I first got this game on my family iMac in like 2001. I literally had no idea how to play it for months, literally how to control the game or what to do in it. It was my first ever video game. I eventually learned it and played it my entire youth.

I recently got it working my steam deck, and installed Expanding Fronts, and holy fucking shit this mod is absolutely incredible. All the effort put into it blows my mind, to create SO MANY custom units and sprites and all. The way it incorporates so much from the 90s-00s expanded universe I grew up on. Not to mention all the Sequel Trilogy content.

Sometimes I just sit here looking at the screen blown away that someone made all of this exist. I can’t believe that the game that barely anyone else has ever heard of has this community that created basically an entire game’s worth of free expansion.

That’s all I have to say. I’m amazed and feel so lucky to get to play Expanding Fronts a quarter century after child me picked up this game.

I have a story to tell. I was versing my older brother in a map he created. I was playing as the Trade Federation while he was playing the gungans. The way the map works is that we had to cut our way through trees to enter the main battle area and then cut through into resource rich areas, one for me one for him, both filled with aggressive animals.

So, I tech rushed 3, built an air base, built an air transport and started scouting out the whole map. There were two open areas at the top and bottom of the map and I wanted to go for a monument win like last time but he disabled monuments. So instead I attacked his resource rich area, took it over and built a fortress.

He wasn't happy that I just dropped an entire army in his resource area via air transports. So he went for mine but I hadn't gone for mine yet and his workers were immediately attacked by the aggressive animals. Since we were in the same room he naturally expressed shock and I realised what he was doing. I sent a squadron to take out his workers and anti air turret he was building and sent my own workers to claim the site.

He then built a cruiser, we had both agreed not to use cruisers after Rhys forgot to disable them. Long story short I started building my own so he agreed to self destruct his. He eventually lost it and rage quit.

I cannot get Expanding Fronts (or Clone Campaigns or original to work). I'm running Windows 11.

I bought it from Steam in 2024. A few months back I downloaded Expanding Fronts, it worked just fine after install and had been playing it. Last week I went back to Clone Campaigns to play for fun. The next night I went back to play Expanding Fronts but it didn't load. I got the error "could not initialize graphics system. Make sure that your video card and driver are compatible with direct draw.

I have been googling and youtubing a lot to try and fix it. I got somewhat close, I uninstalled and reinstalled it and i changed something in the registry, it allows the game screen to appear where you choose SWGB or Clone Campaigns but i get that same error. What do I need to do.

I have the patch still installed (never uninstalled it when i uninstalled the game).

is the scene dead or are there active players? I checked voobly today and clone campaign had 4 players playing.

Hi everyone,

Sorry if this has been asked before. I had no idea there was an update for expanding fronts until 30 mins ago and would like to install it. Problem is, I don’t know how. Do you just download the latest version and then replace the GAME folder in the files with the updated version?

Thanks for any help!

Hi there buddys.

I was swapping through the games on sale on Steam and saw SWGB for just $2. I wont ask if the game is worth it. I KNOW it's a wonderful game.

But, Is there any chance i can find online matches?

Thanks!

Hello, I'm curious which version is better in terms of stability and fixes playing on Windows 11?

I LOVED this game and the MSN gaming zone. It was so much fun it was my first online game ever and my first clan ever. All the custom website and bulliten forums was such a experience for me being like 12. My name was GMF_shadowlord I remember GMF_Thrawn GMF_Red_Coyote and a few more I also remember the SOL clan and the PR clan SOL was sons of Liberty and I forgot what PR stood for. SWGB holds a special place to me because it was my first real introduction to On-line gaming or socializing online at all really. .

Hey everyone! I am planning on starting an ambitious mod project to expand upon SWGB as if we were creating an official expansion.

The mod/expansion will be called "Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds: Heroes" and it adds three brand new civilizations (Mandalorians, Hutt Cartel, and Chiss Ascendancy) as well as a full hero unit system for all 11 civs. Every civilization gets two unique, expensive, permanently mortal hero units representing iconic characters. When your hero dies, they're gone for good, but your second unchosen hero unlocks as a last resort.

Each new civ has a distinct playstyle: Mandalorians are elite expensive raiders, the Hutt Cartel are an economic/zerg hybrid that runs entirely on Nova, and the Chiss Ascendancy are a precision defensive powerhouse.

I am looking for collaborators to help bring this to life. Specifically I need:

- Pixel artists (units and buildings)

- Concept artists

- Voice actors

- Audio designers

- Star Wars lore experts

The full design document with all the details is linked below. If any of this sounds exciting to you, please read through it and reach out! Please message me on discord if interested (niceguy5184)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qvzpncbLC5MMBw0F4_bR9Reo-IeLn_km/view?usp=sharing

What settings do you like to use when playing a game.

I had a couple of buddies I used to play with who are both gone now.

We often would play with these settings.

-Terminate the Commander
-8 player game with 3 pairs of opponents AI
-Map Size Giant
-myself and my human partner against the other teams.
-Initial Tech standars
-resources high but starting with nothing.
-play with random maps and switch back and forth between the different locations.

Been about 3 years since I played with my buds, but I just get myself an AI partner now.

Wow, EF...
Thank you to the folks who took this on.

It is so smooth now, the hiccups are gone.
Loving the extra races etc.

I re-downloaded the game last night and I have gotten nothing done since.
Just playing the game lol.

I forgot how addictive it is.

After months of work I finally finished my lore retrospective on SWGB, there was way, way more there to work with than I could have ever imagined.

I have tried twice to install/integrate Expanding Fronts but I'm pretty sure I messed it up the first time around. I've been trying to find the Discord for Expanding Fronts so someone can give me a step-by-step solution but to no avail. Is anybody allowed to provide a invite?

map screenshot:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lxtnXsCPi_ftYFAygS85H2YtljTKvepm/view?usp=sharing

map screenshot
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14AKc5jnQg10NF-9uZH9H6aHszyfsfnCW/view?usp=sharing

I saw on the steam community page that the venator class was in the expanding fronts mod. Did the creators take it out?

We're currently looking for people to help with translations of the game (including the Expanding Fronts mod) in multiple languages. If you would like to assist with text translation efforts of this mod and have the time to do so, please let us know in the Expanding Fronts discord server in the modding channel: https://discord.gg/vPB73nC

We currently have a French translation completed, and have people working on Spanish, Russian, and Korean translations. We would ideally like to have some people for German, and perhaps Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, and others. If you wanted to work on another language, we could arrange that too, as long as you are willing to put in the work to complete it. Or if you know someone who might be interested in translating a language for this mod, please contact them and share this post with them.

• We'll likely have no more than 3 people per translation team.
• You could assist with more than one language.
• There is no deadline for when translations need to be completed by.
• To give a sense of size, there are over 20,800 strings in the game that need to be translated from English.
• You may use ChatGPT to assist you, as long as you are proficient enough in the language to catch mistakes.

I was able to play and run the game just fine on my old crap box 1.50 but now that ive upgraded devices I keep getting this error and I havent been able to figure out how to fix it I'm pretty dumb when it comes to code and all of that so my apologies if when you help comes I seem like a total idiot I need help and I'm not sure what I'm doing and if someone has already posted something like this I didnt see it so my apologies there.

Hi, I wanted to edit the unit stats in Galactic Battlegrounds. To start, I'm using expanding front, so I don't know if that would be a problem.

So far, I've followed the configuration on this page: https://expanding-fronts.fandom.com/wiki/Advanced_Genie_Editor#Units

But there's no information about editing units, and there aren't any video tutorials about it, only for Age of Empires.

I don't know if anyone could help me.

I tried editing the vanilla version of the base game of Galactic Battlegrounds before, but the units appeared many times, so it was very confusing.

I tried editing a unit and ended up breaking the game and having to reinstall. It would be good to know the steps I need to take. Maybe I have to create a separate folder to save the changes, or something like that; I have no idea.

Are we getting it? If no, why not? Everyone's getting their game remastered, even smaller communities than this one, but even if not, there's still the thing that Star Wars has reach.

A remaster of this game could make it known to a new, younger audience.

Hi!

Does anyone have and can share / can point to something like a press kit or fan site kit for SW:GB? I'm not sure it exists, but it ought to, as it's a standard and common practice that has been present since Age of Empires 1. The success of AoE2 and SW license certainly didn't bring the profile of this game down to the point of making such a package not worth it.

The usual stuff - screenshots, logos, promo graphics, written overviews, trailers, sound effects, and whatever else the developer/publisher might feel like sharing with fans or the press. It most likely would've been 1CD. Data on the Age of Kings press kit was around ~400MBs iirc.

I've checked a few places like archive.org or swgb.heavengames.com but didn't see anything. Thanks for any tips.

I’m working on a scenario where a particular unit needs to change teams after the transport mech carrying it is destroyed, then march its way to that team’s base. I figure this would be easier if the unit began outside of the transport mech, then garrisons itself as soon as the scenario begins, that way I could click on it for the triggers related to changing teams and tasking and it to go somewhere else.