Champions of Mystara - Preview Thread

[Stormrage]

You have my full unfinanced support

Man, we need to get Sandris into D&D and Bill Gates into Civ3 modding. Now that would be a blast

Finish with your units? Or finish placing units in the mod?

 

[Grandraem]

Finish placing units in my mod, and checking them, and adding their civilopedia info. I'm not planning on trying to make units unless I get stuck with no choice.

 

[Stormrage]

Well.. what about Dark Elves? Watcha using for them?

 

[Grandraem]

I'm not including the shadowelves in my mod. They don't really get involved with above world politics until they take over Alfheim later in the timeline. The date my mod's civs are pretty much based on are 1000 a.c. which is when the gazetteer series for the original D&D was based.

I was considering making an elven scenario with a fight between the shadow elves and regular elves, but I thought I'd leave that until when the base mod is done and I'm working on various scenarios for it.

 

[Optional]

It's been a while, so I thought I'd wish you luck with your progress on this mod, Grandraem.

 

[Grandraem]

Thank you.

The mod is coming along nicely. I've had a lot of slow down sorting out and adding units, but as I've mentioned before, they are by far the most time consuming thing left in the mod.

I've still got some more units to add, but unless of unforeseen slowdowns, distractions, or disasters, I still am confident that the mod will be out this year, and at a level of quality that I'm happy with. Part of what makes things so slow is that for every unit I add I check to make sure it can be built properly, then check all the animations in game and listen to/add sounds. I'm also trying to keep the civilopedia up-to-date and adequately written.

Hopefully I'll have some time at some point to make up a unit lines chart or a list of buildings/wonders to preview here, but at the moment I'd rather just spend the time getting things done for the mod.

 

[Grandraem]

I promised some previews. Before I make any previews of unit lines or buildings I wanted to finish up the tech tree to show a preview of that, which won't be done for a little bit, so I thought I'd start by previewing governments first, as I've already got the civs previewed earlier.

Here are the governments that civs will be able to choose from. For scenarios I'll probably add/delete/modify the list, but for the base game I feel that this will cover all the government types. I wanted to be able to give each civ a favourite government that matched its Mystara equivalent, but I didn't limit any civs to any specific government, so there could end up being a dwarven shire, if the Dwarves of Rockhome desire to choose a 'Shire' government as opposed to their favourite government (which is monarchy if I recall correctly).

It is quite a large number of governments, and many are somewhat different names for the same type of government (such as similarities between a Feudalism and Jarldom), but I wanted Soderfjord to be able to have a Soderfjord Jarldom as opposed to a Soderfjord Feudalism (at least in name).

 

[bigdog5994]

very nice but aren't they gonna go for the one thats most like democracy like the AI always does

 

[Grandraem]

I haven't researched any discussion about the AI's handling of 'Favourite Government' and 'Shunned Government' in the editor, but I'm hoping that the civs will be more likely to choose their 'Favourite Government' during a game. If they aren't I might mess around with giving certain civs 'government flavours' that I'll put for them to be more likely to research certain government techs and the opposite flavour for their shunned government techs (because many government techs are non-required for era advancement).

I'm not in favour of controlling which civs get which governments by non-era techs because I want a player to be able to choose any government type they want, which would mean the AI would also have the same opportunity.

In scenarios based on the base mod, I will be more likely to control the type of government the civs have, but not for the base mod.

 

[timerover51]

Nice range of governments, and looks good for a D and D world. I used to do a lot of AD&D, back in the days when TSR was still owned and run by Gary and located in Lake Geneva, only about 45 minutes max from me. I might have to track down a copy of the Mystara gazetteer to look over now. I have one of the Greyhawk world, and keep thinking about doing a good map of that. I will be very interested in how you handle some of them, considering some of them are going to be heavily magic-based.

 

[General 666]

Hi Grandraem !
This is looking like I will love it. Custom artwork of the highest quality meets Fantasy !

You have problems with building in units ?
I would be glad to help you. I could add you a ton of placeholder entries into your PediaIcons.txt like this :

;#ICON_PRTO_
;art\civilopedia\icons\units\
;art\civilopedia\icons\units\

;#ANIMNAME_PRTO_
;PlaceHolder 001


... so you can easily add the rest using c&p and deleting the ";".

The same I can do with your .biq.
Adding a ton of placeholders that you can edit easily. And when you are finished you can just delete the unused entries.

That should speed up your work a little.
If you are interested in my help let me know here on your thread or just email me your .biq and PediaIcons.txt.


Bye
General 666

 

[Kyriakos]

Everything looks great Grandraem

 

[Grandraem]

Thanks for the positive comments.

