Age of Empires III: Galactic Conflict is a non-commercial, fan-based Star Wars themed mod under construction for Ensemble’s Studios Age of Empires III, drawing inspiration from several star wars games such as Galactic Battlegrounds, Force Commander and Empire at War, AoE3: GC aims to bring the star wars universe to the great RTS game of Age of Empires III.
Class: Trooper-Infantry.
Good against: General Infantry.
Bad Against: Mechs, Aerial units and Snipers (if afar).
Factions: Confederacy, Geonosians (as reinforcements only), and some Underworld Factions (as reinforcements only)
Designed by the Geonosians in such way it resembles their insectoid skeleton, the B1-series Battle Droid became the most widely-used model of battle droid manufactured by Baktoid Combat Automata. They were first mass-produced the great commerce guilds, such as the Trade Federation, to use in their private defense forces. During the Separatist Crisis, many trade cartels pledged their support for the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and the B1 Battle Droid would soon become the main infantry model for the Separatist State's mechanized armies. As the Separatist Droid Armies were deactivated in the conclusion of the Clone Wars, B1 Battle Droids were outlawed by the Galactic Empire, though many units would see themselves being sold on the Black Market. Some of these units were re-activated by severall warlords of the Separatist Holdouts that continued to offer resistance against the Empire.
The B1-series often suffer programming glitches that manifest as personality quirks. Battle droids were dim-witted and no match for regular Troopers, though they weren’t designed to be smart but to overwhelm by sheer numbers.
Individually in Age of Empires III: Galactic Conflict, B1s are among the weaker Troopers present in the mod, being easily outmatched by anyother faction's troopers. But their true strenght lies in numbers. Cheap and quickly trainable, the B1 is inexpensive to mass-produce. The B1 is offered no upgrades, and the best tactic to use them as a Confederacy player is to spam these units untill a better replacement is available (see: B2 Super Battle Droid).
Credits:
Star Wars: Force Arena for the main mesh and texture
Model, skeleton, textures edited by me.
Remember to click in view original for a better experience!
Author's Note:
To give these guys animations was a pain in the balls. In theory it's just as easy as to give them a default skeleton, but on practise, because the weights will never be same as the ingame models, the model would come of as a buggy. The B1 is not new on the mod, infact its present on some older screenshots you can see, but this is the first time I actually am "slightly" happy with its look enough to present it, because I never knew how to match the skinning of the model like the base game, the arms would often look funky, and the weapon would NEVER attach to its proper location and rotation -- so in an eureka moment, I thought "why not having the weapon and arms glued together in a stuck position and skin them from there on?" so this was what I did, and this resulted in two different models - one where the arms and gun were glued together (present in most of its animation), and a second where the arms where infact skinned (present for animation were arm-waving is needed). This was a method I used for all Battledroids, and will probably use for anyother new model that needs the game's base animations.