L'Italia Medioevale. Mod Concept and Map
As you can see it's Italy in all it's beauty! I still have alot of work to do in order to make it playable. But here you can get an idea of the regions and major factions I hope to be able to include.
L'Italia Medioevale concepts:
Politics replacing religion. Italy in 1300ad was dominated by political strife.
In the north Geulfs were struggling to bring their factions under the authority of Rome and the ghiberlines were fighting to remain loyal to the Holy Roman Empire.
Many cities in the north were Principalities in their own right and wanted to keep it that way. They were administered as "commune", local authorties.
The powerful Signore families that carried old feudal titles were not permitted to interfere in city politics, but that didn't stop them trying to re-establish their feudal domions and even expand them.
I have been experimenting with various files in Mtw2 and conclude it is fully possible to recreate this scenario in a total war mod.
Recent threads and ideas that lend themselves to this project:
Swaby Wangy's diplomacy; Shows that the diplomacy model is moddable to a level needed to recreate medieval Italian politics.
Rawghi's heraldry mod; A good example of modded ancilleries, regionand faction specific triggers and genuine medieval heraldry art that will all be necessary for a polished medieval Italy mod.
Horse archer's names project; A study in implementing authentic names to Mtw2. His thread shows peoples interest in using the correct names for times, cultures and places and shows how to do it. A must for a regional campaign like this one.
Remove the pope thread: Shows we can get rid of him as a faction if we like and mods a lot of things to do with him. A must because I don't want the pope calling crusades agaist Napoli or anywhere else
A few of my own ideas:
Realistic and historical campaign win conditions for each faction.
Survival and maintaining Your cities independence for smaller factions in the lombard north like; Bergamo, Brescia, Cremona, Verona, Vicenza and Mantova as opposed to The Kingdom the The two Sicilies, powerful duchies like the D'este of Ferrara, D'medici in Toscana, Savoia in Aoste and Piemonte and The Borghese, Orsini and Ottoboni in Roma who will have more expansionist designs.
This will be possible with faction, cuture, religion, faction relationship, traits, ansc and vnv modding and a whole lot of experimentation.
Region landmarks; It will include Italy's famous buildings and places. Some of them like the Colosseum will be there in the desc_strat for Roma only and give bonuses only to that faction. I can't think of upgrade plug ins for it, Maybe an
"tourist trade' upgrade.
Others in Roma would be St Peter's basillica and would increase revenue through the Pope selling indulgences (A licience to sin")
Famous monastries like Monte Casino Are all over Italy and a player could build them at the correct turn number uniquely specific to a province and including pictures of the actual buildings in the campaign.
Building something like the famous "Duomo" in Firenze (cathedral in florence) could raise a factions standing but on the downside make the plce more desirable to a rival.
Condottieri: These were mercenary generals who fought for the Highest bidder. They recieve a "condotta" or an allowance of troops, cavalry and wages from their liege, which was increased for success and long faithful service. Most of Italy's great battles of the period included forces that were comprised of several Condottieri's troops in alliance under a Lord.
The nomad faction/hording function and scripting event monitors for battles and alliances can be used to give the player the option of undertaking and emulating the careers of great Condottieri like Braccio or Bartolommeo Colleoni.
Italy has many famous castles linked with the character and regions I will include in this mod.
Once I know how many regions will be used for towns and cities, I will use the remaining slots to make small sub provinces within a city's home province, but bordering the next province. This way a faction like Verona for example may only have one city but could have several castle provinces protecting it's borders.
The castles could be upgradable but not convertable.
Protectorates. Many cities were vassals to another. I'm look at map editing to better simulate this. On the map tga's each province has it's own colour. By drawing the colour of the papal states province not only in Lazio but also drawing with the same colour around the edges of it's protectorate states in the papal dominion, it would mean an enemy would have to cross Roma's border to annex it's neighbour. e.g If Toscana wanted to take Ancona (a non playable faction maybe) in the marches, the border between them would be a few pixels of Lazio territory.
This would offer better protection to vassals from savage AI.
The only thing then would be to protect Ancona form Savage Roma with scripting.
Hope that make sense. I am testing the idea with vanilla. Landblocks and map features would stop the AI skipping Ancona to get to Roma along Roma's extended border surrounding Ancona.
Foreign Mercs: Most cities bought in foreign merc to bolster their military.
As the mod would initally use vanilla units with balanced stats, foriegn mercs will add more dimension to unit stacks and simulate history.
Eg: Venice brought in mercs from the east, southern states had spanish and muslim troops and the french were often in Rome and Parma.
That is a brief on my inital idea. I hope I get some constuctive replies to this thread
Re: L'Italia Medioevale. Mod Concept and Map
you're very ambitious!good luck
Re: L'Italia Medioevale. Mod Concept and Map
Very ambitous is an understatement!
This is a huge project only concieved 2 days ago.
So far a have 2 people wanting to help. One is a very capable coder, the other is a history student from the north of italy.
Mapping is my first priority. I have finished a beta of map_regions.tga and decided on settlement names for each of them. I want to include mini castle regions on the borders, that is still to be researched for the names of weel known castelli in italy.
I'm currently doing the map_heights.tga, then features, trade etc.
After that I can begin placing the cites, resources and the castles. Then I can finally write the desc_strat, settlement names etc.
Thanks for comment, everything helps!:juggle2:
