Vanilla Extended Mini Mod

[Winters07]

How work is going ? I can't wait to play this mod !

[korsakoff]

Been a fair while since i posted anything about this little project. I had to stop working on it for a good while due to focusing on studies but the RTW nerve hit me again recently which has got me fully back working on it. That being said i have pretty much started with a clean folder so it's taking me a fair bit of time to get to where i was before but it's been fun. In the mean time i have made some slight changes to the faction roster included down below.

I wanted to originally include the Britons but they seem to just sit on the little island dong virtually nothing. While you could say this is pretty accurate it does feel like a waste of a faction slot and having them sitting around and praying one of the AI actually some how bothers to invade the island is rather boring so i have came up with the idea of mostly replacing them with a faction called "celts" or "celtic tribes". This could give the gauls a bit of a fight rather than being too dominant in france alone and i could give the  faction one province in Britian and give them access to unique units only recruitable in briton?

Parthia is another faction i have replaced, the original game kind of just shoehorned them on the campaign map when they really should not have been there. I have been playing some Rome 2 and imperator rome as of late and i rather like the idea of Media Atropatene being included instead to replace them.

Spoiler

The Kingdom of Pergamum - Romans_scipii
The Kingdom of Epirus - Romans_brutii
The Republic of Rome - Romans_julii
The Macedonian Empire - Macedon
The Ptolemaic Empire - Egypt
The Seleucid Empire - Seleucid
The Republic of Carthage - Carthage
The Kingdom of Pontus - Pontus
The Germanic Tribes - Germans
The Bosporan Kingdom - Roman_senate
The Kingdom of Armenia - Armenia
The Dacians - Dacia
The Celts - Britons
The Gauls - Gauls
The People Of Thrace - Thrace
The Greek City-States - Greeks
The Scythian Tribes - Scythia
The Iberian Tribes - Spain
Media Atropatene - Parthia

WIP screenshot below of the  Bosporans

Spoiler

[Jubal]

Yeah, in general modelling celtic cultures effectively is a massive problem for wargames that tend to start with a very Romano-Greek premise for how societies and cultures work. RTW just has the wrong model for it, at a base game mechanics level. In some ways this frees you up - just do whatever works for gameplay, because in accuracy terms "getting it right" just isn't much of a thing. And yeah, unique Briton units in a wider celtic faction seems fine as an idea.

Nice to see you and the mod back

[Lanjane]

Hi korsakoff!

I'm Lanjane, you could probably know me as I was helping with comrade_general's mods Persian Invasion and The Hellenic States before.

I want to invite you to our Discord Rome Total War Modding Community which was created by Ahowl and me and currently has about 163 members: https://discordapp.com/invite/p4jnanZ
Not only you will have a chance to get help with the development of your mod, but you also will get some additional audience for your project and as a bonus you also can meet a lot of remaining RTW modders there, like Ahowl11,  Suppanut, Gigantus, Joar, Robbe Aerts and many others.

[Jubal]

Also, this got included in the latest newsletter:

https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=6019

[ahowl11]

Keep up the good work!

[korsakoff]

Thanks Ahowl 

Thought i would post a small little update since it's been a while. Currently working on replacing the entire julii roster to fit with the new faction symbol and banners which has been a bit of a headache with how many unit cards and textures they have but i think it's turning out pretty well so far.

Spoiler

Thrace has recieved some small buffs to their unit roster as the default vanilla roster is pretty meh. They now have warband, levy pikemen and noble cavalry.  Dacia also has a tweaked unit roster with swordsman and Sicklemen taken from alexenader now added. Falxmen are now exclusive to Dacia and Sicklemen can be recruited from a blacksmith for game balance.

Spoiler

[Jubal]

Thrace is an interesting oddity in RTW terms. It's one of those things that's kinda there for gameplay, and I've had great campaigns playing as them, but I've never found them quite satisfactory somehow. Looks like you made some sensible additions to their main roster, anyway

[korsakoff]

Thrace has always been a favourite of mine so i totally had to give them a little bit of buff 

And of course another small little update!

numidia: unit roster slightly tweaked including town militia and desert swordsmen. The swordsmen unit card is a place holder

Spoiler

Iberians: This faction always felt rather weak in vanilla so they now have access to spearmen and a slighty more heavier version of scutarii (really need unit cards for these)

Spoiler

Carthage: When i was looking into the RTW data files it seems CA left behind a Scutarii texture so rather than let it go to waste of course carthage now have them too!! The unit card was pretty simple to make with a couple of mins of image manipulating in gimp and i think it turned out rather well.

