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I think it's related to "extra skills" -- a high-tier soldier with just combat skills is not as expensive as a lower-tier one with Trade and Pathfinding, in my experience. Play around with this...

Good to see reasonably recent activity here.

Subotai, I've noticed a significant issue with the feminine leather jerkin -- it's a little too short of a torso, leading to the lower part of the neck-and-head object "popping" out in a very jarring manner. I can send a screenshot of this problem if you like...

Also, do you have any plans for more "semi-realistic" armors? I need a few more placeholders. Thanks again for letting me use this for ASLOW, though...

octoburn 说:

Hræfn 说:

Didn't it take Chris thirty years to put together? Crazy amount of time.

点击展开...

he's done other things in that time as well... Unfinished Tales, the whole HoME series, Letters, etc.

点击展开...

Yeah, I'm being a little sarcastic. The time involved was incredible -- I don't mean to slight CRT or the Tolkien Estate in general, I just wish we had more from the Elder Days...

By the way, does anyone know whether anything came of the 'Leaguer of Maedhros' mod, that was off to such a promising start a while ago?

Really superb. Why can't this sort of thing come along more often?

And Morgoth's speaking part was great -- extremely uncanny, not by the author's choice but just because of who's there. That scene alone was worth the price of admission...

I also found it interesting to see some of the things that made it into the final version. I could've sworn that Feanorian lamps had been cut since the Book of Lost Tales, and I was really surprised to see Nellas -- she was cut in the Silmarillion version, wasn't she? I'm pretty sure she was also unique to the BoLT -- an immortal fourteen-year-old Luthien fangirl (with a line like "Lord, I was sitting in a tree," and said to Thingol at that; that was a hilarious scene) feels out of place in any setting in which Sauron isn't a talking cat...

Also, did anyone notice how many Elf-maidens fall in love with Turin and get an inadvertent cold shoulder? Well, correction, it's just two, but it feels like they're popping up out of the woodwork every time the reader turns his back...

(I was also unnerved by how much of the text I recognized -- I begin to wonder whether I might have read Unfinished Tales a time or two too often...)

I'll go ahead and jump in at the very tail end of the discussion without bothering to read the previous posts, but with a few thoughts.

Colt is right, .808 is an enormous hurdle to jump in terms of porting. Luckily most of my work was in module_triggers and module_scripts, which could be carried over unchanged, but the few new scenes I'd created, and the need to start fiddling with items, missions, game menus, slowed me down enormously. (I also noticed that now that I've done it the slow way and released the source, Armagan's extended module_headers to make working with registers almost painless. Well, thanks. It will make life easier for me in the future, though -- and much better for anyone else who comes along with ASLOW-type ambitions. Hint, hint.)

A mod like TLD... if they'd been working nonstop from the release of .808 until now, they probably still wouldn't be done yet. I doubt whether we'll see that one released in .808 at all, and ditto for many of the others.

Not mine, though! I hope to have a new version coming out soon (and, of course, I'm making a point of posting up a storm about it in advance, so that I'll be motivated to work for fear of the lynch mobs ) -- and my porting over to .808 was done in great haste, to get a 'first-mover advantage' over the legendary mods which I had thought were going to be arriving soon. I wish they had -- the mods are not in competition with each other in any meaningful sense, and popularity for one means more of an audience for all. (More money for Armagan, too, which is absolutely vital.) As it is, I've been badly distracted by work (Oh, to be back in the position of looking for a job and developing ASLOW, as I was last spring and summer!), and yet it seems like I've not missed very much...

Except for Winter's work. I hope the release of Craftmod's source will inspire further development elsewhere... but one way or the other, it does seem like a lot of modders have lost interest or had other obligations appear at about the same time. Unfortunately including me, although I don't intend to give up...

Thank goodness, there's not too much that's been posted here.

Winter sent me a stern reminder -- an embarassingly long time ago, too -- that I needed to close this topic, as I now had a subforum on MBX. Winter, I sincerely apologize for this mistake, and particularly for taking so long to get this taken care of, but, with this, the topic's locked.

