SP Antiquity Dawn of Man - The Neolithic Mod, party like its 9999 BC!

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Is the mod dead?  I remember installing this a few years ago and nothing ran out of health but it still was great
 
DarthTaco said:
I've been debating off and on doing something similar to this. My only real concern  would be credible references to neolithic era weaponry. I figure it'd be something fun to do as a spare time project. It doesn't even really need to be neolithic per say. Just something based off stone age societies, or those that were fairly primitive. Neolithic Man, pre-colonial Native Americans, Aztecs/Mayans and such. It'd just be a cool project to do.

If you need someone to bounce ideas on the weaponry and or skills/materials used I could help with that.  This time period (along with the 7th-11th century and the 17-18th centuries) is an area of study of mine, more out of hobby than Academia.  Still, I have a few fair bit of research materials at my disposal and sources for more.  :grin:
 
Troop tree for the Wandering Factions, which will work kind of like bandits, but can trade and be recruited.

Troop Chart


So started up on this again.  There's a topic in the mods under construction section, but I'll probably be posting here.
 
Zarthas said:
Troop tree for the Wandering Factions, which will work kind of like bandits, but can trade and be recruited.

Troop Chart


So started up on this again.  There's a topic in the mods under construction section, but I'll probably be posting here.

The troop trees look cool.  I am looking forward to this mod.
 
A very early release will be ready soon.  So here's what the Pre-Alpha's going to look like:

SAVAGE COMBAT PRE-ALPHA 0.1:

-Total Item Conversion.  All metallic items are gone.  Lots of new Flint Axes, Bone Spears, Slings, War-Clubs, Flint-Knives, Tomahawks, Bone Clubs, Stone Maces, Throwing Sticks, Oar Clubs, Boomerangs, Shark-tooth Clubs, Bamboo Rods, Staves, Obsidian Sword-Clubs, and other stuff I can't remember.

-Lots of new armors.  Wolf, Boar, and Lion pelt Headdresses,  Skull Masks, Leather Armor, Wooden Armors, Bone-Lamellar Bracers, Moccasins, fur robes, tons and tons of stuff.

-Lots of new shields.  Bark, Hide, and Leather shields, mostly.  Turtle-shell shield is pretty cool.

-Factions!  All factions are reworked.  Tons of new troops.
-Weapon Breaking.
-Shield Bashing.
-AI kicks and shield bashes, improvise new weapons when all of theirs break.
-AIs have a chance to go Berserk in combat after making at least 2 kills.
-AIs have a chance to leap-attack when charging(WIP, may not get it to work properly in time!)
-Skirmishing, or as it may have been known, shooting-and-running-away-before-cave-men-can-hit-you
-Emphasis on getting combat to feel 'right', trying to adjust for the different feel.

Sneak peak of one of the new "Sharktooth" weapons, which will be used by the Islander culture.
OVk7p2c.png

These features are mostly implemented already, I'm just cleaning it up enough to get it ready for release.  I need to emphasize again though, these are the only real changes!  Scenes, trading, and anything that's not troops, items or combat will be largely the same.  This will be a 'flavor' test, to make sure its fun to beat other stone-age people to death before I shift focus.
 
Yes ladies and gents, we are slowly moving towards the Stone Age.  I'll post some screenies very soon, some cool stuff is coming together.

@Enriador:  In an older version of the mod, I did reduce the size of the randomly generated battlefields.  I've since kind of changed my mind:  Since there are no horses, you really need the additional space to have enough time to maneuver your squads.

Kinda on this topic, the absence of cavalry has some neat tactically implications.  Athletics becomes of paramount importance for positioning troops.  Equipment weight becomes more significant.

I think that Skirmish-troops kinda fill the light-cavalry role.  They have light gear, extra points in athletics, and ranged capability.  Their stats are geared for speed rather than for ranged effectiveness, as the Archer troop trees.
 
Sorry friend, I'm still cleaning up the pre-Alpha for this iteration.

I'm hoping to get this out in the week.

I am in need of some Native-American-esque face textures for a Siberian/Alaskan/Pacific Native American-Indian inspired faction, if anyone can point me to some OSP-friendly stuff?

Here's my current troop chart, the factions are pretty set now, but I don't have anything built specifically for the Vaegirs.  I'm thinking a Siberian-esque faction, but its not set in stone yet.

Sargonites are the only copper/bronze wielding faction.  They will appear after a length of time as an invading force, and are hostile to all existing factions, including you.  Are kind of an end-game challenge to shake things up after you get your Chiefdom well established.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mduuAKDsUfD-PriwC4d51KsvWdXxVrHZytaaC9GGCyk/pubchart?oid=586379469&format=interactive
 
Not sure how to read the tree - for instance is there still a Neanderthal faction in this version and what are their troops ?
Having some "slightly more advanced" civilization show up as an invading force is a nice thing too. Certainly beats "dark knights" or zombies as far as I'm concerned.
 
Google Charts only lets me do so much, unfortunately!  I'm having some issues with getting it to render correctly in a browser, are you getting that as well?

Anyway, the timeline has been pushed to roughly our equivalent of the Early Neolithic, let's say 12,000 years ago.  This is of course, not Earth, but Calradia, so we have room to fudge history a little.

