So, originally, the plan was to have an action game style plot?

That's the impression I got.


I lol'd.

I was unaware that growth hormones were considered "dark". One of my friends had to take them for a while to gain some height. I'm just talking about a jacked up version of that.

I actually spent quite a lot of time on the palette, making 3D histograms, taking color
spacing into account. In the end it was all for nothing, since my monitor was severely
miss-calibrated, haha! Notice that there are nearly no really dark colors. The ramps and
crossramps are poor or nonexistent. Also, I made the mistake of screenshotting
Photoshop's palette dialog... which actually changes the colors! Might be some color
profile feature.

I could make a better palette, but it would upset all of the current mod content. Writing
a palette converter (batch processing) is trivial though.

I pixel in 24 bit mode. Perhaps when I have a lot of content done, I can put it all on
an enormous canvas, and then index, take that palette and clean it up (nudging colors
into ramps, etc).


Doesn't the white dropship look the most like the crabs? It has those eyes. It's the
Remnants of Mu-Ilaak which are... uh, the remnants of an ancient race.


I was hoping that there could be randomly generated Ronin heads too. I'm worried
that making them into an organized faction would make them... another organized
faction. The unorganized niche is unused, and I need something like the Ronin to
illustrate the dark side of FreeTrade's business.. what happens to those who are on
the outside.

There could be smaller Mercenary unions and things like that too. What I'm describing
is just a few of the major factions and some smaller ones which I need as story
elements. I'm quite deliberately leaving space for fan-made factions.


In my mind you were never supposed to be able to buy stuff from other factions (other
than randomly available black market items), due to various intangible restrictions.
Factions makes things graphically fun and clear on the playfield and it cleans up the
buy menu. Certainly, there could be a general market where you could buy say cheap
robot bodies and standard weapons, but the major factions have also invested
significant resources into developing their technologies, and don't want to see their stuff
used by rivals. Each faction was meant to have enough stuff to allow for varied play,
but since we haven't finished a lot yet, it all ended up in the same buy menu I guess.
It would be fun to give some factions something like beasts, just to break up the... robotony.

The story scenarios (introducing the factions) will probably preface the Meta game
where the planet is finally being exploited. I was planning to work on the meta game
assets first though.

The original plan was to have the Meta game merged with the story scenarios, e.g.
as you play and conquer random sites, and specific story locations would become
available every now and then. It became too messy and inconsistent.


Inspired by Legend of Galactic Heroes...

Sad story

Ooh, scale diagram. Is there one for all of CC's vanilla craft?

Can we get airstrikes? Performed by that lancer?

Will this concept art be kept on the forums indefinately, or can I save it on my computer for future viewing?

Also, for the Skeleton-girl-commander-brain person, I want to be clear on this; her unit is the first girl-like unit in the factions page for her squad, right? Or is she an actual skeleton with wisps of hair or what?

Well, It's great to see an actual size reference for the TradeStar.

A tip, though: stop pre-writing your posts with Wordpad, it messes up all of the spacing when you paste them here.

They're at the bottom of the picture. Look hard.

I host the files on my server. Eventually I'll move it onto the fluff page, so it won't go away.

Uzira is the black girl. She's the only survivor of a battle long ago.

I wonder what kind of damage a 150 meter long sci-fi weapon would do. It's designed to engage
the enemy effectively at a 14 light second distance or less (330 Earth radii). At such distances,
you have a 14 second delay before you see the target, and 14 seconds or more for the beam /
accelerated things to reach the target. It becomes a game of guessing where to be and where to shoot.

Ships probably engage each other at closer distances (<5 lightseconds) to avoid wasting resources.

The ships I posted only covers a few of the larger ships. I'm still working on the concepts for the
ingame ships. But, if you look carefully you can see persons and a few smaller craft at the bottom.

I deliberately bake in line breaks into my text, because it makes the text more readable for me.
I'm on a WUXGA screen and often keep the browser maximized. This makes the lines too long
and I lose track of which line I was at when reading. According to some typography rules, a line
should be about 39 characters wide to be readable.

What, you mean the small dot near the...


HOLY FUDGE MOTHER OF DATA. BIG SHIPS ARE BIG.

Edit: And Prom, you might as well be right, but your spacing is still broken. It goes like "line - sigle word - line - space - line" and repeats.

Would been cool in a mission or something to have an unit with laser designator that designates targets for a coalition warship.

I don't understand what you mean Areku. It looks like this to me (firefox):




In the case of the planet where you're at in CC, we're looking at a very minor brawl over scanty resources.
It has to be that way to work with the skirmish scale of the game.

Also, FreeTrade might not be too happy about large warships firing their weapons near their TradeStars other
when there's good reason. In the case of the peripheral worlds, FreeTrade might tolerate some rules being bent,
but when the story starts the planet is a big unknown and there are 230 000 other star systems with potential resources.
None of the factions have made a major commitment towards exploiting the planet. They just sent low level prospectors
or whatever (you).

Edit: The CMF Lancer is a homage to this baby.

And that's a small Tradestar?
U mad?