For Newcomers from FAF

If you've played Forged Alliance Forever (FAF) for any amount of time before arriving here, then welcome; LOUD is a very different experience.

LOUD is a total overhaul for the game and nothing more. There is no external client beyond its launcher, and it doesn't do anything besides update the mod, point you to important places like game folders, contain the Map Library for downloading custom maps, and show the change logs.

The two big priorities of the overhaul are performance and the AI. Several changes to the game's code have been made to offer enormously improved simulation speeds as the complexity of an ongoing game grows.

The titular AI has been refined over several years to be aggressive, economically smart, opportunistic, and easy on the CPU. It is also highly customisable and has no reliance on intelligence cheats which offer it perfect map knowledge.

The list of changes from vanilla will help you to understand what LOUD generally changes from the base game; if anything is not there, then it is unchanged from out-of-the-box Forged Alliance.

LOUD is also a mod-pack of sorts; a number of third-party modifications have been rebalanced and reworked to work well with everything else included in this package. All of these mods get downloaded by the launcher; just enable them and play.

It is also worth mentioning the social aspect. The community which has formed around LOUD is PvE-oriented, since the aim is to challenge and be challenged by the AI. It's probably smaller, but since there's no need to compete, it's become pretty friendly. Naturally, you can still play PvP with LOUD, and nothing will get in your way.