Htw Spin-off Mod - Ancient: TW

[cegorach]

Modding team is the last thing he really needs (from my experience) especially with all those sweet animations from HTW.

I suggest looking for research support - this can make the work really easy.

Overall I would say the mod can be ready in time of 10-14 days if done at quick pace.

Researching unit rosters are always the most time consuming part.
It is about 2-3 days to add all units in the game, 1-2 days to balance them, 2-3 to write proper descriptions, 1 day to create techtrees, 2 days to set startpos and about 3 days for bug hunting.
Personally I don't believe in balancing the campaign - I usually have thrown realistic number of soldiers for each faction and let the game resolve the rest.
Funny I got opinions that PMTW is so well balanced after this intentionally careless approach.

[macsen rufus]

in time of 10-14 days

I should point out I don't have days, only evenings.... I'm also not keen on time pressure, this is a recreation, I get all the time pressure I need from work (as well as the opportunity to do some research when the boss is out of the office ) A lot of the research is in the modding guides as well - I want to change some of the shields and weapons in the animations, eventually -- keep bronze weapons looking bronze etc. I'm still a bit rusty, but getting back up to speed. I'll also try and be a bit more organised in my approach this time (including more back ups OFF my hard-drive!)

The way it works is that the original install is XL, with units ported over from HTW - I tried the other way round (ie start from HTW and add the XL map) but it wouldn't start properly. It's going to be great fun separating out what needs to be put into an installer later on, but that's a problem for another day. Meanwhile, the best thing is if you have both HTW and XL, you can make a fresh copy of XL, and I should be able to give a list of directories/files that need to be copied in from HTW, and then make a small patch which includes the files that I've changed so far. But that probably won't be just yet...

@DTS - the BA scenario in HTW should work, though a bit buggy, if you use the "Total Patch" which is still up on 3D.

BTW Are you going to use native names - in Egyptian, Assyrian etc ?

As much as possible - but it's never going to be exact transliterating into the Latin alphabet (one advantage you have with more recent eras!) I'm also trying to get historical kings in place - ie Ramses II, Muwatillis, etc etc

More next week