Will there be an aor?
-Yes, there will be an AOR but it will be only for few units because we have a new system with the mercenary barracks that wasn't present in any mod up till now. You will be more informed on it as time goes on.
- If you have ever played EB(I havn't but I have seen the AOR), AOR won't be like that. You won't have that much choice. You won't be able to recruit for example hoplites if you play as Romans trough AOR and so on. As already said, factions that used mercenary units will be recruited from mercenary barracks.
-there probably will be only AOR for little units.
One trouble with British factions so far in Total War games, I find, is that when one faction gains total controls the isles, they become almost untouchable and unstoppable, to anyone but the player at least; this make sense for Empire etc, but in this classical period it would be very challenging for one of the clans to unite the whole arpeggio.
Kingdom of Brigantes isn't a clan. It is a Kingdom that has a confederation of tribes within it. The point is just that the Brigantes are the ones that lead the confederation and that is why the faction is called Kingdom of Brigantes.
So it is possible that they unite whole Britain , even make an Empire, because, again. They are not one tribe.
And by that I mean we will can train regional units?
-All units will be trained trough normal barracks or trough mercenary barracks that we will introduce when the time comes .All units will be trained trough normal barracks or trough mercenary barracks that we will introduce when the time comes .
Seems interesting that mercenary system, will it be like you can recruit them in the field but retrain them in cities?
-Nope, the units won't be able to be recruited in the fields anymore , they will be recruited only from the barracks in the cities. We did a lot of talking in the mercenary area. We concluded that there are mercenary units that were recruited when the army attacked some field. For example when the Romans would attack Gauls, there were some Gallic tribes that would be hired in Gaul as the Romans progressed in their campaign. That type of recruitment is present in the original RTW. However there was another type of recruitment that was historically present. Some warriors would travel to foreign lands to be hired as mercenary units , because of their greed for gold or just because they could feed their families or just because they wanted a good fight, I really don't know, but it was like that.
- Finally you have the third type which is similar to mercenary units and those are auxilia units. Rome's auxiliary units are very well known , but they are not the only one to use auxiliary units , because Seleucids also used auxiliary units pretatty well.
- This type of recruitment of units will actually help people to see better how did a certain faction relly on mercenary units. Also if you take a look at the Carthaginian roster you will see that some unit names are written in green, some in blue & some in red. I didn't explained that, I forgot, sorry ! . So the green ones are units that will be recruited from mercenary barracks and they are either mercenaries or just allied troops. The blue units are the standard units of the faction that will be recruited form the normal barracks. Red units are the ones you can't recruit. They are either standard bearers or general's bodyguard.
And did the Carthaginias even had indian elephants?
-This actually is the problem we came across when modding. The answers is yes , but there is always but !... but they weren't used in that amount that for example the towered elephants were used by Carthaginians. The thing is that the Republic of Carthage enjoyed very good relations with the Ptolemaic Empire from where they got the Indian Elephants. Ptolemaics had access to the Red Sea which was a direct trade root to India. Ptolemaics also used Indian Elephants.
Here is some info I will post so you can get around. If somebody asks for a source I can't give it as I didn't save my resources because if you can see the most important goal of the mod isn't historical accuracy, its gameplay. I just wanted to make a mod where people would enjoy the gameplay and that they don't feel like the are taking history class while on the other hand It won't be the case that it is ahistorical. A said before it will be around 90 - 95 %. But if anybody does some research on their own the will find probably what I did to.
So here you go :
General Information :
Indian elephants(in vanilla game probably Armored elephants)
Indian elephants reach a shoulder height of between 2 and 3.5 m (6.6 and 11.5 ft).
African Bush Elephants(in vanilla game probably war elephants)
On average, males are 3.3 metres (10.8 ft) tall at the shoulders and 5.5 tonnes (12,000 lb) in weight while females are much smaller at 2.7 metres (8.9 ft) tall and 3 tonnes (6,600 lb)
African Forest Elephants(in vanilla probably forrest elephants)
The male African forest elephant rarely exceeds 2.5 metres (8 ft) in height, while the African bush elephant is usually over 3 metres (just under 10 feet) and sometimes almost 4 metres (13 ft) tall.
Historical Information :
Hamilcar Barca made great use of his elephants during the Mercenary War, while Hannibal used war-elephants in both Spain and Italy. On his march through the Alps they scared the Celts so much that they did not launch attacks on areas which had elephants. Hannibal put them to good use in the Battle of the Trebia, though it is believed he lost most of the initial 37 he brought across with him during the winter of 217. Only one is said to have survived, which Hannibal rode through the Arnus marshes. This was supposedly an Indian elephant named Syrus. He did use elephants again however, as the only reinforcements he received from Carthage in 215 came with a small contingent of elephants.
