[WIP kinda] Arkanon tileset

[Fey]

for those with no attention span or who are only having a glance: THERE IS NO PLAYABLE CONTENT JUST YET! I'LL BE EDITING THIS POST WITH THE DEBUT MISSION LATER! UNTIL THEN, THIS IS MERELY INFO ON THE NEW TILESET AND BASIC ASSETS FOR MAPPING WITH.

hallo. this thing is almost done, so I guess I'll put it out there kinda sorta maybe a little. technically the tileset is complete, but I'm still working on the playable example mission, and I'll be continuing to make tweaks to the tileset until that's done, so... ya know, it ain't official just yet

anyway, here's a full map image of the current state of the debut mission-to-be:

Spoiler

and here's an image of just the starting area. this is the sort of thing that will be pictured in the tactical map, so it's not a spoiler. I mean, you clicked on this thread to get a look at the new tileset, yeah? surely this is fine! nobody had better come complaining to me later about spoilers when I hid the full map image!!

this tileset is hand-drawn primarily by ZoeO, AKA my sister who did the lovely splash art for the Summers' Solstice campaign, among other things like those new Barracks we've been seeing in-game, the new smuggler sand mouse or mercenary rock dragon minimap emblems, and more

this download link is for d2k editor v2.0-compatible mapping assets. again, nothing playable here just yet. if you're a mapper and want to mess around with the tileset, knock your socks off. you can find a summarizing list of credits under the FAQs section around the bottom of this post. also included are .r16s of the recolored crater assets. auto-smooth works for water and water bridges too, making that easier to map with
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gb2I4-xpLj1UG5rShNWdwna-RSloT6yG/view

before I continue, here's a clip testing the first five minutes or so of the debut mission-to-be
https://streamable.com/04dlae

this streamable link will expire eventually, but it's here for now to give a peek at what will be the first playable mission, by me at least, on the tileset

it's rough around the edges and totally unbalanced at this stage. my intent with this test was merely to examine the macro game rebalancing, and I got a pretty good look at how the early game goes. very safe build order, lots of production off two refs and four harvs with hard mode's build costs, and I would have had more income after getting a couple of rigs up on the southern island. when I tweak the AI so they don't send end-tech stuff in their first attack, this should feel pretty good

anyway, below is a list of features, some purely about the aesthetic and some involving concepts and plans I have for this tileset. no spoilers, really, this is just hidden for the purpose of sectioning and condensing the thread. it features:

Spoiler

 - primarily-shale plateaus upon which players may construct their bases. shale is not exactly the best building material, so concrete rules from d2k can be justifiably preserved
 - vast salt flats making up the sand-equivalent terrain. sans the sandworms, of course... but there are plenty of other dangers hidden in the environment
 - pink salts as the harvestable resource. these crystals have practical applications in the construction of energy-based devices, such as hovertech, shield generators and laser weaponry, so the locals mainly make use of these things. we have a variety of recolors available for the salts, such as RA ore gold or TS tib green or blue. Spice blooms are not intended to be used with this tileset, so the salts can be mined out of the map
 - dedicated Mining Rig build locations. those big salt crystal clusters on the bottom side of that screenshot, to the right of the Carryall wreck, are drawn to fit perfectly underneath a Mining Rig's sprite. these are an element of counterbalancing against the salts being depletable
 - low-floating corrosive chemical mists that erode non-hovertech units that wander over them. Arkanon's lowlands are completely submerged in this substance, so only its upper regions, its aetherlands, are livable. from orbit, the world looks like a gas giant. the mists assets are not pictured in the above full map image
 - purple infantry rock-equivalent crystal formations. these are solidified mists. while harmless in this state, and even able to protect infantry from being crushed and obstruct vehicles, the crystals are not particularly valuable except in the usage of chemical weaponry
 - purple specks can be seen in the concrete (as ConYards use locally available materials), more-so when illuminated by light fixtures built in to the building skirts. d2k's art is very bright and this tileset is naturally dark, especially its buildable terrain, so the addition of lights within turrets' towers or in those building skirts is our attempt to correct the lighting discrepancies without a complete revamp of all building sprites in the game, which would be a headache of brobdingnagian proportions
 - water! complete with fish, able to support alien flora (like trees), and traversable by hovertech or naval units, both being heavily used by the natives. Kipp is responsible for the water assets, and you may remember them from a couple of Summers' Solstice maps or from Flippy's Great Battle of Arrakis campaign. he kindly recolored them for use with this tileset, and I was responsible for blending them with ZoeO's salt flats tiles. she later gave them faded purple highlights like the cliffs and shale/flats borders have
 - an immense underground bunker with multiple entrances scattered around the livable regions. it descends deep into Arkanon's inhospitable lowlands. while mostly unexplored by humans, its inhabitants are the sole reason the locals settled on this world roughly ten thousand years ago. we now have an increased maximum capacity for tiles in a tileset! therefore, I went ahead and blended some Heighliner assets with the Arkanon ones, producing the superstructure entrance on the left side of the full map image up there under the first spoiler

