Let's all vent about EBII!

[Neuchatel]

Are the new units WIP ? They look far less polished and detailed that previous EB units.

[Neuchatel]

Where is Gustave ? No new units from him since November.
Are the new units going to be improved ? The lack of detail on tunics, helmets, hair is disappointing.

[gustave]

Where is Gustave ? No new units from him since November.
Are the new units going to be improved ? The lack of detail on tunics, helmets, hair is disappointing.

I left the team due to *disagreements* with the current leader.

[alex33]

I left the team due to *disagreements* with the current leader.
Note that some of the latest units, while marked as "textured by marble emperor" are actually mostly composed of textures I made. Cheap assembly with quick-and-dirty normal map on top of it. But giving credit was probably too hard.

is there no way you guys can sort out your problems? It‘s not like this mod has an abundance of manpower and i thought your stuff was always the best especially the awesome shields

[athanaric]

is there no way you guys can sort out your problems? It‘s not like this mod has an abundance of manpower and i thought your stuff was always the best especially the awesome shields

I second that motion. Much as I like drama and all that, this mod's too important. Let's have a "trial", if necessary.

[Tactics Mayers]

I left the team due to *disagreements* with the current leader.
Note that some of the latest units, while marked as "textured by marble emperor" are actually mostly composed of textures I made. Cheap assembly with quick-and-dirty normal map on top of it. But giving credit was probably too hard.

That's a shame. Especially when it's due to hardworking people like you that EB2 isn't reduced to vaporware.

[Rail93]

I left the team due to *disagreements* with the current leader.

Noooooo. Why? Why? I hope you can work it our...

Btw I thought there is no mod leader in Eb but "council".

[gustave]

Noooooo. Why? Why? I hope you can work it our...

Btw I thought there is no mod leader in Eb but "council".

Over time, thanks to his work QS has become the de facto leader. He’s a productive member, the problem is that he’s very bad at team working and treats other people’s work with little respect.

He has also shaped the mod to fit his personal vision, which is more of an AAR and roleplay support than the continuity of EB1. For people like me who worked 7+ years on it, that’s hard to accept.

[Roma_Victrix]

Over time, thanks to his work QS has become the de facto leader. He’s a productive member, the problem is that he’s very bad at team working and treats other people’s work with little respect.

He has also shaped the mod to fit his personal vision, which is more of an AAR and roleplay support than the continuity of EB1. For people like me who worked 7+ years on it, that’s hard to accept.

There's role-playing now in 2.3? Did I miss something huge here? Are we just talking about the areas you have to conquer as certain factions and certain factions you have to kill off or something? I'm very confused by your statement.

[Neuchatel]

Over time, thanks to his work QS has become the de facto leader. He’s a productive member, the problem is that he’s very bad at team working and treats other people’s work with little respect.

He has also shaped the mod to fit his personal vision, which is more of an AAR and roleplay support than the continuity of EB1. For people like me who worked 7+ years on it, that’s hard to accept.

Do you plan to do your own mini-mod with your units ? It would be great for us fans who love your units.

[Rad]

I left the team due to *disagreements* with the current leader.

[Neuchatel]

I left the team due to *disagreements* with the current leader.

Can we have more details about this topic ?
It's a shame for the mod.

[alex33]

I‘m really distraught by this, to be frank. I looked back through the twitter feed and the number of times gustave gets credited there is overwhelming. From awesome stuff like the reworked Sacred Band to shield and building textures losing such awesome tallent would be terrible. Pls for the love of the Muses work out some compromise or something pls don‘t let drama kill of much needed artists

[HarkonRules]

Indeed, gustave made some pretty awesome units.

[jim600]

We wan`t Gustave back.
We wan`t Gustave back!

Please bury your greivances -

Post here if you agree.

[Marvzilla]

Yeah I second that notion, if not only to show that his work is awesome, not knowing any of the behind the scenes stuff.

[k123cp]

Been looking back at the Twitter updates lately and the units gustave made textures for are phenomenal. Talents and manpower shouldn't be wasted, especially with a niche mod like EB, so I hope you guys can find some compromise

[Hellenikon]

A pity, but it's something that happens often with voluntary projects.

