SP Medieval Battle for Sicily 0.303 ALPHA, for 0.751. Arab campaign should now work

[nijis]

NOTE -- THE ARAB CAMPAIGN SHOULD NOW BE FIXED

For those interested, there's a new version of Battle for Sicily available for download. It is an Alpha, meaning that it is incomplete, but I have put an early version up for playtesting and feedback. However, please don't be too upset if your campaign is cut short by a bug and you have to start over.

As always, assistance in modeling, texturing, scene design, and historical research is heartily welcomed.

Here's the download, for a rar archive file.
https://www.mbrepository.com/file.php?cid=7&id=341
If this doesn't work, send me a PM and I'll send you a download link for an installer

Description:
This is an Alpha - meaning that it is incomplete. The campaign should be fully playable as a Lombard or Norman vassal of the Count of Troina, and might be playable as a captain in the service of the Emir of Enna (the code is there for the latter, but it has not been tested all the way through).

This game plays somewhat differently than Native -- there are no quests, and the goal is to fight a medieval war of raids and counter-raids culminating in large-scale siege of the enemy's main fortress. For a more complete, playable mod similar to Native in the same setting, try Battle for Sicily 0.2, which should still be available on the repository.

Screenshots:

The Sicilian countryside

Defending the siegeworks outside Enna

Overview of the Norman's forward base at Troina, with a Greek orthodox church in the foreground (in edit more, hence the odd coloring): http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l69/nijis/troinaoverview.jpg

Features:
* A dynamic campaign system, where enemy patrols respond to the player's movements, raids are met with reprisals, and pillaging your foe's lands affects his ability to field troops
* Armors and weapons relevant to the time period, and changes to the combat system based on 1066
* New scenes and buildings that (I hope) are plausible reconstructions of what the villages and towns of 11th century Sicily -- a mixture of Arab and Byzantine influences -- would have looked like. The scenes are still very much a work in progress, and I plan on expanding them with the new tools in 0.802 once the module comes out. Anyone help in creating villages and castles would be very much appreciated.
* More developed sieges, with your troops fighting up and down staircases and through towers

Known bugs/omissions:
* There's an invisible barrier surrounding the play area (the County of Troina and the Emirate of Enna). This means that smaller parties will often freeze when they're trying to run away from larger parties.
* There are no quests, offered either by the liege lords or the merchants. You gain experience and rewards by assisting your liege in prosecuting a successful war
* Most character classes are not supported, at least for now
* Byzantines and ships, present to a limited degree in BFS 0.2, are not here, yet. They will be in future versions
* Enemy units, when adjacent to walls, are sometimes invulnerable to missile fire. You'll notice this a lot when fighting inside buildings. As far as I can tell, this is a problem with the collision system in 0.751

Notes on play:
* Talk to your military advisor for in-game help
* Speak to your liege lord every 24 hours or so for an experience bonus based on how well the war is progressing

What's planned for the next version:
* Making a few new provinces (probably Gheflud and Palermo) playable
* A detailed system of feudalism, where both friendly and enemy parties will be led by named commanders. You'll compete against them for prestige in the eyes of your lord, who will reward you with estates on which you can settle vassals of your own.

What's planned for future versions:
* Byzantines and Almoravids
* Ships and a more complicated economic model, for you merchant types
* Feudal, urban and court politics. Each main character will have personality traits, which can cause internal conflicts within factions (if you've played Crusader Kings, you'll have a rough idea of what I'm trying to implement)
* More and bigger scenes
* The rest of the island of Sicily, plus southern Italy, up to Monte Cassino in the north and Bari in the east. Popes, anti-Popes, resentful Norman barons, ambitious merchant princes, and the Emperor

Credits:
Mod design by Nijis

I would like to thank the following designers for their models and textures:
Colt for the map outline
Fisheye for the use of the Norman shields in 1066
RR_Raptor for the weapons xpack
Khaled Ibn Walid for the Saracen shields and surcoats, and for supplying lots of information about medieval Sicily
Sahran for the material on which many of the troop outfits were based
Septa Scarabae for his scale armor
Yoshi for various nautical items and for showing how a naval system might work
Ancientwanker for permission to use TLD's dark courser
Chel for his horses
JiK for the palisade pack
HighElfWarrior for the house building kit
Aqtai for historical advice and pictures
KnightOfHonour for the initial playtesting on v 0.3
The mud wall, brick wall, and Maghrebi door textures are all the copyright of Mayang's texture archive
Many of the names, particularly of the Lombards, came from http://www.sca.org/heraldry/laurel/names/

Thanks also to the 1066 team for adapting the item stats to create what I think is a much more challenging combat system that is more appropriate to the early medieval era than the Native system

And, of course, thanks to Effidium and Thorgrim for their invaluable tools, and Janus for the installer script.

 

[Voutare]

.751? You should of waited the extra couple days to release it for .802.  I doubt very many people will download it for .751.

Other than that, nice work, and I like the first screen shot.

 

[nijis]

Yup -- I realize that releasing at this time is probably a good example of what marketing school teaches you not to do, but I was hoping to get some feedback and maybe fix a few bugs prior to the 0.802 module system coming out, as it's probably going to take a fair chunk of time to upgrade.

 

[Dwinny]

Unless you're willing to deal with serious bugs in .802, modding .751 would be the smartest thing to do IMO. And who knows how long it will be until a stable version of .8XX comes out?

 

[nijis]

It occurs to me that the above intro does not really document how the big end-of-game sieges work. Anyway, once your enemy's disorder level is at least 50 points greater than your liege's, the option to begin a siege should activate in the advisor's "dispatch a message" menu. A large army will then assemble near your liege's capital, and march to the enemy capital. Once it gets close, it sets up camp. Up to 12 hours later the first siege mission will activate as a party nearby. If you complete it successfully, then another mision will activate in another 6-12 hours. If you fail a siege mission, then it will activate again. During all this time the siege army's supply will begin to dwindle. You can keep the siege army supplied by either looting nearby villages and delivering their food to the siege army, or by ensuring that supply caravans from a friendly capital get through. If you complete all the siege missions successfully, then the enemy capital will fall. In this version of the game, that's the end. In future versions of the game, the fall of the enemy capital will result in the divvying-up of lands and titles in your liege's new territory, possible quarrels between rival vassals, and a new round of conquest.

 

[rmancrusader]

why does only your capital have a merchant,tavern,etc...?
it is a real pain to travel back to the capital to sell your loot.
when is the full tested version planned to come out?

 

[nijis]

Thanks for the feedback. The other settlements are supposed to be pretty small villages with weekly markets specializing in produce and farm tools, and the idea is to force the player to make a strategic decision as to when to head back to the main fortress and refit another expedition. I will try however to institute a way where you can sell a few goods (say, up to 50 to 100 dinars' worth) and pick up a handful of green recruits in the outlying villages, if that's really a pain.       

The full, untested version -- using the entire map, with lots of different variety in castles and towns, ships, and the like -- is some time away. I'll try and get a more polished version of the Enna vs Troina campaign, compatiblle with 0.803, out in a couple of weeks. The more comments I get, the more changes I'll try to make.

 

[jeansberg]

I tried it out for a bit, and I'm impressed. It feels great to start out with some troops, and the 'guide' companion is really cool. I played as an Arab mercenary, btw. The towns are really well done, a lot more spread out than in native, which makes them feel more real. And I loved being able to send a message to the Franks that their leader's mother has a beard.

 

[Oldtimer]

Hi Nijis,

clearly you`ve put in a lot of impressive work into this, but in some ways I think this version is inferior to the earlier one. Here come my opinions:

- troop types and upgrade paths are worse now. You take the path of randomly equipping soldiers of the same type from what I`ve seen as an Arab mercenary. I think that specialized troops are a must. Sure you can get Sicilian archers, but why can`t you get Arab archers? We must have specialized ranged, meleè, spear troops and some expensive kick-ass allrounders like Trebizond archers(both ranged and meleè)

- it`s very difficult to survive your first days with the outfit and horse you get. While it is true that making money generally becomes too easy in M&B and mods, here it is a great starting obstacle because you can`t afford hiring and you are too slow to run away form mounted troops. And it`s seldom you can find suitable fights to join. No slave trader in Enna doesn`t make it easier either. Looking for caravans is suicide...
A suggestion is maybe to pay the first wages after a week, not the first evening if possible.
And as in most mods leading your pursuers to your allies doesn`t make them attack your tormentors.

