Avali Nexus Forum Thread 3: A crowd.

Star Wars: Interregnum
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Star Wars Interregnum is a mod for that space RTS behemoth Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion proving once again that the real time 4X genre was more or less both invented and perfected in 2008. However Interregnum brings some unique bits to the table that it's cousin Sins of a Galactic Empire doesn't, namely it is an expansion of the excellent E4X mod which builds upon the DLCs for Rebeliion and aims to make Sins feel more like a proper 4X than a typical rough and tumble RTS that snuck into the 4X club with a fake ID. E4X is of course, like any mod, not without it's issues and Interregnum really hurts when you realize that not only does it carry over these issues, it has it's own.

The first thing you will notice when you start a match of Interregnum is that you can still select any of the vanilla factions, and that while the Empire has a loyalist/rebel split, the Rebel Alliance does not. This is not a mistake for better or worse. So right out of the gate if you're looking for a good way to recreate some epic star wars battle or are otherwise in it for any sort of immersion this is NOT the mod for you, however with that out of the way let's dive into the actual gameplay.

Upon starting a match everything will be very familiar and predictable, you start with some factories and scouts depending on your settings, for my first impressions test I played as the Empire under Darth Vader, and so I immediately began to take inventory of what was available to me. The first thing that stood out to me was that the roster of ships was modeled after the vanilla rosters, with a light frigate, missile frigate, siege frigate, defense frigate, etc. however it seemed to lack the support cruisers of the vanilla game, instead simply offering up different variation of the heavy cruiser with different abilities and an interdictor. For capital ships I found my options much more divergent from the base game, in vanilla Sins you have 6 capital ships to choose from that all fill different roles, and you build one based on whatever suits your needs, however as the Empire although there were 7 types of capital ships only 2 were available to me at first, the Victory Star Destroyers, the Venator was locked behind a simple level 2 tech, and the Imperials and Tector behind logistics technologies, which I tend to stall on researching because each applies a global income penalty for the rest of the match. While I appreciated the effort to keep the sub-capitals balanced against the vanilla ships the research tree for ships seemed much less thought out, with even some strike craft such as the TIE/In and a variant of the TIE/B locked behind research (and the TIE/In had a logistics tech as a prerequisite) as well as the Venator and Dreadnought being bundled in the civilian research tree instead of the military tree with all the other ships.

In practice everything still felt like Sins, which you can decide for yourself if that's good or bad, just with everyone's ~~least~~ favorite Star Destroyers and Republic-era escort vessels, the game was merciful enough to make the Victory-I the Empire's "colony" capital ship capable of establishing new colonies immediately after it had bombed enemy ones into dust, which suited me well as the high supply costs of my escorts had made squeezing a colony shuttle in a risky proposition. For expanding my empire they had offered me Sentinel-class shuttles, which may very well be the worst colony vessel I've ever seen as they have literally no weapons and are destroyed after colonizing a single planet, they are also incapable of capturing neutral structures like the vanilla colony frigates, for that the Empire must use it's scout frigates, but the Sentinel did have the good fortune to cost literally 1 supply. For actually building up my planets the logistical structures were nothing new, two research labs, two shipyards, two asteroid mines, a trade port, a refinery, and a broadcast center, however the tactical tab was a bit stranger, my base defense structure was a Golan III defense platform, which is essentially a mini-starbase. Considering that a regular Starbase is generally sufficient to stop a moderately sized fleet dead if not destroy it outright I found the Golan very strange, especially since I had no other actual defenses to build, which somewhat mitigated the high 6 structure slot cost of the Golan (a vanilla defense turret would be roughly half that) by leaving me little else to do with those slots. As an inherited feature from E4X the limit on space mines has gone from 150 pointy explodey balls per planet to a mere 10 pointy super explodey balls per planet, which mildly irked me as I took note of the other structures that rounded out my tactical menu, a repair gantry, gravity well generator, planetary shield emitter, and titan shipyard, nothing new over vanilla though the planetary shield now projected a shield onto other structures around it, markedly increasing their survivability, and the gravity well generator was no long a permanent debuff to jump times in the entire gravity well and now had a toggleable channeling ability the prevented all FTL jumps within a relatively limited radius, which, again, would be much worse if you had anything better to put in all those structure slots. So usually I'd have clusters of 4-5 mini-starbases each with several turbolasers, missile batteries, and 2 hangars for fighters and bombers, and some marginally relevant support structures.
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When it came time to build a titan, the ultimate symbol of my faction's power and influence, I found I actually had two options, a Bellator Star Dreadnought, or Darth Vader's personal Executor. Now hero units are a feature of E4X and the Interregnum factions have them too, so a hero titan caught me off guard, though like most other worthwhile capital ships it was locked behind a fairly high level logistics tech, and my modest empire wasn't ready to lose such a substantial chunk of it's income, so I skipped over it to build the Bellator. In practice the Bellator functioned like any other titan, although I noted it had the ability to spawn TIE/D squadrons if I could research them, which it shouldn't be able to as they are exclusive to the Imperial rebels and I was Loyalist, so naturally I couldn't really research them and had to abandon my dreams of tiny fighter/bomber swarms.

On the galactic scale E4X certainly delivers a level of unpredictability to Sins that makes it very compelling, in addition to the DLC's roaming anomalies E4X and Interregnum appear to have added new artifacts to discover, abandoned superweapons to seize , provided you can also uncover the artifact that houses the secret to it's operation, and various random events such as immigration surges and mercenary pirate captains. All the various events gave my galaxy a refreshingly "alive" feeling as if there was much more going on than the players' petty war for total conquest, though they seemed poorly explained and often somewhat disconnected from the actual state of the galaxy, although this is a problem that was also apparent and present in the vanilla DLC's events, so I'll simply call it a missed opportunity and thank E4X for adding some actually interesting events beyond "the galaxy is undergoing an economic boom!" and "the galaxy is undergoing an economic recession!"

Interregnum is full of curious little decisions and the presence of both it and the elements of the vanilla game seem to clash quite often, as it changes so much that the vanilla races feel like they are intruding upon Interregnum's world rather than the other way around, but combining one of the many Sins mods that introduces a more established IP into the RTS juggernaut's admittedly outdated engine with one of the of the mods that aims to simply improve the overall experience is one of the better matches you'll find in Sins' Moddb directory, and with both E4X and Interregnum being made by the same person their development is very pleasantly intertwined and ensures that both are seamlessly compatible and one rarely updates without the other being close behind. All things considered Interregnum is an excellent addition to the stable of Sins mods, if you wish to try it for yourself it can be found here: http://www.moddb.com/mods/star-wars-interregnum
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