Amazon:Total War

[Jubal]

I once made a little mod which did nothing but add a little more variety to the city view in the way described.

It would be good if a way was found to edit more about the city views, and bring the city to life far more (street sellers, horsemen, guards on the walls or whatever), but that seems unlikely to ever happen.

[SubRosa]

That would be nice. It might be possible by editing the bpi files? I am not really sure. I never really dug into pathing too much. There must be some place that tells the game where people walk in the city view.

In other news, I found a bug today that causes a CTD when going into a battle with Female Gladiators. The sprite line is incorrect. You can fix it by going to Amazon\Data\Descr_Model_Battle.txt, do a search for female_gladiator, and then replace the two sprite lines with the following code:

Code Select Expand


model_sprite slave, 60.0, amazon/data/sprites/slave_female_gladiator_sprite.spr
model_sprite slavs, 60.0, amazon/data/sprites/romans_senate_female_gladiator_sprite.spr

I have made patches to do the same as above for the RTW and BI versions of ATW, and posted links in the OP.

[SubRosa]

Palantir's Lost Legion, and all of the LOTOR stuff of late in general, have gotten me thinking of an idea for ATW. Namely doing the Harry Turtledove misplaced legion idea in reverse. Instead of taking units from the regular world (that of Amazons ), and putting them in a fantasy world, why not take units from a fantasy world and pluck them into ATW?

So what I was thinking was at some future point when I have the time (yeah, right), of making a sub-mod of ATW that would replace one of the factions with one of Orcs and Black Numenoreans who were somehow transported from Middle Earth to regular Earth. Most likely I would replace Dacia, as they are the least interesting faction in ATW and have a good central location.

I would have to create a new culture for them, which does not thrill me as it was a lot of work doing that for the Amazons. But on the other hand I am sure I could get permission to use models and skins from the many LOTOR mods out there to fill out the unit roster.

It is an odd idea, and would never be part of the regular mod. But I think it would be fun to take Amazons against a horde of Orcs. Imagine Drakones vs. Uruks, Companions vs. Warg Riders, or Gorgon Elephants vs. Trolls?

Of course the tag line would have to be: "The Age of Women is over. The Age of the Orc has begun!" :grin:

[SubRosa]

I have updated the full version downloads of both BI and RTW with version 2.5c. So only people who have downloaded them previously will need to upgrade with the 2.5c path.

[SubRosa]

I finished working on Albion. I created two new Rebel territories and gave one from the Britons to them. I also renamed everything but Tara, and moved a few settlements around. Finally there is now a land-bridge between Scotland and Ireland. I am still not sure if I want to create one between the continent and the isles though. I am going to have to experiment with creating one and running some AI campaigns to see how it plays out.



I also plan to make a Rebel version of the Briton Slingers, so there is some more variety to their rebels. Maybe a few other units too.

Hopefully this will make the Britons more fun to play as. At least in the early game. Not to mention make it more interesting when you have to conquer them.

[Jubal]

Yea, looks good.

[SubRosa]

I am experimenting with a new unit info scene. Snowy grass. How does it look?

[SubRosa]

I have picked some low-hanging fruit this afternoon. Two new units, Rebel Briton Slingers and Latin Mercenaries (whose shield texture is courtesy of Halie Satanus).

Rebel Briton Slingers

Spoiler: click to toggle

Latin Mercenaries

Spoiler: click to toggle

I am thinking of doing a mercenary version of the slingers to make available in the British Isles, and maybe a mercenary barbarian archer for the continent as well.

[SubRosa]

I have been working on the textures for the ground types in the campaign map, completely replacing the originals with textures from Medieval 2. I am still tweaking them a bit, but here is an example:

Spoiler: click to toggle

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v90/subrosa_florens/atw/amazonpreview172groundtypes.jpg

[SubRosa]

I have been working on the textures for the ground types in the campaign map, completely replacing the originals with textures from Medieval 2. I am still tweaking them a bit, but here is an example:

Spoiler

[SubRosa]

I have done some more tweaking to the ground textures, varying the shades of the swamp and fertility types to take out the yellows and browns and make them greener. I like how it has turned out.

The map is much more brighter and lively. The fertile areas are easy to tell, the darker the green the more fertile you are getting. When you get really dark it is a forest. All of the ground types really stand out now , making it much easier to tell if an area is swamp or wilderness or something else.


The Nile Valley really pops out against the desert.


The southern steppe shows the 3 basic fertility types. The northern half is low fertility, the area around Olbia is medium, and that around Tanais is high. The very neck of the Crimea is swamp


The Gauls now have natural camouflage, blending in with the background of the Po Valley.

[Jubal]

Nice!

[SubRosa]

Thank you Jubal.


I finally fixed the problem of victory videos not playing. I was mistakenly putting the mod path in descr_sm_factions.txt.



I only have stills looped into a video for now. I am not sure when I will be able to create actual new videos. But it is a lot better than a black screen.

I also imported neo_deus' Numidian Legionary shield for my own Numidians. It really completes the excellent work that Medusa0 did for them. Special thanks go to both for their contributions.

[SubRosa]

I have been busily working on ATW. I finally completed redoing the unit cards for the cavalry of all the Amazon factions in order to get the new horses in.

When I finished I was looking at the old info cards of the other Amazon units, and decided to go ahead and remake all of them as the info cards are relatively simple to do (it is the ui cards that take forever, since you have to size them just perfect to make them of uniform height and scale as all the others). My unit card-fu has dramatically improved since I made the previous ones. I am about a third of the way through, and here is an example of what I have done.



Thanks to some advice by Scutarii I also revamped ship stats in order to make naval combat more decisive, and less a game of ping-pong batting enemy ships back and forth between your own fleets. I doubled all of the attack ratings, cut the defense to the bone, and reduced all the crews to a base of 10 (so 40 on Huge scale). That should make more a lot more ships being sunk rather than running away.

[SubRosa]

I finished re-doing all of the Amazon faction unit info cards. Next I plan to redo all of the info cards for all the new non-Amazon units. That should keep me busy for a while.

I decided to finally integrate Riczu's ship mod before that. So now ATW has those spiffy boats of his: