[NTW] Favourite Miniature Mod

[Ishan]

For the year 2012, there are 5 NTW mods nominated as favourite miniature mod. A category that deals with small mods that either fix or improve certain aspects of the game like stats, recolouring, sound or 2D art like unit cards and such. Vote for the one you like the most:

Manpower Mini Mod 1.0

Description: During the Napoleonic Wars manpower and supply were two of the biggest factors influencing how generals fought their campaigns. Without enough ready men, there was no army. And without enough supplies, whatever army there was would soon melt away. Many people feel that this feature is one of the many that should have been included in vanilla NTW, and this mod aims to do that.

Mod Details

Every faction starts off with a "bank" of supply points. A certain amount of these supply points are used up by the starting armies, and there are some points left over to recruit more troops. Every soldier takes up one supply point, and when you are out of supply points you can no longer recruit any units. But this bank does not simply grow of it's own accord - no interest here! In order to gain more supply points the player will have to conquer more regions. The larger the region, the more supply points. In order to keep the calculations simple, we are using a simple formula for supply points: Total Population divided by 2000 This is approximately 500 soldiers per 1 million people. Now you may say this is a totally unrealistic figure, you may say it's a little off, or you may say it's the best thing since sliced bread. Well it's none of those - it's practical. These are the calculations that lends themselves best to the game. It's necessary to keep a lid on things, seeing as a stack is ~ 4000 men it wouldn't make much sense allowing the player or AI 500,000 men. The first sceenshot shows where the total manpower figures are displayed, Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  And the next ones show you how you can tell the exact value of each region (ignore the "region health" bit, that's an old pic from EIC). Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  You can see that the prestige information has been replaced, but I feel that this feature is much more relevant to the player than prestige. And there is still a whole UI page dedicated to prestige, so it's not too many clicks away for the player to access

Increase artillery damage

Description: A miniature mod that increases\decreases the damage of cannon ball artillery for infantry\cavalry.

Video Presentation

Brewster's CAI!

Description: A custom made Campaign AI made by brewster. Read more details here.

ATC Small Arms Mod

Description: A minimod for small arms and projectiles.

Details

New Physics Effects: NTW has pretty good physics for a RTS warfare game. However, it definitely has some short-comings, some of which totally bewilder me, as they seem intentional. One of these is the fact that all of the small arms fire (i.e., musketballs) fly like laser beams and eventually fade away and disappear from the game world as they zoom off into outer space. This is a bit silly... To fix this problem, in this mod I have enabled the NTW physics system (i.e., gravity) on all small-arms fire, artillery projectiles that had no gravity, shrapnel, many particles and various other types of projectiles and particles. Basically, physics is now enabled on everything that flies in NTW with a few exceptions (I did not fool with arrows, throwing weapons or anything which I wasn't sure what it was -- just a few things). I left these few things alone because I haven't had the time to test them, can't test them or they are "hard-coded" to fly in a specific fashion outside the scope of the physics system. This has a notable effect on gameplay. Musketballs and other projectiles don't fly on and on forever; they drop. This looks far more realistic and makes the volleys of line infantry and peppering, selective fire of light infantry, skirmishers and snipers behave realistically. You will see musketballs and other flying objects travel with life-like, arcing trajectories, hit the ground, skip and ricochet and act like real bullets, shrapnel, etc. Shrapnel, burning debris and embers and several types of effects are much better and more life-like. Cool things begin to happen... for instance, you will sometimes see bullets fall short of their target only to bounce off the dirt and miraculously strike another guy right between the eyes and kill him (and it doesn't happen too much to spoil it or make it cheap and unrealistic). Without this mod, bullets that ricochet just fly off on a deflected vector (direction) and zoom off into space. With the mod, you will see bullets hit the ground, bounce up and fall back to the ground again like real bullets. They sometimes "skip" like rocks on water, and occasionally find targets you never expected them to hit -- especially when fighting is raging in rocky hills or around other structures with lots of surfaces! This gets rid of the "dead-eye" accuracy that infantry units in game have. It adds a new dimension to marksmanship you don't get with the "vanilla" projectiles. The vanilla projectiles fly in perfectly straight lines and the accuracy of gunfire is effected only by the accuracy modifier values for the unit and weapon, which add a slight offset to the linear vector in which the bullet travels. No longer! Like in the real world, an infantryman will often be aiming for a man's chest and hit him in the leg or stomach. It really makes things look and feel much cooler! What makes this part of the mod all the better, I think, is that implementing this feature was so incredibly simple that it literally took me all but a few minutes -- and the mod is very small in size![/SPOILER] New Ammunition: This mod also includes the first of several new types of ammunition I will be implementing: an early form of the infamously deadly miniball, which would later come into widespread use in the Crimean War and American Civil War and change the world forever! After some experimentation and testing, I found some reasonable values (in comparison to other projectiles) for the miniball's stats. Thus far I have been quite pleased with the results. In the hands of one of my new elite light-infantry units, it has proven very deadly and fun! That new unit, btw, will likely be released by tomorrow (8/19/12) night. To use the miniball ammo with your own unit mods/addons, you need only make one very simple edit. In your "unit_stats_land" file, simply change the field for "Projectile ID Ref" to "miniball" and, voila, your men will start using the miniball to slaughter their foes!

WTW: Netherlands mod v.2.0


Description: This mod enables you to play as the United Netherlands, the Dutch monarchy that now have overthrown the French puppet state, the Batavian Republic. It is in your hands to guide this nation to old glories and defend against all of its enemies.

Preview

[General Brewster]

Wauw an other nomination me be honored

[The Vengur]

Voted.

[Ishan]

• Winner: Manpower Mini Mod 1.0
• 1st Runner Up: Brewster's CAI!, WTW: Netherlands mod v.2.0
• 2nd Runner Up: Increase artillery damage