He also used 80 at Zama, but they were apparently young and not very well trained and were spooked easily, causing more chaos than good. Hasdrubal Barca also made use of war-elephants, but again, they did more harm than good when employed on the battlefield. To counter the unpredictable nature of elephants, the mahouts used hammers to drive in nails into the elephant skull, but this may have been quite a tricky task indeed.
Once there were elephants nearly everywhere, but by the time of Hannibal's march in 218 B.C. they had already dwindled to the two species extant today, the Indian, or Asian, elephants and the African ones.
If he had had a choice, Hannibal would presumably have gone into battle with Indian elephants, which had been used effectively a century before in charging against the forces of Alexander the Great. Indian elephants are not quite as large as the African species but much more easily trained, which is why they are favored by zoos and circuses.
Many historians believe a likely source of Hannibal's elephants could have been the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria. Living there at the time was a forest subspecies of the African elephants. These were smaller animals, standing about 8 feet tall at the shoulders in contrast to the 11-foot-tall sub-Saharan animals. The Atlas elephants later died out as the region grew increasingly arid.
Only one of the elephants survived the war, it seems. This was the elephant Hannibal himself had often ridden. Its name, according to the story, was Surus, meaning ''the Syrian.'' Because the Ptolemies of Egypt, successors to Alexander, were known to have seized some Indian elephants as booty in their campaigns in Syria, it seemed likely that some descendants of those elephants had found their way to Carthage. Egypt and Carthage enjoyed good relations in those days. Mr. De Beer, citing the story of Surus, concluded, ''It is therefore almost certain that Hannibal's elephants included at least one Indian.''
Will this mod be mainly based on RS2 units and Ferres units?
-There will be other units from other moders as well, but RSII units were mostly used for factions that other moders didn't do. Many moders didn't focused on barbarians, so we took barbarians from the. I wanted that their work can be seen in one place and that is our mod. So in short the answer is no, there will be other models as well, you will see them as time goes on.
The elephants will be overpowered?
-The elephants won't be overpowered. In my mind they weren't overpowered even in Rome I. You just had to follow the instructions give(use javelins, flaming pigs, fire arrows) and they could be dealth with no problems. You just had to have a few crews of archers and skirmishers because you can't kill them with just one crew.
Will there be chriots in the game?
Yes, there will be chariots in the game.
Uh, the last thing I wanted to see today was Unlocalised placement text and the Macedonian peasant
Hope, it's gonna be fixed soon!
Those peasants are just a generic image of a unit that doesn't have a finished UI card, so no it's not a peasant its just a visual replacement for a none UI made unit. And like above, they will all be made in time.
And many of the units don't have the unit descriptions or names yet. As the descriptions are written the the UI's are made they are slowly added into the mod.
Javelins will be useless like in vanilla or you plan to change that?
Javelins are not useless unless you don't know how to use them, anyway all units will be taken care of to ensure a balanced game.
I am very excited to play this mod. It seems like it will feel, look, and play like a cross between many of my favorite mods like Darthmod, Total Realism, and Roma Surrectum 2. How will the AI in battles and on the campaign map act, more like vanilla and less intelligent or very smart and giving the player a good challenge on the battlefield and diplomatically. Can't wait, playing it on the first day its released. Very well done. Peace.
The mod will actually bee a cross between many mods and will have many features from other mods. I actually never played those mods but I saw many things from youtube that I like in them and also other teammates suggested many things from other mods that we will or we have implemented.
Since Rome II is coming soon , my plan was actually to show many perfect things that were in other mods. I was so admired by the work of the modders from our community that I tried to find something from every of them. All the modders who's work have been used are in the credits GENERAL CREDITS(which are as we proceed updated every time).
We plan to add many more features to the mod itself but in time. For now we are preparing to show you all the factions that we have and what units you will have in the game.
From time to time we reveal some features that are implemented already in the mod, but this will be also updated in time.
THE AI :
As far as the AI in battles we couldn't do very much but use the work that was already done by marvelous modders so far. So in the game there DARTH FORMATIONS will be used. They were implemented by our mod teammate Dictator and tested by him and me, so they work perfectly in the game.
