Hello everybody,
I know you haven't heard a lot from us during the last few months, and probably some of you already suspected that the mod is dead. Truth be told, the mod indeed lost most of the team, leaving us down to a group of 5 to 10 members, depending on how you count (which activity level you set as a threshold for membership).
Because of this lack of members (members includes researchers), we decided to narrow our focus somewhat before tackling the whole of Europe. The advantage of covering a smaller area is mainly that we won't need to do as much research, we will have a smaller map, and we won't have to do as much work on units, etc.
Our main hope with this to get some modders excited about the project and join our team. If that fails, we will probably not be able to finish the large scale Europe map.
Anyways, after some internal debate, we cast a vote with the result of:



The starting date will be 1017 when Rainulf Drengot (later to become the Count of Aversa) and his four brothers arrived in Monte Gargano after being exiled from Normandy, thus the starting point of the Norman adventures in Southern Italy.
Our faction list isn't finalised and will be polished and refined quite a bit after we did some more research and maybe even some balance testing.
If you know a bit about the period, quite a few of our factions will be fairly obvious, but you may be in for a few surprises.
We will try to get more info out to you guys than before, both to get comments on it and to make you interested in our mod. Expect some previews within the next few weeks (as for what we will preview, I will only say that a lot of them will be feature previews from me)
I know this doesn't sound like too much, but I'm confident that we'll be able to get the ball rolling now (if need be I'll do most of the actual modding myself, but I still hope to find a few more modders to help ).
We're also working together with Re Berengario I (the creator of the Anno Domini mod) who is quite the expert on Italian history and a good modder in addition, so some of the features you'll see there will be in MAII and vice-versa. Together with him, we'll try to make the strategy layer of the game much more challenging and, most importantly, push the economic part of the game - formerly building up your provinces - beyond anything you've seen from a M2 mod so far.
You'll see more about that in the feature previews.
I can't show you too much yet, but as a little appetizer here are some screenshots from our WIP map (factions not included yet):



That's it from me for now. If you have questions, our competent team will try to answer them as well as possible.

So long
alpaca