Rambling desription of my Mod

[Hutton]

I’d like to run the concept for my mod up the flagpole to see who salutes.

 

First of all I’m pairing the game down instead of trying to expand it. The expanded universe has always kind of irked me. Almost everything in my mod will have appeared in something written by George Lucas, Brian Daley, or Archie Goodwin.

 

The main adjustment in balance I’m experimenting with is giving the two sides different infrastructure obstacles. Most Imperial units will be expensive to build, but cheap to maintain, and the Alliance units will be cheap to build, but expensive to maintain. My reasoning is that the Empire has a bureaucracy in place to collect taxes and manage supply lines, while the Alliance has to scrounge for resources and maintain supply lines covertly. On the other hand, the Empire has to recruit and build its forces from scratch, while the soldiers and ship crews seek out the Alliance to volunteer.

 

The troop types are what had bothered me most of all in the packaged game, and what inspired me to start messing with RebEd. Rebels are going to start off able to train Alliance Marines and Alliance Irregulars.

 

Before WWII, marines weren’t thought of as assault soldiers. They were used for port security and boarding actions. That’s how I’m using the Feet Trooper Icons for either side. The have high detection values, and good defense because ship to ship fighting would translate well into building to building fighting, but poor attack values.

 

Alliance Irregulars are weak. They have a modest defense value, but high bombardment and practically no maintenance requirement. The idea is that they are the rag tag groups that hide in the hills that will take potshots at imperial when the planet is assaulted.

 

With a little research, the Alliance gets Regulars, which have balanced values, Airspeeder Flotillas, which have the best defense and detection values (they are too light to assault hardened defenses, but can move around quickly to take out stragglers of attacking forces and spot special forces trying to covertly enter the system), and an assault force that requires to much maintenance for the rebels to have more than a few at a time.

 

Imperial start with Marine Regiment (described above) Stormtrooper Regiment (not changed much) and AT-AT Regiments, which are expensive and have high attack values.

 

With research they get AT-ST regiment, which is reasonably priced than AT-ATs, and a better bargain for garrison. They also get Scoutrooper Regiments, which cost the same as Stormtroopers and have weaker attack value, but much higher detection and bombardment, making them useful for garrison.

 

Imperial troops give a little more bang for the buck but the rebels have a big advantage in Special Forces. The Empire doesn’t have any special forces that conduct sabotage missions, and the rebels have two kinds.

 

The Alliance has Commandos, Rebel Agent, Longprobe Y-Wing Recon Wing, and, Infiltrators.

 

Infiltrators and Longprobes are unchanged. Commandos can do uprising missions and sabotage, but have lower combat values than Infiltrators.

 

The Empire has Stormtrooper Brigades, Spy Networks, Probe Droids, and Bounty Hunters. Stormtrooper brigades are smaller detachments of stormtroopers that are engaged in police action instead of open combat (they run uprising missions). Probe Droids are the same except they are the only unit in the game with no maintenance cost. Bounty Hunters cost only one unit to raise, but 10 to maintain. The reasoning behind that decision is that bounty hunters are already out there and it doesn’t cost the empire anything to muster a group of them, and it’s no grief for the empire if they’re all killed, but it will get expensive if the Empire tries to keep too many groups of bounty hunters active at one time.

 

There is a difference between imperial and rebel espionage units. Rebels can send a single guy to a planet to ask some questions, look around, make a few calls, and get an idea of what kind imperial activity is going on. He can do this without attracting too much attention, but if caught, he’s boned (high espionage, low combat). Rebels aren’t setting up base in known population centers. The Empire has to set up dragnets to monitor traffic from and find leads on other systems that rebels are channeling their supply lines through. It’s as not hard for rebels to get wind of an Imperial Spy Network closing in on them, but it’s harder to kill off all the agents in the network (moderate espionage and combat skills).

 

It may have occurred to some readers that the Empire will have a lot of trouble invading planets if it can’t sabotage the planetary shields. Not an issue because the rebels wont be able to build any shields. Well actually they will, but the shields the Alliance has access to don’t occupy the card slots that the GenCore shields did. The concept here is that the rebels only build local defenses to protect their bases from bombardment, and that Imperial Doctrine dictates that because they are claiming authority over the whole planet, they always evenly distribute planetary defenses over the whole planet. The rebels have Local Shield Generator and Hidden Planetary Battery, which have high values because they are focused over the rebel base, but don’t prevent enemy troops from landing for the same reason. The Empire has Imperial Battery Network and Imperial Shield Network, which prevents ground assaults but provides weaker response to bombardment because they span the whole planet evenly.

