RAMBLE ALERT! I am going to talk a LOT about this mod, and formatting won't be pretty.

TL;DR: Great mod. Keep up the good work!

This mod is excellent. It has singlehandedly doubled or perhaps tripled the number of hours I've sunk into this game. (At the time of making this discussion I have about 780 hours in the game. Before downloading the mod I think I had about 200-300 hours. 780 hours is a lot for me.)

This mod has done something I never thought would be possible: it has made land battles fun. In fact, sometimes I look forward to land invasions more than I do space battles. (That is also due to some setbacks with space combat, which I'll get into.)

Flavor dialog is a great feature to land battles, and in retrospect is grossly missing from the vanilla version. Hearing infantry mutter to each other when idle or shouting commands when under fire is *chef's kiss*. The dialog from Black Sun pirates is especially entertaining. I do not know if the audio was ripped from some other game, but in any case, I am now convinced this is what Weequay pirates sound and act like in-universe. Some of the new voice lines in my opinion are of lower quality, but I won't complain for what is effectively a free expansion.

This mod has some of if not the best graphics I've seen in the entire mod community. It looks great and, for the most part, sounds great too. It's incredible some of the effects you can pull off with such an old engine. Some unit animations can be wonky, especially when inspected closely, but this is a minor issue to me.

The sheer scale of Galactic Conquest and the sheer variety of units is incredible. I love training units unique to certain planets, even if they're not the most effective in battle.
I also love base building. Competent defenses are bloated, so it genuinely requires sacrifice to place certain buildings on certain worlds. In a perfect timeline, it might be possible to micro-manage the placement of turrets, power generators and turbolaser towers, but I will always accept hard-coding over modularity if it makes for more interesting gameplay.

Oh, the expanded soundtrack is also appreciated.

I will not attempt to declare whether these are objective issues. Indeed, some of these declarations are more emotional than observational. If a mod developer happens upon this discussion, I will leave it to them to decide whether any of these criticisms hold weight.

First and most egregious in my mind is a bug which affects all units in land battles. It has come to my attention that land combat in this mod is highly dependent on *positioning*. Vehicles will often have multiple weapon systems, each with their own effective range. A single infantry platoon can have carbines, rifles and grenades, again, each with their own requirements as to how close they must be to be used. I like this system; however, sometimes during a battle, my vehicles will randomly break formation and rush directly into enemy lines so that they are in perfect range of grenades, stun weapons and unforeseen turrets. This random aggro usually results in their death, as vehicles take 3-5 business days to turn around without interruption, and totally throws a wrench into the combat mechanics. Developers, please fix this! If I place a vehicle in a certain position, I want it to STAY there unless otherwise ordered.

I can understand the cumbersome maneuverability of AT-ATs or even treaded tanks, but some of these vehicles are borderline unresponsive to movement orders, turning at a speed so slow I can't help but scream at them to hurry up as grenades and rockets blast into them. This may be less of an issue if the aforementioned aggro behavior is removed. But please, *please* increase turn speed! And maybe also allow hovercraft to move in a given direction without having to turn.

I hate rebel mortars. They're great when I'm the one using them, of course, because they're great for cheesing defenses. In terms of damage, the only difference between a single mortar and the Death Star is: time. With enough patience, any defense can be destroyed with a single mortar team. Mortar rounds even bypass shields, which in a way places it above advanced artillery vehicles. And I hate it.

Defending against mortars is a terrible thing. They fire from such a far distance that any attempt at counter-attacking results in getting mowed down by the never-ending stream of infantry (I'll discuss enemy AI soon enough), and they're so small that close air support is generally not effective at killing them. The only winning strategy I've found is to retreat all my infantry to the back line and use repair modules to keep my vehicles alive for the rest of the battle. (I'll discuss general defense soon enough).

I should mention that for the most part I have exclusively played as the Empire and Rebellion, with only a little bit of experience as the Black Sun. At first I hated their droid units, but I've since learned how to deal with them and generally don't have a strong opinion about the faction.

I hate beasts: the ones the Hutt Cartel uses. I especially hate rancors and those annoying tiny ones that stun vehicles. As I've gained experience playing the game I've learned how to counter them, so I don't hate them as much as previous things I've mentioned. All the same, I personally think their HP should be nerfed.

I have a LOT to say about this, since this is basically the core of EaW gameplay.

Apparently the AI has been given some... "upgrades." I'm sure programming AI is difficult, and certainly there are limitations for it in this game's dated engine, but all the same, I find the AI underwhelming. It rides on artificial difficulty. Computer opponents don't adhere to the strict population limit, and will usually earn multiple times my own income. (It is frustrating that the enemy AI can spam economy freighters because they don't have to follow the pop limit.) They have godlike intelligence, and will ALWAYS attack your weakest planet, and NEVER engage your fleet head-on. They will NEVER perform an attack that they do not think they can win. (These are issues in vanilla as well.) Sometimes, if they attack a planet's station but realize the land defenses are too powerful, they will simply fly deeper into my territory- sometimes multiple planets deep- until they find a planet with pitiful-enough defenses so that they know they can win. I hate this.

If your base has a shield generator, the AI will immediately know its location and dedicate 99% of their force to attacking it. With even a vaguely competent defense this can easily turn into a meat grinder, as the AI will not attempt to flank or attack other objectives to spread out defending forces. The AI also does not pause to mass their units, but rather continually deploys units in a constant stream.