Spoiler

Last but not least a few campaign map images. I'd say the campaign map is pretty much fully complete at this point with some polish needed here and there. I had originally intended for the mod to start in 279bc to include pyrrhus and i had a plethora of ideas and routes for the mod to go down on but at the current moment i'm simply lacking time as my studies will be starting rather soon and i also felt that since the mod is called "Vanilla Extended" most of my ideas and the start date i had originally planned simply diverged a little too far from Vanilla. Baiscally this means sadly no pyrrhus and the pyrrhic wars but Epirus is still included i just cut them back down 

Spoiler

[korsakoff]

Mod finally released 

Updated the front page! Going to go into hiding for now,  i need time to relax after working on this lmao!

[Jubal]

Congrats! Did an announcement

https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=6032

[dubsartur]

Wow, cool!  I played some Rome: Total Realism back in the day, it just got boring to defeat endless Ionian armies as King of Armenia, never being able to make progress against Ionians (no money or troops!) but never having to make peace either (the AI was easy to confuse and shoot to pieces with elite archers, cataphracts, and a small phalanx).

What do you need to run a modded version these days  ... a Windows box and the CD/DVD?  I don't really use Windows any more (Windows 10 terrifies me and Windows 7 will not be maintained soon!) and I don't have money for Macs.

I feel confused because a lot of things on computers are going in a surveillancey, software-as-a-service direction that we voted against with our feet in the 1990s.  Its getting hard to do basic things on say my phone in a way which is consistent with my fundamental values ("no, I don't want some online service suggesting music for me!  I want to play albums, one at a time, which I own").

[dubsartur]

Yeah, in general modelling celtic cultures effectively is a massive problem for wargames that tend to start with a very Romano-Greek premise for how societies and cultures work. RTW just has the wrong model for it, at a base game mechanics level. In some ways this frees you up - just do whatever works for gameplay, because in accuracy terms "getting it right" just isn't much of a thing. And yeah, unique Briton units in a wider celtic faction seems fine as an idea.

Nice to see you and the mod back

And games like the Total War series or real-time strategy games also have the issue that they are built around constantly aggressively expanding.  Its hard to represent things like the Japanese ignoring Hokkaido, or the Romans ignoring Ireland, because the locals were weird and didn't seem to have anything to offer their conquerors.

I don't like criticizing commercial games or films for doing what games and film people think is cool rather than what historians think is cool ("just assume that what you see on the screen is wrong!"), but maybe there is room for history geeks and indy games geeks to work together?  I am poking around 0 AD which works on Linux and has features like "women" and "units that work when they can and fight when they must."

[Jubal]

0AD is very neat, I did some programming on it back in the day. We used to have some whole 0AD sections on Exilian but they got archived due to under-use sadly.

I think my conception of this is that "accurate computer games" is a non-starter, but there are ways of showing other parts and sides of history through games that can make them more rather than less fun. I certainly think that you could do the Romans ignoring Ireland with a sufficiently smart AI and sufficient balance of risk/reward (like, "this place makes me no money and the locals keep rebelling, it's not worth it" ought to be a do-able AI calculation). Unfortunately AI modding isn't something any of the Total War games have allowed for very well, but it's one of the areas most of interest with my historian's hat on.

I mostly use the steam version of RTW nowadays on windows - don't know what the linux options are.

[dubsartur]

And I guess you can have games which explore different aspects ... I would love to have a game where if you let the wrong types of troops do something glorious, that has political implications!

Isn't Steam spyware?  I thought it monitors all the software on your computer and all the hardware configurations "to ensure respect for copyright and prevent bots and cheating in multiplayer games."  I am having trouble duckduckgoing the details, because "valve" and "steam" are common nouns with high frequencies, but here is a reddit thread.