Utility: Custom Army Design System (Very Rough Draft)

[DrPraetorious]

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.)

[Zylithan]

boo....

but seriously, you can only do so much
and all your projects sound cool.
have fun with whatever you do in whatever order, and thanks.

[Panpiper]

DrPraetorious said:
This system is intended to provide scrupulously internally-balanced units.

I am SO looking forward to this.

[Endoperez]

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?

[DrPraetorious]

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

[DigitalSin]

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.

[DrPraetorious]

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.