I've been detailing progress on the creation of this tileset in a dedicated channel over in Feda's Landsraad discord server. if y'all wanna check out my diary, you can find it there. spoiler alert, obviously, but you could hang around the server anyway for all sorts of other d2k stuff. here's a link to the pinned thread which itself has a link to said server:

I'll go on to elaborate on the development process and list answers to some frequently asked questions here though

first, here are a buncha development screenies. apologies in advance for crashing your computer if you look under here; there are a ton of images. I guess maybe it might help that most of them are hidden under secondary spoilers? maybe?

Spoiler

Spoiler

these are the very first assets that were drawn for this tileset. they were a texturing test, familiarization with tile size, choosing of the palette... it was always envisioned to have rather monochrome colors, black and white, with its main features being distinctly colored.

or, at least, those were the first assets my sister drew. after the tileset's concept was out there, Kipp drew these funny crystals on Arrakis cliffs...

Spoiler

kinda pretty, ain't they? a bit too dramatic though. as you can see in the final result, if you look closely, we went on to use a very much faded purple coloration in the cliffs and shale/flats borders. that came much later though. initially, they looked quite different...

Spoiler

we took obvious inspiration from existing Arrakis assets, but these are not traced. my sister is much too skilled to trace!! it was important to strongly refer to Arrakis assets for the sake of making cliffs mesh seamlessly, that's all!

these were in an extremely rough state and did not mesh properly with one another at this time. it took many revisions to get them looking correct. I wonder how Westwood did the original cliff pieces with how complex they are... 3D models, photographs and digital altering? vehicles' models could be seen in their sidebar icons. hand-drawing cliff assets was probably the toughest part of the entire tileset

Spoiler

a lot more work was done to finish up the first draft of the rock/sand cliff pieces and rock/sand borders. with all that sorted, I plugged what we had so far into the BLOXMEGR tileset - the one used on S05V1 in the Summers' Solstice campaign - to get a look at how stuff meshed in-game

Spoiler

and this is how all that stuff looked on the map itself:

Spoiler

really puts into perspective how much goes into a new tileset when all that effort only takes up that much space, huh? now have a glance at your scrollbar on this webpage and see how much more there is to go... presumably, that's with all the following images hidden under spoilers, too!

we moved on to other tiles to try to fill in some of that space. the sand- and rock-equivalent terrain needed doing in order to smooth the cliff tiles, anyway. here was the first go at the buildable terrain, the sand-equivalent, and those chemical mists

Spoiler

all this stuff takes up much less space than the cliffs do...

Spoiler

...but it fills a lot more space on a map.

Spoiler

with these pieces' first drafts completed, I could take some steps to try to address the meshing issues in the cliff pieces. even though the passable tiles themselves didn't mesh well yet, a little blending can go a long way! below is just one example of how broken the cliff pieces were

Spoiler

so I took some shale tiles and put 'em atop the cliff pieces, and got to work erasing them strategically to try to keep some details, but blend them with the terrain meant to fall atop them

Spoiler

eventually, we wound up with some better-meshing cliff pieces...

Spoiler

and the result of that effort is here, along with a comparison to Arrakis terrain

Spoiler

yeah. not exactly good just yet, yeah? and I hadn't even touched some of the cliff pieces, like those turns. this is only half the work on the cliffs, by the way. my sis worked over the sand cliffs next

Spoiler

which needed their own blending done. you can see what a lack of blending looks like below the Arrakis screenie there for comparison, here:

Spoiler

and the shale borders, too. needed to blend those. can't forget those

that was on Red Chasm, a skirmish / multiplayer map. yes, other multiplayer maps exist besides Habbanya Erg, believe it or not...

all of these pieces looked at thus far made up the majority of the main terrain of the map. another difficult component remained, however: the Spice. while there are only four thick Spice tiles, the thin Spice is drawn in a crapload of different ways depending on which adjacent tiles are harvested. fortunately, I had already done much of the preliminary work with determining how this plays out for when I designed the crates on the Heighliner tileset. we used those tiles as a basis then because their border lines make it very easy to determine where not to draw

Spoiler

for comparison, have a look at this same reference image with Spice tiles. they are very bright and it's hard to get a proper read on them, ain't it?

Spoiler

that, and new tiles have to be arranged accurately into that jumbled mess in the bottom right (every single time there's a new draft) because that's how the game reads thin Spice tiles

there were other custom tilesets to look to as well, but it turns out they're pretty bare-bones about their resources. many duplicated tiles. functional, sure, but not a good reference for what we had to do

Spoiler

so my sis got started. from the looks of it, the original devs for the Arrakis tileset worked off one thin Spice tile designed to seamlessly mesh with itself, and airbrushed around it to get the various shapes it could take on. she is not one to cut corners though! no disrespect to the original devs, of course. the Arrakis tilesets look really nice. my sis decided to go a few extra miles though and draw each tile individually, so we get to see them shift and shuffle around as Harvesters suck 'em up

it started here. each time there was a new draft, I would arrange them properly in a tileset image...

Spoiler

and then we would get a look at how they meshed, or didn't, in-game. only a small handful of thin salts tiles were done there, but they appear frequently and took up a good amount of space in the first test, also on Red Chasm:

Spoiler

the thin salts tiles were going to be a long and arduous journey all on their own, so in the meantime, I looked for other problem areas that needed adjustment. Helkor very helpfully arranged, like, a bajillion different cliffs tiles in the editor and provided this map image, which made it much easier to see which pieces were screwy

Spoiler

and did what little I could on my end to further improve the blending. lots of tile arrangement, lots of erasure...

Spoiler

and then we had some better-looking rock/sand borders, and sand cliffs. or, shale/flats borders and flats cliffs, as they're called in this new tileset

Spoiler

this was also around the time I started seriously thinking about how to bridge the gap between d2k's extremely bright entity art and this darkly-colored new tileset. this is a base on Red Chasm without any concrete underneath:

Spoiler

which simply wouldn't do. concrete must be left in the game for the AI because it breaks hard if it can't build concrete under its buildings (maybe something Klofkac can tweak, but still). there was the consideration that we could do away with concrete rules because it's a new tileset, but concrete is also a fun and unique aspect of d2k base design when compared with other Westwood games. even if I'm personally not part of the Concrete Club™ and build my bases by committing countless OSHA violations, I appreciate what concrete adds to the game. and, the bedrock being primarily shale warrants its appearance

the opportunity to test concrete as a way to bridge the brightness gap came before long. water was not originally part of the vision for this tileset, but we have these lovely water assets Kipp had done up for Arrakis

Spoiler

yes, heretical and all, yadda yadda. I don't care! it looks perdy!! and even if we don't see too many maps using water on Arrakis, now that we have these assets we can put them to use on this new world. Kipp kindly recolored the tileset with his magical photoshop wizardry and we wound up with a buncha different options

