Age of Vikings and Fanatics: Total war

[Rodion Romanovich]

Ok, thanks, I've edited it now.

[Meneldil]

These maps might help you :



http://www.euratlas.com/big/big0800.htm#%20here

[Rodion Romanovich]

These maps might help you :

Yes, thanks a lot. I'll edit the province list above when I've had a closer look at the maps and decided how they would best be converted into R:TW engine provinces.

NEWS UPDATE May 11th 2005
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Campaign map screenshots postponed. Reasons: 1. Looks like there are more people interested in joining the mod team. This requires some time for planning and coordinating at this stage which takes time from the modding, but in the long term this will be returned by higher quality and faster progress once the planning and coordinating has been done. 2. Doing more detailed planning of provinces before starting will probably save time later, which means the mod as a whole will be complete faster. However this won't prevent me from working on the campaign map terrain, climates etc. so I'll spend some time fixing that while the planning and coordination goes on.

[Lasias Wenson]

The danish cities you listed weren't were important in the 9th century.

On Zealland, Copenhagen was a very small town. The city Roskilde (situated were you placed Copenhagen) was very important as it was the capital of Zealland before Denmark were united.

In North Jutland, Viborg was the most important town, it was another danish capital before Denmark was united. I think it actually was one of the danish fortifications.

Odense (my home town) was very small at this time and should not be a province capital, instead it should be Jelling (english) or Jellinge (danish) as it was the capital of the united Denmark. It was positioned were you placed Odense on your map (Odense really lies on the island in the middel of Denmark).

I don't think you should include an East Jutland as there was no really important town there.

[Rodion Romanovich]

@Lasias Wenson: Thanks for your help! I've now corrected the list according to the info in your post.

[The Apostate]

Will look at provinces and cities in detail over the weekend.

In the interim some more general comments about the starting date and factions.

Agree if the focus is to be the Vikings and it is not going to be just another medieval mod then 1000 is too late.

However for various reasons 843 is still too early and IMO 911 would be better:

1-3 Norway, Denmark and Sweden

Historically these were not unified kingdoms in 843 but collections of kingdoms and jarldoms.

The armies that ravaged NW Europe in the 860's and 870's were actually collections of raiding kings and jarls.

So obscure is this period that we're not even sure where in Scandinavia the most famous raiders came from and there are major questions about the identity of figures like Ivar the Boneless and Olaf the White (AP Smyth's Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles is the best book on this period but almost unobtainable).

Places like Dublin have yet to be founded or are just raiding camps.

By 911 the 3 Scandinavian kingdoms are a lot closer to unification and we have a lot more detail on rulers, towns etc as we are entering the main saga age.

While 843 has the attraction of being before the great Viking raids and invasions of the mid and late 9th century, in practice the AI will never send armies and fleets out of Scandinavia anyway (they will also have this problem with the Barbarian Invasions XP and it will be interesting to see if they can fix it and make the barbarians attack Rome instead of attacking the barbarian faction nearest to them).

In fact I hardly ever played the MTW VI campaign precisely because the AI vikings never attacked, while if you played as vikings even with the plunder rule you never had the money to establish survivable bridgeheads.

In 911 there are well established Viking colonies in Dublin, Iceland, Orkney, Man, York and the Danelaw (Normandy and Russia are separate issues) - of course it will be fudging it to give these to the Danes and Norwegians as they were mostly independent states but doing so will make the Viking factions much more aggressive and likely to attack the Scots, Irish and Saxons rather than each other.

4-7 Welsh, Scots, Irish and Saxons

Similarly while in 843 all of these peoples are divided into multiple kingdoms (Kenneth MacAlpin only attacked the Picts in 843 and never subdued Strathclyde) with a bit of fudging they are all much more united by 911.

Wessex in particular is just one of three Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in 843 but rules all of England that is not Danish in 911.

8 Normandy

There is no Normandy in 843 as the Normans are still all in Scandinavia.

If you want the Normans as a distinctive culture with christianity, knights, motte and bailey castles etc the earliest you can do that is 911 when Hrolf the Ganger is granted Normandy

9 Rus

The early history of the Rus is still a mystery but it is fairly clear that while there were individual bands of Varangians carving out principalities for themselves in 843, to have a unified Rus faction that is distinguished from the Vikings and otehr Slavs you again need to start in 911 - at which point we have Grand Princes based at Kiev who actually sign a treaty with the Byzantines that very year.

10-12 Magyars, Khazars, Bulgars

In 843 the Magyars, Khazars and Bulgars are all pagans but by 911 the Bulgars are Christian and the Khazars (or at least their rulers who are what matters at our level) are Jews.

In addition in 843 the Magyars are still subject to the Khazars and living on the steppes, whereas in 911 they have moved to Hungary and became a major military power.

13 Poles

in 843 we do not even knew if there was a Polish tribe and the dominant Slav power (and the only one significant enough to be a faction) is Moravia.

Although in 911 the Poles were still insignificant they were a lot closer to their actual emergence into history in the mid-tenth century.

14-16 Muslim States

If you want a mod that reflects the whole 843-1099 era then you really need three Muslim factions: Umayyads in Spain, Fatimids in North Africa and Abassids in Iraq.

Problem is in 843 there were no Fatimids - the family only established themeselves by seizing Tunis in 909.

Instead you have a vast Abassid Caliphate stretching from the Atlantic to the borders of China which the AI being what it is will raodily conquer the rest of the world and represent little challenge for a player.

However by 911 the Abassids have broken down into a number of more manageable states (most of which other than the Umayyads and Fatimids still paid lip service to the caliph in Baghdad).

If you choose 911 Spain to goes to the Umayyads, Tunisia and Algeria to the Fatimids and if you give the Abassid provinces in Egypt and Persia high unrest and small garrisons so they quickly revolt you should have playable Muslim factions.

17 Italians

843 presents the problem of Lotharingia.

As the map in Meneldil's post shows very clearly there was a big Frankish kingdom stretching from the North Sea to Rome under the Emperor Lothar I.

However this broke up in 855 on Lothars death into the kingdoms of Italy, Lorraine and Burgundy and within a generation Lorraine and Burgundy had further subdivided into Upper and Lower states.

Italy however was still a unified kingdom in 911 and remained so until Otto II crossed the Alps in 962 and refounded the Holy Roman Empire.

Thus while a separate Italian faction is wrong for 843 it is valid for 911.

There is some question about how far south they will go - in 843 and 911 the Byzantines held the southern coasts (and until 878 part of Sicily) and there were several independent Lombard principalities SE of Rome - these could either be rebels or part of Italy.

18 Byzantines

Byantium in 843 was a relatively weak state under an infant emperor (Michael III) who was the last of his dynasty.

It is also beset with rebellions by Iconcolast and aulician heretics who at several points control much of the empire.

By 911 we have a well-established and long-lasting dynasty (the Macedonians who lasted from 867 to 1056) in control and the empire is beginning its reconquests (but is not the superpower it was in say 1025 by which point it had abdsorbed Bulgaria, Syria, Armenia, the eastern Mediterranean Islands and South Italy).

Asturias

Dubious about including Asturias as a faction as they pretty much did nothing except cower in their little corner until the Umayyads disintegrated in the mid-eleventh century and even then split up into Castile, Leon, Aragon etc as they began the reconquista.

Consequently I would just make them powerful and aggressive rebels


19-20 France and Germany

in 843 these are both ruled by Carolingians but by 911 the German Carolingians have gone and were being replaced by the Saxon kings, while in France the last Carolingians are being displaced by the Capetians.

21 Rome

The papacy will always be a problem.

In the ninth and tenth centuries Rome was effectively a city state ruled by rapacious local nobles who put corrupt and frequently degenerate puppets on the Papal throne while real power was held by a figure known as the Consul or Senator (there was no longer a senate in Rome).

Even after Otto II took the city in 962 it still took several generations before the Cluniac reforms made the Papacy the authoritative institution we love or loathe today.

If you're stuck woth the Senate-Family relationship I suppose you can make the Julii France, Brutii Germany and Scipii Italy in which case they won't attack each other (which is not historically accurate) and the conquest of Rome is equivalent to the same event in RTW.


This adds up to 22 factions with the rebels so you'd still have to drop someone - my candidate would be the Welsh who were by far the weakest and most disunited of the peoples of the British isles and better left as rebels.

Of course one can hope that the new XP will remove the faction cap but nothing I've seen so far suggests that it will.

[The Apostate]

Several typos in last post - the aulicians mentioned under Byzantines should be Paulicians, others are fairly obvious.