Hello Fans!

Some people have been asking for multiplayer in the Universal Combat suite of games released here on Steam. Here's an explainer.

As I mentioned in the forums, multiplayer was implemented in the original Universal Combat (2004) and up to the first Collectors Edition (2007). Maintenance and server backend issues, coupled with new features and updates made the multiplayer version lag behind the single-player version with each new point release.

Unlike the All Aspects series, the Universal Combat series - which use different core engines - were never developed with multiplayer in mind because they were derived off the original Battlecruiser series. Thus, having to add multiplayer to a single-player game was fraught with all the usual challenges that such an endeavor entails. So, in the long run, having to sync the multiplayer with single-player features, bug fixes etc. was an on-going time-wasting challenge that eventually became insurmountable.

And with that, multiplayer was disabled in the 2.0 release back in 2009.

Thereafter, my plan was to spend some time fully developing an updated multiplayer component as a DLC to the on-going expansion and improvement of the Universal Combat 3.0 series; similar to The Lyrius Conflict DLC which expands and improves on various parts of the core engine.

Though I haven't been able to spend as much time on 3.0 as I would like to, due to other projects and the fact that I ripped out a large swath of legacy UC code that I had always planned to re-write, I still plan to develop a multiplayer component. And the quickest way forward in this regard is to integrate the more advanced multiplayer engine from the All Aspects series to the UCCE 3.0 core as a separate DLC once I have completed and released the final version of the single-player The Lyrius Conflict DLC.

Until then, I have now added the original 2007 version of UCCE as a free game to the base game here on Steam. As it's not a separate game on Steam nor a DLC, you will have to manually install it - then add it to your Steam library manually. You can view the changelog here.

Once you have this update, look in the Steam install folder for the UniversalCombatCE_10104_STM.exe file and run it. That's it!

Enjoy!

DISCLAIMER

As a legacy title that no longer has updates, this release is unsupported.

The backend master server used for multiplayer server browsing has been off-line for many years now. So, you can only setup and join a multiplayer game using the command-line options and the console server build. See Section 13 of the included PDF manual for more info on this.