Oh you know, a little of this, a little of that.

Dawn of Victory (DoV) is a modification currently under development by Slipstream Productions for the RTS Sins of a Solar Empire. Dawn of Victory is a total conversion, replacing the game's original assets with completely new and diverse ships, structures, and gameplay elements. Dawn of Victory pits players as one of 3 intergalactic superpowers: the Democratic Federation, Greater German Reich, and the Soviet Union. These three factions wage war amongst themselves even as a greater threat, the Scinfaxi, threaten them all.

Story

While Dawn of Victory started out loosely based on Harry Turtledove’s “Worldwar” and “Colonization” book series, since then, the backstory has expanded to the point where it has taken on a life of its own.

For centuries an alien race known as the Scinfaxi had been the dominant power in the Orion region of space, their slow but steady expansion brought them into contact with dozens of other races, each one conquered and exterminated to provide the resources and material necessary to support the continually expanding empire.

 

In the 14th century, the first Scinfaxi probes reached Earth: it was surveyed, catalogued, and the plans were meticulously laid for its capture and assimilation. However, the Scinfaxi concept of time was very different from humanity's, and so when the first ships of the conquest fleet arrived in 1943, they were stunned to see Terran society had progressed to an industrial state in an unimaginable sliver of time. The initial landings took humanity by surprise, as the Scinfaxi advanced upon every continent.

It was in this darkest hour that what once divided humanity now brought it together, as the old prejudices were put aside and every free nation on Earth united against the alien aggressors. The tide turned in 1945 when the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb on its own soil, destroying a Scinfaxi landing site.

 

With the total conquest of Earth impossible without destroying everything of value, the Scinfaxi retreated to the Southern hemisphere, content with half the planet. Decades went by with no contact from the Scinfaxi, but as humanity grew bolder, the aliens' plans accelerated. As spacecraft from the last free nations made landfall, and eventually colonized new worlds, the Scinfaxi slowly began to advance. City after city was lost until, in a final act of desperation, the various Terran factions agreed to pursue a literal "scorched earth" policy, sacrificing their remaining positions to nuclear bombardment and quarantining the planet.

 

Humanity has expanded to the stars, and dozens of planets and moons now belong to the remaining Terran nations. There has been almost no contact with the Scinfaxi, and the former nations of Earth have become so complacent with their apparent safety that the old prejudices have returned and they once again war amongst themselves. The Scinfaxi are still expanding however, and it is only a matter of time before they decide to stamp out the potential usurpers; if humanity is allowed to advance another hundred years, it may be human soldiers landing on Scinfaxi worlds. The dawn of victory is approaching: the only question is which side will claim it.


Features

 

  • 3 unique sides: The Soviet Union, Greater German Reich, and Democratic Federation.
  • Completely reworked combat model, with each ship possessing dozens of weapons and defenses.
  • Military Based Expansion, with research and economic aspects reshaped to support combat.
  • New particle effects, skyboxes, and planets.
  • Diverse environments ranging from open space to clouded nebulae.
  • Several unique ship classes like corvettes and interceptors
  • New planetary defenses like minefields, missile arrays, and defense bases
  • Nine new levels, ranging from two player deathmatch to heated ten player battles
  • New invasion mechanics, with troopships that can invade and colonize planets simultaneously
  • Customizable cruisers and capital ships

Past Updates



 

 


Comments (Page 28)
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on Mar 12, 2009

Nice to see an update, hope to see more of this great mod .

on Mar 12, 2009

you just made me jizz in my pants after that video.

Now im waiting patently just too see the germans kick the soviet ass back to the first stalingrad.

on Mar 13, 2009

ok swiss ill be as patient as possible.

on Mar 23, 2009

This is something that I found that I thing you all will apreciate.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KEueJnsu80

Enjoy

on Mar 28, 2009

With the resumption of hostilities on the Soviet-Reich border, tensions have risen all across the Illyrium Sector. Civilian trade has nearly disappeared in the neutral colonies of New Geneva, Kuiper, and Outreach over fears the conflict could spread to the New Weimar Republic.

 


SU-85 Bombers

The New Weimar Republic, a GGR breakaway state that only recently emerged as the sole government on Vega following the Collapse of the Imperium of Deustchland, relies on foreign trade for most of its goods and is heavily supported by the USSR. Indeed, many suspect it was the Soviet Union that funded the German Communist Party’s planet wide-revolt that brought the New Weimar Republic to power. Anglo-Canadian and Brazilian companies also provide goods that are otherwise hard to come by in the system, but now many have suspended their operations.



Opalian Maritime Transport, Johnston Lines, and Antosz Shipping have confirmed they will be diverting their ships to Juno, Vesta, and Highgate until the crisis has passed. Still, there are a brave few willing to run their shipments into a potential warzone, Freeport 33 in orbit of New Geneva still receives the odd merchant captain, willing to make the run into the Tannhauser Gate, or even Galleria.



