Faerûn[Forgotten Realms]TW - v0.2 released, check the first post

[Mapolq]

By the way, what is the faction limit for this mod (not counting the "dummy" faction you'll have)? I'm guessing 22 (which means no prospect of a Chessenta, Impiltur or Turmish)?

[Titus le Chmakus]

The faction limit is 29 but we decided to keep some for a later release ... And you are exactly right, those 3 are the ones we were questionning ourselves about. But Chessenta isn't a nation anymore as all the cities are regularly at war against each other (Cimbar, Lutcheq, Mordulkin), so we don't know yet ...

[Mapolq]

It's true that Chessenta is not a single polity in this time, but it is a very definite cultural region (a nation in that regard). In this sense, it's not much different from your use of the Captains' Confederation, which also doesn't fit the starting date but is a clever way of setting up a faction.

[Titus le Chmakus]

Yeah, that is a very good point ! It will finish convincing Vlad (the mod leader) to add them into the next release, with Impiltur and Turmish. Any other suggestion of other faction ? Maybe the dwarves of the Great Rift ? Border Kingdoms (I doubt) ?

[Mapolq]

As far as flavour goes, the Dalelands would be my first choice. The main problem, and I assume that's why they weren't included, is that representing them well would make the map over and around Cormanthor quite a mess of little provinces. After that I've seen most of my choices suggested here. I'd go with Thesk second. And if you expand the map further south, Lapaliiya and The Great Rift. If NOT expanding south, then Erlkazar and Sespech.

Is there a hard limit on the number of provinces as well? Some of what I read here seems to hint at that, but I'm not sure if it's a hard limit or not.

[BarnicleBill1]

That Griffin rider... nice.

[Martinskyboy]

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[hekk]

If wishing to add in a drow faction, I can tell you there are number of surface drow outposts around the map you have. There are the Jaelre Drow of Minauthkeep, in the Cormanthor Forest. And there are also numerous Vhaeraun-worshipping drow settlements in the Forest of Mir between Tethyr and Calimshan, such as Dallnothax, Iskasshyol and Holldaybim. There is also the ruins of Sulasspryn in the Moonsea which is occupied by Lolth-worshipping drow who use it as a base to launch slave raids.

Also concerning Dalelands and Chessenta it would probably be best to select a particular city-state (or dale in Dalelands case) out of them, since they are not unified realms. Cimbar for Chessenta would make sense, since they unite Chessenta under Tchazzar 1 year after this start date. Archendale for Dalelands seems reasonable since it boasts the most formidable army out of all the Dales.

If you want to add in an fiend-ish faction, the Daemonfey of Lothen of the Silver Spires seem to have potential (they are basically demon-blooded elves). There is also the Scoured Legion of Hellgate Keep which is made up of various demonic abominations

It would be really cool if an Uthgardt barbarian faction was added, as they are pretty classic to the Realms. The Griffin tribe or the Black Ravens seem like good choices as they are fairly warlike, hostile and ambitious tribes, rather than having another "goody" faction up there to gang up on the lonely Many-Arrows Orcs.

Evereska ought to be considered as well, it would be a more stronger and secure realm than Cormanthyr despite it's recent troubles, since it's existed for thousands of years and has illusionary magic to protect it from invaders.

Also just to give some more non-human faction suggestion, the Lizardfolk of the city of Surkh are a fearly powerful menace in the Deepwash (that area seems a little empty of factions in the campaign map you guys have). Hlondeth also would be very cool to have, it's a quite powerful city-state in the Vilhon Reach that is ruled by the Yuan-ti.

Personally I would advise against expanding the map. Given the hardcoded limits of M2TW of the number of provinces and factions you can add in, it would be better to just refine and polish the area you have already. The map and the units all look wonderful btw, nice work.

[Mapolq]

I don't think planar threats (or those of creatures like dragons and giants, for that matter) fit the Total War game. They will be very hard to make and in the end very much fail to capture the "feel". My opinion is you should really try to focus on humanoid or, at most, montruous humanoid factions. If the map was to be expanded, the yuan-ti could be a great faction (even on the current map they have Hlondeth and Najara, but not quite faction material in my opinion, if you also had the Black/Mhair Jungles and Narubel, though...). And then going south would mean human factions like Chult, Lapaliiya, Durpar, Halruaa, the dwarves of the Great Rift, the Hin (halflings) of Luiren, the mixed human/drow kingdom of Dambrath, possibly something on Shaarreach, Shaarmid, the nomads, wemics, centaurs, loxo...

BUT apart from that being a lot of work, engine limitations won't make it feasible, from what I understand. So I'm suggesting factions that are influential in and near the Heartlands, and those are mostly human. It's less variety, I suppose, but there's a lot of difference between human Realms in Faerûn, and I imagine that's easier to model, too. Maybe you could make a Shining South submod later on.