Spoiler

and we even got this new asset for the dark cyan Kipp drew into one of my sis' cliff pieces:

Spoiler

I got a LOT of opinions. the dark blue and dark cyan were close competitors, but dark blue pulled ahead in the end narrowly and was decided upon as the default color for the water on this tileset. seeking a place to test the assets, I relied on mission 27 (chapter 3, mission 7) of Flippy's Great Battle of Arrakis campaign. plopped a naval yard (it's a tech center in his campaign, but Kipp originally drew it for Feda's use on RA/TD temperate tilesets as a naval yard) in the water, and converted the tileset:

Spoiler

the water rounds out the palette some: blue, purple, and eventually pink. the salts only started out as purple, but they were envisioned as pink, and we were gonna get more purple from the infantry rock and the mists, uhh... but anyway, uhh... yeah

the concrete was recolored along with the water, so I gave it a look under the buildings

Spoiler

way too dark. doesn't help the lighting issues; doesn't work. how about we replace the concrete here with the brighter gray concrete from the Heighliner tileset though?

Spoiler

nope. too bright. we needed something in-between

I thought: the building skirts are built into the tileset itself, so what if we slapped some lights in those? infantry rock were planned to be crystalline too, so maybe they could have a bit of a glowy or reflective look and give the impression of additional ambient lighting. or, at least that while the terrain itself is dark, the world is still lit up plenty. and then we had that idea to reskin turrets and maybe walls too, and fit some lights into them...

until we figured it out, there was more work on the salts to do. the first draft on all the thin salts tiles was eventually completed

Spoiler

and I had a look in-game at some of the new units intended for use on this world. here are some hover tanks chilling over the water

Spoiler

eventually, a test thick salts tile was done

Spoiler

but it was extremely dark

Spoiler

we needed to base it off the fully-surrounded thin salts tile, but that itself also needed touching up because it was so griddy-looking. we had also tried the first recolor at this time. it took some tweaking to get the right shade of pink, but that was the first shade we tested

while my sis continued her work on making the thin salts tiles seamlessly mesh, I set out to blend Kipp's water tiles in with my sis' salt flats

Spoiler

although only subtly off only in texture thanks to Kipp's skillfull recoloring, every detail is important, and I wasn't about to half-ass this with my sis working so hard. we wound up with some cleaner water borders and salts before long

Spoiler

the thin salts were really looking smooth now! I tested every combination, of course

Spoiler

that blobby field on that mission of Flippy's wasn't ideal for testing, so I went to my expanded version of H9V2. here's an older screenshot, testing a prior draft of the thin salts with the much-too-funky thick salts test tile

Spoiler

did I release these maps on the forum? the expanded versions of the vanilla maps, that is. I made some co-op campaigns with them, one vanilla and one modded. I posted them up in the Landsraad and Missionaria Protectiva... maybe I didn't quite make it official here. I intend to do a proper single-player campaign on those, so that might be why. I guess I should post 'em up regardless

anyway, some proper thick salts tiles were drawn, and the curvature of the thin salts' edge tiles was greatly improved

Spoiler

TheRings0fSaturn, my generic infantry VA, kindly handled recolors for the salts after they were wrapped up

Spoiler

it had gotten to the point that most of the tileset was filled out. we still had dunes-equivalent terrain to correct, concrete to do, infantry rock, special cliff pieces... so I marked the available tiles in the tileset to account for where I could squeeze in the infantry rock assets yet to be done

Spoiler

we wrapped up the shale bedrock. after it was smoothed out, I blended it with the shale cliff pieces

Spoiler

my sis did the couple of tiles we needed for the Mining Rig build spots too

Spoiler

and then it was time to tackle the infantry rock. they don't have to mesh with one another, so they were actually on the easier end of things to do, though it took some effort and several opinions to figure out the right brightness level for them

there are even more Arrakis tiles than these, but surely there were sufficient infantry rock pieces to work off of here!

Spoiler

after their completion, I cropped 'em outta the reference image...

Spoiler

and then tried to choose some good tiles. we went on to expand the maximum capacity for tiles in a single tileset, but I still had to be decisive for the sake of the vanilla-compatible version of the tileset

Spoiler

those screenshots are from a much later draft, by the way. each time a new draft was drawn up, I had to complete this process or some portion of it again in order to test brightness adjustments. the following is one of the first screenshots (from that mission of Flippy's I had been testing water on) getting a look at the new infantry rock, and they are dark! we had also implemented that turret reskin and artificially-lit building skirts by the completion of the first draft of infantry rock

Spoiler

a tileset is hard to map with without presets in the editor, among other things. with so many tiles done, I set out to customize an ini for the editor. we're getting some very cool new tileset-related mapping features in the editor, but this served as a helpful basis for creating the .TLS file, helped me understand more about the backend, and it remains useful for v2.0 mapping. which to my knowledge remains kind of important for multiplayer

Spoiler

the ini can be used to assign colors on the minimap

this isn't just for the editor, but can also show up in-game nowadays. this map the above image belongs to is mostly covered in salts... as that's cleared out, it looks more gray. and the Imperials are purple and ubiquitous on the rock islands

a bit later, we had those brighter infantry rock drafts done up

Spoiler

the dunes-equivalent terrain was revisited

Spoiler

and I went on to test the new drafts on that expanded version of H9V2. we got it all smoothed out eventually

Spoiler

remember those purple crystals embedded in the Arrakis cliffs from way earlier on? that seemed like a bit of a busy design, too busy for impassable terrain. my sis portioned the cliffs well, so I did a crappy attempt at conveying this different idea. if we highlight the existing details and never touch the cliff edges, then we don't have to worry about messing up the seams between the pieces!

Spoiler

we went with a more subtle, muted and also more purple coloration, similar to the infantry rock-equivalent pieces

Spoiler

the tileset is largely on the grayscale, but it was my hope with this that that would appear like the deliberate stylistic choice it is. these are not unfinished sketches or something! it's an alien world with an alien look to it! the player should be the one to paint the map with color and light through base building, resource harvesting, and battle over the open terrain leaving craters and such behind

knowing that the salts can be depleted though, and figuring that the water could support something, my sis did up some pink trees for the tileset. she used the RA/TD temperate trees as a reference

Spoiler

and those trees naturally took a few drafts to get looking right too

I also isolated some wrecks and barricades from Arrakis tilesets. I had to get rid of the river tiles in the vanilla-compatible version of the tileset in order to squeeze trees and wrecks in there. but after everything on that front was sorted, we wound up where we're at today. hello, Arkanon!

it is impossible to fathom how much effort this was without witnessing the absurdity of the development process. this is the extent of my sister's generosity - she's owed our highest praise for all her hard work! and I make sure any she receives is passed along to her, as she doesn't frequent this locale

I will be doing my best to justify all her efforts: make this tileset simple to draw for other mappers through carefully customized editor presets, come up with remaps for Arrakis tilesets so they can be quickly converted, characterizing it strongly through a passionately-crafted series of campaigns including old and new factions... all that stuff

here are some FAQs

Spoiler

Q: Where did all this come from?
A: Nothing more than a dream. I dreamt once that we had a weird ass purpley tileset with chalky salt flats, great shale mountains, purple mists and pink crystals... and I mentioned it idly to my sis and she was like, "Hey, want me to draw that?" So I was like, "Yeah!" And then we started with this whole thing. She, uhh, didn't really know what we were getting into at the time, but stuck it through anyway, no matter how ridiculous things got, no matter what complications we encountered along the way to achieving my vision. I'll forever be thankful to her for all the effort she selflessly puts towards bringing my dreams to life.

Q: "Arkanon"?
A: That name also comes from a dream. Once, my sister was awoken early and, in her groggy state of half-sleep, muttered that we have to find the flight master in Arkanon, a city in World of Warcraft that does not exist. Considering the origin of the tileset itself, and the one drawing it, I remembered this amusing moment and bestowed the name upon this world.