As Cirdan noted, I will be resolving the siege problem -- I hope -- shortly. Please raise any further questions on this over on MBX -- at http://mbx.streetofeyes.com/index.php/board,47.0.html.

Rover109,

Thanks a lot for your suggestions. I'll have to experiment with Elite Galine Infantrymen -- they're only tier 4 (level 20) as opposed to the Foo Paladins' level 25, but I've found that the ligher-armored upper-tier Soltalline fighters -- Swordsmen etc. -- can do pretty well against top-level units (does anyone else have any Aimarine Ranger Party horror stories to share? ), and the Galines get glaives -- and shields...

Is Delmarinen *still* not fixed? I'll have to check it again -- I could've sworn I'd fixed it... ... Oh, wait. I have fixed it -- but only in the current "development track," not in a released version. I hope the game's still playable...

As for city garrisons -- it sounds like with that aspect, it might not still be playable! Eleven hundred defenders would be bad... I may do a bugfix version tonight before releasing anything further. That's crippling...

Thanks a lot for your weaponry advice (and, Tuckles, for your refutation of his weaponry advice ) -- it's concrete things like this that I need most. Slow down lances, speed up bows, increase ammunition (at least for the player -- I may end up doing the opposite of the NPC_horse_javelin of good old Magnificent Seven) -- though I think I might want to do some more play-testing before doing something that'll strengthen NPC as well as PC horse archers. In my own limited experience, the Ajarine Knight super-elites (Ajarine Knight and Chanurin Mujiahidin) are death on four legs and heavy barding -- they can ride over anything they can't shoot down, and making them stronger might get ugly...

Does anyone have further thoughts on this? Tuckles, your counter-argument's a strong one; I think I want more evidence...

Come to think of it...

OK! Poll on archery now posted over on ASLOW-MBX, here. Fire away!

You're right about ancient weapons -- saved for the future if that. If it seems appropriate by the time development reaches that point, I'll try to do sidequests for finding them -- which will be of the "raid treasury" or "kill famous warrior" variety rather than the "explore cave" one...

I like your idea of going for reach rather than speed with cruciform and bastard swords; I'll have to do that. Shortswords are lousy, but I don't intend them to be usable in the main game; they'll be mostly for defending in ambushes -- attacks in taverns, assassination attempts, that sort of thing.

Again, thanks a lot.

Tuckles,

I agree with your complaint about parallel forums. My joining there is to some extent a courtesy to Winter, who invited me to set up an MBX subforum -- besides how he's been indispensible in the "Modmakers' Q&A" thread. I'll keep an eye on this thread, though, and I'll certainly still respond to people here.

Winter had mentioned that there'd been a problem -- now fixed -- with posting in the ASLOW subforum; can you post there now?

thelast,

The drunken hedonist approach will generally get you better attributes but extremely few skills. I'm not sure if that's a better or worse bargain, actually...

I'll have to think about "taking back moves" in chargen. It wouldn't be too hard to do -- yeah, I'll do that.

I'll have to play Extended Gameplay. I never really did, but it sounds like a lot of good ideas... (For what it's worth, though, I'm going to try to avoid traditional "progression" in ASLOW as far as possible. The game will focus on its story and the implications of that; many games go too far in the direction of progressions of power -- complete with tidy instances of Miyamoto's Law -- and I'm interested in a counterbalance. Note that I don't have Extended Gameplay, or anything related to M&B, in mind when I talk about that problem...)

dagorkan, Leprechaun,

Whatever did happen to Lombard Leagues, anyways? I seem to remember that they and Age of Ash have their own fora now, such that we don't hear about them very much -- but with the amount of time that's passed already, I'm guessing we're probably not going to see an LL release. A real shame, that -- it'd be a pretty interesting sort of mod...

First off, everyone: A Shield Lying on the Water now has its own sub-board on MBX, here. Please make further replies there, if you don't mind; I'll keep my eye on this thread for a while, but I hope to move conversation over to a less cramped venue.

doorknobdeity,

I really like the idea of multiple maps depending on equipment -- I'll have to remember the general notion -- but what I was thinking of was on a larger scale, not a question of how to handle the storming of cities but how to implement sieges in general -- something like what Winter's doing with Storymod chapter 2.

