How to make an empire at war mod

Lean back, crack your knuckles, and open your pirated copy of 3DSMax 9. It's time to make your own original Empire at War Mod!

STEP 1: Choose a time period that's already been done at least three times

Galactic Civil War or New Republic are your go-tos, basically involving the same aesthetics and assets. You can choose Clone Wars if you're feeling dangerous. No other subjects or periods are allowed. What do you think this is, 2018?

STEP 2: make some good changes

Show ship pathing, show all hyperspace routes on the galactic map, maybe give an early warning system for enemy attacks. General quality of life stuff.

STEP 3: add EVERY ship from the legends canon

If it appeared blurry in the background of Clone Wars or Dark Empire, it needs to be here. Give them all at least one engine and some guns, and spread the same 2-3 special abilities between them, all copied wholesale from vanilla. Maybe reskin power to weapons as "assault" or "full broadside" or something. If your units aren't samey enough or if bomber screening is still useful, nerf missiles by making them not penetrate shields anymore. Also make sure each and every unit has a paragraph-long ultra-deep college-grade lore-filled bit of flavor text so the player knows you've read Wookiepedia.

STEP 4: make sure the rebellion still sucks

Crank up that unit cap as far as your 2010 macbook will allow, while still making rebel players build each and every individual fighter squadron and barely give them any carriers. We have to stay somewhat true to the original game.

STEP 5: balance the consortium (optional)

This is easy; just delete all their special abilities.

Also, they're the CIS now

STEP 6: maps

We've talked about how big our fleets should be, but now we need big maps to hold them. Don't worry about going overboard, make crossing that map as agonizingly slow as possible; aim for about 4 minutes on fast game speed before a single shot is fired. Don't make ships any faster to compensate, in fact, make them slower.

If you're wondering about which planets you should include, refer to step 3.

STEP 7: economy

With all these ships, the player needs a way to build them all. People like the game Civilization, so make sure to add a bunch of new resources like food, population, happiness, ship crews, etc. Credits still matter, of course, there's just a bunch of other stuff the player needs to keep track of. This might add nothing to gameplay, but what it does do is inflate save time.

STEP 8: difficulty

How hard should your mod be? There are two options:

1: so easy a journalist could do it. Remember all that economy from before? Yeah, the player never needs to engage with it, since their starter units are more than enough to wipe the galactic floor clean even on Hard.

2: linux user mode. Make the player's starting units, defenses, and economy terrible. Make sure they're forced to abandon as many starter planets as possible before actually getting to play the game. Enemy AI should hound the player constantly and have their ship health and credit gain rate jacked up by an undisclosed amount. To top things off, make any useful ships only unlocked in late tech levels and prohibitively expensive to ensure the player can't replace them when they're inevitably outgunned and destroyed.

step 9: make the entire mod a hate letter to mon mothma??

I didn't think she was that bad a character, what the h*eck is wrong with you guys?

9 - General Gameplay

We've already done most of our work with the first eight steps. Ships are too slow to effectively reposition or evade fire, they have few to no distinguishing features, and fit into the general categories of A: giant capital ship or B: useless. Fleets are too huge to be properly managed, which is either a constant annoyance as corvettes get obliterated or completely inconsequential as massive ships tank millions of points of damage. All we need to do is make sure units can move forward properly (this is optional). After all, battles are won by overwhelming force at this point, which is either handed to the player for free or earned by hours of grinding.

10 - For Advanced Players Only

If you want, you can make fighter screening important again; just make sure anti-fighter ships are slow, super brittle, and have to be replaced constantly so we don't accidentally make tactics more important than money.

STEP 11 - Land Battles

Of course we need to keep land battles. Empire at War wouldn't be the same without auto-resolve. Basically follow the same steps, making sheer number of units the deciding factor, which is easy since that's how it is in vanilla. Keep infantry contrived into being valuable by being the only ones who can capture points, just make sure they're the slowest units in the game for balance.

Step 12: skirmish mode

We've already made all the new ships, no further action should be needed.

And we're done!

Congratulations! If you've followed so far, you should have a mod that's indistinguishable from all the most popular ones. They have to be doing something right, and now so are you!

[Heenvon]

What about Spaceballs Star wars empire at war mod????