The 20 some odd Freeports in the Illyrium have their fair share of scares lately after fighter spacecraft and bombers from Soviet battlegroups have begun flybys dangerously close to civilian shipping. 2 weeks ago civilian salvage ship “Tranquillity” was forced to abort its docking at Freeport 29 when a squadron of Soviet bombers fired shots across its bow.

Still, even with such incidents occurring at an alarming rate, not every free captain is willing to find safer routes.
For the BBC, I’m William Moyles reporting from Freeport 33.

on Mar 28, 2009

Since we launched our Wiki, we've had an enormous amount of fan backstory written.  User-generated content has came from forum games and such, but there has also been quite a bit of pure prose from some talented individuals. Entire minor factions have been built up from scratch, diplomatic relatons and history described, and conflicts and skirmishes illustrated in great detail.  The mod's development and backstory has been heavily influenced by fan-created works. Both our latest news updates' names were inspired by an article created by user Super-soviet called “Proletarian Colonisation”, which also found its way into the manual.

Most of the long articles on units were written by myself, but there have been some rather lengthy articles on various other aspects of the universe. SSP forum regular Wingman has taken it upon himself to flesh out the entire DF faction: he has contributed to the main DF page as well as created several articles about their politics in an attempt to keep them from being the “generic good guy” faction.

Erdrick Colonization Corporation

The Erdrick Colonization Corporation was the first privately owned colonization and Terra forming company in the Democratic Federation. It was founded by Lorik Erdrick in 2097. They have both private funding and receives what basically amounts to a blank check from the Liberty 94th Exploration Division to aid in their various programs. They have their feet in almost every aspect of everyday life on the new colonies, with the exception of Oceania, which has accused the current head of the company of money laundering, negligence of human rights, and taking advantage of their status of being above the law.

Another frequent contributor, the aforementioned Super-soviet, did a ton of work mostly on the Soviet side of things, like creating the Communist Party article.

Communist Party

The Intergalactic Communist Party
The highest level of all the Communist party. Few, even in the Soviet Union, know of it's plans or how it makes them. This level of the party has no leader, the lessons of Stalinism taught them never to such a mistake again. But it is unknown how it actually works, outsiders can only guess how (and what) plans are made. It is rumoured the party is run not by men, but by computers, wired up to the brains of dead communists leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, and others. But considering the fanatical humanism of the party and that the bodies seem to be intact in the Red square of New Leningrad, it's unlikely. Nobody even knows who the members are, though it's suspected Admiral Petrovich is a leading member.

The National Communist Parties

The second highest level of the party structure. The national Communists oversee activity in each of the human nations. All members of the Soviet government and high up military posts are required to be members of this party level. In the Soviet Union it runs all social activity and controls political thought and economics. The Soviet parties are divided up along the lines of the ethnic population; old U.S.S.R (i.e a Russian communist party, a Kazakh communist party, a Ukrainianparty, etc.). The Communist parties of other nations are mostly underground, while in natural nations such as the Japanese Empire, they act openly, and enter elections peacefully



We will be incorporating material off the wiki in unit descriptions, the manual, and loading screen tips, so keep up the good work!

on Mar 28, 2009

I like those strike craft, what role do they have?

on Mar 28, 2009

They're bombers.

on Mar 28, 2009

Nice job with those bombers, they remind me of the Sukhoi-32 

on Mar 30, 2009
Hello Comrades, for the next week or so we will be posting daily journals of how the gameplay of DoV will be changed from base Sins. Our first entry, written by Comrade Carbon, goes over some the general changes being made for the mod.



For the last...well, let's just call it a “long time” for the sake of both of us, we've been showing you renders, screenshots, and concept art nearly exclusively. I've written a little bit about our gameplay mechanics in dev journals and such, but there really hasn't been an explanation of how much Dawn of Victory is actually going to change things in Sins. This is slightly ironic, as our goal for the project is more to bring new gameplay than to have a bunch of models: I know I've seen a lot of supposed “total conversions” for a variety of games that ended up being a bunch of models pulled off other sites from a popular IP and with no gameplay changes beyond the utterly superficial. We don't want to do this.

So starting today, I'll be writing one journal per day for the week about things we've either done or plan to do for the first release of Dawn of Victory, but all of them will be discussions of how gameplay will work, nothing else. Hopefully, this will catch me up to our artists. smile.gif Today's discussion is going to be a general one: what makes DoV different from base Sins?

Military focus

The answer is: enough to make it feel like a brand new game. We have taken influences from a variety of titles, from Petroglyph's Empire at War (the game on which we first started the mod) to Big Huge Games' Rise of Nations.

