Questions & Ideas

[Megas Methuselah]

We can hope there won't be a faction limit, but who knows?

[Fisherking]

How difficult is it to add factions?

Adding the units and perhaps techs? Any idea about that from working in M2?

If you are adding all that land it has to be populated. Just wondering about the peoples of the South West Pacific…also adding more tribes to North America is not a bad idea. South America would be mostly conquered, outwardly at least…some of the tribes there still are wild, like parts of New Guinea were until recently.

[pevergreen]

As for extending the map, I think I will be forced to fill it with unhistorical units to start with.

Going on M2TW, adding a faction is quite a bit of work, even if you use pre exisiting units (which will have incorrect colours and so on). It will help if CA releases the SDK.

It can be done, but will take some time, as the base I have within M2TW may not help, due to the new engine and such. Maybe it will be tons easier to add a unit.

[Sir Beane]

As for extending the map, I think I will be forced to fill it with unhistorical units to start with.

Going on M2TW, adding a faction is quite a bit of work, even if you use pre exisiting units (which will have incorrect colours and so on). It will help if CA releases the SDK.

It can be done, but will take some time, as the base I have within M2TW may not help, due to the new engine and such. Maybe it will be tons easier to add a unit.

In my opinion Africa will be hard to do accurately given the variety and number of the various local tribes. Asia will be even harder, probably impossible, given the various Asian cultures and how different their architecture and units would look.

On the plus side you can add in the whole of South America without being too incorrect. Just fill it with Spain and Portugal and it will be more or less accurate to history. And Australia is practically deserted at the time. The aboriginal tribes did very little fighting, so representing Australia as more or less deserted would not be too inaccurate.

There are quite a few places that were occupied by a faction already in game that can be added in without problems. A lot of island chains (especially tropical ones) come to mind.

[pevergreen]

And as for those areas, I think we could suffer them to be there, and populated with incorrect unit types.

Australia...<3.

And as this is Extended Vanilla Mod, I don't want to be changing too much. The player should be able to play vanilla, then see this as an extended version. Not too much new stuff. We can go off on crazy sub mods though.

[Sir Beane]

And as for those areas, I think we could suffer them to be there, and populated with incorrect unit types.

Australia...<3.

And as this is Extended Vanilla Mod, I don't want to be changing too much. The player should be able to play vanilla, then see this as an extended version. Not too much new stuff. We can go off on crazy sub mods though.

I heartily agree with the decision to keep the mod as vanilla is possible. Changing too much can alienate people who liked vanilla.

Making the mod as modular as possible using sub mods is a really good idea. Allowing players to mix and match exactly what features they want to install can help avoid people not downloading the mod because they dislike one feature.

You could divide the mod into certain sections. For instance:

Extended Map - Mod that adds in more land and more provinces

Rebalances - If the game is rebalanced then this could include those changes.

New Units - Adds in new units (if any get made of course)

Timeline Changes - Contains any change made to the timeline of the game, for instance the number of turns, turns taken to build thnigs etc.

This is just an example of course. The idea is that you could download one big mod with all the changes, or lots of little mods to allow you to pick the features you want. I suggest this because there are a number of larger mods I got for Med 2 that I liked some of but not all of. For example The Long Road, I loved the larger map and new traits and ancillaries, and the new units, but disliked the huge increase to building times (I do realise that increasing times was more or less the point of the mod ).

I'm not experienced in modding of course so I have no idea how easy or hard this would be to do. If you think I'm getting too carried away with suggestions then feel free to tell me to keep quiet.

[pevergreen]

Based off what I've done with the previous games, it shouldn't actually be too hard to do. In some cases, a few files would be different depending on how many submods you are running, but if I really went to town, I could probably write a program to do it all.