As far as the campaign map we also made differences in the AI. We have enabled that all factions can now perform naval invasions. This should mean that you will no more be safe play as isolated such as Kingdom of Brigantia or half isolated fations such as Kingdom of Bosporus. This means that the enemy should actually load thir ships with units and come across the sea to take your homeland.
Also all rebel settlements will now be a little harder to take as they won't contiant 2-3 units that guard them. Since every rebel settlement actually is a faction for itself(if we look in the way that rebels contain many different factions under its name) the units stack will always be half filled or fully filled, so if nothing it will take you more time to take the settlementt.
As far as diplomacy there isn't much to be changed or modded. We will look into this when we get the time.
Will the battles be vannila length(short), XGM/EB length(medium) or RS2 length(very long)?
We won't know until we have set all the unit stats, but we will most likely aim for medium/long
Oh ,man, I was hoping that it won't be like RS2 where it takes you a YEAR to finish a campaign...
By Dictator :
" What you asked was the in-game battle speed, that has nothing to do with the speed of the campaign.
Roma Surrectum 2 has I believe a 4tp/y which drastically expands the length of the campaign. "
Asgaroth :
As already answered the speed of the battle is nothing to do with the campaign length. Logically looking you can auto resolve the battle and you can be faster that way if you want to play it faster. Or simply become strong and meet the victory conditions that are given to you. In that way you can finish even before the time of the mod ends.
The length of the campaign is mark by many factors. First you have the victory conditions where you can choose to play a long or short campaign(the same will be in VVVTW). So for those people who can't wait just simply press the shorts campaign and it will end sooner.
As far as the game itself the time until the end is marked by a term : " turn per year ". In Rome Total War Vanilla you had 2 turns per year if I am not wrong. This means that you have 2 turns , one summer , one winter until the end of one year. And every mod, even the vanilla game starts at some year and end at some year, so what we can do as modders is increase the length of ONE YEAR .
Our mod for example will have 4 turns per year. This is to represented one turn for every part of a year : Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, which you actually can't see in the game(on the map precisely) because the engine is made like that I think, so you only have winter and summer in the game. Which finally means that in our mod you will have two turns of winter and two turns of summer instead of one turn for each part of the year.
There are also mods with 8 turns per year & I know a mod for Medieval Total War 2 which has 12 turns per year. But in my mind 4 turns are enough.
@Asgaroth: good job on the new feature VVVTW team, glad the barbarians will have stronger defenses without huge stonewalls, wooden walls seem more accurate.
The point is that the new walls have platforms that are fully functional so you can put your skirmish units up....
For the stone walls I can only say that none of the barbarians will have huge stone walls, but the first stage of stone walls for some barbarians will be available because historically some barbarians like Gauls, Britons, Illyrians & Dacians did build stone walls, for others there will be a wooden palisade and a wooden wall which is presented today...
As you are not going to alter too much the vanilla buildings, will you modify the stats of buildings to allow for better management of your empire, and stop the late game public order problems?(mods like RTR, RS, have high amounts of public order generated by buildings(and the ability to built several temples per turn) that make the building of an empire easyer, improving the way the game feels and he way empires were created and maintained.
Yes, it will be done in time for sure...We will try to make sure the public order stays at its highest so you can build up nicely your empire....We will try to deal with squalor as well , so far we have added the 4'th and 5'th levels of buildings to barbarian factions so you will have cesspits, and buildings similar to them which will lower the squalor and increase health and population growth...
Generally :
This mod actually takes some parts from various different mods to show off to the public what other people have done for Rome in their mods. Through this mod we actuallly other people's work and we give the proper credits.
Our mod will have elements of RS , EB, RTR, EXGM, HGCS, Variagmod and other mods. As well as many minimods. I always tend to use the work that other people have done if they give us the permission of course, I want to show of to the public how people actually enjoyed Rome Total War game , even though years have passed...
So as far as units, buildings, minimods, etc...you will have much to see from different people...
Will there be unique buildings representative for cityes(excepting the wonders) like the Colloseum for Rome, Parthenon of Athens, harbour of Carthage, which will grant those respective cityes special bonuses?
No, there won't be any. You will have the standard wonders that will give special bonuses to cities/ factions , like in vanilla...
But we do aim to do something else...We aim to give each faction something special....For example Republic of Carthage to have a bonus on sea trade income, barbarian factions to have a small public order bonus due to hapiness on blacksmiths and that their blacksmiths improve weapons better and so on and so forth, but we haven't reached that stage of modding yet.