An update of sorts

Hey everyone, I just wanted to let everone know where we are at.

Well, I just finished watching Gundam SEED, and I also finished Gundam X.  Yes, I know, how can you work on a mod without watching the shows first?  So sue me lol.

Having watched the shows now though, I can see some issues with what we were planning on doing with Gundam SEED.  So this is simply to let everyone know that the last version of the SEED layout that I posted will not be the one we are going to be using.  I have also taken into account everything everyone has been asking about, and there will be a lot of changes in the comming months to the mod.

What are these changes? Some of them like the changes to GDI, NOD, and Scrin you already know about.  Some of them you will finally see next weekend when we hope to have alpha 9 out (Oct 1st if everything go's well).  Others, like the changes to SEED and AW will have to wait until the 10th alpha.  But good news, we hope to have the final layout of UC done for next weeks release.  The buildings will not be correct persay, I have been making some throw-together models to use temporarily just to get the coding aspect done, but they will accomplish 2 important tasks. 

1. Their look should give you an idea as to their purpose.  

2. They will function properly in their designed way.

This means that, for example, the UC Vehicle Depo will actually look like a landing pad and ALL of it's units will be flown in on a Madea and dropped off from off the map.  So a player that plays his base close to the edge will get his troops quicker than a player that has his base near the center.  Also, this means that a player could, if not careful, have his Madea's shot down before the troops are dropped off, so you will have to at least think about giving the Madea's flight path some thought when deploying the building (a hint, the Madea will come from behind the building and then land in front of it).

Also, the new UC design we hope to have in place by then will also be more streamlined, with a clearer understanding to what you need to do to gain more mobile suits and advance.  This is being done because our current system, while interesting, is too cluddersome and makes playing UC way to slow, especially compaired to UC's enemies.  

What else..... EF as a whole has a new resource gathering system.  The Resource Pylons will still be there, but with a different building, as a secondary source of income if the player feels they need it or they simply want more, but the main source of income will come from the Vehicle Depot.  There is now a unit you can build that is simply a resource drop.  This unit costs no cash to make (wouldn't make much since if it did) but takes some time to drop in.  This means that the player can build quite a few of these things for cash, and then switch on the fly to unit deployment when it needs to.  We still havn't worked out the exact time to cash ratio yet (right now it's sitting at 30 sec for 2000) but this should again make EF different on the field.  Also at the moment only the basic Vehicle Depot can gather resources.  If a player upgrades the Depot to a timeline spicific Depot then it loses the ability to be used for cash.  Again, I don't know if this will stay in the A9 release, but it seems to work well now and gives the player something to think about.  

And finally we come to the new design for UC.  What we're going to try to do is make the Pegasus Class ships along with the Argama do more of what they are supposed to do, which is be used to deploy and carry mobile suits instead of build them.  How are we going to do that?  It's a secret!