So on request I will talk about what is Wrath of the Norsemen and what is new from vanilla M2TW?
Well, this beloved idea have been worked on by countless team members from 2007 until release...Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Ideas have been created-scrapped-reemerged and scrapped again so I guess it's time to talk abit about it.
We have all tried to keep this mod semi-historical using historical factions with real people (some legendary ones from the saga's though). Several historical leaders will emerge when they come of age historically too.
So it starts in 785 just before the "official" start of the viking age usually refered to 793 and the attack at Lindisfarna. The factions will be small, poor and weak. Some weaker than others but none really awesome. You will have to forge your kingdom from scratch with only a few, puny settlements and the rebels can be quite powerful at times.
You will enter a settlement and notice there are no defensive walls, a small selection in buildings to produce and NO units. So you will have to provide buildings for the units to have equipment and training facilities. I gave a preview for it here back in the days after I made it, and to further enhance understanding I will post the current-ish complete building tree now.
Featuring the Innovative Building tree
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
What is most important is to keep in mind that the higher tier barracks building require more armors and weapons, usually produced by the smith tree.
The smith tree is what will keep driving your settlement forward as most other building branches require it at some point.
Barrack tree produce infantry, Fletcher tree provides archers, stable tree provides cavalry and you will find some special units in the tavern tree.
The units will vary in how long they take to produce and how long until it's availiable for recruitment again. The more elite units will also be much fewer in the unit than the units of lower quality. This can lead to some confusion on the unit cost which have been carefully balanced by myself. The cost is based on what the unit is wearing and how many men there are in the unit. So an elite unit with awesome equipment will not be that much more expensive than a unit with cheaper equipment since there are a lot more men in that unit.
The statwork is created by me and is carefully balanced and influenced by Real Combat by Point Blank with some modifications. It will make the outcome of battle predicatable and battles will not be too fast or too slow.
The map is huge and we have quite a bit of new strat map models to give the ol' dark age feel. The settlements and regions are all authentic and historically correct (maybe some minor descrepencies) so you will get the feeling of how the world was at the time.
Among our greatest historical contributors, who have stuck with us through thick and thin, is the awesome Harðurāðaz with his great knowledge in old norse.
All the units are obviously new and the creators of the models are absinthia, Heathen Storm, Horsa and myself.
To give the player the feeling of desperation and poverty the settlements will not produce much income in the beginning and the army upkeep will be very costly. It was not uncommon during Beta testing to end up in the negative in the start. So how would a real viking solve it...
That's right, go and plunder something. The beta testers were impressed over how effecient their vikings was at plundering, yielding up to 40.000 from a single settlement.
Another way to gain income is to loot corpses on the battlefield, the greater the victory the more income earned (or lost), from 100 to 1000. Also keeping your generals in enemy territory will let the earn a small amount of ravaging-the-land income (500).