Armada 2 Fleet Operations 3rd party mods tour suggestions

[Blake00]

Hey guys,

Earlier this year I decided to make a Fleet Operations video tour on my retro gaming youtube channel to try and create some renewed interest in the game and these communities. To spice things up I decided to expand the video to a 3 part series covering some of the coolest 3rd party mods for Fleet Ops out there as I suspect many of the regular/casual A2 fanbase (that never got around to joining forums) either don't know that there are extra mods for FO or don't even know about FO itself lol!

Unfortunately back when I made the series I didn't have an account on the FO forums or here at MSFC so I couldn't engage the community and just had to make my own choices based on what I could find over at FO forums. The videos ended up being quite popular (hopefully leading to a few signups here over the year) and I got some great responses from the community resulting in me finally singing up at both forums to chat with everyone. After joining here I noticed there were a few projects I didn't know about and that perhaps I should do a Part 4 video at some point showing off more mods.

Both these forums are huge with years of history and no doubt there's other places hosting mods too so I'm curious to know what's everyone's favourites/recommended total conversion FO mods that are either finished or at the very least in a playable state (without requiring modder knowledge to get working) that I should cover in a future video??

Projects I already covered in the existing series are:

• Default Fleet Operations
• Warriors of Fluidic Space
• Roots
• Dominion War
• Star Trek Federation Dawn
• Armada 2 Classic
• Star Trek Armada 2 Upgrade Project

 

[K_merse]

Thank you for the free advertisement for Federation Dawn. I made me crawl a hole into the wall when I saw you didn't find the upgrade button on the shipyard and the constructor ships But maybe it's something that should be more obvious. I'll make a note
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By the way, I suggest to stay away from Jetnova! That man is trouble and definitely not 100% sane. And he has no respect for other modder's work. By the way, he is this USSJasmine character as well.

 

[Blake00]

Ahh yeah sorry I should have played a bigger test game before doing the video but was trying to save time.. which of course lead to me getting rather 'lost' trying to figure out the era upgrades haha. Great mod though! Awesome work man!

Oh dear.. that's.. not good. Thank you for letting me know.

I accepted his invite to his forum as I wanted to keep an eye on his project as it sounds cool, and since then he's sent me some nice welcoming msgs there. When I made these videos and joined all these Armada communities I didn't want get involved in any of the politics/drama/wars that happen in fan communities so I'll keep my distance from this one lol!
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uh oh.. now I see you guys are arguing in the youtube comments of my part 3 FO video.. like I said above I'm just a fan of the work all you guys are doing who doesn't wanna get involved so I'm not touching any of that.. staying clear.. staying clear lol!

 

[Terra_Inc]

I'm sorry you had to get involved in this. We're generally a very peaceful and civil community, this guy is just a particularly persistent troublemaker.

Just to set the record straight, Jetnova has been banned from basically every A2 website because he always ends up flaming people, even those who tried to help him. (You don't need to believe me - just check the posts he wrote on FO.net that got him banned there last year, under the USSJasmine nick.) And as K_Merse said, he's pretended to be several different people in the past in order to circumvent his bans. I have no doubt this 'Jasmine' person doesn't actually exist.

I know you don't want to get involved in any of this drama, but I didn't want to let his lies about us stand.

 

[K_merse]

I won't argue with him on Youtube either. There is no point.

EDIT: I see my previous post was edited. Sorry if I posted anything inappropriate, I didn't mean to.

 

[Hellkite]

The two post was merged together, nothing was changed K_merse you did noting wrong .
It was just a little thread clean up.

 

[Majestic]

Having had several issues with Jetnova myself I can confirm what K_Merse and Terra_Inc says. He's one of only 2 people who were members (not just spammers etc) with a lifetime ban here due to their actions of trouble making and bullying of members here. Not to mention model stealing in Jetnova's case.

I do believe he's not entirely in his right mind, often acting as very childish and makes up a lot of shall me say stories to enforce his opinion. He has no respect for others work or opinions and comes off at first as nice then his nasty side comes out.

I didn't create MSFC for drama either unfortunately some people thrive on it as I believe Jetnova does.

However I do think what you're doing is awesome and something I haven't see before. I no longer mod Armada but this is certainly a pretty great community service you've got going here.

 

[Blake00]

ahh so there's more over at FO.net lol.. after K_merse's warning I had a look over at armadafleetcommand and saw a pretty intense argument between this guy and Hellkite from many years ago so I can see this has been a bit of a long term problem in the community lol!!

Dear oh dear.. thank you for the warnings!

And back on the original topic thank you Majestic. Yeah in-between my own modding projects (Doom & Civ2) I spend most of my time showcasing other peoples amazing work on my website and youtube channel. Always extremely satisfying when I see a struggling project come back to life due to getting more attention from something I've done!

I noticed last year that next to next no one was doing FO videos on youtube anymore and the ones that were there didn't showcase 3rd party FO mods and I just thought.. wow I need to fix this lol! Especially as I noticed there were still FO mods being worked on today when many probably think the FO scene is dead.

I make lots of other trek gaming videos too (eg I recently did some Armada 3 stuff for Sins of Solar Empire) so I plan to advertise these FO mod videos in the end cards and intros of many future Trek videos to come as more people need to know about this stuff!

