Stardrive has always been a very good real time x4 game with excellent mod support. The main issues of the game were low performance on end game and bugs. The Blackbox project addresses these issues. And we decided also to work on and improve some of the better mods out there, created for StarDrive 1 over the years. Combined Arms is based on Combomod (keeping the best parts in Combomod). We did a lot of balance work on Combomod and added such vast amount of new content that we decided it deserves a new name.
- Around 80 New ships 3D models and hulls. Every role (besides Titan) has 2 more 3d ship designs to research, along with dedicated slot maps. This is of course, per faction. So with the new Bomber and Drone ships, each faction will have a total of 19 hulls to design ships for. The new Titan per faction is truly big. Draylok Titan, for instance is 4.8k slots.
- Each Faction has it's own battle station, which is also rendered as the space port, when a planet has it built.
- 8 New Missile 3D models: Blackbox code opened the option for us to create different 3D models for missiles, instead of using the default 2.
- Kulrathi and Vulfar got their own 3D freighter models, instead of using the Terran ones.
- Two new space station models; Small Station and a huge Sector station.
- New drone role - a 4-6 slot (based on faction) small, automated fighter which is launched from drone bays
- New ship hull (classified as Fighter Role) per faction - Bomber, which contains internal slots to unleash Anti capital bombs
- New weapons, such as Rapid Blue lasers, new versions of mass drivers (extended, compact)
- New Reactors. You can take a path of lower output, but non exploding reactors such as the Cold Fusion or Quantum Fusion reactors, or go crazy with very high output, but highly unstable Anti-Matter or Dark Energy reactors
- 19 new types of armor, including shields combined with armor, self repair armor and more. These were present in Combomod but got new textures and massive balance
- New, hi-res textures for all the lower texture modules in the game
- Tech tree is 2.5 times the vanilla one
- Install the base blackbox release from https://stardriveteam.itch.io/mars-151
- Download the mod (https://github.com/TeamStarDrive/CombinedArms/releases). If it is your first install, download all the zip files along with the extract batch, put all of them (including batch file) in your Stardrive's Mods directory and run the batch (you will get a protection warning).
- The extract batch file will combine the zip chunks (needed because of github's asset size limitation of 25mb), delete older Combined Arms folder (if present) and extract the mod for you.
- Note that downloading the files is only needed for the first time you install Combined Arms. The auto updater will do this automatically for you if you click on the update prompt in the game's main menu when there is an update available.
- It is recommended to remove your saved ship designs if you saved designs using the old combo mod. Usually its located in c:\users[username].appdata\roaming\stardrive\saveddesigns
- You need to update the latest blackbox build before loading Combined Arms. The auto updater will prompt and install latest patch for you.
- Start the game and load the mod from the mod menu.
- Drop us a note in Discord chat (https://discord.gg/dfvnfH4).
Credits:
Some of the assets used for module images come from:
- https://pl.pinterest.com/lisik13/
- https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/sci-fi-turret-3d-3ds/285010
- https://pl.pinterest.com/senshaotoko0510/
- https://www.nationstates.net/
- https://pl.pinterest.com/raulvegamoreu
- http://simonboxer.com/2013/02/low-poly-3d-assets-from-concept-to-completion/
- http://marinaortega.deviantart.com/art/UGR-camera-drone-574803602