I can tell that TC01 is still active (very much so
)... Hopefully he could post here and tell if he ever plans to continue with this mod. I was just reading about the
Donner Party... I thought to myself -- why there are so few finished Colonization mods? Real history beats the fiction hands down any day of the week. But fictional mods get more attention for some reason... Like Final Frontier instead of Wild west mod...
Rather late to reply to this, but I checked these forums recently and saw an interesting thread about a scenario map for this mod, which I admit guilted me into posting.
Westward Ho was one of the first mods I started working on. I had gotten both Colonization and Railroads!, and unlike quite a large number of other people, I enjoyed both games.
I was also at this time getting into modding, and I saw this project. Flintlock had been working on it for a few months, I think, but was running out of steam. He posted saying he needed help with it, and I thought "hey, I could help him out, I know XML and a bit of Python". So I posted and took over the mod and eventually released Westward Ho 0.2. (Flintlock's unfinished release was what I considered to be 0.1).
Now, I felt like a wild west mod would be cool- a chance to play with some of the features in Colonization I liked but felt were under-emphasized, but in a new setting (the wild west). To develop the economy and so on.
After I posted some patches to 0.2, Kailric stepped up to help with some DLL work, and we released 0.3 and then 0.4. And then... I had laid out a roadmap of what I thought would need doing by release 1.0. Unfortunately, I wasn't looking forward to working on any of those features. So I wasn't much inspired to work on 0.5.
Also, there were too many strange issues popping up- with land transport units, with the home cities being on the map, and so on. We tried fixing a few but to my knowledge most of them are still there. At the time (and honestly, still to this day), I lacked the C++ knowledge to fix them. Whatever enthusiasm I had for the project waned as the issues with trains and home cities became more obvious.
I also found myself increasingly getting involved with projects in other areas: writing computer programs and messing about with Linux. I was still working on Final Frontier Plus because, first of all, Final Frontier Plus was
my project. This was a project I took over to help out Flintlock, and while I thought it was cool, all the crazy issues that popped up didn't help motivate me further to help out with someone else's brainchild.
And second, I didn't have a series of goals I was trying to reach with Final Frontier Plus. We were developing as we went, saying "Okay, let's make a release, what features would be cool to add?" I didn't increasingly feel like I would be unable to meet the goals I was setting for myself there. That's the other main difference between the two projects I see: Final Frontier Plus will never be done, but Westward Ho would have been "done" at v1.0 (even though more releases could still happen)- and I realized I could never get there.
Perhaps someday I'll spend more time on this mod, but today is not that day. It would certainly help if people who were willing to actually
work on this project would step up, like I did for Flintlock. Having said that, please don't volunteer unless you actually know how to mod. If you're good at DLL modding, graphics, Python scripting, adding a lot of cool new content to the XML, scenario design, mapscripting, etc, then I'd be glad to pass over parts of the project to you. If all you can contribute is ideas- then no offense, but we have quite enough of those already.
And if someone wants to take over the mod
completely, go for it!
There are so few finished Colonization mods because Colonization, as a game, is far less popular than both Civilization IV and Civilization V. It was a bit of a niche, enjoy Colonization, but I haven't played it for a while and I don't know when I will again. (Maybe soon, though, now that I've made this post). So it hasn't attracted nearly as many modders. Some have gone onto Civ V, some have fallen back to Civ IV, some have just gone on to other things in life.
Oh, and as to your other comment- there are plenty of people who prefer real history and plenty of people who prefer fiction. Personally, I enjoy stories more than I enjoy history, and stories I don't already know the ending to more so. I love playing Civ, but I'd say given the choice I would rather play a fantasy or science fiction variant on it (ex: Final Frontier, Fall from Heaven 2). No offense, of course, but just recognize that many disagree with you.
