The Medieval World (TMW): Reimagined

[knin]

Hi everyone,

As some of you may know, I was active on this forum about 2 years ago working on a project called "The Medieval World: A Kingdoms Mod." (You can find the old thread here.) Like many modding projects, it started off promisingly: I was eager to dive into the world of modding and early progress was made at blazing speed. As the project got bigger and bigger and more pieces and more people were involved, work inevitably began to slow down and I, unfortunately, lost the zeal that had spurred the project on so quickly to begin with. I disappeared for a while, tried to come back but by that time had already transitioned into the life of college student in which free time is a precious and rare commodity. The projected was suspended, and without leadership withered away. A few months ago, I lost my hard drive (and my Windows partition), meaning that all the old work that I had was lost. A development version is probably floating around somewhere, but I have little desire to return to that incarnation of the project at this time.

I do, however, have an interest in returning to modding. My resources are rather thin at the moment (I'm borrowing another computer as my re-partitioned Mac no longer allows me to run M2TW) and will become even thinner in a few weeks when I return to school. I'd like to try and reincarnate my project, albeit with some adjustments to reflect my own changing interests, as well as a much more open-ended time frame which I feel is more realistic for me. At the same time, I want to have a structure in place of 'checkpoints', or places in development where enough new features have come together to warrant a possible release, instead of always wanting to put out updates every few days or weeks.

So, what is the vision for this TMW: Reimagined? Well, here's a look at what I think are some of my biggest changes of plan:

1) Vanilla-based campaign map - though I was proud of the original map I created for TMW, it took weeks upon weeks of work to create, and I was constantly tweaking and reworking it. It provided great realism, but it also stretched the focus areas in ways I didn't necessarily like. I am a mapper first and foremost, but with the limited time I have before my access to full gameplay testing is all but over, I didn't want to throw myself into the creation of a brand new map again. So, instead, I've cut the vanilla M2TW to the width of the old RTW, basically eliminating the Americas and the southern part of North Africa. I'm about halfway through filling in the regions, and I have to say, it's packed. Fighting your way through this map will be no cake walk.

2) slight date adjustment from 1080/1081 to 1115- this was partly for me to ensure that I would do my own research again and delve back into this era of history I enjoy so much, but also because even this small 35 year jump is enough to be able to find more information and be able to say more definitely if such and such a place or such and such a person existed. This also means...

3) new faction list - this is one of those pieces I'm definitely calling 'indefinite', but eventually I would like to include a full slate of 31 factions in the mod. The 35-year jump means that some from the old list are out and some new players will enter, but I'd also like input from the community of course.

4) toned-down 'local flavor' - this is an 'at least at first' caveat. Another problem with the original TMW is that I got bogged down in research and detail which I then forced upon the player, which I imagine may have made some things difficult. So, at least at first, the local names and the languages and the diacritics (oh, the diacritics) will be kept to descriptions and such only, so as not to affect the flow of gameplay where possible.

I don't have any screenshots to post quite yet but they are not far away, for now I simply wanted to reintroduce myself and my project and highlight some parts of it. Hopefully I will see some familiar names around as I ease my way back into the forums.

[againster]

Good luck

[knin]

As promised, some screenies. All images show this project in super alpha stage and do not necessarily reflect final, well, anything.



Though there are many many new provinces in the game, England receives only one, Gloucester, representing the Norman-Welsh border marches.



A peek at Hungary. If you look to the radar map, you can see the province shapes much more accurately reflect the borders of the medieval Hungarian kingdom, as well as acknowledging their control of Slavonia and Croatia after 1102.



Here's where things start to get crowded. The south is firmly in control of the Norman Hauteville dynasty of Sicily, but the north is a hodgepodge of rebels and factions and cities, with Venice, Pisa (which is placeheld by Milan in this picture), the HRE (not pictured), the Papal States, and (eventually) Florence vying for dominance. Tight quarters make for tough conquering!



And finally, the most densely packed area (I hope rightfully so) of the map includes northern France, the Low Countries, and northwestern Germany. Not sure how I'm going to address factions in this area quite yet. And you can probably see in the radar map that the South won't be any easier to conquer.

Also not pictured, I've decided to incorporate permanent fog to cover areas that aren't of focus in the game, which would be anything north of the Volga, south of the Tigris-Euphrates, and south of the North African coastline.

So, with the bulk of my basic mapping more or less complete, the next series of goals for me includes:

1) Adjusting and balancing (within reason) the starting points of each faction, or at the very least going back and taking out all those damn roads (that was for me to check pathways).

2) Basic adjustment of 'rebel factions' to reflect more than just the vanilla 'German rebels', 'Russian rebels', etc.

