This mod is a Total Conversion. Before I saw StarCraft: Sons of War, I was hoping for this mod to be the awesome final mod StarCraft deserved before StarCraft II came out. The only problem with this mod is that I plan to make a campaign, but while I can do everything for the mod myself, such as voice acting, sprites and I can just borrow portraits, I can't to it as effectively (or quickly) as most people out there, thus limiting the quality (and release date) of it. I originally planned to have everything in the mod to be 100% custom made down to the interface and terrain if possible, but I'm going to have to drop some of those hopes.

This mod is basically supposed to take place during the middle of the Iron Wars in a Science Fiction universe I made up. This mod is going to cover the events from the beginning of the war to the Iron Wolves Empire reclaiming their resource rich world of Selias with a bunch of gaps. This basically is the first half of the Iron Wars with gaps because there's no way I can cover a six year war without cutting a few parts out.


Gameplay for each faction is as follows:

-The Iron Wolves Empire relies on a variety of powerful units with even more powerful special abilities, their weakness is high resource costs, high build times and lack of powerful low level units as well as high costs and research time for upgrades. The best way to get them running is to build up very fast and expand fast so you have the resources to use later in the game for you more powerful units.

-The Earth Federal Forces play on versatility and defense. Their defense turrets usually keep most non-dedicated units out for a long time, causing players to waste resources on attacks. They also have a variety of versatile units. Their weakness is that they have no dedicated attackers meaning that while they're units are effective against both flying and ground units, a specialist unit will decimate them.

-The Regine Empire play on numbers and power. They are dangerous early in the game because of their strong ground defenses and cheap land units, but they suffer near the end of the game because they lack significant heavy units of their own. They also have very little in the way of large air units with the exception of the Sincla which is only accessed by taking over an IWE Heavy Star Dock.

Campaign:
Okay, the campaign is played in three parts. First you play as the Earth Federal Forces who find a patrol group of their ships ruined with a small group of Iron Wolves Empire ships not too far and heavily damaged. They immediately assume the attack was done by them and attack, destroying the force. The Iron Wolves Empire ships had no communication systems operational to explain what really happened. The Earth Federal Forces declare war on the Iron Wolves Empire and began a full scale assault on the Iron Wolves Empire's two largest worlds; Koval, an industrial world, and Selias, a large, resource rich planet, also the only natural source of an alloy called Tyrizene, which is used in making most of the Iron Wolves Empires ships and land vehicles. After a few battles on the surface, the Iron Wolves Empire retreats from Selias, most of the ships are civilian ships. As the ships are leaving the surface, a fleet of mysterious ships begin to appear and start shooting at the transports while more fly to the surface of the planet. The Earth campaign ends there.

Next is the Regine Empire campaign where you play as the conquerers. You spend the first few missions taking out what little defense is left on the surface of the planet and take over. After that, you attempt to take over the Iron Wolves Empire's famous Rozalin Shipyards, the primary producer of the famed Selveris Assault Cruiser which comes to service a few missions into the Regine Empire campaign. When you take over the station, you gain two new ships, the SinBlast and Sincla Mega-Gunships. The SinBlast is a hero only unit. During the next few missions, you are provided with a few Sincla ships. The rest of the campaign is spent taking over one Iron Wolves Empire owned world and one Earth owned planet.

During the final part, Iron Wolves Empire campaign, you are trying to reclaim your worlds. First you try to reclaim the Koval from Earth with the help of a Heavy Soldier named Ryan Karmunds, who is one of the lead technology developers for the Iron Wolves Empire and Zachary Ratch, an Elite who drives a modified Hellstorm Tank, meanwhile keeping the Regine Empire out while they're trying to take it from both. After that, you are trying to reclaim the Rozalin Shipyards to gain access to the Selveris Assault Cruiser again with the help of the few remaining Selveris cruisers, including the Iron Wolves Empire's flagship, the Kerion. After that, you try to reclaim Selias, a few new heroes become available then; Kaitrei Rozari and his ship the Iron Claw, FZ-10-N, Viki Ryonen and Rho Silverbane will be there to help reclaim the planet.

Currently, I do not have any maps ready, the campaign is still in heavy planning (I'm the only on who works on it.) I want to have a fully melee-playable mod before I even open the map editor to work on a campaign.