 

My purpose here is to force the Alliance to become more dependants on its special forces, and force the Empire to depend more on its military might. Rebel bases are also going to be a little bit more mobile. It’s not going to cost as much to for the alliance to tear down and build up their defense structures, but maintenance cost is going to impose a severe limit on how many they can have.

 

In fighters, I’ve tried to keep some of the designs from becoming obsolete with research by making them cheaper than the more advanced versions. I’ve also eliminated the Tie Defender because as far as I know, it only appears in other games. I put a TIE Advanced in the slot to take up space. It’s one of the strongest fighters in my version, but also the least cost effective.

 

I haven’t messed much with capital ships, but I intend to change most of the imperial designs to different variations of star destroyers. Also little tweaks, like which rebel ships play anti-fighter roles, and which have turbolasers.

 

I’ve messed around with facilities a bit to make a bigger difference than just basic and advanced facilities, but not much.

 

I changed a lot of characters. All the characters included are (as I wrote before) mentioned in something by George Lucas, Brian Daley or Archie Goodwin. Admiral Griff, for example, is kept because he appears in the original weekly comic strip. In that, he is in charge of developing the Super Star Destroyer, so I’m making him the Empire’s ship research guy. Narra, according to the NPR radio drama, was the senior surviving fighter pilot after the battle of Yavin, so I’m putting him in Wedge’s slot so he starts on Yavin. (I don’t think you should start with Wedge as a character because he isn’t officer material right after Yavin. Later when you run a recruit mission for him, it represents training him to be a flight leader). To my shame, I’m recycling some of the character art that came with the game for characters that are never depicted visually. In other cases, I resorted to using a web site that had scans from the Star Wars card game to give names to characters that appear in the movies, but aren’t named.

 

The overall gist for characters is:

-The Empire has a strong admiralty. Imperial admirals can also act as generals.

-The Empire has some junior officers. They have moderate leadership and can act as commanders and generals. Some of them have some other talent.

-The Empire has a few dedicated generals. They have the highest leadership in the game.

-The Empire has some bounty hunter characters. The Empire is mostly dependent on them for competent covert actions.

-The Alliance has a strong flight officer corps. About a third of Alliance characters can only take the rank of commanders and have good leadership. Most of them have moderate espionage abilities.

-The Alliance has a strong pool of special forces operators. The downside is that they have to draw most of the generals from this same pool. They have great espionage and combat skills, so they’ll catch imperial missions, but most have mediocre leadership.

-The Alliance has a few dedicated generals. Not as good as imperial generals, but very high leadership.

-The Alliance has a pool of Jack-of-all-Trades characters. A few that can fill a couple of roles, like Luke and Han.

 

I have all the Troop artwork done. (About half of it is new).

 

I have all the special forces artwork done except for espionage mission units, which I haven’t got a concept for yet. (Most of the encyclopedia portraits are recycled. About half the in-game pictures are new).

 

Defenses and fighters just had minor art changes which are done.

 

I haven’t done anything with capital ships. I’m not sure I will do anything.

 

All rebel character art is done. (Some of it is recycled. Most of it is new, even if a lot of similar cards have been done before).

 

I did have most of the Imperial Character art done. But it was the only stuff I hadn’t yet backed up when my hard drive crapped out a year ago, which is why I gave up at the time.

[AdmiralFishface]

Wow, you really got some serious thinking going there. Impressive.

[Hutton]

Yes I have.

 

But it's the art that takes the effort. Some people will look at the new cards and think they've seen them before. The pictures i've used for a lot of the pilots have been used for cards before, but most of them are cropped awkwardly. Previous cards just size the images so the cropping meets the borders of the card art. I've spent a lot of time building the parts of the image that are cropped off pixle by pixle.

 

I've also spent a lot of time on the fleet and tac images, getting the best effect for the low resolution I can. I hope everyone will appreciate it it I ever get it done.

[maxref]

Did you finish your MOD?

[vakundok]

I do not recommend giving very high leadership to imperial officers. The game uses the 'seat of power' effect further improving it by 50%.

[maxref]

Did you finish it or not?

[Eko]

Gove him a chance to reply, lol.

 

Anyway, nice thinking, I like it.