I've figured out how to do that, though, and I'll be starting work on it this evening; I don't want to give away more of the surprise than I already have, so I hope you'll excuse my not going into more detail. Armagan's approach of giving away as little information as possible in advance has its merits...

Tuckles and Merentha,

I'm pretty much certain that one could implement, at the very least, the 'destructable walls' half of knocking a wall down with a siege engine. As to the 'siege engine' half, I think that the finagling of magic in Storymod and Schattenlaender could be adapted into siege engines, though I'm not so sure about armor...

And certainly the time issue is a large one -- unless we're talking about the 15th century, which we're not.

I've had a few interesting experiences with Honseli spearmen myself, Tuckles. I know what you mean. Armagan, if you're listening: A bit of a self-preservation instinct in the next version wouldn't hurt. ... (That, or I forgot to remove tf_kamikaze...)

Damien, I had let Cirdan's swipe against Godfrey slide, since the main subject at the moment was Napoleon, but I agree quite strongly. Speaking of the Crusades as a Western attempt to destroy the East not only fails to grasp the Crusaders' objectives, but also forgets that the Arabs did not start history in control of everywhere from Anatolia to India to central Spain. Any discussion of Islam (here using "Islam" to mean its region, in the sense of "Christendom" for Europe) has to remember that the Arabs got to where they were by force of arms -- which Said definitely tried to ignore. (Of course, there's also the problem that all parties involved seem to read "force of arms" and hear "forcible conversions." That's one thing the Muslims didn't do, or at least didn't have a pattern of doing (there are almost certainly a few cases I haven't heard about, but remember the Jews and the Idumeans) -- they didn't make life easy for conquored People of the Book, and I don't want to get into the subject of converting away from Islam, but the conversions to the religion were primarily products of belief and/or desire for advantage, rather than force.)

(Edited: Here I thought I wasn't being snarky. Whoops... Please take the paragraph at its new face value, everyone. Sorry...)

However, I want to ask you, Cirdan, and anyone else interested to continue this conversation on MBX, not here -- I'll be creating an "ASLOW and Orientalism" thread very shortly.

I like your siege ideas, too -- and I'm beginning to wonder whether I shouldn't give the player the capacity to construct siege engines during a siege. I had envisioned sieges as being a matter of skirmishing and waiting, but this could be a welcome enhancement to storming...

Does anyone know where I might find siege-engine models, though?

Merentha, it will most certainly be possible for other parties to join sieges -- rest assured on that point. I hope.

Rover109:

The intra-town battles of 1066 are an inspiration to us all. I'd be implementing a lot more features like theirs if only I were better at (and/or had people who could help with) level design...

Your siege ideas -- everyone's on the thread -- are a little finer-grained than I had in mind, but welcome; I can tell that this is an area people give a lot of thought to.

I'm glad you're getting into the spirit of the game's units. Next version's big money sink is going to be buying war parties directly -- you'll pay the same amount as a city would -- but money isn't meant to be an object at the player scale (nor much of one at the player's-party level).

The importance of horse archers in the game has actually taken me by surprise -- I hadn't really known what to expect with the heavy cataphract-types, but they're pretty danged powerful. Do you think it'd be worthwhile to tone down the power level of some of the game's weapons, though? I'm afraid the interminable upward progression may have left them a bit unbalanced... though it does ensure that battles end quickly.

I had forgotten about TLD-style "behavior orders" -- very good idea. I don't make any guarantees about "go to city X" next time (though it wouldn't be too hard to do...), but I'll have to get the rest of them running. (Free for the player, too: one more perk of being royalty. )

Parties do have to pay for their troops, and you can 'pin down' an enemy pretty effectively by taking out their tax collectors and foragers. Salaries for troops are probably (though I haven't done the math on it yet) not a very big part of a city's expenditures -- don't expect to see the garrison weaken too quickly -- but if you're assaulting their economy, you at least won't see any Defensive Armies coming up.

However, armies are "fire and forget" -- defeating an enemy army doesn't weaken the city that bought it, unlike in TLD.

doorknobdeity:

(About the mod confusion Whoops indeed. I know the feeling, though...

