[WIP] Rise of the Eagles Alpha 2.0 (Custom Battles release) UPDATED 27-02-2017

[alexandersymoiw]

I haved try but can't becuase I will wait next version

[MilesNDavis]

This is a cool mod! Thanks for sharing!

[KmanBEAST]

Loving the released versions you have so far! I have noticed some obvious bugs and crashes but other than that it runs really smooth. If you want me to report any specific thing I can, but I don't really have time to play as much as I used to. I love this time period, so that's a reason I still play it whenever I can. Thanks for all your hard work so far, we all look forward to what you will continue to add to this in terms of battle and campaign.

[Sirlion]

By all means feel free to report any bugs. I did not experience any crashes with the current released version so if you can share your specs and conditions for the crash I might work something out. Currently you should exclude the heads stretching as I've already addressed the problem but any other bug reports are welcome.

[KmanBEAST]

It's crashed for most maps that I've tried to use with exceptions for certain ones like Grassy Plains and Edwelis or (Edwelsis or whatever). For example I tried like Saharan Sands and such and it didn't really crash but the battle map just appeared as a huge ocean and all my troops died instantly.

Another bug I noticed is that the general unit models on horses don't SIT on the horse...they just kinda stand on top of the horse model LOL! It's fine with me for now because it looks hilarious, but yeah that's another bug in the mod.

But other than that...I can't really say much about anything else other than one more thing.

Note: This is NOT really a bug unless it wasn't intended, but I still want to express my opinion anyway. I still love the mod very much and it's one of my favorite ones so far even though it's still not even officially FINISHED yet lol.

I don't know if you did it on purpose because of how in that time period the type of warfare was meant to inflict fear rather than cause huge casualties, but rifles don't really do much DAMAGE in this mod. Now don't get me wrong, I know the rifles back then were innacurate and as stated before, it was all about staying in formation and not breaking rank. The warfare was based on who's army could last the longest in a fight like that. However what I have come to find in the mod is that cavalry REALLY dominates on the battlefield. In a US Civil War mod I played for this game, they managed to really fix cavalry being overpowered due to the fact that line infantry did crazy damage if they managed to get volleys off into cavalry that were charging head on. They also added deployable stakes to their light infantry/skirmisher units and also gave them farther range. I really liked this because it reminded me of Empire and Napoleon's style of approaching unit diversity, which I really liked even if the engine sucked for melee. Line infantry were good in melee and were supposed to be the main force of your army. Skirmishers/light infantry aren't supposed to be good in melee at all and are exposed to cavalry charges more. However, they are perfect for skirmishing from a distance to wear down the normal line infantry. Cavalry should be used for charging the flanks, because charing head on into line infantry or stakes that the light infantry has deployed is pretty difficult except if you can find a weak point to charge in. Artillery should be powerful (and it is in your mod, nice job on that). I believe deployable stakes for artillery might be a good idea, but some might believe that giving that ability to just light infantry/skirmishers is enough for now. So far, your mod has done a good job of making artillery and cavalry pretty powerful. For some reason however, the line infantry and light infantry/skirmishers just don't do enough damage with their rifles. I don't know if it's the accuracy or what, but most of the time my units or enemy units rout before even taking more than half damage (and this is with generals being around healthy and alive too).

Anyway, those are just my two cents so far on the mod. As I said before, I still love to play this mod and I do support it. If you truly love something, you must be able to criticize it as well. So that's why I wanted to just give a few opinions as to how the mod plays out while also listing a few of the bugs I noticed. Sorry if this was the wrong thing to post it in.

[Sirlion]

Since I dont have a hosted section yet, that's fine if you post your concerns here. I have made several mods for Napoleon based off my own research and many books I've read and parades \ reenactments that I've attended to, I think I know quite well the Napoleonic battle mechanics now to be confident in what I make. You are correct, the units are not supposed to inflict major damage and I am very satisfied by the fact that they rout with most of their numbers intact, compared to vanilla where you could have 1 man running around the map. They used "muskets", the barrel wasnt rifled at the time and even the few units that did use rifled muskets, still had to consider a great amount of smoke that would prevent them to see the enemy after a few volleys, the panic of seeing the enemy fire at very close distances, and cavalry charging in. I have taken all of that into account when trying to adjust the "damage", which really just comes down to "not aiming at the enemy". Soldiers were not taught to aim at specific targets but instead they did in the general direction where the enemy stood, some didnt want to kill, others were simply trying to remain sane by loading their firearm constantly etc. In most cases it wasnt about killing the enemy but merely just staying alive.