Q: Are there any maps or something of this world? Like, world/concept maps. Not the in-game maps upon which we play missions.
A: Nope lol. However, I did come up with a buncha names for its regions. Arkanon looked kinda like a Greek word to me, so I've been going with a naming scheme involving corruptions of Greek words both for those region names and the natives' various units. Places like the Vathys Trench, Kydonos Basin, Ayyevros' Ascent, Mikros Shore, Ammodys Beach, the Kokytal Ashlands... translate some Greek words with the internet and see if you can jumble the letters or blend some words in a way you like, if you like that route and want to come up with some more of your own. As for the natives' units, you can see the Keravnos (thunderbolt) Laser Tank and Pyrkagia (conflagration) MLRS in the clip of the debut map up there around the top of the thread.

Q: Did you name anything else?
A: Kerasya trees. 'Cherry,' as in cherry blossom. Not that kerasya trees are the same thing, but they're pink and cherry blossom trees are a beautiful real-life inspiration for these, so, yeah.

Q: Can I use this tileset?
A: Of course! The download link to the assets for use in map making is up there, with a debut mission to come a bit later. Here are the credits:
 - ZoeO drafted and perfected the art. She also colored highlights on the water tiles.
 - I guided the vision, organized references and assets, and handled technicalities and implementation.
 - Kipp is the original artist behind the water assets, and recolored them for this tileset. He also recolored the craters.
 - Klofkac's work makes it possible to map with this tileset, not to mention that he expanded max tile capacity.
 - TheRings0fSaturn is responsible for the set of alternative colors we have for Arkanon's salt crystals.
 - Helkor assisted by helping to point out misaligned cliff pieces with the test map he drew up.

And I got lots of opinions from lotsa folks that helped guide the design in the most well-liked overall direction. That's a bit too vague and incidental though. The point being: Lots of people contributed to this tileset! Please attribute its assets properly to honor their hard work! Copy that list (replacing I with Fey in the second line) or link to this thread, if you'd like. If you want alternative colors for the salt crystals to swap in to the tileset, you'll find those under the long spoiler full of development screenshots. Just do a ctrl + F for TheRings0fSaturn.

Q: I wanna remap existing Arrakis maps to this tileset. How do I do that?
A: After picking up the assets and putting them where they belong, load any Arrakis mission and in the top bar, click Tileset, and then Change Tileset to Arkanon. It will make everything a jumbled mess. Go then to Map, also in the top bar. Click on Remap Tiles, and load up the appropriate ini. There's one for each Arrakis tileset to account for their differences. That's it. FYI, we have more advanced remapping capabilities nowadays! Like, we can randomize which sand tile those extra ones turn into, making conversions look much less samey. I'll be officially releasing those more advanced remaps with the debut mission for this tileset. Note that even then, remaps are NOT PERFECT and cannot account for everything! There are surely some tiles that will be screwy, especially where there are no equivalents, like with BLOXXMAS' bridges or BLOXICE's unique ice cliff pieces. I did what I could. They still save us an absolutely stupid amount of effort. If you want to tweak the remaps yourself, you'll find everything labeled and ordered so it can be more easily customized.

Q: How do I configure units to be amphibious?
A: There's a relatively new feature Klofkac implemented. Hit ctrl + X in a modern version of the editor as of the time of this post, like v2.3, and then mouse over the stuff under Restriction. Their tooltips will explain how it works.

Q: Hover animation on applicable units?
A: Export events is a thing. Refer to PsYcHo's smugglers restructure campaign, export the unit loop, import in your map. It's easy to find since it shows up colored in the events and conditions column. You can also find graphical assets for those new hover tanks over there, though more have yet to be created.

Q: Agh! Where is this campaign?!
A: Cm hasn't gotten off his ass and made a thread for it yet. xD It's linked in the Landsraad Discord server's #campaigns channel under the downloads center category. I'll get the debut map out for this tileset as soon as I can, which will use the same assets.