 

[Terra_Inc]

Yeah, I agree with Maj. This is great, and I hope to see more.

I'm not familiar with a lot of FO-based conversion mods, but maybe you might be interested in Sigma. It's a wonderful FO total conversion that's not based on Star Trek, but its own unique SciFi universe. Sadly it's no longer being actively developed as far as I know, but you can most likely find the last stable release on moddb. I remember it being well polished and really fun the last time I played it.

Apart from that... I wonder how much work it would be to get Achilles' Art of War working under the STA2 Classic mod. It's probably the best non-FO total conversion, quite polished and well balanced, I think. (Achilles was one of the greatest modelers of ye olde days, and most of the models in AOW are his own.) Might be worth a try - if it's even up your alley, that is.

 

[Blake00]

Thank you! Ooooh yes sorry I should have said that the total conversion mod suggestions don't have to be Star Trek! Eg I noticed CABAL put up a FO converted copy of the Babylon 5 mod so I'm definitely going to showcase that one as I'm a huge Babylon 5 fan and showcase B5 fan games on my website & youtube channel too.

Someone on the ArmadaFleetCommand forum commented on my copy of this thread there and pointed out that converting vanilla Armada 2 mods over to FO (as long as you've got the classic mod installed, which I do) is actually quite easy and he kindly linked me to a guide on the FO site on how to do it. I had a quick look at the guide and it doesn't look too bad.. so yeah if converting regular Armada 2 mods over to FO is easy then that certainly expands the cool available mod options for future videos big time!

So any mind blowing vanilla Armada 2 total conversion mods you guys know are worth a mention too! So thanks for those 2 above Terra_Inc.

 

[Majestic]

So any mind blowing vanilla Armada 2 total conversion mods you guys know are worth a mention too! So thanks for those 2 above Terra_Inc.

If I recall Future Wars was pretty fun to play back in the hay day.

 

[Terra_Inc]

If I recall Future Wars was pretty fun to play back in the hay day.

Oh yes, Future Wars was great, too. I haven't played that one for ages. Didn't it have a campaign as well? It was some good work, in any case. I can't vouch for its stability though - as I said, it's been ages and I don't remember it very well.

 

[Blake00]

Oooh custom campaigns?? now that's something I'm yet to experience in Armada. That would be cool!

 

[kjc733]

Vanilla mods... BSG Half Race mod.
Not shamelessly self plugging, honest
To be fair, I have no idea if it's ever been ported into FlOps Classic Mod. I think someone tried to convert to normal FlOps but it killed the flak weapons.

 

[Terra_Inc]

Oooh custom campaigns?? now that's something I'm yet to experience in Armada. That would be cool!

Well, there's not much to talk about, sadly. The problem is that the original A2 campaign is mostly hardcoded into a set of binary files that can't be modified. AFAIK, for a long time the only way to mod the campaign was to work with the parts that aren't hardcoded - maps, mission texts, etc, but it was basically impossible to make new missions. So the vast majority of people didn't bother with campaign modding.

However, a few years back, someone managed to work around that with a mod (MMM - Megadroid's Mission Mod) that allows for custom mission scripting using Lua. I don't think I've actually ever seen a finished campaign using MMM. (Probably because, well, it's programming, and even if you know the language, it's still quite a bit of effort.)
I know TUN, the developer of Sigma, was working on a campaign using MMM, but I don't think he ever finished it or made it available online. Wastelands was also supposed to have an MMM- based campaign, but the mod isn't even in a playable state yet, and at this point I'm not sure it's still worth the effort.

I'm not entirely sure which of the two the Future Wars campaign was based on, but I'm pretty sure it was the former.

 

[Blake00]

Vanilla mods... BSG Half Race mod.

BSG as in Battlestar Galactica? I thought I'd seen mention of a Battlestar Galactica mod somewhere and had been meaning to go look for it!

 

[kjc733]

BSG as in Battlestar Galactica? I thought I'd seen mention of a Battlestar Galactica mod somewhere and had been meaning to go look for it!

There was a full blown conversion in the works (not on this site) but it sadly didn't go anywhere.
Here in our download section we had a different mod called BSG Half Race Mod. Because of the size it's been uploaded in two parts.

It was called Half Race Mod because originally it just had the nuBSG Colonials as a faction and there are no bases. Instead you build up your civilian fleet to obtain newer tech.
However it was updated with a very basic nuCylon side which has the bare minimum of unit types (also with no bases). Both sides are playable factions, there were some custom maps, and I was especially proud of the flack weapons.

It's quite old now (before I was even making models!), so probably looks rather dated. And as I said before, to my knowledge it hasn't been ported to FlOps.

 

[Blake00]

Speaking of mods with new campaigns JanB just kindly contacted me to let me know he'd seen my video covering his big FO Root's mod and wanted to let me know he's just done a big version 2.0 release (posted on ModDB & the FO forums) adding heaps more stuff including a campaign story (that includes custom cutscene videos). Definitely going to have to check that out and include it in the part 4 when I eventually get to it (still buried in my Civ2 modding projects atm).

 

[K_merse]

Hea made some excellent work on his mod. I had no time to try it yet but eager to do so.