In the Civil War, which you take as an example, things were radically different: the Franco Austrian war of 1859 had already shown that NOT aiming was out of the question and the muskets of the time were too accurate to remain in the standard packed formations of the 1700s. They used trenches, cavalry raids rather than full scale charges, they used the Minié ball which was not round compared to the Napoleonic lead ball (which would bounce inside the barrel once it was fired, so the trajectory was already not the one intended as soon as it left the musket itself), also in the US Civil War artillery was already more powerful than cavalry, while in the Napoleonic Wars it makes perfect sense that it's very powerful. Of course as you say, it must be toned down a bit, but I dont want to have them too weak. They already have low morale and less troops compared to the line infantry, which is in the "spearmen" category, therefore they need to have some advantage.

The general sitting on the horse is indeed hilarious. I'll have to figure out what to do with him because I dont have an answer to that so far other than "assume it's a very courageous guy". As for the maps not working, I'm afraid that's not my fault because I have not modified the main maps in any way. I'll investigate.

[KmanBEAST]

What you said makes sense, so I can agree with that. Now that I think about it, it does make sense. Cavalry was still pretty powerful in that time period as well. And making the muskets innacurate and just deal more morale damage stresses the importance of having more professional line infantry units with better morale so that they can hold the line longer.

So as I said, the things I pointed out were just criticisms that could be changed with you explaining the choices behind it, and it does make sense now. Thanks for the reply and good luck with the rest of this mod!

[Sirlion]

It is also important to consider fatigue resistance, not only morale. Thankfully MTW2 has a slightly deeper battle system set in place which allows for a more in-depth customization of single units, alongside with the heavy scripting. Of course at the scale of Napoleonic battles we are not talking about "professional" troops, so much as "motivated" troops. since they were recruited on a national scale for the first time. Anyone could hold a musket and fire, being a musketeer was easier than ever before; therefore, training was, at least in the later stages of the war, performed on the go, while the battalions were marching from fort to fort. Sometimes troops received no more than some weeks of basic preparations, there are even instances where very young war orphans between age 15 to 18 were employed: that is why a strong national pride and a very high sense of justice \ morale was crucial. In Spain, French troops suffered the greatest privations and the most brutal weather conditions, guerrilla assaults, and on top of that they had to deal with the combined forces of British and Portuguese troops, and yet they still held on for 8 years, and even in Paris when any sensible man would have stopped, they still kept fighting, inflicting losses upon losses to a combined force with such numbers that normally should have disposed of them fairly easily. That is no small feat; to accomplish more-than-human enterprises of such a large and terrible scale one has to be really inspired and have a will of steel. That is what I'm striving to represent.

[Sirlion]

Rise of the Eagles' Alpha gets a final update. This time I'm releasing a patch rather than the full mod so that people who have already downloaded the base game wont have to spend much time doing it again when files have not been replaced entirely.

New in this patch:

- All models' bones have been fixed. No more stretching heads and\or arms
- Better textures, some fixes to normal maps
- Added Austrian Jager unit to the Austrian roster
- Completely remade all plumes, which looked very low poly and unrealistic before
- Fixed issues with Lifeguard Dragoons and Artillerymen when belts wouldnt appear in game
- Many changes to the viewing distance of the most hi-poly models to enhance performance and prevent crashes

Download the patch HERE

[soso]

Thanks ! Great job, I really like the french Army but (ç_ç) :
The light dragoon have no musket, Chasseur a cheval de la Garde have no Musket


If you want :
Tirailleurs of Silesia (Prussia)


and, a website on Napoleonic uniform (in french) :
https://www.1789-1815.com/uniformes.htm

[Sirlion]

I'm trying to balance the units out a bit. Having them all cavalry with firearms doesnt seem the best idea, and besides their accuracy was very poor (more so than the line infantry) shooting on horseback is more of a Hollywood move thing than real life in this era. That uniform seems from around 1812-15 which is not the date the mod starts in, I'm trying to maintain the uniform variety in their peak (1807-1810)

[kennyoldchan]

Hey pal, I really appreciate your work
I have some humble suggestions for you:

As I am an amateur battle editor, I realise that units can just walk through buildings in my homemade battles, so if you will want to have historic scenarios we gotta work on those mechanics.

Also, I was playing with the 1648 mod lately, and I found the bayonet charge animations are very strange in M2TW. Soldiers tend to stop and raise their weapons over their heads before charging as long as their primary roles are missles, good luck for that one.

Looking forward to have this mod in large scale platforms maybe even have youtube videos about it.

[KmanBEAST]

So do you have plans for getting a working campaign for this mod? Honestly, me and many others aren't worrying about you getting unit rosters for every single faction that you have in this mod so far like the Ottomans, Morocco, Naples, etc. I wish you luck if you are still working on this, and happily await the release of a campaign.

