Spring RTS Engine

Star Wars: Imperial Winter has been moving along at an excellent pace in recent months. We have made leaps and bounds in content, having finished all of the units planned for the beta for both sides, and making leaps and bounds in our balance. Before I move on with that, I have a lose end to tie up.

The Winner of the Imperial Commander Competition
Firstly I'd like to offer my sincere apologies to the people who took part in this for taking so long to announce the winner.

Truth be told, we decided the winner of the competition within a few weeks of running it, and have had the completed design for several months. The reason we withheld the information was because we wanted the announcement to coincide with our beta announcements, which, to our naive past-selves, seemed quite close. The team then hit a bit of a rocky patch, so we delayed the announcement. We also submitted it to PCGamer when they contacted us - we thought it'd be a nice surprise to everyone if the winner was announced through there, but alas, it wasn't to be!

So I'd like to thank the following people for submitting designs (in no particular order):

- 1v0ry_k1ng
- TRO
- AF
- Dr.Zais
- Jack Cloudy
- Daan
- Runecrafter
- Argh

the winner of the competition was:
Dr.Zais AND Runecrafter!

Yes, after much private debate, we came to two finalists, Dr.Zais and Runecrafter. We concluded that we really liked elements from both Dr.Zais' design, as well as Runecrafter's design, but also found weaknesses in both. We contacted both Rune and DZ about this, and together they worked up a final design which was modelled by Rune and myself, mapped by Gnomre, and textured by me.

Congratulations to both the winners, who did a fantastic job, and well done to everyone who submitted, it was a hard decision, and there were some very interesting designs.

Let me walk you through the new Imperial Headquarters:



The Imperial Commander is, as was mentioned in the competition, immobile. It is important to note that the Rebel Commander is actually a fully mobile vehicle.

Your HQ is a smaller version of the Imperial Prefabricated Garrison Base. It came into use shortly after the empire fractured in order to keep planets under control for a fraction of the cost of the larger garrison bases that were used at the height of the Empire.

A Star Destroyer can typically carry several of these, which are then delivered to a planet to keep the peace - or more typically, to subjugate the planet - and then keep the peace. These structures are self-contained, and designed to offer an Imperial commander everything he needs to ensure the planet remains under Imperial control.

As an Imperial General tasked with wresting control from the Rebel Alliance, this is your centre of operations. If it dies, you will lose.

Initially, your commander provides a small amount of resources in order to get your warmachine running. It is capable of producing Scout Troopers, Probe Droids and ProtoConstruction Droids.

It is quite heavily armoured, but is unarmed. However, it is guarded by six Imperial Guards, the most elite Stormtroopers. These guards are dispatched personally via their own drop pods from an orbiting Star Destroyer. When they fall in battle, they are slowly replaced. Imperial Guards are dedicated in their service to the Empire, but they take their orders from higher up then you - and have only one mission - to protect the Garrison with their lives. You cannot control these troops.

The Imperial Garrison is delivered with a bare minimum of facilities - this is to save space on the orbiting Star Destroyer. However, the garrison is modular in design, and once landed, can be upgraded with new abilities. These upgrades are forking, and one path will rule out another path (though you are able to 'downgrade'). You will have to select which upgrade path suits you or your situation best.

Here is a chart displaying the upgrades:

Note that in the beta you are only able to upgrade to military upgrade 3 / command upgrade 2.

Here you can see images of the commander in its various states:



Now, the beta!

As has been mentioned in the past, we are having a beta. We want to open up the game for some heavy testing so that we can make sure what we've done so far is playing well.
However, it is going to be a closed beta. This is because we specifically don't want the beta to be confused as a release. We have one real shot at the big time, in terms of attracting people who are interested in Star Wars, but have never heard of Spring. These people are likely to be put off by IW's currently unfinished state, so it is important to us that we control who is playing our release.

We are currently asking people to post to let us know that they are interested in the beta.

If you would like to take part in the beta, please post in this thread on our forum.

Please first read the thread carefully. Not everyone who signs up will automatically be in the beta. This is not because we want to be bastards, it is because we need to keep the numbers to a manageable level at the start so that we can keep things under control.
Also, we intend to bring people in in waves, so if you miss out at the start, this doesn't mean that you won't be playing the beta.

looks very nice one of my faiv models so far keep up the good work and nice to hear that progress is coming along quickly.

this mod looks very promising and is what spring needs ;}

Cant wait for the full release

Stormtrooper rush kekeke

This is going very professionally! Good work!

If I was one of those troops, I sure wouldn't be sitting with my legs dangling out >_>

Technically in Star Wars they stand up when they're on-board, but our stormtroopers just look so lame and rigid when they're standing. It looks a lot cooler when they're sitting. Which is based on how troops ride in black hawks, as well as huey's

Looks good, Dr.Zais design was my personal favorite. Does it have the cool landing/construction animation with separate parts? How does the imperial guards work, are they unselectable units that stand around the building at all times, and when they die new ones land in a drop pod? Or do they arrive in drop pods once the commander is attacked and then leave?

I like the upgrading tree as well, looks very interesting.

We decided that animation was too elaborate for the beginning of the game, IIRC, because you need to be able to start building as soon as possible. We were going to have one of our dropships leaving it at the beginning of the game instead.

The royal guards are unselectable and respawn automatically after dying at a rate of somewhere around 1/minute, I can't remember the exact amount of time. You get six of them at the very beginning of the game (they do have elaborate reentry animations since there's very little need for them in the first thirty seconds of the game) and they'll always fill back up to six as long as your garrison is alive.

Ok, I see that the multiple drops at the beginning are still there in the form of descending guards then.

can you build another garrison if it is destroyed in a no com ends match?
If you can, will you get six guards automatically, or do they come every minute?

At the moment there are no plans to allow players to build more garrisons. If you could build more garrisons, you would get more imperial guards.

Also, as you can see in our upgrade tree that there are tentative plans to allow the Imperial commander to build imperial guards via upgrade.

We are considering allowing some sort of 'commander level' structure that will allow imperials to have 'backups', but it's unlikely at this point to be another HQ building, but some other smaller structure.

*Begins scheming ways to maek profit off of game*

... epic necro fail, there was already an eyecandy thread man.

While we're talking about headquaters anyway, I need to design a 4-tier (visual state needs to show tier) headquater, sci fi style, and I'm having trouble doing that, does anyone have a reference or something that can give me ideas?

I said sci fi style

this is NOT the thread for that, start a new one, this thread was for the: IW News: Winner of commander competition, closed beta, no general command building discussion.