Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.

I know many of you waited long enough for such post to happen. First of all, let me thank you again, you players, for the incredible support the mod has recieved since day one of the release. Not many of you know, but UGC CE is the very first mod I made (and currently still working on it), which is also the case of RadicalEdward2, the official GC level designer of UGC CE.
Such awesome response from the community only motivated more to push the boundaries of the mod further and further away from the original UGC CE goal : fixing UGC v1.0 bugs and rebalance some of the things. Thus, since mid-november 2017, UGC CE development took an incredible scale, overhauling UGC v1.0, up to a point where, now, original UGC's code is almost entirely rewritten.
All these additions and expensive change notes are nice, but I know you guys wanted to see more changes, something like a large scale addition to the mod, kind of like the multiplayer compatibility or the pirate joke-faction. I hope you won't be disapointed by the 3 big changes I planned (plus a bonus), with the help of RadicalEdward, as well as a handfull of other people working in the shadow that either wanted to stay anonymous or are credited in the numerous changelogs. I think I wrote enough on a post where you guys only want the exciting list of features that is to come.

Hyperspace Lanes Rework

Probability to happen : 100% sure.
ETA : April to June 2018
A lot of you complained about the possibility of jumping "behind" front line planets. Quite often, the AI would jump to an undefended world and you would just be taken by surprise when you expected the enemy to be unable to jump behind your defence lines. This is about to change. While this Rework will take some time to get implemented, it will add a few planets, will almost entirely change the hyperspace routes and most importantly diminish the maximum jump range of the fleets. Jumping behind defences will still be possible in some areas, but will be way harder and less profitable. Along with these changes, some planets will also be repositioned more accurately. I am not entirely sure yet, but this rework will, maybe, only affect "the Galaxy Awaits" maps sets("UGC CE" sets, normal start and one planet start). It is likely that this rework will be release all at once.

Coreworld defense faction

Probability to happen : 75%
ETA : Depends of the Hyperspace rework release and other factors.
This was a suggestion done some time ago that captured my attention. The faction would be a "copy" of the vanilla pirates, unplayable and not having a GC map AI. The faction would replace the pirates as the default faction for some planets in the Core Sector, as it is lore-wise. The main goal with this addition is to make the GC map a bit more accurate and give it more of an alive feeling, with multiple factions impeding the player's expansion over the galaxy, rather than just pirates. I honestly have few details to give you about this, because the project is not yet started and still need a lot of adjustments.

AI Enhancements

Probability to happen : 75%
ETA : March to June, along with other updates.
Here it is again, the time consuming AI development that gave me a lot of troubles. First things first, I'd like to point out that modifying the AI is not easy, not at all. Moreover, testing the thing takes a huge amount of time, time that I don't have. That's why I'll do my best to re-enable a custom AI for UGC CE over the next months. While it is likely to happen, its efficiency is uncertain. One thing is sure though : it will work better than the original custom AI...

BONUS

Playable Hutts

Probability to happen : 25% (if not less)
ETA : ---
This is something to pair with the pirate joke-faction. While it would be cool to play the hutts, this feature could actually help fixing the inactive Hutt faction you might have encountered if you played one of the UGC CE GC maps. This faction would be a "copy" of the playable pirates faction, and would require a ton of time for little. While I'm not absolutely opposed to it, only the future will tell if I have enough time to work on this. Moreover, the playable pirates still have some bugs I'm unable to fix yet, which means the hutts would inherit of the same issues if they aren't fixed before the creation of the playable hutt faction.

Well, as you may guess, time is often a deciding factor in life, and as I will enter university around august 2018, that leaves me with little time to achieve all the things planned for UGC CE development.
While development will continue, at a reduced rate, I cannot provide you a list of planned things that could happen after these three new features, simply because there isn't any other thing on the list.
Things like stability and bug fixes, along with AI improvements will be sustained as long as I can. Small additions may also happen, but the big updates will then be over.

I hope you guys are excited about what's to come, and will understand the reasons why after these three points, the development of the mod will have to slow down. As a whole, I'm pretty proud of what has been already done with the mod. All the objectives I set to myself with this mod have been reached. It exceeded much expectations, and you guys threw it to the top 10 of the most popular mods on the Steam Workshop, and that I can't thank you enough for.
It has been an awesome ride all along. And I hope it will still go on well until the end.

Huge thanks to gutang for the original UGC v1.0 mod.

Thank you for playing. :-)