Homo Neanderthals are pretty rare, however in this world, they didn't die out, they interbred with the more numerous Homo Sapiens.  As a result, two of the cultures, the Mammoth Hunters and the Cave-Dwellers are actually descended from Neanderthals and migrating Homo-Sapiens, and are ethnically distinct from much of the rest of the world, namely a bit shorter and a bit stockier, and a bit behind in technological advancement due to their clannish nature.  They might be colloquially called "Old-Blooded' folk by the Cro-Magnon-esque humans.

There's a few more human-offshots that have been quite extincted yet.  Since the scale modifier actually works properly now, there's a shorter humanoid based on the famous 'Hobbit' finds, and a larger, more ape-like humanoid at the far fringes of the world.  As it stands, they're extraordinarily rare.

There's kind of two trains of thought on this:  the "I want realism and I don't think that includes humanoid offshots" camp and the "I'm open to alternative prehistory and think it might be fun" camp.  Depending on how far I want to extrapolate the humanoids, I may add a Mod-option to disable the "Alternative Prehistory" features.

I'm kind of kicking around the concept of a "Stone Age-Dark Age", in which 'humanity' somehow lost most of the achievements they've made up to this point, as Europe did after the fall of Rome, only much worse.  Probably natural disasters, such as an inconvenient series of massive floods and volcanic eruptions.

The player of course will be free to choose their genetic ancestry, be it Neanderthal, Homo-Sapien, or somewhere in-between.

Apparently extincted is actually a word.
 
It shows fine on my Chrome actually.

Personally I tend to be in the "more realism" camp (as I've been since I started following the mod), but I'm also in the "I want to play as non-Humans in every mod" camp, which here meant Neanderthal at first but can mean any of the offshoots. (They have their own factions right ? Can't stand making my own faction in M&B, no matter the settings) As long as they still looks like cavemen and not, y'know, aliens. :fruity:

Anyway if you want a cataclysmic event there's actually one that happened in real life : the Toba supereruption . A solid (but not proven) theory suggests that human population dropped as low as 3000 people after the glacial age that followed. So if you want some "Dark Age" in your Prehistoric Calradia, then a similar event can certainly be used as the background.
Also last nitpick - Neanderthals weren't shorter than Cro-Magnons from what we know (just checked Wikipedia to make sure I wasn't spewing bs with that), but were likely stronger physically. Of course you're free to ignore this point if you think having them shorter makes the mod better.
 
That particular supereruption is kind of what the concept is based on  :grin:  Its excuse I have for pooling so many varied cultures into one continent, we're assuming that much of the planet's habitable land is now either underwater or otherwise uninhabitable, and they've flocked here to battle it out for the limited resources.

I'm kind of the same as you really, I intended the mod to be a little more "realistic", but the temptation to do more enjoyable things can't be resisted.  I'm of the opinion that what we do not know from the archaeological and fossil record far outweighs the minute clues we've been able to piece together, and I'm kind of running with that, within certain reasonable parameters.

There'll end up being a lot of factions, but some will be 'Mini-factions', that don't control any territory and are made of hunter-gatherer roaming parties.  The proto-human factions will be hunter-gatherer types.

Strangely, you find lots of text out there that describes Neanderthals as being "shorter and stockier" as an adaptation to the cold, but you're right, Wikipedia puts them at 5 ft 5-ish, which really isn't short for an ancient human, and isn't short in a lot of places for a modern human.  I read once that the belief that they were much shorter comes from the earliest depictions of them being hunched, which still pervades to this day, apparently.

On the other hand, I was really basing the concept that they were "shorter" on a relationship with Cro-Magnon, whom Wikipedia claims would be around 5 ft 9.  This seems a bit generous to me, or lots more people are part Neanderthal than we're admitting.

I should probably clarify that their scale is set to 0.9, so they're not very short in-game.

Even the Smithsonian is guilty?!?: 
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-neanderthalensis
http://www.livescience.com/28036-neanderthals-facts-about-our-extinct-human-relatives.html

Seems to just be a copy-pasta blurb that's out there.

Subconsciously, I think I was trying to make them as Dwarf-like as possible, since that's the best fantasy-analogue out there.

I will re-evaluate, but honestly I like their slight shortness for for visual irregularity.

There's always weird one-offs like these guys:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimaldi_Man#Physical_characteristics

I'm also playing around with Denisovans, but all I have is a toe-bone to go on...
 
Can said minor factions "aquire" territory ? I think there's at least one mod out there where some minor factions can eventually become "major" if they conquer a fief, but the name eludes me right now. I basically really want to rewrite history and make Neanderthals survive. :grin: (They were asocial like me after all - and that's in fact one of the theories for why they died out. They had bigger brains than us from what we know actually, although bigger doesn't necessarily mean "better")

Also I'm gonna share a link that I gave to jakub in the other thread about Gigantopithecus. The short version is that a Giant-like creature did roam the real Earth a long time ago. The timeline is a bit off but it's still well in "late prehistory" settings and it's not millions of years before either, so it's definitely not like having humans fight dinosaurs. The mod could be set when they're already dying out (can't adapt to the new conditions - what likely happened IRL) but there could be a few parties of them somewhere in the map as some bandits maybe.
Of course maybe making the model/skeleton for that wouldn't be worth the trouble. Also some interesting stuff can happen when you use Scale on such huge creatures. (a small arrow hitting such a unit suddenly becomes huge for instance)
 
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