I think you're right, catapults giving you a map with nobody defending the walls would be reasonably apt. Psychologically inappropriate, most likely (I'm getting images of Honseli spearmen running after a flying rock trying to stab it ), but since destructable props don't have weight once destroyed...

Tuckles, I'll have to check whether Holy War's out for .808. I wouldn't put it past myself to miss it...

Defense advantage, yeah. (I feel like I should acknowledge this statement, but I don't know what to say about it...)

So you did mean that Machiavelli! All right!

You've got quite the strategy for it, too. That sounds like a pretty good way to wipe out one's rivals about as conclusively as possible... I'll have to hunt down a copy of the game again and try it.

ASLOW is the mod I'm developing for M&B -- check the signature. It might indeed be worth a glance -- it's not aimed in the same direction, but it's not completely removed from it...

I think I agree with your appraisal of Mobygames. I use them, and have seen them used, more like IMDB for video games than anything -- the game-sales aspect is indeed a little silly. I agree, development companies need to do a better job with their back-catalogues -- releasing things as free or as compilation disks, either way. The trouble is that the accumulated horse-sense of the whole world of business warns them that giving something away for nothing is generally bad, but sales for compilation disks and re-releases don't tend to do all that well -- if Squaresoft can't make money doing it (FF Anthologies flopped, to put it politely), nobody can. And it's no large loss to them if the rest of the world is denied knowledge of their games and the only people who make money off them are Amazon resellers...

Not that I think piracy is the solution, though -- it'd be best if these companies would see reason one way or another. If nothing else, online distribution; the Wii's Virtual Console is a step in the right direction, though -- being a first step, after all -- it's likelier than not to be a little overpriced and under-usable...

On-topic ASLOW players, you have my apologies in advance. Please continue to feel free to post...

Cirdan, glad to see you wrote back. (We may want to take this to e-mail, though -- not that I want it to stop.)

On Said and Napoleon: The question is whether Napoleon even could have understood Egypt, in the sense that Said wanted him to. Napoleon could be said to have been -- no, I should say was -- dismissing Egyptian reports of Egyptian history, but I think it was in the the Enlightenment spirit, the desire for empirical verification of knowledge, rather than in an imperialist spirit. But by this point I'm starting to force you into becoming a proxy for Said, and I've got us debating the inner thoughts of a person two hundred years dead -- I don't think we're going to get anywhere except angry. I appreciate your clarification on Said, though.

On the Soviets and threats to the West: Well... there was exactly one political force referred to as "Soviets" that was a threat to the United States and western Europe and that was wrecked by a military adventure in Afganistan, and it wasn't popular assemblies. I don't like using "Russians" for the Soviet Union (call it the ghost of Solzhenitzyn), and to speak of the Soviet Union as "the Communists" is like calling Henry VIII's England "the Protestants", so I used "Soviets" in this context. Do you have any suggestion for a better word to use for them?

As to the position of the Soviets in history and the present day, I agree that their conduct in the Third World was much better than that of the United States, but I think that their conduct among their own people kind of makes up for it (the reverse being the case with the United States) -- as suggested above, I have read Solzhenitzyn. The problem with Russia today is that the Soviet Union collapsed but the KGB kind of didn't (Putin being the most obvious example) -- we might say that the only leader worse than Stalin is Stalin pretending to be a democratic leader... (Chechnya, anyone? Of course, it might be just a case of old habits dying hard...)

As far as Vietnam, I think you might be interested in some of what James Webb has to say about the issue -- the perspective of an American who took the American intervention seriously, you might say. Articles here. Of course, he's not exactly closely related to our conversation, but he's always an interesting tangent...

What are your thoughts on China, though -- out of curiosity more than anything? From what I know of the conflict, the choice between Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi if we want to be pedantic) and Mao Tse-tung/Zedong was pretty much the choice between a budget Mussolini and a budget... Lenin, I guess. I'd favor Chiang, if nothing else then because it was well past time for the xia to defeat the populists in the civil war that China's been fighting on and off since the Chu-Han Contention, but I have this odd feeling that you'd probably favor the other side...

