WarMap v1.0: Released

[GrimSta]

Jesus, your map is huge!!!! i cant wait to try it out!

[BDH]

How the hell did you get a regions file that had 510 pixels east west!?! All the hardcoded i've seen says that it can't be great than 500 pixles!?! Thats tremednous!

[IceTorque]

Ciaran, Thanks for your interest, and yes feedback after actually playing the mod would be much appreciated.

Gisela and GrimSta, I hope you like it.

BDH, It is possible to make it even larger, but only by reducing the water area and increasing the land mass. but then of course it no longer resembles a map of europe.

[Ciaran]

All right, I can hardly call it extensive testing, but nevertheless, I thought I´d bother you with some comments.
First of, your campaign map is simply amazing, the "land bridges" hopefully will allow the AI to cross water after all. That´s one very clever idea. You´ve got my deepest respect, so I hope you´ll forgive me if some of my following coments may seem like a rant to you - they are not, at least, that´s not my intention.
One issue, and the most prominent one, is that currently (v.1.0 of your mod, mind you, I´ve just now seen you updated it) the game crashes on the faction selection when clicking the icon of a faction other than the roman ones, Germania, Gaul and Britons.
Starting with the Julii, I noticed I had Gothic cavalry as my only cavalry choice Why´s that? I mean, they´re not bad, but it´s kind of confusing.
Dito the very limited unit choice, archers, early legionairs and cavalry. I´ll assume you´ll use the Marius reform to make the later legionary cohorts available?
The cities are very much developed, too, and I don´t suppose squalor or happieness will ever be an issue in your mod, considering the boni the buildings give. So, anyone who´s a fan of the building part, especially the "starting from scratch" part of the vanilla game, might be disappointed - you start out with a pretty well developed little empire. Then again, it´s called Warmap, not buildingmap.
Cities and recruitment, that´s something I´ve got to mention, too. I can see why it makes sense to train diplomats only in the capital, but why can´t you get spies everywhere - or at least in the starting cities? And what about assassins?
Last but not least, the battles. I´ve noticed you went to great length to change all the unit stats, but aren´t they a bit high? Especially the morale, and maybe the archery range (it´s huge, or so at least it felt to me) is an issue there, the units will hardly ever rout and most of the time fight to death instead.

All right, that should do it for now. I can only repeat myself, don´t take my comments as an insult of your great work, they´re just my personal opinion, and there we might differ.

By the way, what´s new in v.1.1 and what´s the Vanilla WarMap version(the link to that doesn´t work) ?

[IceTorque]

Ciaran, First let me thank you for your detailed feedback.

Now I'll try to explain my reasoning for the changes.

The game starts post marion (as far as unit selection goes anyways)
All men were created equal and the aim of the unit stats was to:
Allow for more realistic advantages of moral, experience and terrain only and NOT level 2 unit can beat level 1 unit which is so gamey and creates a fundamental gameplay flaw that is apparent in all TW games.

e.g. I strive to build armies composed entirely of elite units, but when i do i am rarely if ever challenged by an AI army of equal quality. I concede STW was'nt too bad but MTW and RTW are. Hence the need to create a more level playing field with what i think are more realistic advantages and my claim of "The most consistently challenging campaigns and battles".

Brutii use the urbans, julli have cohorts i, scipii have cohorts ii, senate has praetorians. This was to keep the roman armies uniform.
Barbarians and most other factions have a wider variety to achieve the exact opposite.

Gothic cav only at the start but when you conquer rome you can recruit praetorian cav and praetorian cohorts but only in Rome of course.
As you will find in all other capitols you will be able to recruit a special unit.
Which represents your regional/mercenary troops. Also as your empire grows so does your troop diversity.
But the player and AI's powerbase is always in their respective homeland.

Normal non-retrainable mercs were deleted to keep the AI's armies consistent in quality and numbers.

Cities starting off well developed was necessary to stop the AI from depleting their populations by training rubbish units, and basically going bankrupt and not advancing up the tech tree.
Also to speed up the game opening and allow for the start to be relatively easy and get harder as the game develops.
The exact opposite to vanilla.

Squalor i never did like it, and i wanted the AI to direct their attention at me or expanding their empire not fighting endless uprisings.

Diplomats, assasins, spies were restricted to being recruited from capitols only in an effort to reduce their numbers and to reduce micro-management by countering them all.
I was playing a version with none of the above and the feeling of a huge burden being lifted was tremendous allowing me to concentrate on the core gameplay attraction of TW. which is of course the battles.
But i concede they are a necessary evil.

I concede the moral is a bit high and units rarely rout but again i thought this preferable to time wasting battles of chasing routers. Also to have consistency in the quality of battles for more of a challenge.

Archery range again to me looking at the scale of the battle maps seems more realistic. I once shot an arrow out of an ordinary looking bow which travelled at least 300 metres. and i was a total n00b at it.

v1.1 just makes all factions playable as was intended.
Vanilla-WarMap is just the map with all vanilla units/stats/buildings etc.
It has been submitted to TWC downloads section and should be available soon.
Aso my first post has been updated with a new link.

I hope this helps in explaining the method to my madness.

[Ciaran]

Thanks for clearing that up, I´ll download v.1.1 and the vanilla map. Your approach is good if you´re going for the fighting part, but occassionally I like some empire-management, too. Great work, anyhow

[Boudicca]

I do think that this map has great potential to be used mod wise. It is simply great work by IceTorqe and so absoultuely delighfully huge....

[BDH]

BDH, It is possible to make it even larger, but only by reducing the water area and increasing the land mass. but then of course it no longer resembles a map of europe.

Yes, well i have tried doing that, but I usually do tests with no water. Its all very interesting. I will just do some more tests