- getting your fief doesn`t work at all. I had even to attack it to enter.

- I don`t believe that people couched lances there and then. Take this feature away please.

- while at removing things, remove crossbows. I think they weren`t invented yet.

-  nerfing of archery(less arrows) isn`t called for IMO. What is called for is nerfing archers melèe capabilities. I don`t think they carried shields and polearms. Away with serious meleè weapons, some short sword or mace is enough.

- add throwing darts.

What is very promising OTOH, is the dynamic economy and campaign system.

Regards, Oldtimer

 

[nijis]

Oldtimer -- Thanks very much for the detailed feedback. That's exactly what I need to weed out the experiments that work from the ones that don't. I think I can get a fixed 0.803 version up fairly shortly.

* Having no distinct archer/melee troop trees were intended to make the economic model easier, and also to make sieges more difficult (ie, preventing the player from sweeping battlements through superior firepower, which I think is unrealistic for the time period). If having the proportion of missile troops randomly determined makes planning and battle tactics a lot less interesting, however, I'll put them back in.

* The troops and money you start with should be just enough to get by as a Norman/Lombard, but then the Arab caravan routes are more easily accessible without transitting enemy territory. I hadn't tried myself played as an Arab mercenary except for basic testing. Bandit-hunting for bounty still should work at the beginning. Unfortunately I don't know if there's any way to delay wages coming do. There is actually a slave trader in Enna, but I put him inside the caravanserie, which in retrospect was a pretty silly place to put him.

I'll work on making the Arab beginning game survivable. In general, however, the Arab campaign will probably be a lot more challenging than the Norman one, as historically the Norman knights seemed to dominate the Sicilian battlefields pretty consistently and I've tried to make it so they do in the mod, too, at least when they attack en masse. I was thinking of making North African Zanj/Murabitun spearmen available to an Arab player under certain circumstances, which is semi-historical and might balance things out a bit, but I'm not sure how to fit them in. When the other emirates are made playable, there should be many more opportunities to build up cash and experienced troops at the beginning without taking the Normans head-on at the get-go.

* I'll fix the Arab fief.

* The Normans probably did start lance-couching about this time, and there's some evidence that Muslim and Byzantine armies couched as well. I've restricted couching to the Norman knights.

* Crossbows did exist, but I should probably make them less common. This would go along with creating separate Lombard missile/melee classes.

* I had wanted to nerf archery for the player as well as the AI, but cutting the number of arrows in half maybe goes too far. Archery seems to be somewhat nerfed in .80x, anyway.

* I've never actually been clear on the difference between throwing darts and javelins. I assume that darts are probably shorter and lighter, and thus you can carry more. Certainly the game could use more variety in the thrown weapons department.


Jeansberg -- I'm glad the guide/advisor works out. If there's any other aspects to the mod that would benefit from an in-game help section, I'll add those in.

 

[Oldtimer]

Hi Nijis,

thanks for your attention to my comments. Some more observations/ideas:

- you have not restricted couching to Normans, as Arab I could couch as well. As the game is now the wise tactics is to couch away, I took out 11 Norman knights single-handedly by that and won. But it makes playing not very interesting, having one "win" tactics only. I believe specialized troops are a must, in most mods I play inf only bands(myself mounted sometimes, but only myself) and a mix of ranged/spear is a viable tactics and lots of fun.

- couldn`t find the slave trader at the caravanserai.

- the merchant in Enna doesn`t pay out bounties due.

- the game freezes upon entering conversation with the vesir in Enna.

- throwing darts are mini-javelins with the grip at the end of the shaft, surprisingly powerful toys... Quite popular among Arabs/Berbers and I believe standard issue to Byz cataphracts, 3/man. A pack of darts should be 1 or 2 pieces larger than for javelins when moslems are concerned, IMO.

- impassable terrain is a game destroyer as of now. I can`t see it and get pushed into impossible fights through unpredictable pathchanges.

- a general notion is too large weapon range across horses neck especially rearwards for the AI:s(very annoying), should be restricted to maybe abt 30 degrees and only forward/downward. Also for the player, of course.

- I fully agree that the Arab campaign should be very much harder then Norman and harder then Byz, but not downright impossible.

