Arthurian Age Mod

[james924]

Hey Folks,
I've been working on a Mod for a couple days and I figured I'd announce it on the forums to get an idea of who would be interested and who would like to help out.

The Mod:
"The Arthurian Age" will not be based on Arthur (although we might include him). The Arthurian Age is based mainly around the year 480 AD, 70 years after the Romans left the Island. The native British people are fighting for their lives against an invasion of Saxons, Jutes and Angles from the East, Picts from the north and Irish Raids from the west.
We'll be basing a lot of the mod on the writings of Bede, Nennius and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

My Experience:
I've done quite a bit of modding in the past, but it has been a while so I've had to refresh myself with a few tutorials. I made a mod similar to this, but I didn't go to far into it because the Kingdoms expansion pack came out a few weeks later. Overall, I'm more than capable of seeing this through to the end.
I am a bit of a historical expert on this era (which is why I'd love to make a mod about it) and I have a huge collection of books covering it.

MAP:
This will be a simple modification of the M2TW: Kingdoms Brittania map.

PROGRESS:
I've pretty much completed the map tga file. Suprisingly, the regions in Brittania Campaign are very similar to the historic regions of 5th Century Britain. There are points where choosing a boundary or border line were hindered by disagreement between historical sources. In these cases I've used Bernard Cornwell's very well researched novel "The Winter King" which is a fantastic historical fiction account of the post-roman Britain issue and a must read for anyone who has any interest in the region. But I digress...

I've changed the names MOST of the regions and cities but still need historically accurate names for the Northern regions.

I've narrowed down the faction list but I won't show it yet as there are a few things I'd like opinions on, such as: Should Saxons and Angles be two seperate factions, Should Dyfed and Gwynedd be covered by "the rebels."etc etc. So I'd like to see if anyone is interested in hopping onboard as a team or at least a discussion group before I post an actual Faction List.
Units wont be a problem because 90% of this age's units were spearmen.

As I said, We'll be basing a lot of the mod on the writings of Bede, Nennius and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, so a lot of the "work/decision making" is covered by that.

HELP NEEDED:
The areas where I could use help are:

-HISTORICAL EVENTS: We need people to come up with interesting historical events to post during the game.
These are the Dark Ages so this will require historical digging.

-FAN FLARE: Sig pictures are fun!

-PLACE NAMES: There are several areas of the map that have little recorded history during this period. We need historical references on which to base the names of Provinces and ESPECIALLY cities/castles. Particularly north of the Antonine wall, and in Ireland. 5th Century place names are hard to find in those areas, as the Romans never touched them.

-TEXTURES: I could certainly read a tutorial and do it alone, but doing these things as a team is much more fun (and easy )
Anyone who is good at tweaking, swapping or even creating unit textures would be appreciated. If not, no big deal, because most of the units of this period can be found by simply tweaking the units already in game.

-Culture: The only big deal I see in cultures is Renaming the already present cultures in Brittania Campaign.

-Scripts: Once again, I could simply read a tutorial, but thats no fun! Any help would be welcome.

Let me know what you guys think, and we'll see about starting a thread, establishing a group and getting this project rolling.

EDIT: IMPORTANT FACT This mod does NOT take place in the same timeframe as Vacuus Lux Lucis Mod. They are two very different eras. Mine is Immediate Sub-Roman Britain and Vacuus Lux Lucis is Pre-Viking Saxon England.

[Justiciar]

Good luck. But Bernard Cornwell? Those are good books, though hardly the best researched out there. And outside of the West Country and southern Wales his maps are.. well.. crap.

[james924]

Good luck. But Bernard Cornwell? Those are good books, though hardly the best researched out there. And outside of the West Country and southern Wales his maps are.. well.. crap.

Dont worry, I'm not basing the mod on Bernard Cornwell, lol.
I'm only going to use his borders as the "tie breaker" in cases that are disputed by historians.
Also, the map in his Winter King novel is consistent with every map I've seen, specifically:
-Osprey Publishing's "Arthur and the Anglo-Saxon Wars" By David Nicolle
-"The Anglo-Saxons" By Geoffrey Hindley
-"An Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britains" By Christopher Snyder
-"Roman Britain & Early England" By Peter Blair
Those four books on my shelf are the ones on which I have based 99.9% of the map. But when those 4 sources contradict each other in reference to border locations, then I use "The Winter King" map as the deciding factor. Not that it matters, as the differences are typically only a matter of a few dozen miles.
So the Winter King map is definitely not crap. As far as his other maps are concerned, IDK, I listened to all the Sharpe books on CD, so I never saw his other maps but I'll take your word for it. ;)

[absinthia]

Hey Folks,
I've been working on a Mod for a couple days and I figured I'd announce it on the forums to get an idea of who would be interested and who would like to help out.

MAP:
This will be a simple modification of the M2TW: Kingdoms Brittania map.

I'd like opinions on, such as: Should Saxons and Angles be two seperate factions, Should Dyfed and Gwynedd be covered by "the rebels."etc etc. So I'd like to see if anyone is interested in hopping onboard as a team or at least a discussion group before I post an actual Faction List.

HELP NEEDED:
The areas where I could use help are:

-TEXTURES: I could certainly read a tutorial and do it alone, but doing these things as a team is much more fun (and easy )
Anyone who is good at tweaking, swapping or even creating unit textures would be appreciated. If not, no big deal, because most of the units of this period can be found by simply tweaking the units already in game.

Let me know what you guys think, and we'll see about starting a thread, establishing a group and getting this project rolling.

sounds quite interesting. somewhat in the direction of the ArthurianTW mod for RTW, which i really liked.
i have been thinking about something similar for scandinavia. but without a rudimentary strat map, where i can play around with the factions and see the changes i make then it does not seem worth the time spent.
neither do i have experience with scripting and stuff like that.

but i could probably help out with editing unit textures, adding faction specific colors, symbols and such.
i could help out with faction banners, icons and buttons. and set up descr_standards, descr_sm_factions, descr_banners_new, strategy.sd and shared.sd.
i could also set up expanded.txt.strings and battle_models.modeldb, given time.

on factions:
i do think the saxons and angles should be two separate factions. i also think that dyfed and gwynedd should be actual faction. i believe that the number of factions should be quite large to represent the range of petty kingdoms that existed during that period.
the whole map ought probably to be split into even more provinces. there could f.ex. be a system of region, representing the boundries of the petty kingdoms. one province being the regional capital and the others mostly fortifications and small villages. controlling the capital could give certain benefits, while controlling whole of the region even more.
the "kalmar-union" effect could be used to actually take control over a faction that is pressed into vassalage.

[Charles the Bold]

I really liked the ATW for Rome but for somereason it crashed my Barbarian Invasion.

Can't wait for the release of this mod. i could probably help with textures and whatnot. Contact me if you wan't me to.

I'm more than willing to help.