Well, where an ETA is concerned, too early to say, even though I am pleased with the speed of progress so far. I am halfway done with the Sovereign class Siege ship, and that leaves the Progenitor class Mothership, the Wyrm class elite battleship and the Leviathan class Titan to be done for the ships... and that's it! I plan on making a second teaser movie featuring the new ships as well as some of the more awe-insipiring abilities they'll have when the remaining ship models are done. It actually might be done by the end of this month, or at the beginning of the next.

Once the ships are done, I'll set my sights on the orbital structures. To save time I'll have a modular design for the non-essential structures, for example the both types of labs will pretty much look the same, which is not that odd since they are both basically giant neural grids (read: floating space brains) and only differ in what areas they are trained to think in.

Sound production is going parallel to the graphics production (check out this Mass Energy Cannon ability sound, there is also a remixed version for various beam weapons such as the Electron Ray), so it should not cause a delay at all. And finally, there is the research tree, but that should only cause minor delays as I will inevitably make typos and cause minidumps.

Its been quite a ride so far, these past eleven months or so... hard to believe I've been at this for a year already. I've learned a lot (just take a peek at some of my first models in this thread) and I can honestly say I've managed to cut my production time per model in half, if not more. Now that I've pretty much got a firm grasp on the ropes, things should *really* get rolling!

Oh, and since I felt like spending some time fleshing out the lore to be in a presentable form, those of you who would like to see the illustrated version of the Pangalactic War Timeline, you can get it here. It shows what's where... current Sins factions included (look for Emergence Point).

Yeah, that's the idea. The geometry will be the same, but certain parts of the texture will differentiate in color to mark what type of lab it is. In the case of labs, there will be crystalline outgrowths which will glow, and that color will be the differentiating factor.

what years on that timeline do the vasari and the tec and the advent showup?

In other words, he's making it up as he goes along.

Dun, dun, dunnnn.....

That is something that would be rather interesting to expand upon if they include an ability to add a story element to the game. I could easily see The Hegemony and the Clans remnant lending a paltry aid to the TEC in the interest of having a wall between them and the emergence point. Where the Advent would play into this would be rather difficult to say. The Vasari will either keep running or be wiped out, my money's on keep running  (Thousands of years as nomads, Its a life style by that point). The TEC will try to hold as it always did, and the Hegemony and Clans (if they follow typical sci fi civilization thought paths) would lend what small aid they could to the hapless humans.

One thing that would be rather interesting to try and do is, ontop of your inclusion of these brand new races, include new bits of technology or equipment for the various factions to represent the amount of time that they have been in conflict with each other and to symbolize the influence of your new factions (and practically, to help to solve the inevitable balance issues having 3 new factions causes.)

As far as the technological inbalance is concerned, I "took care" of it by stipulating that the Xin have not, in fact, opened a stable wormhole at the Emergence Point. If they had, all three vanilla factions would naturally be allmost immediately wiped out (after all, they couldn't hope to stand against a power which has more than half a galaxy worth of resources AND advanced technology at its disposal). As it is, the TEC, the Advent and the Vasari will have to face only a small contingent of Xin ships which went through - of course, those ships are perfectly capable of taking planets and turning them into strongpoints which will eventually produce more ships, but at the onset of the story and the beginning of Episode I, the Xin are not unmanageable, despite their advanced tech.

The Remnant, again, is not exactly advanced as such - although they had many thousands of years to do so, the vast resources at their disposal and the fact that they had virtually no need to improve upon any of their technology for the major part of the Legion Alliance's history means that their ships are actually *weaker* than those of, say the TEC. But the one thing they have over anyone else is their experience in building ships quickly, effectively and moving them about with great speed. The whole Nomad Fleet is like a kamikaze that's so big it smashes through everything without actually breaking apart. The Remnant will be able to field twice as many ships as any vanilla faction; four times as many as the Xin.

And finally, when the Hegemony enters the fray, it will also do so (storywise) with but a portion of their fleets - most of their strength will have to stay at the Bulwark to prevent the Xin from overrunning it. But by the time Episode III is finished, I hope to have some new tech added to vanilla races as well.

Hopefully in the future expansions we will see some sort of a "campaign" mode; I'd love to create a full-fledged storyline for the three new races.

 plz,tell me when it would be ready or how many time it would take to complete it,plz

Here's a little sneak preview of what I'm currently working on:

Guess what this one does!

Teal, hey, I started with a cube. Just keep going at it.

Vp21ct, will do. Ducktopia, you know what I'm going to say: when it's done!

mine?  suicide ship? either way it looks like somghing thata attaches to ships and blows up.

Hm then I guess it'll have some heavy weaponry mounted at front side; perhaps capable of destroying entire planets? That would be cool

is it the colony cap or titan ?

Just to clarify, are you going to make 5 capital ships and 1 titan or 5 caps and 5 titans?

I have to agree, 1 titan is a much more effective system than 5.

Another question: Is it possible to apply buffs to one specific type of ship (ie. buff the colony capital exclusively)?

If so, you could make it so that all 5 capitals working together could create a synergistic effect that greatly improves their durability. This could work like this;

colony - buffs - support - buffs - anti-planet - buffs - dreadnought - buffs - battleship - buffs - colony

However, you would want to alternate the supports between offensive and defensive ships

Also, is that the anti planet or main battleship capital ship?

I am eagerly awaiting this mod! 

Here's the newest addition to the Xin fleets! To save time I copy/pasted the lore and intro from ModDb webpage.

Space catapults. You got to love them.

Face it, nothing instills fear in the heart of a commander as seeing a big, lumbering device of total destruction being dragged into a firing position. Over time, names have changed, but the idea remained the same - to drop something big, heavy and possibly explosive on the other guy's head.

The Last Stand mod follows this fine tradition of warfare by giving each new faction a specialized capital ship which has only one role - to deal massive damage at extreme range. And as these things go, they are also made of glass, at least compared to the hulking battleships on the front line. For the Xin, the ship in question is the Sovereign.

Much like other Xin capitals, the Sovereign is immense in size. In fact, these ships are so large they have been known to get stuck in denser asteroid fields at times, though certainly not for long - one discharge of its powerful weapon is usually enough to clear any such paltry obstacle as a floating rock!

 The spindly projection spires are especially vulnerable to damage.

And while the Sovereign is a powerful ship when used correctly, care must be taken not to place it in situations where its weaknesses, most notably the lack of strong shields and less-that-average armor plating, can be exploited. Also, to fire its main weapon, the Sovereign must not only align itself with its target, which makes it incapable of tracking and targeting smaller and nimbler ships, but it also has to expend a significant amount of its internal power reserves. Stock ships are estimated to have enough power to fire only five or six shots before their weapon capacitors need recharging.

The projection spires trailing behind the ship are used to shape the plasma charge.

To compensate for these shortcomings, the Sovereign has a couple of unique abilities at its disposal. The first is inherent to the interconnected power systems which run throughout the bioform superstructure of the ship, and that's the ability to actually drain its shields and use so gathered energy to fire several extra shots of the main weapon. Needless to say, this ability is best used with caution. The second, more exotic ability is something only mature ships possess, and that's the bioform's ability to utilize the gravitic nature of its Singularity Engine to produce a gravitonic shockwave effect. The shochwave does negligible damage but is capable of repulsing smaller ships and objects away from the Sovereign, thus perhaps giving it time to escape being swarmed by enemies it normally cannot engage.

Hope you like!