Here are rendered images of some of the units that are going to appear in the mod. Just so you know, some renders are older than others.
For Earth Federal Forces:
EFF SL-3 Slicer Scout fighter.
EFF SL-4 Slayer Stealth fighter
EFF M-92 Mesallas Bomber
EFF M-92b Mesallas Light Remote Bomber
EFF Thor Gunship
EFF Magnus War Cruiser
EFF Crossbow Cruiser
EFF Eagle IV Carrier/Mobile Factory

For the Iron Wolves Empire:
IWE Hellstorm Tank - (Anti-Air mode)
IWE GX-3c Prototype Assault Mech (Hero unit)
IWE VV-X "Vivi Ten" Raider
IWE ZZ3-F9B Testbed
IWE R-20 Scythe Advanced Tactical Fighter
IWE R-21 Carver Missileboat
IWE Spire Missile Frigate
IWE Selveris Assault Cruiser

For the Regine Empire:
RE RipFighter
RE Deathfish Bomber
RE Vortex
RE Nightmare Gunship
RE Sincla Super-Gunship
RE SinBlast Mega-Gunship

This mod will feature:
-Three factions: Earth Federal Forces, the Iron Wolves Empire and the Regine Empire.
-Unique units designed from the point of concept up. (Iron Claw is an exception, I borrowed that from RazorClawX with permission.)
-Custom AI tailored specifically to the new factions.
-A fully playable campaign.
-New buttons and consoles.

What I plan to have done before I release the mod for anyone not involved in its design group:
-A complete set of units.
-Mostly balanced units.
-Stability to the point of crashing at most once every ten games.
-New command icons.

I will post some screenshots here soon. Until then, you can look up my mod on ModDB.
http://www.moddb.com/mods/8364/project-iron

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 25 2008, 7:13 pm by Ardis.

I'd be happy to help.
I can do decent mapping, and I can write/concept art. [Although I reckon you have that down, I can only do inorganic art, vehicles etc.]
I'm a very good ideas man if I do say so myself, and if you want to talk to me over MSN or anything just send me a PM.
I'm also a good problem-solver.
If you need a jack-of-all trades, that's me.
Sounds awesome by the way, good luck to you!

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 25 2008, 4:00 pm by candle12345.

That's kind of what I do as well. I do the concept art, modeling, storyline related stuff and everything else. I used to have someone who did the iscripting for me, but I figured out iscripting for myself. (He's still going to be listed as an iscripter in the credits since he did a decent amount.)

I just added renders of most of the complete units.

If you need a terrainer for the campaign, im available. Check the terrain ladder for examples of my work.

Very interesting stuff, but what I meant by custom terrain was creating new tilesets from scratch, but that's probably not going to be done in time. I can do the mapping myself. but I'm still working on other stuff for now such as balancing, AI and coming up with more units.

Entire custom tilesets? That's ambitious.

I mean new custom tilesets as in new terrain tilesets, doodads, etc. Re-doing them from scratch. I finally dropped the idea because I realized that the current terrain is fine as is and anything I could do wouldn't be near as good as the built in tilesets in StarCraft, I will probably replace a few doodads here and there though.

EDIT: I misread what you said. I thought you said "ambiguous" not "ambitious".

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 28 2008, 6:33 pm by Ardis.

So, I got a no?
Anywoot, hope this gets done, looks cool.

Okay, I'm not done with the model yet, but I have a good idea on how this unit is supposed to work. The new unit is the Liberty Mobile Stardock. It is an IWE building that can take off and land (like the Terran buildings, obviously) but this unit can turn and attack while airborne. I've got the concept of its design on some paper and I'm going to work on the model for it later. I'll have more details when it's ready.

Good to know that you're still working on it. Just to tell you, if you need any help with the Liberty Mobile look around Ad Astras for the Vangaurd platform. It's a building thats very similar to it.

Actually, just after I finished the drawing of the Liberty, I remembered that. Also, that was a pretty interesting mod. I would do a space-only mod like that, but there's too many others, by the time I finish it, the whole thing will be overdone.

and there aren't many ground-based mods?

I'll have the basic model up soon.

Okay, here's the Liberty Mobile Shipyard in the form of an animation of it transforming from mobile mode to production mode.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oLKZ1sxQ18
You might have to wait for it to process because I posted this right after it was done uploading. You can also see other animations I made that are related to the mod, you can see the Hellstorm tank transforming (but that ability may be taken out of the mod due to complications I am facing.) You can also see the harvesting platform that's going to appear in one of the EFF missions on the campaign.

How many frames are you going to cut that down to?

I don't know yet, I am considering cutting it down to about twenty frames for transforming, seventeen for mobile, one for idle, one for when it's almost done being built and a six frame loop for when it's working on something.

Okay, I just started the model for the IWE Factory a half hour ago and here's what I have so far. I want to know what you guys think of it so I know if I should finish it or throw it out before it's too late.
http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i271/the_peacemaker/Iron/IWEFactory.png
And that is with the add-on which is the small building and that's supposed to be a robotic crane on it, I just haven't added the claw/hand on the end yet.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 25 2008, 10:25 pm by Ardis.

The Factory looks like a bunker to me.

I guess it does look a little bulky/armored. It looked much different on paper, but I changed it a little when I made the model. I'll fix it up a little later.

Can I see your sketches?