@Gustave, I wish you the best, and thank you for all the time and work you put into the mod.

[MagusCaligula]

Well that's sad, in my opinion modellers and texturers are the most important ones in modding because it's something that requires talent, I mean everyone can learn coding but art requires talent. Often mods die because modellers and texturers leave. I've made a really big total conversion mod for Mount & Blade Warband and it would be impossible without all the insane work of modellers and texturers.

[QuintusSertorius]

Since you're determined to make us look like a bunch of amateurish teenagers by airing your grievances in public, the least I can do is counter the half-truths and distortions.

Over time, thanks to his work QS has become thede facto[/FONT]leader. He’s a productive member,

Necessary tasks keep popping up without an owner, and I keep making the mistake of volunteering to take them on in order to keep the mod going. That's how I ended up with recruitment in the first place, then with starting positions, then with scripting, with random mapping updates, with unit integration, and now I've ended up community manager even though I don't want the job. Plus all the random bug-fixing of anything that's broken, answering many of the questions, and handling much of the team's contact with this and other fora. Who's the poor sap who ended up maintaining parallel builds of the game for almost a year, and seems to have ended up the person who has to compile the zip for 2.3a?

the problem is that he’s very bad at team working and treats other people’s work with little respect.

So atrocious at team-working that at least half the current team were recruited by me (I've never seen anyone else make much effort to go and find new team members), and the team has managed a huge amount of improvement to the mod in a wide range of fields during the time I've been there. Never mind managing the whole process of testing with this community that took place after 2.2b that ironed out the vast majority of the bugs and trialled lots of new features.

Treating someone else's work without respect would be choosing not to integrate what someone has done, or taking it away from the mod for use somewhere else, or claiming credit for things I didn't do. I didn't do any of those things, I re-used some elements in a limited way to plug a gap no one was working on, to improve the overall appearance of completeness.

We're talking about the officers here, where only a handful of factions even had proper captain models (but the Romans had a full suite of course...). Hellenistic factions, only a third of those in the game, had nothing but an EB1 model that wasn't even made for this engine, and was re-used as a standard bearer. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as the old saying goes, but according to you, finding the best-looking units to fulfil that role for the time being is insulting.

He has also shaped the mod to fit his personal vision, which is more of an AAR and roleplay support than the continuity of EB1. For people like me who worked 7+ years on it, that’s hard to accept.

And here we get to the real nub of things. You think EB1 was a great game worthy of continuing, I guess your "vision" is that EBII is just EB1 ported to the M2TW engine. Whereas for me it's a cautionary tale of all the things not to do, lessons to be learned and improved upon. I can't imagine anything less inspiring than just trying to re-create EB1. Even if we overlook the historical issues arising from units concepted in private conversations with no oversight or scrutiny, the gameplay was terrible. The AI is awful, on the campaign side everyone who shares a border with you hates you, and will invade with stupid little 2-3 unit stacks forever, unless it's the gray/yellow death, in which case get ready to fight 2-3 elite-packed full-stack battles, every single turn. Forever. Or until you blitz them. That turned the core element of the gameplay - fighting battles - into a tedious chore.

As for "shaping" the mod to fit my personal vision, I engaged with the historians and worked through the details of their intentions. That's how a collaborative project works, we exchange ideas, talk through the possibilities and arrive at practical solutions to implement them. A huge amount of what I've done is implementing the things that were either already concepted in the Factions subforum (but never implemented, or only partially done), or talked with them about whatever new features they wanted.

Which features have I implemented that weren't the desired intentions of the historians (subject to the constraints of the engine)?

About this, 2 things :
- Overall the mod is very easy, especially in battles because for some reasons the unit moral is very low. Which means that unless you set home rules you will face little challenge. To me, the difficulty must come from the game and should not be self-imposed by the player.

Not "for some reasons", based on an extensive testing process to find a new balance that enables the battle space to have some depth to it. Where every battle isn't decided solely by attrition, because by the time units rout, they're too battered to ever rally. That's how things were before, now you actually have to pay attention to "beaten" units who can return, especially cavalry.