(Wait a second -- glancing at Wikipedia -- where in heck did we get the name "Kai-shek"? ... Oh, stylename. I'll have to look up its Wade-Giles form sometime, so as to stop embarassing myself by using his name's Cantonese form...)

kuenta666temporal,

Are you really thinking of this game, good old Merchant Prince itself!? If so, I don't think it would fit very well with M&B, but still, there's another Merchant Prince player on the M&B forums! We've got to celebrate -- get a drink, burn down a rival's villa, bribe a few cardinals, something...

(Note to everyone else: Yes, this is the game where you bribe cardinals. Best investment in the game...)

(I could toot my own horn here, too, except that ASLOW doesn't currently work that well this way -- kind of lacks super-money-sinks for the late game... ... Yeah, that's the ticket. Won't next version. )

thelast,

It makes my day to know that I'm a partial answer to your complaints. Don't worry, more varied stuff is certainly coming. I'm not entirely happy with the narrow range of armaments wielded in the mod as it stands; I'm going to try to come up with more weapon and combat-style concepts, and, of course, they'll see implementation once I've thought them up. I'll have to play Extended Gameplay, and see what I can steal -- uh, borrow...

Additionally, further story and political stuff is most definitely in the pipeline. Next release is going to be the one in which sieges now work (ever play Rise of the Phoenix?), and I'm planning on much, much more going on with NPCs, various 'side-plots' and so on, and, of course, a story. (I do not pick my avatars without reason. )

As far as the character choices -- I did that mostly intentionally. Many of the bonuses are pretty subtle, deliberately so; if you must know what they do, experiment... or perhaps I'll include spoilers in the manual. Yes, that sounds like a good course of action...

The Xeno,

Good idea regarding money reservation -- I hadn't thought of that angle at all. I'll do that. I had liked the idea of "newly-encountered" cities being good for a substantial cash bonus, but, well, I hadn't quite thought the idea through yet...

I'll look into the feminine extravagant armor bug. I'm noticing it too, now that you're starting to talk about it -- I *think* I know what two places are likeliest to be harboring such a problem...

Let's see. Both are marked as merchandise, all right -- I'm guessing the problem is item rarities. Probably forgot to map feminine extravagant armor's rarity onto a cultural influence... (Speaking of which, though, I think I'm making some of these rarities a little less painful next version, too. I'm going into towns and seeing nothing but culture-free sumpter horses for sale...)

(And regarding your last observation: You're the one leading them. You should be using a slightly better mix of forces, and you're not going to accomplish anything beyond getting your people slaughtered no matter what tier-one unit you try to use against paladins. That said, I see your point. )

TheMango55,

The cities are a huge work-in-progress right now -- or rather, a "work-not-yet-in-progress". I'll have to at least give them more rational placement, like you suggest; sorry...

I'll add that confirmation to declaring war. Usability isn't my strong suit yet; I'll have to remember that design principle ("always get a confirmation from the user before doing something irrevocable and/or dangerous") for the future...


One other thing, everyone: I've been looking at the latest version's "in-engine" battle simulations, and all I can say is that I am extremely grateful to Armagan -- both for writing this stuff and for having it out already. The siege system is not going to be very difficult at all now, and will be significantly more elegant, and all-around better, than I'd initially envisioned...


I have also discovered that cities were kind of not paying for their troops, as some of you may have suspected by comparing the salary _you'd_ be paying thirty Ajarine Generals with the salary that the _cities_ must have been paying. I shall explore the implications of this breathtaking change presently. (To be exact, everything was using slot_town_curr_garrison_wages, except that the payment routine -- and dialogue talking about salaries, which thankfully tipped me off -- used slot_town_garrison_wages with no _curr_. Rebalance coming soon -- and hopefully this'll make slightly more reasonable garrisons. No more 200-man Ayrums...)

Eh... yeah. ASLOW's not buggy. No, not at all.

Bloomoon:

... Oh, crap. I missed one.