Sins of a Solar Empire, as we all know was a cross between 4X and RTS, but this approach doesn’t work too well when applied to our vision of Dawn of Victory. We will be cutting out a majority of the 4X elements to suite a more military oriented game.

This doesn't mean you won't manage empire-building: however, it does mean that existing mechanics will be retooled into more military specific roles, new mechanics, research, and structures will be focused on combat and strategy, and players will usually start with more than one planet under their control.

For example, take the Planetary Defense Base, available only to the Soviet side. Here, corvettes are spawned in at regular intervals (though if you don't want to drain your supply, you can turn them off) rather than built directly. Another structure available to all factions is the Communications Center, which performs a similar role: calling in units from afar. This allows players to feel like they are a commander in a struggle much larger than their own: they can requisition fleets from “elsewhere” as needed. This mechanic was inspired by Empire at War, where larger starbases would call in small ships like the patrol cruisers regularly.

Planets are vital

One of the larger retools is how planets are managed and taken. Planets in Dawn of Victory maps are scarce: taking a planet is a difficult but rewarding endeavor, and losing a planet is a major setback. Dropships now both 'damage' and colonize planets through troop invasions with (unlike the base game) chances below 100% of success. Even if not successful, invasions may lead to allegiance drops, planetary revolts, income drops, and so forth. Troopships must be refilled after each usage at the Planetary Defense Base or Orbital Barracks, so players cannot wait a short time and try again. Planets have larger radiuses allowing more strategic static weapon positioning and minefields can be deployed to force an enemy to go where you want them to go.

Retooled ships

The final thing that you'll definitely notice off the bat is how damage in Dawn of Victory is taken. Ships have four main attributes: hull, armor, plating, and power.

Hull represents the underlying structure of the ship. Ships in Dawn of Victory often have very weak hulls: they regenerate quite quickly though, as crew of a ship tend to put “fix leaking atmosphere” near the top of their priority list. A ship's hull has no mitigation (see below) and therefore 300 hull points will fall much faster than 300 armor points.

Armor represents the general strength of the armor of the ship. It should not be confused with the “armor points” of the base game and functions like Sins' “shields” attribute. This takes the majority of the ship's damage but unlike Sins it regenerates slowly or not at all. Targeting opponents' resupply and repair ships will doom them, and lone capital ships can no longer plow through five planets' worth of local militia and come out without a scratch on the other side. As in Sins, armor is fitted to repel certain kinds of attacks, and some warheads will do more damage against some ships than others.

Plating represents the electric reactive armor fitted on all ships in Dawn of Victory. This plating helps dissipate enemy warheads before they hit the hull: this translates to a percentage shaved off the amount of damage taken by the armor depending on the rating. Higher is always better and plating can be upgraded through the research tree. Plating also becomes proportionally less effective when fired on from multiple targets, as opposed to the increasing effectiveness in vanilla Sins of a Solar Empire.

Power is a percentage representing how much energy is available to perform certain tasks. Unlike base Sins, it is always between 0 and 100, and abilities therefore take a certain percentage of the power total rather than an arbitrary number.

See you tomorrow for our next discussion: the largest, most fierce ships in every commander's arsenal, capital ships.


 

on Mar 30, 2009

Oooh, can't wait! This means you might give us a somewhat soonish release! DELICIOUS!

on Mar 30, 2009

Your changes sound like they'll make it much more challenging and tactical to play, I like it .

on Mar 30, 2009

Hooray for more combat!

on Mar 30, 2009

What about the AI? The new features sound great, but how will you make the AI use the new system, for example refill the troopships for another invasion attempt, or perform strategically at all considering the changes to the way fleet buildup is handled? Considering the SoaSE Ai is notoriously difficult to adjust, will DoW be more oriented towards multiplayer gaming, or will we be able to enjoy battles against a computer opponent as well?

on Mar 30, 2009

ManSh00ter
What about the AI? The new features sound great, but how will you make the AI use the new system, for example refill the troopships for another invasion attempt, or perform strategically at all considering the changes to the way fleet buildup is handled? Considering the SoaSE Ai is notoriously difficult to adjust, will DoW be more oriented towards multiplayer gaming, or will we be able to enjoy battles against a computer opponent as well?

Troopship stuff uses a hacked antimatter thing so they may be able to go back, probably not though. We're not going to dumb down the game so that the AI can play it 100%: since there's just so much stuff we'd have to cut out, doing that would mean a mod like I talked about, just model replacements. They'll still be able to do the basics, and you'll still be able to play against the AI, they just won't do some things effectively/efficiently. Fleet encounters should be OK, though I'm a little worried about the AI's usage of PDBs

We're going to make as much of an effort as possible to publicise it so there should be a decent # of people playing online upon release. We hope. I'm thinking we'll probably do a Hamachi network or five to make it easier, not sure how ICO handles mods.

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