From the onset, Dark Times has been about giving the single player lots of variety. The "random" aspects of the mod - designed to stretch the replayability of individual maps in the absence of multiplayer. Wave modes - single player challenges at heart (despite some concessions to MP, like Kamino and Hoth).
One big thing I knew I wanted to do if I did a second version of the mod was include a real single-player campaign. I had some fun ideas for implementing it, and I knew that if I had a solid base of maps to work with, I'd be able to make a decent-length set of missions that would serve the singleplayer experience very well.
"Dark Times: The Rising Son" is no more and no less than a full Rebel Alliance campaign, stretching from after the Battle of Yavin to the end of Return of the Jedi. It has sixteen missions, although only ten of them are
required to finish the campaign. Why is this? The campaign uses the Galactic Conquest interface, so that I could do a planned campaign with smaller branching paths. The advantages of the GC interface also include the ability to "customize" your campaign missions with purchases and bonuses.
The campaign looks like this:
The player starts at Yavin IV and proceeds through the missions to Endor. They are all land battles, and while they do use "turns," only the player himself gets turns. You can see that at three different points in the campaign, the player is given the option to move out onto shorter campaign "branches."
Each mission offers a reward for beating it (just like normal GC). The credits you receive for beating each campaign mission can be applied towards bonuses, just like a normal GC (although you will notice only the pertinent bonuses can be used - energy boost, increased ammo, health regen, and enhanced blasters):
More important and probably ultimately more useful are the unit bonuses you can buy. This is a little different from a normal galactic conquest. All your basic units are already "unlocked" and available for each campaign mission. However, each of the Alliance hero support units can be purchased as a separate unlockable. Not every hero support unit will show up in every mission, but each mission (with the exception of the first) has three hero support units available to it. If you've purchased one of those hero support units, they will be able to be used in that mission. You can see how investing in these powerful units can be a great asset! It may also make each individual objective easier, too - for example, on Fest you have to take down AT-PT walkers. While you can do this with a standard heavy unit, if you have the "technician" hero support available, this will be a much easier objective.
To be perfectly honest with you, I started to take some individual pictures of each of the campaigns, but there are a lot of them and my fingers were tired. You've seen all of the maps these campaigns take place on (each DT2 land map is featured as well as three stock maps), so there is very little "new" to see. Here are a couple pictures that are completely non-representative.
Each campaign is similar in length (maybe a little shorter, sometimes a little longer) to a stock campaign. It had always bothered me just a little that the stock campaign missions cut off at Hoth, since the story obviously doesn't end there. No longer! Now there's a full-length GCW campaign. I had lots of fun making it, and I know it's lots of fun to play!
