcih had a secret treaty with Count Dooku. During the landing of their forces. While engaging Republic ground forces including the Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, Canteval planned to ambush the Venator-class Resolute, which resulted in his ship flying into a gas giant after losing control of its engines.
Captain Mar Tuuk - Space: Lucrehulk-class Droid Control Ship, Procurer A shrewd Neimoidian tactician and student of military history, Mar Tuuk was the commander in charge of the blockade of Ryloth. After Anakin Skywalker rammed his Lucrehulk with the Defender, the CIS forces at Ryloth fell into disarray and the Republic was able to successfully liberate the planet.
Admiral Dua Ningo - Bulwark-class Battleship, Unrepentant Dua Ningo was a high-ranking Sullustan admiral during the Clone Wars, serving as the commander of the new Bulwark Fleet late in the war, a fleet comprised of multiple new and powerful Bulwark Battleships built at Foerost. After his success at breaking the blockade of Foerost, Ningo was tasked with planning an invasion of Coruscant, resulting in a series of battles against the Victory Fleet under the command of Jan Dodonna and Terrinald Screed throughout the core.
Aut-0 - Space: Providence-class Carrier/Destroyer, Resounding Cadence Aut-0 was a super tactical droid who commanded a fleet of primarily Recusants within Separatist territor, who was deactivated late in the war by asquad of droids led by R2-D2.
TF-1726 - Space: Munificent-class Star Frigate, Tide of Progress TF-1726 was a T-series tactical droid who commanded the separatist fleet of Munificent frigates at the Battle of Quell against General Aayla secura, in which the droid was able to secure a separatist victory, although Aayla was able to escape.
Kalani - Ground Another super tactical droid, Kalani was dispatched by Count Dooku to dispel resistance to CIS occupation on Onderon after the repeated failures of King Sanjay Rash, whom KAlani later executed for his failures.
General Lok Durd - Ground: AAT Lok Durd was a Neimoidian weapons developer and general within the CIS. He was repsonsible for the creation of the Defoliator, an anti-organic artillery weapon which left droids unharmed, which he planned to test on MAridun. In the ensuing battle, he was captured by Anakin Skywalker, Ahsoka Tano and Aayla Secura.
General Whorm Loathsome - Ground: AAT General Whorm Loathsome was the commander of the Kerkoiden military forces, as wella s the leader of the Retail Caucus' forces within the CIS. He was the notably responsible for the capture of Christophsis and the commander of CIS forces against the Republic liberation force there.
Durge - Ground, Space: NovaSwird Space Superiority Fighter Durge was a bounty hunter of the Gen'dai species, meanign he was able to regenerate his body from almost any injury. By the time of the Clone Wars, he was nearly two thousand years old. He harboured a deep hatred of the Mandalorians, which led to his recruitment into the war against the Clone Troopers of the Republic on the side of the CIS. He was only killed once Anakin Skywalker launched him into a star.
That's it for today's post. As I said near the start, we have some other options and idea for heroes for future releases, so if you notice someone missing, feel free to suiggest them, but don't worry- much like ICW, our goal is to approach the mod in smaller chunks to make sure we're able to do releases in reasonable timeframes. Tomorrow we'll be talking about ICW and doing a developer livestream at 2pm eST, which you can watch here: https://gaming.youtube.com/c/coreyloses/live
Hello everyone! On June 8th, Thrawn's Revenge will hit its 12th anniversary, so we're doing an update series to mark the occasion for all of our current projects. We'll be starting with Ascendancy today (Thursday), then Friday will be Fall of the Republic, and on Saturday we'll cover Imperial Civil War. These will all have a video and a written component, though unlike usual, these will cover different things. You can follow the links below to get between all three updates when they're released:
Star Wars: Ascendancy - Hapan Preview & Balance Patch Overview Fall of the Republic - Preview Video & We Could Be Heroes: CIS Edition Imperial Civil War - 2.2.5 Projections & Dev Stream
As we've previously announced, the Hapan faction will be the next faction added to Ascendancy, which will be the main focus for 1.2. The next version we release, however, will still be focused on balance changes for the original four factions before piling more content in. Myself, Bane and Caesar's Legion have been busy testing and tweaking things to smooth out the rough edges, something Ascendancy has needed for a long time, while we've been finishing ICW2.2, working on the planning stages for the Hapan faction and getting their enitities set up. We'll be getting into the balance changes in a moment, but first, I've done a quick (very, very) early preview playthrough video as part of my 12 hour livestream on Corey Loses, which you can watch here:
...Balance Change Overview...