3) Porting (in a minimalistic fashion) factions that I wish to include from Kingdoms regional campaigns into the mod, namely Norway and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Still haven't decided definitely about Lithuania.

4) Replacing (again, in a minimalistic fashion at first) Portugal with Aragon-Navarre, Milan with Pisa, and Novgorod with Kievan Rus'. The essence of these changes will be name-only, as I won't have the time or the skills to do full reskins and don't want to delve into big unit overhauls by bringing in units from other sources - yet.

5) Streamlining a basic system of recruitment that eliminates the town/castle tree distinctions and will provide a new and interesting (but still relatively simple) method of recruitment for the player.

Once I feel satisfied with at least a majority of those things, then I will turn my attention to bigger projects such as new factions from scratch, bringing in new units, adding depth and flavor, etc. In this case, rather than building from the ground up, I have a (well, relatively) solid foundation of the vanilla game that I just want to tweak and accentuate for a more enjoyable playing experience.

Thoughts? Questions? Comments? Leave 'em below! And thanks for checking out the page!

[royal flush]

It looks good.
But area between France & Germany is tight.
However, it is your idea good luck.

[Insomaniac]

Nice keep up the good work. Cool to see that you want to do all your own research for this as well

[knin]

Thanks guys, I appreciate the support.

One new screenie of the progress I have made this weekend and tonight, there are two things of note to see:



First, I managed to port Norway over from the Teutonic campaign without too much difficulty, though I still have the tedious task of going through the pesky battlemodels.modeldb file to assign textures to Norwegian units. Thanks always to Gigantus for making a tutorial that is so easy to follow and virtually idiot-proof.

(yet somehow still I managed to test that )


Second, because I did not have a lot of computer access this weekend and actually had to end up uninstalling and reinstalling M2TW and Kingdoms AGAIN, most of the 'modding' work I got done was just a bit of text editing, and so I made a pretty good dent into Rebel Faction names, one of which you can see on the tooltip in the screenshot. Other than that I spent a bunch of time researching, writing down family trees, generals, etc., only to realize I forgot to copy over one of the names files for myself so that I could actually put some of these guys in the files. Oops.

Hopefully I will equally as easily be able to transfer over the KoJ from Crusades tomorrow night. Screenies to follow upon completion.

[knin]

More progress made. I think I'm becoming nocturnal again...



Here you can see a good chunk of what I imagine will be the biggest family tree in the game (though Sicily will have as many generations). One line of the family only has one surviving member, and I may "kill" him off and make him a rebel instead. Apparently he and Vladimir Monomakh didn't get along so well anyway. When I was working on the original TMW, I figured out a way to make each character take his father's name (ex. Yaropolk Iziaslavich), which is hard to do because the engine thinks you're supposed to keep the last name of your father, which would obviously be different in most cases. I can't get it work yet, but I may keep trying.



And as promised from yesterday, the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Silly me didn't realize most of their units are Crusades-specific, which means more work for me as I have to add them back to the mod. Joy. At least this is the most faction creation I should be doing for a while.

Speaking of factions, I'm having a conundrum. Christian Spain is a mess in 1115. León and Castille are united (sorta) under Castillan queen Urraca and her underage son (who I will probably just age up for the sake of sanity), and she has just nullified her marriage to Alfonso I of Aragon. And going back to the middle of the 11th cent., brothers and their descendants have fought over who controls what piece of the pie. It's only about 20 years until Aragon will move closer to Catalonia through marriage, so I'm wondering if instead of having L-C and A-N, I should do a variation on L-C with Navarre and then a Catalonia faction that also controls Aragon? Basically, I have two factions and 5 potential kingdoms to work with, later should I so choose I can do more than 2. So what combinations make sense? As I said, conundrums.

[Vipman]

Hi Knin, really good to see you back!

I don't know if you remember me, I offered to be a beta tester for your mod TMW back then. I still have a version of your mod, I think the 2nd and last version you gave me. I will upload it tomorrow and give you the download link.

Well now I'm part of Tsardoms Total War team and doing whatever modding I can there so I can't help you much with your project, but I wish you good luck

Also, I'd like to ask you something, if you don't want to continue with your old mod, would you be kind enough to consider releasing it as a free to use resource for the community? Well the work you did and the stuff you will get permission for, f.e. the BC units would need permission I think. It would be good to know your work wasn't all for nothing and if others want they could use your map for their mod maybe, or anything else they can use.

[knin]

Hi vipman, thanks for the welcome!

I'm happy to release the old stuff, I just don't have it anymore unfortunately. But yes, I would only be able to release the things that I did, not the permissions or even the parts of the mod that I myself didn't do - for those you'd have to go back and ask other members of the team. But the map itself is mostly my work, so that could probably be released without issues.

But anyways, I'm back at school now so mod work goes to the back-burner for a while.