Rise of the Mandalorians (RotM) is one of those mods when you have a game that was really good, not quite good enough though, and unsupported for the last several years. It's basically an expansion pack in and of itself that completely overhauls starship hardpoints and weaponry for more spectacular space battles, adds partially animated gun turrets that actually track their targets (why was this not in the base game?) and a substantial number of new units. Most important to what it does though is replacing Forces of Corruption's questionable third faction, the Zann Consortium, with the Mandalorians. The Consortium made extensive use of exported Mandal Motors/Hypernautics vehicles, which makes the choice of replacement obvious, and it always seemed kind of iffy that a criminal organization should be overtly vying with the Empire and Rebels for control of the galaxy, while the Mandalorians have a canon reputation for bringing the galaxy to it's knees quite easily when they band together and get all imperialistic. So what is the problem with this mod then? where does it go wrong? RotM doesn't really go wrong it just hits the same snag that many other mods of such level of ambition hit where the game it builds upon tries very hard not to let it do the things it's trying to do, skirmish mode always lacked the depth of a campaign in Empire at War but with RotM UI limitations prevent skirmishes from featuring most of the new units, these same limitations even manage to rear their heads in the campaign where having too many production buildings on one planet prevents you from selecting certain construction options due to menu overflow.
Perhaps most importantly RotM really doesn't address many of EaW's inehrent issues, the rebel AI will still attempt to invade planets with a single platoon of infantry and an entire air wing of snow speeders, the AI will simply refuse to attack a planet unless it has a comical amount of overkill (even then it still manages to lose quite a lot but usually somewhat narrowly) or can bypass the orbital fight altogether, and such a confrontation averse AI basically defeats the purpose of a RISK style 4X, pathfinding issues remain fairly rampant and are actually made worse on RotM's new planets, the AI still seems to fail to grasp even the most basic strategy, committing giant fleets of nothing but Y-wings and X-wings to attack fortified starbases with predictably disastrous results, and finally various small bugs persist with irritating frequency.
However the developer of RotM is planning a complete overhaul of the mod, while it's new high resolution textures and models certainly look very nice and the prospect of a new and revised unit list is exciting, but I have to wonder to what degree with RotM2.0 suffer from the same issues that prevent the current version from truly wowing me.