EaW Space Addon News No. 16

Welcome to our 16th News!
Today's subjects are the new GUI, some new details about the diplomacy system and a new ability for carriers in space.

Let's start with the GUI: As most of you probably know, Space Addon uses a Sub Menu System to switch between different ship classes on Empire at War's command bar, which allows us to add a lot more units to the mod, since Empire at War itself could only handle 26 units on one planet at once. We were not too happy with the alignment of the new GUI buttons, so we have re-positioned them to make them look like they were actually a part of the original command bar:

Let me explain the function of the buttons from left to right:

You will recognize the first two as standard Empire at War buttons(droid helper and objectives window), nothing special about those two.

The next four buttons are part of our Sub Menu System. The first one will open the Corvettes/Frigates menu, the second the Capital Ship menu, the third one the Super Star Destroyers menu and finally the fourth will open the research menu.

And now the last button, which is the most exciting one, belongs to our diplomacy system, which leads me to the next point:

Influence Table and Low Influence Notifications

As I said, the last button belongs to the diplomacy system and will display the Influence Table, which allows you to keep an overview over all the influence values of your planets.
Although the table is still a work in progress, let me show you a picture of how it could look like when it's finished:

As you can see, the table first displays the planet name followed by its influence value.

You have probably noticed that I have a rather low influence on Coruscant.
And since we know that you cannot always keep an eye on the influence table we have decided to implement Low Influence Notifications.
These notifications are important! Of course their main purpose is to tell the player that his influence on a planet is decreasing, but moreover it could mean that an enemy diplomat is hiding on the planet, ready to take over the planet without a single fight.
In game these notifications will appear as a pop up from the droid helper and look like this:

And now the last point for today:

The Fighter Garrison Ability for Carriers

This ability allows you to garrison fighter squadrons in carriers.
Now you might wonder why we are recreating an ability we already have in ground battles.
The reason is simple: the original ability just doesn't work in space battles.
Modders have tried for years to find a solution and now we can finally present you a working method(although it is still a work in progress).

Here is a short preview of this new ability:

Basically the carrier unit gets two dummy abilities. The first one to garrison fighters, which will despawn any fighter within a certain range. The second ability launches the fighters again.

This ability gives you the chance to make a lot more use of your fighters by garrisoning in the carriers and taking them as near to their target as possible without the risk of being shot down by anti fighter corvettes.

That is all I got for today.
I hope you enjoyed the little insight about our new game play features!
Don't forget to vote for us in the MOTY 2010 contest!

P.S.: Also check out our other project:
Sins of a solar Empire - Future Wars - Tactical Simulator