Q: I'd like to use this tileset, but I need mission ideas... What kinda stuff goes on on this new world? Who should even be involved?
A: Questions below the following secondary spoiler get into spoiler territory for campaigns I'd like to put out later. If that doesn't matter to you, proceed. You'll get all sorts of insight into my plans for this world and the sorts of conflicts that might unfold here, and why. If it does bother you, then I'd just refer you to the list of terrain features around the top of the thread: Shale plateaus, vast salt flats, corrosive chemical mists, water and trees. Go wild. Maybe you can pit some factions against each-other over the trees, or something.

Spoiler

Q: Okay, so we've got this new world to mess around on. Context?
A: Nothing that's been formally established, but here's the idea... Around the end of the Butlerian Jihad, remnants of the Thinking Machines fled somewhere humanity couldn't find them. Humans settle on this world after the Machines have burrowed down into its unlivable regions. A stalemate ensues. Simple setup, fine excuse to fight some robots or whatever cuz that's cool, lots we can do with that concept. ...For your information, the bit of Heighliner tileset in the debut map's full map image is mostly just a test of the expanded max tileset size. The conceptual existence of the Machines' bunker is just to justify large-scale superstructure interior macro missions since I'm not sure we have a suitable environment for that at the moment. Unless you were to draw a Heighliner without any Void tiles, but that only feels interior. It's in space. It's different!!

Q: The Machines aren't a new faction though. Cm_Blast did the Butlerian Jihad campaign, Thel'Vadam Flippy had Legion. New faction wen? Wen new faction? New faction? Wen?
A: The Order of Aether Knights was established to stand watch outside the Sarcophagus of the Thinking Machines. They hold total dominion over Arkanon's livable aetherlands. There are also The Culled, a small group of humans who don't submit to an Aether Lord.

Q: So there are three 'new' factions on this world. Let's start with the Machines. How big is this 'sarcophagus'? What have they been up to?
A: Nine layers, like hell. Portioned to let in the environment's greatest hazards if humans try to breach it. Big enough superstructure to support full-on macro battles in an interior environment. Underground mining efforts continue to maintain the remaining Machines' environment and keep a stockpile in the event of invasion - that being a breakthrough by the humans, or the opportunity to invade the aetherlands. The Machines are on the brink of annihilation and know it though. Regardless of their numbers and advantageous position, they keep to themselves. The Aether Knights, from repeated failure to breach or collapse their bunker, have only established defense lines at its exits around Arkanon's aetherlands. Not even they dare venture too far inside.

Q: The Aether Knights?
A: The 'natives' on this world who have been here since the end of the Butlerian Jihad. These ancient humans went through a bloody cultural revolution and maybe they stranded themselves here, or maybe even then they chose to remain. Whatever the case, their society is a social response to hundreds of years of battle against an unfeeling and uncompromising foe they're united in hatred of. They fall under the banner of one King who defends the crown through superiority in combat. The Aether Lords beneath each hold dominion over a section of Arkanon's aetherlands. There are quite a few of them, and they constantly wargame with one another to keep their teeth sharp. Although an isolated faction with no standing whatsoever in the Landsraad, they represent an extraordinarily capable force that has been keeping stubborn remnants of the Machines in check long after the rest of the Known Universe thought them utterly annihilated. And backing up their fighting prowess is a specialty in electronic warfare: ECM systems that throw off homing rockets, the ability to hack other factions' units and structures, superior surveillance tech...

Q: What about those Culled guys?
A: Basically the Fremen of Arkanon. They're forced to skulk around in the shadows because of The Order's dominion over the world. Having been subjugated time and time again and still refusing to submit to an Aether Lord is a rejection of reality, in The Order's eyes. The Culled are descendants of survivors of that bloody cultural revolution from long ago, and so hate The Order to such a degree that they actually would betray humanity if it meant the collapse of everything The Order had built. Their situation is a good excuse to re-use Dune 2000's Fremen assets. Stealthy hardened warriors.

Q: So what are you gonna do with these guys?
A: I'll elaborate beneath this tertiary spoiler.

