Well said and thank you, Diessa.
diessa 说:
Silverstag started as Floris Workshop, so it began in this sub-forum. There will be a Silverstag development thread and sub-forum eventually. This project is new. It shares some similarities with Floris, including Windyplains' (the developer) involvement with it, but it has a different design philosophy and vision for gameplay.
A quick bit of Silverstag history that many likely know and is touched on here. The Silverstag project began initially as the Floris Workshop which is only intended as a
sandbox mod for me to test new ideas and improvements out in without potentially breaking Floris because I might want to ask
what if. With WSE not having been available to support the latest version of warband in mid-late 2012 and the Floris team deciding not to integrate WSE until the release of 2.6 that left my projects that depended on WSE in an unreleasable state. Hence the workshop was initially created to provide an outlet to release things in development and allow testing by folks while we awaited an update to WSE (which came later on) and for the team to have the time to begin full development of Floris 2.6. Unfortunately, the latter never quite became an option and for many good reasons described in
Monnikje's last dev diary.
This left me facing a choice of continuing to develop Floris by myself or beginning an uphill climb of turning the fledgling workshop mod into something that could stand on its own. Obviously I chose the latter, but my reasoning is that I wanted to create the new mod incorporating some lessons learned from my part in helping to design Floris by keeping the features as integrated with one another as possible versus Floris' modular design. I think this approach has worked so far, but it definitely left the
as yet untouched portions of the mod, such as troops and items, in an inferior state. Dawg of War, on the other hand, was looking to potentially restart construction of the Silverstag mod he has had in the works for some time and with our two projects being at a good juncture we decided instead to turn the workshop into the Silverstag setting.
Skip several versions forward and we arrive to the present where I've stuck around in the Floris forum largely to help support answering questions for Floris while the rest of the team is in a well deserved hiatus. This has led to some confusion over the involvement of the workshop with Floris and the future of these two projects. With the development of Floris having been halted as long as it has and the growth of Silverstag to the point it is at I feel it is unlikely that a merger of these two mods is going to ever take place. At this point there would be a tremendous amount of reworking needed to either mod to make the other work within it. I can't speak for the Floris team though so I cannot say that Floris will not see future updates. What I can say is that my goals have now shifted to developing Silverstag and will remain there. My intention with v0.13 was to move out of the Floris forums to alleviate any future confusion except when I built that thread here and locked it while I was setting it up, I forgot that upon moving it over to the released mods section (where I am not an admin) I would be unable to unlock or edit it because it was locked by me as an administrator. So now we're just waiting for that first locked thread to either get unlocked or move beyond the first page prior to attempting it again. I hope this clears up any confusion folks may have had and sheds a little light on how the two projects came to be.
A Treeless Troop System
The troop system is being reworked in two ways. Firstly, two factions are being added (earliest is v0.16), and troops are being redone for the existing factions. Dawg of War is leading this design and balancing effort. Secondly, the troop tree system is being removed (upcoming in v0.15) to allow for more units with more uses instead of the two or three "top tier" units in each faction who are superior. (I may be wrong with my understanding, so I'd suggest waiting for Windyplains' explanation.)
Diessa has stated things correctly here. There are a lot of plans I have for the future of Silverstag's design which is why it has the 0.14 version vs. 1.14. The mod stays in a generally
release ready state so that I can address issues quicker and with smaller, incremental changes, but the overall shaping of the mod has a long way to go yet. My preference is to let everyone play it as it is developed in what would best be described as an open alpha so that you can help me weed out the bugs and guide the balance of the work. This does mean that certain features remain unchanged
until I get around to them and that some features are continually getting revamped as they are developed in stages.
One of the goals I've had for the mod stems long ago from my dislike for having to upgrade troops all of the time. I knew that I wanted to change the system and I had some ideas how, but I had not yet quite put my finger on the why. That reasoning was better
stated by Hanakoganei last year and helped to pinpoint a few issues with the upgrading design:
- AI & Player use different troop recruitment systems. While it is often a necessary evil for finding the balance of a game it is usually an annoyance to players. The other problem is that for a feature to exist it must have an AI version and a player version which means twice the work for me.
- Faction identify and troop focus is fixated at the top tiers. Folks may use troops of lower tiers, but only as stepping stones towards the "top tier" troops in a tree. Player parties run around with all knights while the AI simply wasn't designed to deal with that kind of opposition which leads a lot of players to feel the game becomes too easy.
- It doesn't make sense. As you fight battles it makes sense that your troops would learn from these engagements and be able to apply some of this newly acquired experience in becoming better soldiers. What doesn't make sense is that they also change out their gear and/or acquire a horse along the way in mass numbers. An army may have supply personnel, including smiths, along for the ride, but not on that kind of scale.
- It is a grind. After most fights you'll see the "some of your troops may be able to upgrade" message and so you begin the process of going through your party panel and clicking away to upgrade each troop to its next link in the chain. I always found this to be more of a chore then enjoyment after its initial novelty wore off.
- The tree system requires extra troops simply to support branching. If you want to have a troop of a given type then it needs to exist on the tree's branches somewhere. Typically it makes sense that it upgrades from something that shares similarities with it so that it appears your troops evolve into this later troop type. The problem is that if you want to have more viable troop types then the tree has to have more branches and more filler troops early on to support these branching points. What if I want to give you an option for Rhodoks to have a bowman, but just a relatively weak one? Should this be a branch that leads off early and dies or should it be a predecessor to their crossbowman which makes less sense?
The answer to this is simply scrapping the upgrade system entirely and making the troops individual classes. If you take the time to read through Hanakogenai's original thread that details a desire to do this very idea then you'll see a fairly supportive stance from me and this is why. My approach will be different and focuses on a different reasoning, but the genesis of the idea is the same.
I have less issue with wanting to force a more tactical game vs. wanting to allow more troop diversity and situational access to troops. The new system I've developed is part of the overhaul to how you'll deal with towns and villages and looks a little like this:
What you're seeing is the new recruitment screen for how you'll acquire troops. Each village,
castle and town will have a pool of peasant recruits to draw from that you can pay to directly train into a role. That means you can take a raw recruit and train them to become a man-at-arms directly as most of their upgrade lies within the equipment. Being able to do this, however, means that they'll cost considerably more as you are not paying for upgrades or having to keep this troop alive in order to get that far up in the upgrade process. Also this list will allow me to setup unique troops available in certain locations, do so easily and in a way that the AI uses
just as the player does.
Here's a few ideas on what is easily possible with this new design:
- Knight orders could be created to show on the list if the player has completed prerequisite quests or met a certain relation value.
- Bandits can be made to show up on the list if the player has a negative honor.
- Unique troops that are just a flavor of the area can be made to only show up their respective towns
These are just a few examples for now as I've run out of time before work. For now I'll have to run, but I'll add more later and as you can see from the screenshot there are other pages yet to cover.
