Hey and welcome to our EB2 forum.
As for thread title, we've decided to call it Stele instead of Developer Diary. Just to keep it a bit "EBish". Name might be subject to change though.
This will hopefully be the first in a series of “almost-weekly” news updates I will be writing about the progress on EB2.
As of now, very little work has been actually done on EB2 from a pure modding perspective as we haven’t begun fiddling a lot with the files yet. However it’s an altogether different matter when it comes to research and our main focus has been on which ten new factions to choose and checking out what features Medieval 2: Total War has that Rome: Total War does not have and can/will we use them.
The first thing we will mod in will be the map itself and it will be the new map which will be in the next EB1 release and which was previewed some weeks ago. But that does not mean the map is forever “locked”. There will probably be more changes to province borders, city locations and so on and Iberia will most probably be redrawn province wise.
If you are going to redraw Iberia why aren’t you doing it for EB1 too?
Easy, we want to finish EB1 and that means finishing some aspects of the mod so we can free up manpower for EB2 and this includes the map. We can also mention that the remaining traits & ancillaries that are concepted will be added, but from there on only the most important trait/ancillary ideas will be added to EB, because as stated earlier we want most people to work on EB2. Some stuff like voicemods will be added later to EB1 as there is not much work needed to be done updating text files.
We have already chosen seven out of ten factions and are discussing heavily the three remaining ones. There have been many discussions on the public forums about which factions people would want to see in EB2 and it is fun for us to see the different candidates suggested and talked about. We won’t release any info on which factions we have chosen…yet.
However I think we could mention two factions which did not make it in and the reasons why. This so you have two less choices to worry about :wink:
Mauryan Empire:
The Mauryan capital Pataliputra is FAR to the east of our map, along with almost all of the empire itself. Having a massive empire that is only marginally on our map is not “endorsed”, you can say by EB. Portraying Mauryans accurately would be much harder with most of the empire itself outside the EB map and which brings us to another point. Some say we could scrap a few provinces and use them to add India. That would make EB unhistorical, as we would fail to portray the different cultures as unbiased as we can. At this point in history India was probably the most populated region in the world and if we would use as many provinces on India as we would let’s say Asia Minor, it wouldn’t be an accurate and fair portrayal of India would it? India would require MANY provinces if we were to have some relation between India and the rest of map when it comes to provinces, population, settlements and geographical size.
Jewish faction:
We know people love the Jews and would want a Maccabean faction. Here is the deal though. The Maccabeans revolted a century after the game start. They would be an emerging faction which is something EB has decided not to have. If we did, you could bet Yuezhi would be in. Another thing is that the Jews would only control Judea and the consensus from reading sources is that the Jews would most likely be happy just to have Judea and not try to subjugate other nations or peoples, at least not on the scale that is in Total War games. We might add some more unrest to Judea, although the Jews seemed to have lived well enough under the Seleukids (before Antiochos IV of course) & Ptolemies before, as they were granted royal charters recognizing their rights.
As mentioned we have also been checking the new features of M2TW and we already have ideas for guilds and religion. But we can mention those another time. For now I’ll write about crusades & jihads (hey, I need to have some material for the coming weeks!!)
Our idea so far, or at least the idea most mentioned, is to use crusades and/or jihads to represent Migrations. With these some factions, most notably the Sweboz & Saka could launch “Jihads” into a province which represents migrations. It is just on the concept stage for now, but we will check if crusades require a Papacy faction or if we can use Jihads outside imams. On a sidenote, some of our factions will probably be made into Horde factions, so if they are defeated they can take their people and find other lands.
And to finish this off, it seems we can chop out chunks of script code and free up building complexes as we can apparently represent military reforms VERY easily using event triggers which will make reforms so much easier...hopefully.
Until next time,
Krusader