The changes here won't be exhaustive since that's impossible without a huge wall of text (we'll try to do a full changelog including bugfixeswhen the actual patch releases), but hopefully will give a general idea of where we're headed, so please keep that in mind. There are a few major areas we're hitting for each section, so we'll address them by faction.
Pentastar Alignment
The Pentastar Alignment has stood head and shoulders above the other factions in 'competitive' play, so there are several nerfs and adjustments coming to them. First off, the Venator- it's meant to be a carrier with some combat ability, but for a few reasons, it's basically both a really good carrier, and a really good everything else. To address this, first off there has been a mod-wide reduction of laser damage against frigates and capital ships. The Venator had multiple point-defense lasers, which in the mod were giving most of its anti-capital damage as well. This has been significantly reduced, without reducing their intended function (being actual point defense), and as a result, the Venator now loses to the Procursator in direct 1-on-1 combat, as it should, while still being a strong option for providing fighters. Its also had some increases to its population cost, and resource costs. The second major change with the PA is with their supply lines tech- the goal with that tech was to have a small passive regen for fighter supply, but the result was a huge passive resupply regen instead, to the point that it was next to impossible to keep their fighters down. Now, the regen should be enough that it helps strategically, but not enough that it's a tactical problem. For that, PA players will have to invest in fleet tenders.
The Empire and the PA, while they're supposed to be quantity over quality factions, had that accounted for both in ship pop costs, as well as their available supply, giving them undue advantages on both counts. While they'll still get bonus pop cap out of research (where the EotH and NR get other quality improvements) their baseline fleet supply research has been standardized with all factions, so each faction starts with the same core and then gets modified from their according to their strengths and weaknesses. This should also help a little bit with late game performance and fleet management. Another tech that gave them a huge advantage over the other factions was the bank increase tech, Spread Fire- this could basically double their damage output beyond what the EotH and NR could keep up with, so this tech has been removed (it doesn't work with the Hand for technical reasons, and in general it's too powerful a tech to be worth keeping around).
Imperial Remnant The changes directly related to the Empire have more to do with the subfactions. Generally, Daala was quite strong while the others lagged behind. Daala will remain more or less unchanged, aside from what's already been mentioned and some other smaller tweaks. With Palpatine, we're generally happy with the playstyle of the faction, but there needed to be more adjustments within that. Primarily, the drawbacks for his faction make sense, but the numbers for them were too high and came all at once. The culture suppression he has is strong, and he shouldn't spread as fast as others, but it was often too hard to expand at all if you took him too early. We'll be reducing the culture penalties he has fairly significantly, and spreading them across more tech so he has more time to adapt to it. We'll also be reducing the capital ship experience gain penalty a small bit. Shield mitigation on the non-Eclipse SSDs has also been increased a bit for all factions, which should help out all the Imperials a bit more than other factions. One area we're looking at with Palpatine particularly is making the initial investment in World Devastators worth it, or at least increasing their chances of being able to scale to the mini-titan point intended if given enough time (we don't want to front-load that too much, however).
Thrawn and Pellaeon are the subfaction which requires the most work. A lot of their numbers have been increased for this patch, including fleet supply numbers since their focus is on smaller ships however they lack the same clear 'hook' of Palpatine and Daala. With them, making them more interesting is as high a priority of making them more usable competitively so they will likely get a bit better with this patch, and get more fleshed out with the 1.2 release and the Hapans.
New Republic
A lot of the New Republic's issues are generally solved by the nerfs to the Imperial factions- a big reason they were not really able to compete as much was because they were generally being outnumbered, as well as the target bank tech increase the PA and IR received. Most NR changes have revolved around small changes to pop cap allocation, like making the Dauntless and BAC's slot count lower, but generally alongside the other changes we've found them to be in a decent spot in our testing so far. They've also received a new tech to increase their max trainable capital ship level, further emphasizing their quality over quantity focus.
Empire of the Hand
Aside from some of the toning down with the PA and IR we've talked about already, some of the biggest problems with the Empire of the Hand were how micro-intensive they can be. A lot of their strengths involved how quickly they could move around the map, and while we want to keep some of that micro-focus, ultimately a faction that relies on speed isn't able to compete as well in the late game and relies a lot on spreading heavily in the early game. Generally, our focus here will be to strength the abilities of Empire of the Hand capital ships, giving them better access to higher levels (as we did with the NR) and increasing ship power by buffing the abilities rather than going for raw stats, leaving their ships generally more vulnerable between cooldowns but having more tools to work with when used properly if they can maintain those levels.
We hope you're looking forward to these changes and the others coming with the update- we're doing our best to make the mod a fun competitive experience, and we appreciate your patience as we try to sort through everything. It's always an ongoing process, so anything we overlook in this release, we'll keep addressing as we need to in future patches. This one in particular should be hitting ModDB on Thursday, June 28th.