Also because of the hard-coded placement of shield generators, combined with the AI's tunnel vision, it is actually seldom a good idea to upgrade from a shutter shield to energy shield, as an energy shield almost never covers the generators that power it. Shutter shields don't block incoming blaster fire, but they do still prevent bombing runs and orbital bombardment, which would otherwise guarantee complete destruction of my defenses. Even with a thorough anti-air defense, the enemy bombers seem to get a massive buff and are much more likely to tank flak or air units, so the best defense really is to prevent them from being used in the first place.

What I'm trying to get at is that land defense battles are long and repetitive, and generally boil down to the same exact strategy. If your planet is on the front line, then build a power generator and shutter shield. It is required. Ignoring this defense will guarantee destruction of your units, no matter how powerful or how well-positioned they are. Also you will always position 100% of your garrison by the shield generator, as that corner of the map is the only place that will see action. Also some units are basically required to be on the front line to ensure survivability instead of range or lethality.

I should mention now that there's a strange glitch with artillery where the AOE damage effects ALL enemy infantry regardless of their distance from the point of impact. However, I would kindly ask the developers to not fix this bug, as it is satisfying to punish the enemy spamming trash infantry by suddenly killing 10 platoons after a few artillery shots.

Sometimes- actually, quite often- if an enemy vehicle is damaged, it will screw off to the furthest corner of the map, and later return. I assume this is so that they can recharge their shields. I kind of hate this, but I also do the same thing sometimes so I can't argue as to its removal. What I CANNOT stand is when the invading enemy has expended their entire army, except for some damaged vehicles waltzing around in the woods refusing to attack. In especially desperate scenarios this can be frustrating, as my surviving army may not be strong enough to leave the base and hunt them down. In a perfect world, there might be some reinforcement mechanic where the defending player gets a fresh garrison if the attacker takes too long. But I won't bother debating potential fixes: I just wanted to vent about this.

The #1 strategy of the AI is to spam trash units. These are your Headhunter fighters, Dreadnought cruisers, volunteer infantry, light speeders, etc.. Even in the late game, the computer Empire will have a billion Dreadnoughts, or the computer Rebellion will have a billion T-Wings. And when attacking, they'll pull all their trash units from across the Galaxy to ensure victory. CoreSec is the worst, probably because they have a much more limited selection of units, but I've seen them attack my planets with up to 40 infantry platoons. It feels more or less the same with other factions, too. It generally boils down to WW1 tactics of throwing all the infantry in the Galaxy at the enemy until they run out of ammo. There are times where I lose a battle not because I had inferior defenses or made some tactical blunder, but because my turrets and vehicles simply didn't have enough HP to resist the billions of light blaster bolts from infantry. I do not like this. Personally, I would make it so that certain vehicles and buildings are simply immune to infantry blasters; though I don't know whether the AI could be made to recognize which targets are worth attacking.

I would like a diplomacy mechanic. Independent factions are ANNOYING, and sometimes I just want the security of knowing they won't attack me if I won't attack them. I've observed, or at least feel like computer opponents are more likely to attack the player rather than attack each other, so it's just unfair. Again, artificial difficulty.

It is clearly the intention of the developers to enhance the singleplayer experience, with far less of a focus on multiplayer. With that in mind, I sincerely hope the developers can and will upgrade the AI to a higher standard.

Also, if it's possible, please increase the unit capacity in land battles, both for offense and defense. I never feel like I have enough units to handle a situation, especially if the map has multiple lanes to travel through. (I like securing all my routes.) I would be fine if the 8 or 10 unit limit was still at the beginning, as long as command posts added like 5 or maybe 10 more units for each capture. Also please allow more than 10 units for defending a planet. I get the feeling that this might be less feasible, since their positions on a planet are hard-coded along with buildings. I propose a compromise of making units larger: perhaps a company of 100 soldiers instead of a platoon of 40 per unit.

For the most part, space battles are excellent. This might be a controversial take, but I don't like the realistic scale of fighters to other vessels. They're too small. It's impossible to appreciate their dogfighting like you can in the vanilla version.

The size of space maps is HUGE in this mod. For a while I couldn't understand why, but I later figured it may be because the position of defense stations is also hard-coded, and the maps are upscaled to accomodate the broader selection of structures. Even so, it's just too big. There's way too much down time between exiting hyperspace and making first contact with the enemy. In my opinion, I shouldn't have to resort to using a single fast ship and pressing the fast forward button every single time I initiate a space battle. Also, the huge space between stations can sometimes lower their usefulness since they may not all be in range of an invading fleet. Also also, I think space stations need a buff. I know it may be the intent for space stations to be support structures for the fleet, but let's be real, the player will mostly be using their fleet offensively to attack other worlds, and the genuinely strict unit capacity seldom allows the player to just let part of their fleet sit idle somewhere. Out of the hundreds of hours I've sunk into this mod, I can name ONE instance where the computer actually attacked my main fleet with all the defense stations intact- and it was great. I lost due to dreadnought spam, but I still had a good time. I digress. Make space maps smaller please!

I commend the developers for their work on this mod. It has a long way to go, but it's also come a long way, and I'm excited for future updates.