you will be able to use modded content locally, but currently the system does not support downloading modded content from the server. There may be legal issues with that. If someone made a star wars mod and it became more popular than GSB, then I would effectively be hosting copyright infringement 
That’s fair, at least we can use modded stuff in the campagn. 
Is the campaign going to be turn based?
Perhaps if possible it could almost be like Heros of Might and Magic where you can take turns on the same computer, would make for much more interesting evenings as I’d be able to battle my friend’s ships with my own while dominating their Empire.
The perfect drinking game!
It’s a singleplayer, turn-based campaign.
All of this campaign news is very exciting, I can’t wait!
It would be nice if there was a hotseat option, too, though - maybe not for the campaign, but for one-off battles and challenges.
I miss the turn based starlanes method of these sorts of games.
GalCiv2 is awesome, but the AI kicks my ass something fierce because I suck at defending such a wide open, chokepointless empire.
Why did MOO3 have to suck so hard?
GalCiv2 can strongly resemble being the Defense Minister of a nation like Poland; no natural terrain features to make for easy borders. [sigh]
As for MOO3, at least it insures that MOO2 will always shine brightly forever more. My kid and I played more of that than I can ever measure.
No possibility of allowing the player to take over the opposition at all then?
Will you be able to play as any race in the game, or will you be stuck with only one race?
one race, but you can capture enemy ships.
I would love to see repainted ships, because seeing the vibrant expansion races fighting alongside the dull core races (as well as any race fighting themselves) would be a little confusing.
plus I’ve always wanted to see the federation in gold 
Then again iirc you said it was pretty difficult in the FedElite ships thread.
Ok, this post is about this topic but it is also going to be a little round about.
I bought GSB for this update only. I had downloaded the demo and played what there was to play in the demo. I was mildly interested. I beat everything with Tutorial ships.
Then I read this thread and looked at the pictures on the GSB site. Oh boy, I can’t wait. Ok, I’ll buy this game just to play what’s comming. How ‘soon’ is soon?
So I bought the game. I played all the missions on ‘normal’ and beat them all with Tutorial Cruisers and Tutorial Fighters, except the mission where Cruisers can’t go. I earned about 100,000 honor (I did this twice, on my home machine and my work machine). This is kind of disappointing… I did not need to design one ship to win 90% of the missions. (Also the delete design function in the context menu of the deployment screen is broken and should have a warning dialog (do you really want to delete this design?) I accidentally deleted my Tutorial Fighter and had no way to recover it when I was trying to spam deploy).
Then I used that honor to unlock cruiser hulls and weapons…I went back to play a mission I had done before (the first one after the tutorial mission). I beat it with 9,000 honor, I played the ‘hard’, beat it, then the ‘expert’… Had I just created the most awesome cruiser ever??? The game started to come to life, I made a few varients, tweaked a little more honor out of each mission…
My enjoyment level with the game started to rise. I tried a challenge, finally beat it… OK, I’m ready…
BRING ON THE CAMPAIGNS!!! I want to fight!!!
(Note: for the most part I like the game - I want to love it but there are many interface problems, some crashes, etc… I’d like to post all those issues but I wonder if they’ll be addressed?)
Hey Ramcat and welcome aboard.
You must have been very lucky, as I never could get anywhere past the 5th or 6th mission with tutorial crafts!
Anyway, the hard stuff is really with the challenges. I suggest you go check the Challenges forum.
As for any issues/bugs/crashes, you should really post them in the Support forum. You"ll see Cliff is very active there and usually fixes stuff as soon as he can reproduce it.
This will really add a lot to this game. Although I have everything unlocked right now, I think it would be pretty awesome to start small and fight for the ability to make big cruisers with heavy weapons! Plus careful/efficient ship design will be just that much more important.
Capture??? Oh I love being able to do that!
I assume we can play as any race, but have that race for the entire campaign.
And regarding fighters IN carriers, wouldn’t that be a great way of allowing you to ferry fighters though fighter hostile environments?
Fighters are my fav part of the game. I just wish they were better done.
some more campaign notes:
I added a feature called construction limits, for shipyards. This limits the total cosyt of ships built per turn, per shipyard. Bigger yards can build more stuff per turn. The idea behind this is that you can’t conquer 75% of the map, but spend 100% of the resources in one turn in an insta-fleet deployment right by the border. This means that controlling multiple shipyards becomes more important once you have enough cash and crew coming in. It also gives extra weight to those chokepoints where nebulas prevent certain ship classes, meaning you might need to route big fleets around them to get to the front line.
Another new feature is auto-deployment. Some of the battles are big, and you fight a lot of them in a campaign, and if you merge two big fleets, suddenly you might have 60 ships to drag onto the map.
The autodeployment feature is not perfect, but its a one-click option to auto-drag all those ships onto the deployment zone, not randomly, but in columns centered on the deployment zone, with each ship design in a different column. You will almost certainly need to re-position a few groups of ships and obviously assign deployment-specific orders such as escort and formation, but it is much much quicker than having to drag them manually onto the map.
Often you don’t need that feature anyway, because fleets that are kept together between battles remember their deployments anyway, but it’s still handy,
More details to come closer to the beta / release. I may release the new race before then. Who knows!
Woot! Go Cliffski! That all sounds pretty great.
How big in credits/ships can campaign battles be? Unlimited?
We’re drooling over the details, and the wait…soon, please!
There is no limit, but I’m hoping that people will be aiming to complete the campaign against the clock. I may try to build in some sort of leaderboard to illustrate how well you are doing compared to everyone else in this regard.
I don’t want any artificial caps on the sizes of the battles, just so that people who want really insane battles can have them. I recently fought a battle in the campaign with 146,000 credits on my side, and that was pretty seriously big. I still need to do a ton of balancing of the game so that the AI will retaliate better against such big fleets.
I was reading the campaign description ont he home page. I did not understand this “Rather than set, pre-determined fleets to battle against, the game utilises the fleets designed by other GSB players to provide an endless variety of opponent”
how does it work, it is a single player campaign… right!?
how could it be “undetermined” fleet?