Exilian
Game Design and Project Resources: The Workshops Quarter => Total War Mods - The Engineer's Shed => Mods, Maps & Game Add-Ons - The Bazaar => A Game of Colleges: Total War => Topic started by: sinophile on January 25, 2013, 02:22:44 PM
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Been thinking about this today and it occurs to me that EU3 might actually make for a better starting point. I have absolutely no modding experience on either game, but I know there are a lot of mods out there, and it's maybe worth considering at this early stage. From what I can see:
PROS:
- Larger map
- More provinces
- Probably easier to mod province effects (eg. UL, Union)
- Can give every college exactly what it owns (i.e. most Backs colleges have stuff either side of the river, lots of the older colleges have boathouses)
- More factions
- Don't have to lump colleges together
- Cassus Belli system can represent rivalries (i.e. John's v Trinity get permanent CBs on each other)
- Core province system would make colleges more likely to try and hold their initial possessions (no sacrificing your old court to Trinity/John's and retreating across the river)
- Supracollegiate pacts could maybe be represented using the system of the Holy Roman Empire (although I don't know if you could mod it so that there's more than one, or so that you can create new ones. I'd be hopeful though, since they gave the Chinese empire a faction system and the Japanese clans a competition to be Shogun)
- The economic importance of Sainsbury's/the Grafton/Lion's Yard could be represented by making them Centres of Trade.
- If colonists are disabled, we can represent Jesus Green, Midsummer Common, Parker's Piece etc. as no-man's-lands that troops can be moved onto and fight in, but that you can't actually 'own' or fortify.
- 'Culture differences' mean that you can recruit different unit types in different provinces (i.e. boaties, thesps, Pitt Club schweffes, ASNACs)
- Generals (fellows) don't reproduce, they get recruited based on Army tradition (research reputation?).
CONS:
- No real-time battles
- Armies can't garrison cities - garrisons are dependent on fortification level (although realistically, most college buildings have ground-floor windows or easily climbable fences that makes them ill-suited to holding out against a siege, so it may make more sense to just give a defence bonus to armies in home or occupied territory and let the game engine work it out).
- Economic simulation is key, and the system might be time-consuming to adjust
- Naval combat opportunities would be even more limited (although everywhere's so close and the Cam's so narrow that it'd be difficult to make this anything more than a sideshow even in RTW)
The lack of real-time battles is obviously the biggest problem; it'll reduce modding time significantly but might make it much less interesting to play. On the other hand, trying to mod each college from generic cities might take forever, and it could actually be more fun to imagine hordes of fellows swarming into Tit Hall, rather than leading 'modded-Praetorians-who-I'm-pretending-are-fellows' against 'modded-small-Roman-city-that-I'm-pretending-is-Tit-Hall'. By contrast, in EU3 there are far fewer 3D models to make (the map and army sprites), diplomacy's more satisfying and nuanced (royal marriage = academic collaboration?) and every college could be an independent actor. Based on the project's title, it may also be worth noting that there's already been a mod of CK2 (another Paradox game) based on Game of Thrones.
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Pros of RTW: I know how to mod RTW and I have a good six years of experience doing so.
Cons of everything else: I don't.
If you can find an experienced EU3 modder who wants to make such an EU3 mod, be my guest, but the reason I'm able to do this on a reasonable time-scale is that I've built two major total conversions of Rome already and I know the problems I'm likely to face and can deal with them and debug them very efficiently. So basically RTW has to win from a human resources aspect.
Not all the pros are unique to EU3 either; we can expand the map later, I'm just trying to keep the project a sane size, and we can get some province effects and local area recruitment is fairly easy to do and in the plans anyway.
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I had thought about suggesting EU3, but:
1) I don't know anything about modding it. I don't really know that much about playing it.
2)Even if I did, a bit of googling seems to indicate that modifying the EU3 map is a rather tricky and time-consuming process, and obviously the default map is completely useless for our purposes. Compare this to the quick turnaround time on Jubal's mocked up RTW map.
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A lot of it's just practice with most of these games; I'm just trying to use the skills I have to optimal effect I guess.