General 666,
Thanks for the offer, but I think that I'm ok with adding units for now. It has taken some time, but I'm done all the land units and some of the sea units. All that is left is some sea and air units, but they're small in number, and with not many cultural variations, so it shouldn't take too long. But thanks again for the offer.

 

[Grandraem]

Just a little update...

I'm done adding all the base land/sea/air units, with their cultural variations, though I still have some Sandris unit packs to sort through and add from. I forgot to mention that I haven't added each civ's unique unit yet, but hopefully that shouldn't take too long. The only possible delay will be if I have to create any of these units.

Before getting to UUs, I have the annoying task of working out how many shields each unit should cost, as I only roughly guessed while adding them, and I also have to decide final attack and defense values/transportation values/movement for all the sea and air units. I'm trying to keep things approximately the same as for the original civ to try to maintain game balance.

I had a bit of a dilemma with air units. I want to give them movement rates but I know that if they are caught and attacked by even land units they will be instantly killed. However, I thought that if someone wants to keep them in a city they still can, as with normal civ air units, but if they want to risk moving them out of the city at least it gives them an alternative of free flight, just with the risk of instant death should they be attacked (unless they're protected by flying 'land' units). This way my gnomish blimp (which is a transportation air unit) can transport units freely and quickly and airdrop them anywhere, so long as it doesn't get destroyed first. This also gives air units an ability to attack land units normally (not just bombarding).

I was going to fix up and finish the tech tree, then preview it, but after spending a couple of hours arranging the 1st era I decided that if I need to add any techs it will have wasted alot of my time to have to rearrange everything again. So if you'll excuse the lack of previews for now, it would just probably waste a day of working on my mod to create tech previews.

Here's what my priorities for the mod are right now:

1. Decide Cost of Units.

2. Decide Att/Def/Trans/Bomb/etc. costs for Sea and Air Units.

3. Go over some Sandris unit packs and substitute any old placeholder units for better versions.

4. (Sigh) Arduous task of sorting graphics for King units. Finding enough decent ones with an attack animation, that look 'Kingly' enough, and then adding them and all their upgrades, then testing them all. Probably about 3 weeks of work, hopefully not more.

5. Work on resources, then apply them to unit/building requirements.

6. Place worker actions with their appropriate technologies.

7. Place other things (such as when civs can trade/spy/reveal map, etc) with their appropriate technologies.

8. Add/change citizen types (the ones like scientist/engineer/entertainer/tax collector). I'm going to add a few and slightly change a couple.

9. Decide cost of each technology and change it, then doing tech blurbs.

10. Undecided... By this point the mod is pretty much finished (unless I'm forgetting something). Then I'll just work on miscellaneous things such as fixing up some graphics and altering the diplomacy text more.

Well, I'd better get to work, lots to do.

 

[T-mun]

You're getting close to the end, Grandraem! Keep up the good work, I'd like to see it finished this year

 

[Grandraem]

I'd like to see it finished this year

That's the goal!

 

[tom2050]

Here's what my priorities for the mod are right now:

1. Decide Cost of Units.

2. Decide Att/Def/Trans/Bomb/etc. costs for Sea and Air Units.

Indeed, figuring the right values for land units is much easier, with sea in the middle, and air units a pain. You can watch AI progress for land units and can determine how to balance by making subtle changes as you go, same with sea (only that there exists the problem of AI building the most powerful ship only, so then you have to use various ways to force AI to build more variety of ships), and air is usually just a pain

Good luck though, it's looking good!

Tom

 

[Grandraem]

I had more Sandris unit packs downloaded (and unused yet) than I realized, which makes me think that it'll take me a good few weeks to sort out which units to replace with new graphics, and then testing them all ingame for errors and making sure they all have sounds added.

While I was attempting to use Sandris' Egyptian packs to apply to the Thothians I started to get a little overwhelmed because I didn't remember if, for example, Light Footmen were supposed to have leather armour or chain armour, and whether or not they were supposed to carry shields (according to D&D original rules), or things like that. As a result I thought it'd be handy of me to create a little chart for myself with pictures of the units and a small description. When I started doing this I thought to myself that I was practically creating unit previews so I might as well just make complete sets and post them here so at least I have my unit previews done.

The previews I'll be adding will be generic units based on the unit lines. There are cultural/racial variations of almost every land unit posted (and some sea units), and there aren't any unique units in the preview, so take the previews as only a sample of the unit lines. You also won't see the awesome aaglo units like the Fireship and Phaseship as they are civs' unique units, but they're definitely in the mod. To show a sample of differences I'm going to post a preview of the completed Thothian civ next week (complete with new leaderhead ) to show what an individual civ's unit lines will look like.

Previews below:

 

[Grandraem]

Here are the land units:

 

[Grandraem]

The Artillery, Sea, and Air Units: