not enough introduction; too many stickies

[Epistolary Richard]

We have a parade? I'm there!

Seriously though, in part he has a point and in part it's the nature of the beast. As these are modding forums they can properly expect a certain level of sophistication and discernment in their patrons and not have to lead people by the nose to the same extent as forums such as the Entrance Hall.

As for spreading the news of mods to other users: if a mod team wants to attract non-modders to use their mod then they should post an announcement in the single player or the multiplayer forums - as they are their target audience. Modders post on these forums to talk about mods in development, to ask and answer modding questions and to publicise anything that should be known to the modding community.

As to a dedicated research forum: the General forum _is_ essentially the research forum, it's where people go to ask questions and to post new discoveries. People who want to get into modding should be heading over to the Guides forum where the the tutorials provide a far better introduction to modding than could be provided here.

As a research forum, the general forum is necessarily a bit imposing. Modding RTW is a huge subject and there is far more important knowledge here than in other forums. That knowledge, because of the diversity of the subject, can be highly fragmented. Vital information for graphics, modelling, coding, scripting and editing can be quite complex and utterly irrelevant for people not working in those areas.

That all being said.... there are ways that the current set-up can be closer aligned to the forum's objectives:

1) The "General" forum, while all-encompassing is possibly not the most helpful title. If it was called the "Modding Questions" forum or "Modding Research" of "Modding Questions & Research" then it might lead to fewer misdirected threads.

2) The "Welcome to the General Forum" thread looks like it was intended to be an initial hello thread when the forum was first started and it doesn't really contain any useful information that isn't linked more visibly elsewhere. The top post there should be rewritten to more use to first time visitors or preferably be unstuck and a new stickied thread take its place which would be clear of the reply trail.

Doesn't have to be anything big, just something like:
-------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to the General forum: this forum was created as a place to ask and answer questions about modifying the game of Rome: Total War and as somwhere you can post and read the latest discoveries and modding breakthroughs about how the game works.

If you've come here in search of information about a specific mod, you may like to check out our Forge sub-forum for mods in development or the Hosted Mods area for major modification projects by community members.

If you'd like to learn how to modify your game then check out the tutorials and walk-throughs in the Guides, Tutorials & Tools sub-forum.

If you're looking for some specific modding information then you might find what you're after in one of our Important Modding Information threads. see below for more on this

etc. etc.
-------------------------------------------------------


3) There are quite a few stickies; some of these are active research topics and are rightfully there, others have fallen dormant because the information has been posted and questions have been answered. Ideally we'd go through the dormant ones and prune out the vital information to make it more obvious. However that wouldn't reduce the number of them as - because they cover such diverse areas - each one would probably need its own identifying thread, plus it's not always obvious what's the important info and what's not.

Instead, what we could do is have something similar to therother's Forum Index for the Colosseum. You have one thread called Important Modding Information Threads (or the Look Here First thread or, as therother suggested, Don't Look Here thread) and that would contain a link to the thread and a brief description of the important information contained in there (after all sometimes the title isn't that obvious). The dormant stickies can then be unstuck and allowed to drift down the forum.

So, if we say a dormant thread is one that hasn't been posted in the last month it might look something like this:

-------------------------------------------------------
Complex conditionals for recruiting and building
Contains detail on additional conditionals for specifying the recruitment capabilities of buildings in export_descr_buildings namely 'or' and 'not'.

A quick question from a modding newbie...
Contains detail on modifying bonuses provided by buildings in export_descr_buildings and why farms can't be made a recruitment conditional for units

Console commands & command line options for modders?
I can't claim to understand this but it looks really important.

Modding suggestions for the next patch
Contains requests for additional modding support to be included in the next RTW patch. Which is out now.

Post your "must-know" modding questions here!
This thread is now closed. It contains answers from CA staffer JeromeGrasdyke to modding questions posed by the community.

Uploader for RTW files.
Contains an upload script for RTW files.
-------------------------------------------------------

BTW the link for Rome Total Realism is, unsurprisingly enough, www.rometotalrealism.com
It can be easily found by typing "Rome Total Realism" into a website called Google, which is a popular search engine.