Re: Custom Army Design System (Very Rough Draft)
 

Work on this is on hiatus until I finish my megamod *and* my black tome mod for the new patch version; I'm doing preliminary work now.

This system is intended to provide scrupulously internally-balanced units. The units in the vanilla game, and the units in the megamod, are not-so-scrupulously-internally-balanced (i.e. some of each nations units are better than others.)

Re: Custom Army Design System (Very Rough Draft)
 

boo....

but seriously, you can only do so much http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
and all your projects sound cool.
have fun with whatever you do in whatever order, and thanks.

Re: Custom Army Design System (Very Rough Draft)
 

I am SO looking forward to this.

Re: Custom Army Design System (Very Rough Draft)
 

Personally, I think this project's is doomed to fail. Perfect] isn't a good target. Reasonably good balance would be MUCH easier to do, and would probably get used more. The fort lists, as an example, are great.

Some reorganizing would help a lot. HTML form would be good, and some kind of hyperlinks are compulsory IMHO. Example:
1) troops
1.1) races; if human, go to 1.2
1.2) technology: melee weapons
1.3) technology: missile weapons & mounts
1.4) technology: armor
1.5) units and chassises
2) commanders
2.1) mages
2.2) thugs
2.3) others


etc etc.

The idea is that if you're creating a new nation, you can do it in order, write down what you just chose, and go on to the next part. Also, everything should be named - this paragraph is about Non-priest Sacred Commanders, pass if you aren't interested. At the moment, there's no easy way to get past the race creation - especially as it ends on a list of weapons, and the next section is about weapons and armor.

Also, there should be rules for exceptions. What if my selection is a mix between two of your choices. Say, I want to use Bronze Armor I, but also Ice Studded Armor. The latter isn't worth 125 points on its own. What should I do? The armor lists are very good idea, but what about Super Plate and some cheaper type of armor, etc combinations? Do I have to pay for both?

Re: Custom Army Design System (Very Rough Draft)
 

Ordinarily what you'd do is: you'd have one "race" with bronze armor and another "race" with studded ice. It's kind of a book-keeping headache.

It isn't going to be "perfect" but it is intended to be *scrupulous* - meaning, if you spend more points on troops, *all* of your troops get better (cheaper, if nothing else.) Some nations get units which are bad-*** and don't pay extra gold for the privilege - how do I balance that? etc. etc.

The idea is that if you have one super-infantryman and a bunch of crap, you won't ever recruit the crap anyway, so it's free.

But obviously there need to be exceptions for this - for example, archers and infantrymen really do fulfill different roles, and some nations should have superior archers vs. other nations which don't.

Spearmen and swordsmen are *supposed* to fulfill different roles, but the extent to which they do so is not what might be desired.

So I'm thinking carefully about it http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Custom Army Design System (Very Rough Draft)
 

I didn't mean to be pushy about you continuing this, in fact I found it a good jumping off point into starting a mod that got cut down by a bad case of the lazies.

Re: Custom Army Design System (Very Rough Draft)
 

Well, anyone who wishes can feel free to modify it and post new versions, but I'm not going to put further work into it any time soon.

The original idea was a sort-of warhammer type thing were you would build your own army lists, pick out and/or modify the art you needed, and play the custom nations against eachother in MP; it would also be useful as a rough guideline for those designing mod nations, but that wasn't the *point*, as such.