That's going to cover it for this update. If you have any other suggestions, please feel free to leave them on the comments of this news post, or visit our forums or the Corey Loses & Gul Survives Discord server, which has channels for all the Thrawn's Revenge mods. Next up will be Fall of the Republic tomorrow!
This patch primarily focuses on attempting to fix or reduce the freeze issues which sometimes occur when battles end. So far, we've had few to no reports of it since certain fixes were applied, but we can't be 100% sure without more testing. There's a potential for some transaction-relient abilities to still cause it (boarding, Single-unit retreat) so we're keeping an eye on those specifically. We've also applied several AI upgrades, along with other smaller bug fixes and changes. This patch will not be compatible with saves from 2.2.3.
2.2.4 Change Log: - Several map updates (Phindar, Serenno maps added) - Re-added m,ap preview images (on invasion/base layout sacreens) - AI Improvements: -- Improved the way defending ground forces interact with landing zones (defendedrs shouldn't care about enemy reinforcements, they can go take landing zones) -- Certain defensive plans made more accessible to AI -- Fixed EotH building namers in AI plans -- Improved AI handling of planetary weapons (factions using PA HVGun should fire it now) -- SSD asteroid collision removed to help with pathfinding -- AI now takes reinforcements into account before deciding to retreat -- Incrteased desire to upgrade starbase levels -- Added Interdictor as independent category type for AI use -- Other minor adjustments - Validusia made available to all Imperial factions - Validusia range increased, should now outrange most ships and actually be somewhat useful (2100 -> 3100) - Nerfed Ewok hunter damage - Various text fixes (including Trier, Okins and Kosh ship command text, boarding use depletion tooltip) - Lag experiements: restored AI for inactive factions, incraesed galactic movespeed (may be reverted) - Fixed Megamaser graphical effects (singles should no longer render as duals) - MMT AoE damage removed. strong single-target damage, shouldn't wipe infantry squads- Gamescoring script restored, should track end-game stats more accurately now) - Documentation updates: EotH only for now, added more stats to tooltips - Potential fix for crash opn completion of Katana Fleet mission (needs more testing) - Elrood income 220 -> 120 - Oto, Empress, Validusia prices adjusted - Empress Proton Torpedo launch count 2 -> 1 for all HPs - Raid fleets temporarily disabled in era-progressive GCs - Harrsk combat bonus to own star destroyer now applies properly (Whirlwind) - Performance improvements to structure display
It's been just under a month since the release at 2.2, so we wanted to take a moment to talk about common problems, what's coming in patches, and also release on of those patches. Overall we've been happy with the release of 2.2 so far. There's a lot still to be done and worked out, but the goal with 2.2 was to establish a new basic starting ground for the updates we want to make going forward, and we feel like we've accomplished that. There have been a few issues which we'll talk about today, but very little that's entirely gamebreaking, and very little that we're not confident we can fix. Before we get into direct plans though, we want to address some of the most common problems that have come up.
Before we get into it though, as always I have recorded a video version of the update, which can be seen just below. The information in both is the same, so pick whichever medium you prefer:
Issue: I get a crash/perception parsing error when the game starts/a Galactic Conquest starts/I can't build any units with the filters
This is generally caused by another mod having installed its AI or Scripts folders to the base data folder, which will interfere with other mods. Because a lot of features in TR heavily rely on being able to use our own AI and scripts, this can cause several issues. To resolve this, you just need to go into your Forces of Corruption data folder (not the mod's) and delete the folder named Scripts if it's there, and then into the XML folder and delete the AI and Enum folders if they're there. Sometimes only one of those three will be present.
Issue: Some planets blink red and can't be accessed.
This has actually been one of the most common reports we've received, however this is not a bug- this is what a locked planet in EaW looks like. these are planets which have story elements tied to them (generally emergent factions or era progression). It's kind of ugly, but there's unfortunately not much else we can do with them, the functionality wasn't really intended to be heavily used by PG, so it does look kind of weird.
Issue: When I try to load games, they'll sometimes crash.
This is basically a base game issue caused by memory accessibility for the program. The bad news is, it's not something mods can fix as it's a base game issue, the good news is the Steam version of EaW is hopefully being patched soon to address it. This does unfortunately mean the GoG and retail disk versions will, much llke with the selection freeze bug, continue to have the issues, so we may have to make certain larger GCs where it's especially prone to occurring, like Empire's End, Steam only. Mitigating this is also why certain things like extra VO and planet preview images were left out of the initial release, and will be patched in afterwards. We'll have to make some choices about how exactly to handle that for the versions of EaW where the issues will persist. We do however recommend getting EaW for Steam (it goes on sale fairly often) to get the most stable experience as mods continue to push the boundaries of the engine, since it's currently the only version of the game receiving official patches from Petroglyph.