(To be fixed next iteration. Somehow or another, the transition over to the new terrain codes has not gone particularly cleanly... I'll have to check the other cities, too.)

bcboy:

Thanks for pointing that out. The current "Stone Age" implementation of invasion forces does make that a very real possibility... If I do an interim release before the next formal one (which I probably will, see above), I'll be sure to patch that; either way, look for a much better invasion system next version, which, for one thing, won't have that sort of issue. My apologies...

I'm glad I'm not (or rather, my friend's not, the Fremen didn't bother me quite as much ) the only one interested that way...

You know, if you're up to modelling no less, you should be comfortably able to pick up coding. If you have any CS background, or even any casual-programming background, at all, M&Bscript is really not difficult to learn -- with enough time, that is. I gather that you may not have that...

One way or the other, though, this is what i was thinking of when I spoke of mods that could potentially attract developers. I don't want to commit myself too far, but I repeat my offer of coding and design support; and if nothing else, try just releasing a "Dune Items Pack," and let it kick around the Repository until someone decides to take you up on the offer.

Which aesthetic 'vision' of Dune are you thinking of, though? Neither of the filmed versions was particularly good in art direction (any more than anything else ) -- though Lynch's had some really good moments. What are your thoughts on Moebius' take on Dune?

But then again, you did talk about already having done some concept art. Maybe that would be the trick.

(BTW, as far as shield protection against rapid attacks, I think you've got the right approach -- think of a damage type and give high resistance to it. Cutting might be a better choice than piercing... ... That, or just don't include any ranged weapons beyond the types that would work on shields. We didn't see the Fremen wielding very many AK-47s, after all... )

HanerD -- sorry I missed your comments previously:

For one thing, if you're using a setting like the classical (or near-classical) period, non-historicity strikes me as an odd choice, and at the very least a choice you'd be better off mentioning. The classical era is an extremely 'bookish' setting -- not one that one fiddles around with casually, most of the time. (By contrast, I doubt that anyone would raise too many eyebrows at a medieval, whether Eastern or Western, 'fantasy' mod that made little mention of the fact -- witness the original game and Storymod, Clans of Kherge, ASLOW itself...)

"Bounty hunter" speaks to a very definite sort of person, a variety of "unofficial law enforcement" more or less living off collecting rewards for criminals that the government can't manage to catch. I didn't know of any such thing in the classical period -- assassination is a very different sort of, um, discipline. (Not something that the classical West did very often, either, IIRC, excepting Persia and the occasional mob of senators. But then, getting targetted by assassins for breaking faith with a nation is very logical; I think I just objected to the word...)

Sparta certainly was a long way from "mainstream" Greek culture, but so was Athens, and it's largely Athens and Sparta that I at least assume people are thinking of when I hear them talking of "classical Greece." I was concerned that you weren't distinguishing between Athens and Greece, or perhaps between Sparta and Greece...

Rome and Sparta in the same mod still strike me as a little bit silly -- and as bad news for formation functionality: credibly-implemented phalanxes will be at a huge disadvantage against credibly-implemented legions. It would be like putting early Norman knights and Hapsburg tercios in the same mod without realizing that they might not be equally playable...

But then again, I don't think I'm accomplishing very much by saying any of this; and if you've found other people to help you out, good luck! More mods are always welcome, and the "play by the rules" concept promises that this may very well be an interesting one...

(By the way, are you implementing elephants? There's the Hellenistic period in between the classical Greeks and classical Romans, in which elephants became... part of the way of... eastern Mediterranian... war... ...

MOD INSPIRATION! Anyone here familiar with the first book of Macabees? I think I need say no more... )

Dain Ironfoot:

As the guy who has "Fish Speakers" in his mod (don't worry, just a placeholder name ), I look forward to your mod's release with extremely great enthusiasm. Dune is the perfect SF for the M&B engine, too -- and I know a friend or two who'd really enjoy the chance to have more of the atmosphere that the first third of the novel suggested. Be sure to dwell on that, I think -- I've heard it said that the Fremen feel like they were meant to be a "sidequest," and the first third of the book is what the other two thirds were supposed to feel like.

If you need any suggestions, or code (though I don't know how useful mine will be for your purposes... well, not what's been implemented yet, at least) or development help (time permitting), let me know; I'd be delighted to contribute.

