Unit abstraction?

[CarlG2]

Originally posted by Zen:
Carl,

Just a little footnote here, since I hope you decide to purchase the game for all of it's great qualities and not this single one that is divergent from your desires.

I am heavily leaning towards picking it up. I really like so much of what I have read/experienced of the overall design and scope of the game (i.e. scope as in all that it encompasses, not scope as in unit scale, etc.), and developers like illwinter are too rare (i.e. game design before graphics). I'd love it if the game looked like a big-budget Total War game, but companies producing eye candy with nothing behind the mask are a dime-a-dozen... (not to say that the Total War series has nothing behind the mask, as I think Shogun and Medieval are quite excellent...just using Total War as an example of very good graphics on the strategic and tactical levels).

Dom2 has a modding tool. In this tool it is possible to adjust upkeep, statistics, gold/resource cost and even .tga (the icon representing a unit).

Funny enough, I saw on Blues News a few days ago that the new patch was out which expands the modding capabilities. That, combined with the CGW review got me interested and I started doing some research on the game, and ended up here with this thread. I think I mentioned way back in my first post that I have been searching for a tool/game engine that might let me build a scenario based on Robert E. Howards Hyboria...awesome backstory, well developed nations and history, etc. Would make a great wargame!

You could if you desired Mod the game, keeping all of it's current balances and nation/theme ideas (the whole of Dom2) but change aspects to create a more epic feel.

The limitation on that would be the size of maximum units (32000) in the game, but its worth a shot. Or alternatively you could modify the .tga so that it's like MoM and add multiple figures (if you can squeeze it in) per unit.

Some ideas at least to fit your style of play.

Very interesting proposition. I noticed that there was a group doing multi-figure graphics for Civilization 3, most likely for the same reason (although, the Civ games have always had a huge abstraction inherent when considering what each "unit" represented).

Out of curiosity, and because I'm too tired to look, how many .tga's are there for the 1,000+ units in the game?!? Okay...I looked...I don't see the individual .tga's for the units, and am assuming they are packed in another file. I'm sure that is all covered somewhere else in a modding thread.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions!

Good gaming,
Carl G.

[ January 15, 2004, 05:24: Message edited by: CarlG2 ]