Development Diary #6: The (new) New Republic, Special Forces, and more!

With a build-bar bursting full of new units, take a sneak peak at the state of the New Republic's reworked land forces...

With the latest episode of The Mandalorian everyone is talking about the New Republic. My mission in Age Of Legends is to bring the Expanded Universe version of the government formed by the Rebel heroes to life for you, the players.

For weeks I’ve been working on the guts of the mod, doing the coding changes necessary to bring gameplay up to the next level. But nobody wants to see pictures of XML coding, right?

So how about something more exciting?

Special Forces Infantry, Operatives and Sea Commandos!

There are two new unit classes coming to the mod: Special Forces Infantry, and Special Forces Operatives.

These Mon Calamari Sea Commandos are the New Republic’s Special Forces Infantry.

Both can travel behind enemy lines using galactic-level stealth, to conduct raids, destroy important targets, neutralise enemy leaders and even take control of planets with well-planned surgical strikes. But each class has a different role:

Special Forces Infantry: These come in 4x squads of 5 troops. They are better trained, more accurate, better armoured and faster than standard Assault Infantry (at the trade-off of the smaller squad size). The Special Forces infantry can engage and destroy enemy infantry, and provide support to…

Special Forces Operatives: Like Clone Commandos, these squads consist of four highly-trained troops. Each has a different set of special abilities:

1. The Vehicle Thief does what it says on the tin: they Sprint towards a target, Hijack it, and turn it against the enemy.

2. The Saboteur is equipped with Sticky Bombs and Sprint, to escape firefights.

3. The Recon has a valuable FOW Reveal, and - you guessed it - Sprint.

4. While the Tech has the most exciting ability of all: Deploy Landing Zone.

The Tech’s small Landing Zone won’t let you call in an AT-AT or heavy amour: it’s just small enough to call in more Operatives or Special Forces Infantry once you’ve secured a defensible position. This can give you a major tactical edge.

Here you can see a group of New Republic SpecForce Operatives and Mon Calamari Sea Commandos awaiting reinforcements during a raid on Zsinj-occupied Taris. Their forward LZ can be used to call in more Special Forces from behind Zsinj’s base, allowing the group to outflank him.

Mission accomplished: with the held of a captured AT-AT, the SpecForce Operatives and Mon Calamari Sea Commandos are victorious, and Taris has been liberated.

(Other factions will have a wide range of new and reworked units to fill out their Operative and Special Forces Infantry roles: from Trandoshan Slavers to Noghri Assassins. More on that next time!)

The early New Republic ‘s roster

Thanks to the official patch by Petroglyph, it is now possible to have many more buildable units on the build bar than it was before. I want to make full use of that, to give the New Republic a varied roster; while making sure that every unit has a job to do, that it is well suited for.

Here we go, new (and retextured) units galore: from Fleet Troopers, and Plex Fleet Troopers, to the New Republic’s dedicated gunship, a new Sniper unit, the whole gamut of airspeeders, fighters and bombers… There’s a lot to play with, and…

Preview Pictures

Me hacking through the mod’s to-do list…

But seriously, you can see here the reworked Raptor Trooper, a (lot) of dead Sea Commandos, and somewhere in there probably the new Raptor Trooper Commander I showed off previously.