Besides MLA and Legion, there is a third faction in the works called Union. It seems to be an entire faction inspired by the boom bots:
https://forums.planetaryannihilation.co ... sion.73447They don't have a complete roster yet, so they're "plugging the holes" with standard MLA units. But they DO have two commanders, as you can see. Nothing looks bad either, it all looks fairly acceptable.
So my thinking is to try and see if we can give these commanders and these units to AIs, to act like natives/barbarians. We could add as many of those as we want to our wars, and they will likely increase the war time by as much as we want, depending on the setup. Forget about trying to land somewhere "on your own": you can always be surrounded by enemies and have to fight for every scrap of land or water. Hell, if we give them enough eco boost we'll be fighting for our lives and might even have to ally against the AI.
Note that the Union project hasn't been updated in two years, so the question is if we can use these units even though they have no buildings. So we would either have to give them standard buildings, or make them work without buildings somehow. And this is where the Scenarios mod comes in:
https://forums.planetaryannihilation.co ... rios.73550ferretmaster wrote:Bug Horde Mode
One of the most popular modes developed using scenarios is the bug horde mode.
In this mode each player spawns in with some starting units and a control tower (zapper)
around every minute there will be both distributed and clustered spawns of enemy bugs that will attack the nearest player. These spawns will not occur within the vision of a control tower (zapper) and you can build more to expand your control.
Enemy spawns will become larger based on time and the number of towers the player has. The waves will also scale exponentially to somewhat match how fast a pa player develops.
This mode scales linearly with each additional player.
While there is no direct win condition as of yet, the enemy ai will be killed if the sim speed gets below 15% as a kill switch. Covering the planet in control towers or ragging it effectively ends the game as well.
Unlike the Union faction, this mod is posted in the Released Mods board, so it's working. All we'd have to do is delete the kill switch and make the bugs use the Union units and just reprogram the spawning to be like a
They Are Billions version of PA. Everything else in our wars will remain as normal, but with the additional timed horde waves making our lives more complex. This can be IN ADDITION to AIs with full functioning unit rosters; perhaps the AI can take Legion and the players MLA.
I am not sure if on top of the above units someone has also made actual bug units. I am still looking for those.
There are more cool weird mods like this, and I think if we combined all of them and subtly redesigned them, we could end up with something that qualifies as PA 1.5, that I would call "Alex Kierkegaard's Cosmic War". I should also be able to redesign the main menu to reflect this. One of the issues with this so far is that every new unit added to the game slows the sim down, but we have the server power now to not care too much about this, and soon we'll have even more power. It is time for PA 1.5 to become a reality.