RELEASED 1999
PLOT
It's the late 21st century, and the world's civilisations have been wiped out by a series of nuclear strikes. Most of the humans, desperate for survival, scatter into colonies of scavengers. You work for "The Project" - a group of people desperate to reconstruct Earth to it's past state. To do this you need artifacts that help scientists mirror old technology. But the only people who still have artifacts are scavengers, go figure. Eventually as you play through you figure out who it was that nuked Earth.
GAMEPLAY
The game is old-school 3D. You can also rotate the camera, zoom in/out, and pan the camera. You may also see a unit's perspective of view. (but not control it like a TPS game)
There are 4 major factions in the game, Nexus, the Project, the Collective, the Scavengers and the New Paradigm. You get to fight them all as the Project in campaign however in multi-player everyone plays as the Project. There's not really any special features of the units for each faction because you choose how you want your units.
When you collect artefact or build a research station you are able to research certain technology. There are 4 different research areas: base defence (towers, stronger structures), unit defence, unit parts and new structures.
Once you get unit parts from research you can design your own units which is such an awesome feature of the game. Each unit is made up of 3 parts, wheels, body and turret. The wheels simply say how fast the unit goes and how much added defense they have if they are bulkier wheels. The body gives a certain amount of defense and speed as with the wheels. The turret is basically the "function" of your unit, there are weapon turrets and system turrets. The weapon turrets are things like rockets, machineguns etc. the usual. System turrets are repair units, sensor units for scouting, engineer units etc. There are over 400 parts for making units with and over 2000 possible unit combinations.
This game is simply addicting. The online play is so fun because the AI are very smart and thanks to a mod that comes with the latest build AI learn from their mistakes. It took me a while to port forward for it but I got it done and I played with Wookiee a few times. The the first and second times we got absolutely obliterated by the AI. Then we played another game with Racer, free for all. I took over the middle of the map at the start and then built heaps of tanks and put them in the middle ready for attack. Then Racer came out with rocket tanks and started owning a few of my tanks just sitting off to the side so I selected all my units and came in and killed his base. Then I thought I'd check out Wookiee's base so I sent a few little tanks into his base and viola, he has his whole base surrounded by walls and he has heaps of rocket tanks. So I made a looping production of array rocket tanks with repair turrets at the back. I went in and defeated his base, then fireworks started popping up. It was super fun.
DEVELOPMENT
On December 6, 2004 the original developers released the source code and all of it's music/art under the GNU license. A group of developers took up the challenge, made a new site, and are actively developing it (the last release was a few days ago).
There's a map system and mod system. You can create new units, modify how the game works, etc.