Keep up the good work!

Regards, Oldtimer

 

[nijis]

Actually, now that there's an agent_get_troop_id command in 0.803, it would be fairly easy to work couchable lances as an optional selection. There can actually be three options -- 1) as the game is now, with couchable lances issued only to Normans but can be looted by other nationalities, 2) couchable lances are used only by Normans and can neither be looted nor bought, or 3) couchable lances do not exist, and a couched lanced charge is simulated by galloping hard at the enemy and thrusting. This is actually a fairly effective tactic, and gives extra incentive to buy a really good warhorse -- if you're coming at them fast enough, sometimes they don't get their shield up in time.

Unpredictable impassible terrain was actually intended as a feature, to give the player a reason to stick to the lowlands (the areas that look easy to pass through on the map, generally are easy). You may be able to lose the enemy in the hills, or you may find yourself up against an unexpected defile and he catches you. However, this may be another feature idea which seems good in principle, and is bloody annoying in practice.

One of the hardcoded problems in the game, unfortunately, is that the hilliness of randomly-generated battlemaps seems to be determined by the proximity of impassible terrain rather than the elevation on the map. This means that in order to have the rolling terrain of central Sicily appear on the battlemaps, I need to have patches of impassible ground. However, these patches need to encompass at least six tiles in a hexagon to be visbile, and even then they are only just visible.

Conversations, fiefs, the Enna merchant and the slaver will be fixed shortly, so as to have a working Arab campaign. Thanks for catching those.

I don't think I can do anything about the horses' necks, unfortunately.

One other idea on weapons meshes/animations -- the sword meshes I'm currently using from Raptor's pack, although scaled the same as the swords in Native, are about 10-20 percent too long for their reaches, which were based roughly on the 1066 item stats. One comment on the previous BFS thread said that sometimes he swings and the weapon appears to make contact but doesn't register a hit. I can either shorten the meshes to correspond with a reach of about 80-90 cm, or make the weapon reaches correspond to Native. Any thoughts?

I'm leaning towards handling troop trees by stripping regular Arab and Lombard infantry of their missile weapons, and making Sicilian archers the missile tree for both the Norman and the Muslim factions, rather than have a separate Arab archer troop branch. (Defending infantry will still be issued javelins, darts, and stones in sieges). Sicilians basically represent village lads who are willing to sign up; Arab, Lombard, and Normans are going to be landed troops who are given holdings in the player's fiefs.

This is both semi-realistic (Sicilians did serve as auxiliiaries for both armies, and specialized in the bow) and will hopefully create a another layer to the game in which your political decisions will influence the kind of army you can field. Arab, Lombard and Norman mercenaries will show up in the mercenary pools depending on their faction's success in the war, as well as the amount of their fellows who have been given land in the past. The advantage of landed troops is that they will regenerate much faster than mercenaries (representing wounded troops recovering, captives being ransomed, or sons taking over their fathers' holding). Alternately, you can settle mercenaries by stripping the indigenous Sicilians of their land, but then they'll be less likely to fight for you and more likely to go brigand or fight for your opponent.

 

[Oldtimer]

Hi Nijis,

I think that your idea of stripping ranged weapons from all except Sicilians can be an acceptable compromise, although IMO the Byzantines are so different from others that this maybe should not apply to them. They should have a completely different troop and upgrade range.

Re couching I`d settle first hand for this being available to Normans exclusively, but if possible change the proportions of users. Say 20% or maybe even fewer Norman knights couch, the rest are traditionalists spearing and throwing. That because as you say couching was a recent novelty and I`ve read that proper couching with a great lance wasn`t developed until abt. 1150 by some French knights.
If not then option with lootable lances could be acceptable, but without increasing the couchers component in the Norman units above 20% max.

Another "bug" I`ve discovered is that when trying to talk to allied Arab caravans they challenge me to combat. The possibility to offer paid escort to own faction caravans should remain IMO.

Regards, Oldtimer

 

[nijis]

Bugs in the Arab campaign should be fixed (I hope). I've also moved all the merchants into the middle of Enna, so that there's not so much need to move around a large scene that can take a little while to load on slower computers.

