I forgot to respond to your post Solari.
We are building UNION in a very modular way. Our campaign missions will have two factions, UNION and Alpha Centauri, but you will be able to tweak them or create your own with as many factions as you want (including ships, structures, and weapons). All of the tools and methods that we use to create UNION’s included campaign will be included with the game at launch.
We also want to give you as many options as possible when hosting a server, so you will be able to do things like disable AI crew members.
We have played UNION on an older Intel i5 laptop with 4GB ram and a HD4000 integrated GPU. It ran at above 30 FPS on medium settings, and we will do more optimisation before release.
I’m not certain what you mean in terms of the map, so I will describe how it is right now and maybe you can give me feedback on that?
Right now you load a map at the start of the session. The maximum map size is quite large, I did some quick testing there and it would take around 28 minutes to cross the whole map at cruise speed (our version of warp). The map is created by hand, at the moment we have no plans to procedurally generate them (though we have thought about it).
I have considered supporting larger maps, but there is a good deal of work in that.
I would love to hear your feedback and ideas.
Thanks,
Mark