Cirdan:

I've never thought of the Communists as authentically Russia -- I'd say that "greater Europe", the West proper, extends to include Russia in about the same way as it includes North and South America, but that Europe is, at least historically, the core of it. Communism had already fouled up Russia and much of Europe, and was a threat to the rest -- a social threat primarily, not a military one; one might remember how the Communists expected many more countries than Russia to fall apart from WWI. I think that, in retrospect, that we can say that the discrediting of Communism-qua-concept with the fall of the Soviet Union was much more important than the defeat of Communism-qua-Russia -- though I can think of several hundred megatons of reasons why we shouldn't shrug off the threat of the Soviets proper too completely, even in retrospect.

My abbreviated description probably failed to completely explain my thoughts, and probably did make them sound a little too conventional. I don't subscribe to the Pat Buchanan vision of the world, for what it's worth (though it pains me to speak of Buchanan in such an insulting manner) -- although I should add that just because I'm familiar with Edward Said doesn't mean that I agree with Edward Said. I was practically screaming at the man for the duration of reading Orientalism -- it seemed that he condemned the concept of Westerners trying to understand the Middle East, that he hated Napoleon for bringing scientists on his trip eastward much more than he hated Godfrey of Bullion for not bringing them...

But then again, we should both try to figure out what the other is saying, before we say anything else. I have the odd feeling that we're going off on a tangent...

TheMango55:

It was deliberate on my part to make the player choose among cultures before figuring out what they were. There are two sides to this, you might say -- it's very hard to persuade someone to read up on a civilization as a prerequisite for playing a game (which might turn out not worth beans -- and the same might apply for the reading materials on the civilizations); and additionally, I've always enjoyed being thrust into a setting or situation without complete details about it. It's a freeing experience to not worry about knowing everything going in -- to not be able to know everything going in, even... although given that the convention of video games is to expound everything as quickly as possible, I certainly see how one could end up overwhelmed in chargen. Particularly when there's no story to accompany it, as yet...

*makes note to include 'Cultures' section in manual*

Reen:

I've noticed that the Repository has these sorts of hiccups at times. Have you tried downloading again since you posted? If so, and if it didn't work, private-message me with your E-mail address and I'll send you the latest installer...

Don't we have a thread for "I want this mod", though -- or did that make it over from the old forum? It was interesting reading at times, at least...

HanerD, I think that a lot of the problem is that M&B mods are big. No one this side of, say, Winter or Yoshiboy is really "a modder" in the sense of rattling off multiple mod projects; most people get into M&B modding for one particular project or a couple of them, and perhaps manage to complete these and go on to something larger. (That, or they're named Chel. ) I'll second the statements of those upthread of me -- you will probably not find someone sufficiently interested and with sufficient time.

Note that I do not say definitely not -- there is a possibility of your finding someone to collaborate with. I had been collaborating at the design stage with one James MacAdams on a possible mod to be set in Scotland in about 1720; that ended up falling through, I think, but I still like the idea -- enough that, even if I never get in touch with its originator again, I might try to do it after ASLOW -- if ASLOW doesn't get me 'noticed' for real-world game development quickly enough after its final form, that is. (Let's knock on wood that I don't ever do the Scots mod? )

As to your idea, I think you combine one very good concept and a lot of sloppiness. "Bounty hunters" in the classical period, Rome and Sparta militarily active at the same time with no mention of anachronism, a distinction between Sparta and Greece (you mean Corinth? ) -- not very impressive. However, the idea of being a soldier in someone else's army, and having to "play by the rules" has a lot of potential -- I'm reminded of certain parts of TIE Fighter, though that game sort of hinted at rather than implemented the concept. My advice: Take that idea and run with it...

And Drizzt -- skeptical though I automatically am of anyone with a major D&D character as an alias (and what does it say about me that I recognize Drizzt Do'Urden on sight?) -- if you're serious about posting those ideas you mentioned, the only way you're stopped from posting them is if an admin bans you. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's at least passingly curious -- though don't expect me to drop everything and build one of your suggestions, though I might find something worth incorporating into ASLOW or thereabouts...