The Arab campaign has not been rebalanced, however, and still may be virtually impossible to win. Rather than rebalance for 0.751, I've included a cheat whereby by speaking to your advisor you can add a few troops to your party and play the campaign through and experiment with castle assaults, village looting, etc.

Actually, even when given couchable lances, the AI will use underhand thrusts in most circumstances. We're still a long way from the massed charges of the 12th century and later, when knights would form together in a line. Anyway, this is a controversial enough point that I'll include a range of options (Khaled Ibn al-Walid, for example, has argued that Arabs and Byzantines were already couching several centuries before the module's setting). There's a quite interesting article on couching at http://www.classicalfencing.com/articles/shock.php.

The Byzantines will have a very different set of troop trees. Recruiting will be also be quite different, as they will represent an overseas expeditionary force rather than a feudal levee.

From here on out -- assuming that there's no more major flaws with the 0.3 Alpha -- I'll be spending my time preparing the mod for 0.804. There's a number of new operations which will make scripting the strategic map AI much more efficient, and make it much easier to expand the play area.

Anyone who is interested in playtesting these as they come out, send me a PM. The next big feature will hopefully be personalized enemy and ally parties, where each party is led by a particular vassal with a randomly-determined personality traits (similar to Crusader Kings, if anyone has played that). This will be mostly just add color at first, although I hope to develop the concept in future versions.

 

[ronin47]

Hi!

Yesterday 17.00: Took a look in the Taleworlds-Forum
                  17.05: Oh, nijis got the Battle for Sicily-Version out.
                  17.07: Download finished                 
                  17.10: Oh, can´t play it yet. Got to get to Jap-Slapping-Martial-Arts-Training.
                  20.30: My Head is aching, time to get some sleep.

Today        17.30: Back from work.
                  18.02: Started M&B BfS-Mod
                  18.03: New Game, New Character
                  18.03: Hey, Lists of Names for every Faction. Cool
                  18.06: Character ready, a Lombard-Merc. Let´s see whats new in Syracuse
                  18.06: What the.... Where´s Syracuse??????????
                  18.07: What´s this Arnulf Guy talking to me???
                  18.08: Ok, what now? Hey, this Castle nearby is nearly undefended.
                  18.19: Castle captured, lost 6 of my men...
                  18.20: What´s this? Hold castle and send for .... WOW!!!
                    .......
                    21.10: Stopped playing. FOR TODAY!

nijis, you´re concept ist GREAT!!!
Also I found an "SWADIAN" City in the western part of the Isle, I encountered so far no Bugs.
Very good work!!

 

[nijis]

Oh excellent -- many thanks for the kind words. Did you meet the Enna siege army? Let me know how that works out. I haven't had enough chances to playtest through, so I don't know if trying to hold a castle is too difficult, or has the opposite effect and allows you to attrit the enemy too quickly.

How lightly defended was the castle, btw? They're supposed to hold constant at a garrison of 25, which is supposed to provide a fair challenge but not be impossible.

 

[ronin47]

Yeah, met them this evening. Didnt´t attack them, cause they were too strong for my forces.

The Castle Garrison had 25 Defenders. I needed three attack-runs and lost half of my men. I personally think you should change the Number of defenders to 35-40 for a greater challenge. Interestingly I was "killed" during the second attack in the Tower by an Archer. Did you change the AI in some way?? I´ve got the impression that the Archers are much better than the Vanilla or 1066!?!

 

[nijis]

The AI isn't changed, but in the siege battles you'll often have missiles coming at you from multiple directions which makes it harder to defend against them.

If you stay in the castle until the siege army shows up, you'll be able to fight them from the walls and they will have to thread their way through the gate, which should give you an advantage if you have enough missile troops (for the next version I'll add some code which issues all defenders missiles with which to pelt the enemy from the walls). The down side is that you can't retreat from the battle, unless you attempt a sortie.

 

[ronin47]

Oh, too late, I fled and now Enna retook the Castle ! Once a coward.....
Will retake it tomorrow.
Hey, there are so many new features in it, it will take me day´s to see them all.
What I do not really understand is the looting routine. I never gain something if I loot a village. Is this option just disabled yet?

 

[wamba]

my main source of income is looting do you go back into the village after you loot it and go to the cart thing that appears? theres an invisible chest that you open to get the loot