[Mapolq]

hekk has very good points, but in the end, I don't think you want to make 1-province factions like the Daemonfey, Surkh, Uthgardt would probably have to be. We have discussed the Dalelands and Chessenta issue of not being unified, I proposed them since seeing what you did with the Captains' Confederation, I figured you would like to do larger factions and it would be fine if they weren't actual polities if they had an unifying "feel". And the Dales, though not an unified polity, are an alliance, so that is even better - they are arguably more unified than Chondath is.

As for the Drow... the thing is all those outposts would be 1-province (and in many cases, that's stretching it). But they would be viable, in a sense. As would the yuan-ti, with Hlondeth and Najara.

[Martinskyboy]

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[Mapolq]

If you go a bit counter to the lore for faction balance sake, you could add Surkh to a "reptilian" faction along with Najara and Hlondeth, that'd be pretty viable.

I say counter to the lore because Surkh is isolationist and not allies to the yuan-ti or nagas by any stretch.

[assurbanippal]

welcome on board mapolq, glad to see another FR enthusiast over here

2 more pre ingame previews: simbulmyn (2h knights) nd simbarchs (wizards)

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[hekk]

hekk has very good points, but in the end, I don't think you want to make 1-province factions like the Daemonfey, Surkh, Uthgardt would probably have to be. We have discussed the Dalelands and Chessenta issue of not being unified, I proposed them since seeing what you did with the Captains' Confederation, I figured you would like to do larger factions and it would be fine if they weren't actual polities if they had an unifying "feel". And the Dales, though not an unified polity, are an alliance, so that is even better - they are arguably more unified than Chondath is.

As for the Drow... the thing is all those outposts would be 1-province (and in many cases, that's stretching it). But they would be viable, in a sense. As would the yuan-ti, with Hlondeth and Najara.

I understand that, however I think you'd need to add some 1-province factions, otherwise you'd risk only adding in human factions that are quite similar to each other. Having both Damara and Impiltur as factions for example, seems incredibly redundant in my opinion as both of them are conceptually very similar countries. They both are ruled by paladins of Ilmater (and Ilmater's faith is strong and nearly predominant in both countries), they also have no history of conflict or hostile relations between each other so they would have virtually no reason to fight each other in lore, but due the nature of M2TW they would come to war with each other fairly quick since they would border each other and have little room to expand anywhere else in this campaign map.

You could also potentially remove some provinces somewhere to make room for new ones. That is if you have reached the province limit with this campaign map.

Also you could add in events that could provide some extra units for small factions (i.e. Uthgardt managing to absorb barbarian warriors of other tribes into their tribe, the Drow given reinforcement from the Underdark, etc) to aid in their expansion.

Personally I think to nearly only have human factions would be a mistake, and not in line with the spirit of the setting, as the demihumans (i.e. non-human humanoids) are an important and interesting fabric of FR.

[Martinskyboy]

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[Martinskyboy]

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[Mapolq]

For the record, I'm against the addition of more non-human factions on your main mod. My reasoning is the following: such creatures are often very important in Faerûn, but apart from the dwarves, elves and orcs, and possibly a mashup of Scale Folk or a heavily scripted drow faction, they don't have the ability to raise armies. So they're not going to be very well-modeled by a Total War game.

The human factions have a lot of things that are particular to each one of them, so it wouldn't feel boring at all. On the contrary, I think it's a great way to explore less-known areas of Faerûn.

[Titus le Chmakus]

Yep, you've summed up everything in your last post Mapolq ! All we planned to do is adding all those monsters as rebels ! For example, there will never be any drow faction, but Myth Drannor will be full of drows at gamestart. And powerful ones. We have planned not to balance the game, we have planned to recreate Faerun as it is in 1372. So if factions deserve to die, they will probably do in 90% of the games. And if selected by players, then it will be a tough challenge !
So a lot of monsters or non human will be in, but not playable (Yuan Ti, Drows, Centaures, Minotaures, Khobolds, Hobgoblins, Trolls ... etc)
We'll have Thay with a lot of monsters.

But for non human factions, Elves, Orcs, Dwarves and who else do we need ? Btw, Evereska is the main city of Elves. They also have Tangled Trees.

Each human faction will have its own units, own buildings and religions, so they are far from being redundant. At least less than France and England in vanilla !

For the map, we have suppressed the Southern part because it was pretty much useless. We wanted to focus on the main centre of interest of Faerun. And again, creating a 1 region faction is a lot of work for just a little game benefit. So it is not worth doing it.

Underdark is not feasable, we already thought about it.

197 is the maximum hardcoded number of settlements.

Maybe we could add 1 Uthgard unit to the Dwarves ?

We planned a special script for Elves for the High Forest in late game. It will not be accessible to other factions. So there will perhaps be some Demons as rebels too ...

[Martinskyboy]

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[Titus le Chmakus]

No it was not a mistake, it was a long debate between Vlad and I on its use in the mod. It was too many settlements for a little benefit, where these settlements could be of better use somewhere else. Sometimes it is better having a smaller map with tactical interest than a huge empty map ...
And as the map has a max size, Evermeet was too much West to be useful because it would mean a lot of sea South of it ...