[Sirlion]

I shall answer one point at a time.

Animations - sadly the tools to convert them to MTW2 format arent working for my system and I have no idea why, no matter the Python version I install. If somebody would be so kind to convert them for me I'd change quite a few, especially the musket loading animation. If this does not happen you'll be stuck with the standard pike animations for bayonets.
Units walking through buildings - a common "issue" if you will, this may be fixed with proper collisions, however historical scenarios involving so many units at once are by their own definition not realistic. It is not possible to replicate the huge scale of those conflits right now on any engine, therefore an approximation must be taken into consideration. Allowing for multiple units to overlap in a single location is not nice to look at close range but it is sometimes necessary for strategic purposes.
Campaign - I originally had plans to release the barebones version by May at most, however your suggestions in the NTW thread about regions and settlements made me realise the map must be redrawn in certain areas. I'm working on that at the moment.

Overall you should not expect a new release until late October. I'm trying to impose myself some deadlines to improve workflow and add some needed pressure to the work. The next iteration will include five new factions: Kingdom of Italy, Kingdom of Naples, Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Russia, and the basic campaign with proper regions.

[Crociato78]

I see you're working fine!


I wish you a good job!


Can not wait to try the version with the campaign in October!

[KmanBEAST]

I'm happy to see you are still invested in the project and that you are putting lots of hard work and effort into it, I still play your mod for the custom battles and it still brings me back for more because of how well you've implemented this into the engine for Medieval 2.

Can't wait to see your future releases, no matter how long it takes.

[byacornise]

Good afternoon Sirlion weeks ago a user named bashez and I tried hamachi your great mod and we played a customized battle and after playing a battle these were the results of our analysis:

The firing rate is very imprecise, when compared to the total napoleon war, the total war napoleon has a better firing rate since the soldiers point to it but the soldiers of the mod have a terrible aim, they die two in every 10 rounds Of shot by the soldiers with remote weapon.
2- Soldiers have unlimited ammunition this does something monotonous and in the end it does not become a somewhat realistic challenge as soldiers have unlimited ammunition
3- The units of infantry do not have formation in picture
4- Bashez told me that the game has some bugs when ordering the child to attack another unit.
5 - I had already mentioned that they have a bad aim but now is the distance in which they shoot, bashez moved a unit of yours to a unit mine to shoot at a distance of approximately 2 meters, and barely caused a decrease in the first shot after delay Much to cause another drop to my unit taking into account that it was just two meters away from your unit and mine.
We have taken into account that it is the alpha version so I must say that the units are beautiful looks great and the audio effect gives it a lot of realism, also the cavalry units are very cool and the artillery is amazing has more aim and scope Than the medieval 2 total war.
Great Sirlion we are anxious for you to finish this great mod for medieval 2 since we organize medieval campaigns and to see this unique and beautiful mod that you are doing we are looking forward to this complete to organize a multiplayer campaign in your honor.
Atte: Byacornise

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Posts merged and spoilers added for easier viewing. ~ Frunk

[Sirlion]

Well first of all thanks for the report, I'll need every bit that you can squeeze out of your multiplayer games during testing for the next updates.
Now, some clarifications.

1 - The low accuracy is intentional and the fact that's way less than NTW's standard is also good. I dont want to recreate NTW, I want to get as close as possible to what a prolonged fight could have been, especially taking into consideration soldiers tiring. This isnt to say the accuracy wont be tweaked, I need to gather more info about MTW2's projectiles stats and how they work.
2 - Soldiers dont have infinite ammunition. If you look at the EDU, you can see how many cartridges they have. They have 30 shots, pretty much the standard for the time (but I may change it on a national basis with more info). The dragoons have 5 shots.
3 - By "formation in picture" I assume square formation. That cannot be added, you'll have to do it by hand, OR try schiltrom which I'll have to implement and test extensively.
4 - Describe "bugs". You're telling me nothing with this. I need info.
5 - This is a problem that's part of point 1. I'll have to do extensive testing for that.

[Crociato78]

I've seen the campaign map POTOP mod. It would be great even for your mod!

[Sirlion]

Thank you but for the moment I want this to be truly my own project. I'm trying to use as less external resources as possible. I've put everything I've ever learned into this work and I'm fully committed to see it through the end perfecting it as much as MTW2 will allow. The campaign map will receive improvements based off of your feedback, and I'm sure some regions wont be 100% correct in the initial release, but that is also why I want to learn to make it, correct it, and finish it step by step with my own hands.