The Present and Future news - Star Wars: Interregnum mod for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

Greetings commanders!

The second half of 2022 has been quite eventful for the mod and the Sins community in general. First, we released the Beta 2 update for Star Wars Interregnum. While the mod team was trying to decide how to approach the next update, we got the long awaited news the Sins of a Solar Empire II is now in development and will be entering early access within the next week! With that, we decided its time to share a bit about our current plans for the future of the mod and give you all a very basic roadmap for the future.

Star Wars Interregnum Beta 2 - Dark Empire

But first, for anyone who wasn't aware, we released Star Wars Interregnum Beta 2 in July! This update focuses on a new "Campaign" system, which are special maps with unique victory conditions and sometimes special units. The campaigns allowed us to create a new subfaction, the Reborn Emperor Palpatine's Dark Empire, which you can play as or against. By restricting this powerful subfaction to the campaign missions, it allowed us to add the Dark Empire's full arsenal of powerful weapons that would be far too overpowered to balance in normal games, such as planet killers like the Eclipse Star Dreadnaught, the Galaxy Gun's Disintegrator Warheads, and even Palpatine himself.

The update also saw the largest set of balance adjustments ever released, new technologies of the New Republic, some new units for the Imperial factions, new minor factions, Star Wars special planets, maps and more! Definitely check it out if you haven't already.

Sins of a Solar Empire II

On September 16th, Stardock Games and Ironclad Games announced that Sins of a Solar Empire II is in development. This was big news for the entire Sins community. Sins is a game I've been playing non-stop since 2009. While the game received numerous expansions and DLC over the years, most notably Rebellion, the upgrades and new features couldn't hide the fact that after nearly 15 years, the game was struggling to keep up with modern hardware advances. Sins I is an amazingly optimized game for the 32 bit, single core CPU era. But virtually everyone now has PCs that can throw more power than those technologies allow.

I won't speak too much about Sins II, it's best for you to learn about that from the Sins Devs themselves on their website. But needless to say Sins II appears to have a modern game engine fully supporting essentially unlimited RAM and multi-core processors. It also seems that the game will be leveraging this computing power to add features that would never be possible in Sins I, such as fully independently tracking and firing turrets and fully simulated projectiles.

Just these three features are huge for a potential Star Wars mod in the future. The mod team here at Interregnum is taking a wait and see approach with Sins II before deciding on what we may want to do in the future with it, as my guess is the game is at least another year from release and the Devs have confirmed modding support will be one of the last features to fully flesh out. But needless to say all of us are watching the career of Sins II with great interest! I personally intend to play some of the technical preview that will come out next week, so if you are curious about seeing some footage of the game in action and my own opinions on it, keep an eye out on my YouTube channel.

The Future of Interregnum

That said, with Sins II no longer being a topic of speculation and rumor, the Dev team has made an important decision about the current Interregnum mod. One way or another, it is clear that the future in changing, and even if Sins II never arrived, we are approaching the limits of what we can add into the Sins I engine.

Therefore, we are pleased to announce that the next major version of Star Wars Interregnum will be the full release of the mod. No more alphas or betas. It will be Star Wars Interregnum - version 1.0. Between Betas 1 and 2 the mod has come a really long way, and we have now added all the features I originally planned for nearly a decade ago, and all that we've promised the community.

Interregnum 1.0 will have some exciting new major features that we're not quite ready to talk about yet. But we intend for it to be the final major content update, along with taking what I think have been our very polished beta versions to the next level in terms of quality. We thank you for all the support you've giving us over the years, and we look forward to fully releasing the mod sometime in 2023.