Italia Invicta Aims and Goals
Welcome to our aims and goals thread. This post is an overview about what our basic design concepts are, and will serve as a good point to start for people interested in this mod. On top of that, we will try to adhere to these fundamentals whenever possible, so it gives you a quite neat idea about what to expect from us.
The first thing you should know is that Italia Invicta will be a total conversion project. This means that, while M2TW is of course still the base for our mod, we will change most parts of it, resulting in a completely new gameplay feeling. If you feel like you didn't understand that yet, most mods are based on the vanilla M2TW gameplay to a much larger extent. Most buildings, units and factions are the same and the changes are mainly "at the edges". In contrast to that, we're starting with almost completely empty files, and add only our own stuff instead of using what's already there and more or less well-balanced.
This means three things:
- The mod will be closer to our interpretation of the game
- It will be a bit less diverse because we simply don't have the resources to create as many units, etc.
- It will take longer to finish
While the second and third points are important disadvantages, we still feel that the first point more than makes up for it. With the ideas we have, there's simply no way to take the vanilla game, modify it slightly, and end up with a satisfying result.
Now, here are our fundamental concepts (shortly called RATS, you'll see why :laugh4: ):
1. Realism
One of our most important design choices for II is that, whenever possible, we want to stick as close to what happened in the real world as possible. This doesn't mean that we will favor realism over gameplay in our decisions, but rather that we attempt to amalgamate both into a single entity. We feel that realism isn't detrimental to gameplay most of the time (as some people seem to think), but that, on the contrary, one of the greatest fun factors for TW games is to compare your own achievements to what happened in history. Furthermore, a multitude of features for our mod are actually inspired by our trying to implement the complexity of the real world into the game.
To ensure that we're being as true to this crucial point as possible, we have a lot of great researchers on the team, including professional historians.
2. Alternate History
In the previous paragraph I went on about how important realism is for us and, immediately following that, you read alternate history. Isn't that paradox, you might think? To which I can only reply, Not at all! Imagine the following situation: You are playing as the Zirids and you conquered a Northern Italian trade city like Genoa and keep it for decades, eventually even moving your capital there. In CA's interpretation of the game, you would still retain all your old ways as a desert faction, being all light cavalry and shock infantry. Now please ask yourself if this is realistic or even interesting to play.
No? Good, we can agree on that. In such a case, it would be much more appropriate if your faction adapted itself and to some extent (at least in this newly-conquered area) adopted the traditional ways of the local population, resulting in a new situation where you have access to unique troop types and technologies that would otherwise have been closed to you. In our example, it might happen that the Zirids start readjusting the local Italian troops to their own style of warfare, ending up with a few cross-over units. Heck, they could even get a well-armored halberd unit that hurls javelins before charging!
We will try to include as many of these situations as we can, as they drastically improve both realism (if the intersections are done sensibly) and replayability for each faction, because the campaign can be a little different every time.
3. Tradition
This is a slightly less important point than the first two, but crucial to understanding the logic behind our project. Tradition in our sense means that we will try to bring back many of the particularly enjoyable features from the previous Total War games. You already saw an example with the View Settlement feature from Rome: Total War that we reimplemented via scripting and that has already seen a release for the vanilla map. Another example are the Provincial Titles from the first Medieval which are also sorely missed by a lot of people because they gave you another way to tweak your characters. From the original MTW, we will also bring back the glorious achievements as victory conditions, although our thoughts on them are quite more sophisticated than the original implementation (we will reveal it in good time in a preview, but I'm really excited about what we're doing there - in my opinion it's the single best feature II will have).
If you have any further suggestions in this area, we will of course be pleased to hear them.
4. Strategical Depth
It has to be said that the tactical layer (the battles) are, while not perfect, already quite good. They are lacking in a few ways, such as AI, but we can't do anything much about that at any rate, so our changes to the tactical system will be rather small and mainly a stab at balancing it as good as possible.
In contrast to this, the strategical layer (the campaign) is really far from reaching its potential. There's a lot of good ideas already in there, but the majority of them are either implemented badly or not balanced and thought through properly. We attempt to increase the attractivity of the campaign to a point where you spend most of your precious playing time thinking about decisions that you have to make instead of playing countless battles that you'll eventually win anyways. Our team has quite a few very good approaches to this and I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to fashion this mod into an astounding piece of brain-boggling strategy game. Unfortunately I can't reveal which these are right now, but our interpretation of the glorious achievements I mentioned above play a large role in this.
I hope you enjoyed the read and have a better idea about what we're trying to do with this game than before.
Goodbye,
alpaca
