The votes are in. Here are your winners:
🥇 The Fleetmasters by Vinco
🥈 Lumenovis Enclave by Anoc tied with The Recyclers by ShadowTiger, Helios Dominion by fauxsoleil and Takarajin by AIL
Yes, that's a four-way tie for second place. And yes, one of the fourth-place finishers is AIL from our dev team. AIL didn't want the key since they already have the game (and the source code) so we have sent out 4 keys in addition to the 3 keys for the voter raffle.
What gets added to the game?
The vote has nothing to do with which factions get implemented. The dev team will select the factions that fit the game best, and we'll contact those creators directly to work with them on the implementation. This starts after the summer holidays and will take months, not weeks, so don't expect them in the next update.
Drama
Tying Steam keys to vote counts was a mistake on my part. Some people gamed the vote with single-use email accounts, which wasn't in the spirit of the contest, and those entries were disqualified. This caused a bit of drama (join our Discord if you want the full saga). Lesson learned.
Play with all the factions right now
If you'd like to play with or against the factions the community has made hit the Download All Factions button at https://factions.nullvectorstudios.com/browse and drop them into your custom factions directory:
Windows: %appdata%\\Astro Protocol\\custom_factions
macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Astro Protocol/custom_factions
Linux: ~/.local/share/Astro Protocol/custom_factions
Thanks to everyone who participated by submitting, voting, or just watching the drama unfold. The factions themselves made it all worth it.