Issue: I ran 2.15 fine, but 2.2 often lags on the galactic map in larger GCs
EaW can only use a single processor core, so even the best computers will start to struggle with larger maps that have a lot of active factions on them. 2.15's largest map was about 90 planets with 3-4 active factions, counting the player, whereas int largest in 2.2 is 138 planets and up to 6-7 active factions, so there's a lot more going on that the processor has to keep up with. This is also why we have such a wide array of GCs- regardless of computer strength, you should be able to find a good amount that run smoothly for you. We are also playing with some other factors, like AI modifications, hyperspace speed, etc to reduce how much has to be processed at once, so you may see some back and forth during patches on this front while we experiment- this is one of the things that we'll be actively playing with even after the last "full" patch for 2.2.
Patches
Since release, we've been working on fixing various bugs which have arisen, and for the most part we seem to have handled the biggest ones in the 2.2.1 and 2.2.2 patches. Because Steam workshop has automatic updates, we've been testing them in smaller chunks on Steam and the ModdB releases will be updated with larger patches less frequently, to make sure people have the most straightforward installation processes. Tonight, some time after this post goes up, (May 7th) we'll be releasing 2.2.3 to both Steam and ModDB, which on top of the fixes already handled by 2.2.1 and 2.2.2, has some more experimental lag changes, focuses on stabilizing some of the era change edge cases where the script controlling some spawns would sometimes not work. The full patch notes for all patches can be found both in the download description when it goes up, and here (the same changes apply to both the Steam and ModDB versions).
As we approach 2.2.5, which will be the last major patch for 2.2 before moving onto the new content for 2.3, we will have a couple primary focuses. The first and foremost is addressing any remaining major issues with era progression, which once we're comfortable it's all working properly, will include adding in other forces to some of the emergent faction events (Hapans are pretty powerful, but things like Zero Command were left kind of bare-bones to make sure they weren't causing problems before we flesh them out more). Second, we'll be trying to find out what's wrong with the Yevethans so we can re-enable them and the Empires at War & Black Fleet Crisis scenarios. Third, we'll be starting to overhaul some of the documentation in the mod, to make it more consistent and informative. In the super-short term, this will involve removing some information about weapon loadouts for ships- they'll be added back in 2.3 with full information on hardpoints, but they will be handled differently and we want to make sure translating the mod into other languages is as easy as possible, so doing it this way makes the most sense long-term. Finally, we'll be working on adding some multiplayer GC maps to the mod. This was left out because there are many features the mod relies on which can't be used in MP, so we have to basically use entirely separate unit sets for it, among other changes. We'll be starting with just one or two Empire vs New Republic scenarios, but we'll expand this when possible.
After that, it's on to 2.3 where we'll be adding the Corporate Sector Authority as a playable faction and beginning the ground overhaul, as well as working on Fall of the Republic, or Clone Wars mod (and Ascendancy for Sins, of course), so there's plenty to look forward to. If you want to keep track of development as it goes, in addition to these news posts, I also do preview playthroughs and other videos on my YouTube channel, which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/c/coreyloses
We have just pushed a patch to address a few issues. This will currently only be available for Steam Workshop copies because it allows auto-updates, but once we've compiled more changes, the ModDB mirror will be updated as well.
Major Changes: - Disabled Yevetha (and therefore Empires at War and BFC) due to causing crashes on initiating tactical battles until we can find the cause. - Added Reinforcement prevention radii to Starbases and mines in skirmish - Altered stats for power to shields/weapons in skirmish - Removed power to weapons from larger ships in skirmish (Praetor, Nebula, Allegiance) - Removed 3 mines on Core Conflict - Removed Bright Jewel, Mantell Massacre, Corellian Conflict and Dark Fury skirmish maps (redundant or unfinished) - EotH starts with Krsiss instead of Nsiss in Skirmish - Added merchant dock units for all factions - Fixed several skirmish ships removing all FoW, some may still remain. - Empress station damage nerfed (6 protons per hardpoint -> 2) - Moff Resuun Tractor Beam enabled - Enforcer pop cap 2 -> 3 - Fixed [MISSING] Ion cannons on Oto, added Quad Ion projectile - Fixed an issue where boarded or retreated units would sometimes spawn at dummy planets and be inaccessible. - Fixed Eriadu Lancet availability - Fixed duplicated Hailfire company - Strang and Weir added to Eriadu for era progressives - World Devastator and Praetor should unlock in era 3 and 4 respectively for Remnant, with WD relocking in Jax era.
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