Colosseum: Total War

[Comrade Alexeo]

I'd be willing to do some skinning and research work. If its possible to use GMAX for RTW modeling, I can do some of that too, as my 3DS Max trials have run out...


I don't particularly see how engaging this would be though. All you would do is select a gladiator unit, right-click to attack... and then... what, watch? Since RTW is stats and not skilled base it would just be He With Biggest Sword Wins essentially.



EDIT: I've tried doing some modeling in GMAX, and it seems to work... and then, suddenly, I find that I cannot switch around heads. Whenever I reload them or merge them, they almost literally explode and disappear from sight. :(

[Lucjan]

Historically certain gladiator types were intentionally paired against others to provide the most entertainment because of their natural difficulty of performance against one another. For example.

Secutores were paired against Ratiari because the ratiari had difficulty getting the net to hook a Secutors sloped helmet. Resulting in the secutors name, which means "chaser" in English, when the ratiari realised it couldn't tie his opponent down and ran like heck.
Thracians were paired against hoplomachus or samnites because their speed gave them an advantage over the weightyness of their opponents bulk in armor.
There are only (to my knowledge) 5 documented images of a scissores gladiator in existance, all of them in the east, and it is assumed they would be fielded against a medium opponent like a mirmillo, who would have trouble dealing with the scissores hook.

I could continue but the point is, that gladiator games really were just as tactically involved as full fledged battles between opposing armies, it was a matter of strategic application between the two opponents.

I would presume to recreate this by using some of romes features like "strong against armor" "strong against cavalry", etc.

For example, the computer takes 2 units of mirmillo and a secutor into the pits, the player chooses ratiaris, samnites, and a velites. The samnites, being heavily armored, could hold the two mirmillo while the ratiari skirmish with the secutor, the velites using their javelins to take out the more lightly armored secutor chasing around the ratiari, freeing up both the velites and ratiari to help their samnite allies against the medium mirmillo units.

[Woad Warrior]

Well, all the different gladiator units would have unique strengths and weaknesses, so there would be some tactics involved.

It would be cool if you could edit cities to appear as a colosseum so the units could fight inside it.

[Lucjan]

We know it's possible to alter buildings...so if buildings could be changed to appear as columns and walls, which were most certainly known to have been erected inside the colusseum pits to make fights more interesting sometimes, we could definately have a really interesting battle map.

[Crusader Invasion]

How are you going to make 1 man units?

[Lucjan]

Unforetunatly, as I don't believe it is possible to make one man units, some minor concessions will have to be made. Using the smallest of the unit sizes available, which would be for vanilla arcani, and using the small setting in the video section of the options, the units would be small enough to be considered a gladiator stable. So in selecting four units, you would, in essence, be taking four, seperate, eight man stables, into the colosseum.

In my opinion, a unit of 8 is more than sufficient to make it small enough to represent a large gladiatoral game without having to sacrifice gameplay.

The largest battles possible in this way would include twenty stables on both sides, thats 320 men total...the size of a regular campaign battle between two armies each with only 2 units.

[snevets]

Hmm no the smallest unit size I've been able to work is 4, where its only two on small settings. That would be fully realistic, since gladiators often fought in teams.

You realize you could make this a fully interactive adventure type game- you could have a campaign map where you complete against other schools- and when you win in an arena you've bested that city's gladiators and it becomes 'your turf' to recruit local gladiators and profit from local games (so winning in an arena replaces city conquest in RTW). You could start out with just a small 'camp' which would amount to your gladiator training school.

You talked about animals- you could have the rebel faction be mother nature, so that your gladiators traveling around the countryside would have to fight animals on the way.

I don't agree with what was said about it being uninteresting, potentially it could be very cool, with alot of work.

[Seasoned Alcoholic]

Yeah this is an interesting concept. You'd probably need to build a new provincial campaign map (or modify the Prologue / Sons Of Mars map), focusing on the Italian penninsular.

For individual gladiator units, you have numerous approaches. You could strip all vanilla units from existing faction rosters, and put individual gladiator units under each vanilla faction. Obviously you could then rename the vanilla factions to be a specific type of gladiator.

Alternatively, as snevets has suggested, you could use the vanilla factions as gladiator training schools who compete against each other. Each school could be restricted to specific gladiator types.

I'm not sure how you'd go about sorting out the actual combat environment. Perhaps siege battles (IE the settlement) needs to be replaced exclusively by a scaled-up colosseum venue.

You also need to think about the linkages between the campaign map and the battlefield, such how would specific types of gladiators be able to fight each other at an arranged location. Perhaps diplomats can be used as messengers to offer gladiatorial combat between rival schools? Unless of course as mentioned, you focus exclusively on custom battles, as this will allow you to skip the pre-amble on the campaign map.

Anyways, an interesting concept