Spoiler

There are five campaigns planned: Imperial Sardaukar (15 missions), Culled (8), smugglers & mercenaries (w/ the dual faction system, 15), Thinking Machines (7) and The Order of Aether Knights (15), for a total of 60 missions.

That might sound really ambitious. When Summers' Solstice was created, I had to customize eeeeverything on a very specific level. Variables make it easy to do all sorts of cool mapping tricks and can just be copy-pasted between missions to some degree. I also already have tons of maps drawn. It's ambitious still, sure, but in a different way.

Anyway, here's how it goes:

Dune 2000 happens, Sardaukar are kicked off Arrakis. The Guild is not happy that the Emperor's gambit interrupted Spice production and tells the Sardaukar, "Hey, you guys aren't going home until you pay off this debt. Go conquer this world for us. The natives are jerks." So the Sardaukar wind up on Arkanon and fight The Order on behalf of the Guild. They can't leave for a while anyway cuz the Aether Knights struck first when the Heighliner appeared in orbit, damaging some key navigation systems during their attack.

Playing as the Sardaukar in the first campaign of the series is also a chance to fight unfamiliar enemies with a familiar enough roster. Similarly to how, in Summers' Solstice, I deliberately kept vanilla-like units like those most similar to Light Infantry or Gun Turrets during the prologue, with only some occasional new units showing up. Arc 2 was when new stuff like Shotgunners showed up. Gotta give the player the chance to get comfy...

The Sardaukar eventually beat up the Aether Knights' king, with a little help from The Culled. Their ulterior motive, however, is to obtain forgotten information on the Machines' bunker whereabouts, as The Order doesn't just lock them down. They try to keep them secret, and blind the Machines to matters in the aetherlands. Their goal then becomes to sabotage the Aether Knights' defenses in the first level of the Machines' bunker, revealing to the Machines the extent of the chaos going on and providing a catalyst for their emergence.

That catalyst comes in the form of the smugglers and mercenaries, who are misled into thinking said bunker is actually a great vault. The Aether Knights are universally uninterested in the affairs of the Known Universe and have very different motivating factors... They're openly hostile to the Guild and even view Spice mutations as some kind of horrific attempt by the corrupt elements of humanity to emulate the functions of Thinking Machines. So where do they keep their wealth?! Surely it must be in this bunker!!!

Nope. So the Machines go join in the fun on the surface, the Culled formally join them, shenanigans ensue and the Machines wind up taking over the Heighliner. Oops, that's kind of a problem because besides Guild Navigators, Thinking Machines can also calculate fold space stuff. And they just killed the Navigator, so the situation is FUBAR for the humans.

Didn't the Guild see this coming with prescience? Well, maybe their ulterior motive for seizing this world wasn't for its salts or other resources, but to put an end to the Machines the Aether Knights are incapable of finishing off. It's not like foresight THAT far into the future is perfect, and it wouldn't be the first time they messed with stuff and brought shenanigannery upon themselves.

So the Aether Lord in the final campaign has to repel the Machines from the home front, beat up and induct some Sardaukar vassals, deal with yet more attacks by the Machines, butt heads with the Aether Lord responsible for failing to hold the primary line of defense outside the Machines' main bunker entrances, destroy the remnants of the smugglers and mercenaries that are hiding out in some corner of the aetherlands after having provoked the Machines, fight the remnants of the Sardaukar to decide the fate of the Heighliner, and then go blow up the compromised Heighliner in orbit. Many floors of scorched, twisted metal makes for a nice makeshift meteor to bury the Machines' bunker, cut them off from their forces on the surface and give The Order a chance to rebuild. It also makes for a big, perdy fireball. And wraps things up in a neat little bow, yay.

Q: Debut mission wen?
A: I'll continue documenting progress in the Landsraad Discord server's dedicated channel for the above campaign. I invite you to drop by! If not, then know that it'll be "soon™."

that's all for now. check back later for the debut mission. I'll be sure to edit the thread's name when that's ready

Edited 7 hours ago by Fey