Trying to chase an appropriate difficulty for players who will use any and every exploit available to them is a fool's errand. Replicating the stupidity of EB1, where the player is worn down by all-out war against anyone they're near is hardly a solution. Do you have any appreciation of how complex the task of setting an appropriate difficulty is? The hardcoded levels for battle/campaign are mostly useless beyond a few automatic impacts, and you can only have one AI, effectively. So we fiddle with lots of ancillary elements in the hope that the whole they create achieves the desired result. Then adjust it again and again.

Try playing a faction that doesn't have some of the best units if you want to see more challenge.

- There is a lot of tedious micromanagement on the campaign map, especially with factions like Rome and Carthage where you have to constantly move your generals all over the place. Have you already tried to play as the romans past 150 turns ? The whole cursus honorum becomes a chore when you have to micromanage dozens of generals.
Thats why I call it a roleplay / AAR support, people who like to roleplay their games probably enjoy it, but it doesn't fit my vision of EB, I think it has lost a lot of the simplicity of EB1.

This really does encapsulate how irrational your animus towards me is. You talk about tedious micromanagement, citing two factions and their mechanics with regards to which I wasn't involved. Both use trait-based systems for which I did very little in either concept or implementation. The cursus honorum was there before I joined the team, I have literally done nothing whatsoever with it. But evidently that's all my fault.

EB1's "simplicity" was a lack of much by way of features because the RTW engine wasn't designed with a great deal of customisation in mind. There were few meaningful differences between the Hellenistic factions, pick your colour and starting point, but otherwise they're much the same. That isn't the case in EBII nowadays, and that's clear from the very beginning with many factions. You don't play Makedonia just because you want black banners and UI elements and to start in northern Greece.

What you call simplicity is having a blank page with nothing filled out. Instead we have some outlines and channels; good gameplay is based on constraints, not total freedom. Freeform alt-history doesn't make for an engaging game, and makes all the investment in the history largely redundant if all of it is meaningless within 100 turns of play. I won't apologise for implementing features that have made factions distinct, and made the way they play different.

It's really a team effort, you need people with all kind of skills and not only artists for a mod this big (although we all know that shiny graphics create hype ). For my part I've really enjoyed working with the modelers and historians of EB2. Awesome people.
But when someone intervenes in pretty much every department, ignores the work processes that were in place, bypasses the historians validation, sometimes mixes up the work of several artists to create his own fantasy units, that's a problem.

You talk about EB1 being your standard, then criticise me for "fantasy units"? The game with two-handed bronze swords and mauls in Britain, Iberian cataphract cavalry and veils of mail and many other fictions. Simply because a unit has an officer (one model!) who might have come from a different unit? The same officers who were visually approved by the historians concerned, because they fit the brief in terms of equipment and status.

Which fantasy units are these? The three skirmisher cavalry units that were approved by the respective historians as good enough for now? Did the units they came from suddenly become ahistorical because we put them on a pony? Where did I bypass historian validation?

I intervene in many departments, because that's my job. See above with all the things I inherited when no one else stepped up. Would you prefer things just didn't get done? Maybe if you'd volunteered for more things outside your preferred silo, I might not be involved in so many elements.

I don't, sorry, I'm done modding medieval2, however when I have more free time I may release some of my shields for rome 2 mods. Not that they are really needed (rome 2 modders created some awesome textures) but at least I would get the feeling that my work is not wasted.

How is your work "wasted" when people see more of it than they would otherwise, at least temporarily?

Well that's sad, in my opinion modellers and texturers are the most important ones in modding because it's something that requires talent, I mean everyone can learn coding but art requires talent. Often mods die because modellers and texturers leave. I've made a really big total conversion mod for Mount & Blade Warband and it would be impossible without all the insane work of modellers and texturers.

It's exactly this attitude, that the visuals are the most important thing, that is the reason why there are so many AAA flops. Where good writing, engaging gameplay and well-written/stable code take a back seat to "pretty".

Coding requires talent too, even if a lot of that is rigour, attention to detail and sheer persistence.