The April/May Monthly Modification Report
On this day in history…
The Battle of Tewkesbury – Edward IV defeats a Lancastrian Army and kills Edward, Prince of Wales.
Bonjour fellow Modders once again for the second Medieval II : Total War modification report. It has been an interesting month in the world of Total War since our last meeting and as such there is a lot to cover. Sadly the patch we were all waiting for has not surfaced just yet, although the leaked patch seems to have had good reports thus far so lets hope the real deal arrives shortly and is as promising as we had all hoped, especially in the modding sense. The past month has also seen a few projects rise up from nowhere and plant themselves on the scene and a few of the more established projects have progressed nicely too, but more of that later.
In the time since the last report I, NagatsukaShumi, have attempted to get my head around these fiddly new ways of modding and have slowly made some progress, moving from my days of modding the original Medieval to the current incarnation really does show the great strides that have been made with the series and I have a great appreciation of how much work our beloved modders really do have to contend with to get a project out nowadays, in most ways its even more difficult than Medieval : Total War but the flip is certainly that it offers so much more than our golden oldie.
Once more I stress that anybody who wishes to have their project showcased in the reports can merely drop me a line via the private messaging system on the Org with some details of what they’d like to announce, I am quite happy to listen to any proposal and go from there.
Medieval II : Total War - Kingdoms…..the Invasion?
In the space of a month Creative Assembly have decided to unleash upon us the first expansion pack of the series not to have the “invasion” moniker, much to my veteran disappointment, however, this is eclipsed by the sheer amount of tasty information on what the future holds for modding as regards Total War with Medieval II : Total War. Although there are still issues with the game, hopefully these will be addressed with the patch and hopefully Kingdoms will offer us more hours of joy than headaches regards tinkering with it, as it certainly holds plenty of potential to create a fantastic base to build from. Features such as the mission points in the New World and the new strongholds inside provinces open up a whole new ball game, along with the countless other features available it should be an exciting few months leading up to its release and following it. Kingdoms is by far the biggest expansion of the series, offering 23 new kingdoms to play around with and this should make modders water at the mouth in anticipation.
Broken Crescent by mirage47 and AlphaDelta1
Mod Aims
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FEATURES
- 1175AD to 1400 AD. Basically from the rise of Saladin to the Timurids
- 2 turns per year
- Religions will be Islam, Christianity (no sects), Paganism or perhaps Hinduism if someone is willing to help me make a Hindu "Rajput States" faction.
- Will have brand new units for the eastern Persian, Afghan and Indian factions.
- Will focus heavily on mercenaries, I want to have mercenaries of high yields all throughout the map of every ethnic and tribal persuasion.
- Estimate the release will be middle or end of this summer.
- mirage41
Already Broken Crescent looks like it will be one of the dominant projects on the scene for Medieval II : Total War and is certainly progressing nicely. Aside from the great screenshots of the map which stretch much further east than any modification on the same time scale previously it is also full of some great new textures for the units that will be making an appearance, these are skins of the highest quality and I fully recommend that you check them out. The majority of the factions have also been confirmed, although some are conditional to more help from the modding community, it is certainly a well developed modification even though it is still in its infancy.
I am sure we will all keep an eye out on the project as it progresses over the coming months, check it out here
Mediæval Auctoriso - Italia Invictus by the MA Team
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Hello everybody,
I know you haven't heard a lot from us during the last few months, and probably some of you already suspected that the mod is dead. Truth be told, the mod indeed lost most of the team, leaving us down to a group of 5 to 10 members, depending on how you count (which activity level you set as a threshold for membership).
Because of this lack of members (members includes researchers), we decided to narrow our focus somewhat before tackling the whole of Europe. The advantage of covering a smaller area is mainly that we won't need to do as much research, we will have a smaller map, and we won't have to do as much work on units, etc.
Our main hope with this to get some modders excited about the project and join our team. If that fails, we will probably not be able to finish the large scale Europe map.
The starting date will be 1017 when Rainulf Drengot (later to become the Count of Aversa) and his four brothers arrived in Monte Gargano after being exiled from Normandy, thus the starting point of the Norman adventures in Southern Italy.
Our faction list isn't finalised and will be polished and refined quite a bit after we did some more research and maybe even some balance testing.
If you know a bit about the period, quite a few of our factions will be fairly obvious, but you may be in for a few surprises.
We will try to get more info out to you guys than before, both to get comments on it and to make you interested in our mod. Expect some previews within the next few weeks (as for what we will preview, I will only say that a lot of them will be feature previews from me)
I know this doesn't sound like too much, but I'm confident that we'll be able to get the ball rolling now (if need be I'll do most of the actual modding myself, but I still hope to find a few more modders to help).
We're also working together with Re Berengario I (the creator of the Anno Domini mod) who is quite the expert on Italian history and a good modder in addition, so some of the features you'll see there will be in MAII and vice-versa. Together with him, we'll try to make the strategy layer of the game much more challenging and, most importantly, push the economic part of the game - formerly building up your provinces - beyond anything you've seen from a M2 mod so far.
You'll see more about that in the feature previews.
- alpaca
So, after a few months of uncertainty I am pleased to announce that the MA Team can finally announce to first release o the project will come in the form of Italia Invcitus. As alpaca stated, the temporary downgrade is both to test our features out in a smaller scale and to attract new members to the cause of making a community realism project, we are most definitely not abandoning the grand idea that we still have plenty of resources for in the future, we just need the man power. There is not too much information available at the current time for the public, but be sure to keep checking up on the progress as there are certainly exciting times ahead.
Check out the latest news from the MA Team here.
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Work has begun in earnest now.... even though the tools are not avaiable to put new content in the game.
I have started with the Tomb Kings, since I already had some nice skeleton units in RTW. I have improved the mesh slightly and added clavicles to the units. I have re-done the models to give them a more Egyptian slant, with more fitting weapons and kit. Next job will be to add the chariots and start work on the Tomb Guards and Bone Giants and Ushabti.
I already have skeleton horses which will be put back into service.
The Brettonians are pretty much the ordinary MTW2 units....though I will re-do some of the stuff just for the hell of it!
- Bwain
Well, it seems to be a theme this month of projects involving the Medieval II : Total War Modding Castellans, continuing with the very intriguing project of War hammer : Total War. Already Bwain has got his hand onto modelling in an expected fashion and has created some skeletons which are available to view in the aptly named “Gratuitous Eye Candy Thread” over in their new hosted forums right here on the Org. Warhammer look very promising with Bwain at the helm but, as with any of us, any help is appreciated and if you have an interest in Warhammer outside of the Total War arena, what better project to get involved in?
Make sure to keep your Orcy eyes out for updates from Bwain here.
In other news……
The Lion of Flanders has been released, placing the Flanders Factions into the Medieval II : Total War engine without too many other changes, find it here.
Lands to Conquer has released a 2.2 version, please note you MUST have the leaked patch to play this properly, find the latest version of Lusteds fantastic project here.
The Eagle and Lake : Total War was recently announced and focuses on the South American tribes prior to the European colonisation, find out more here.
