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So this is a tad funny because I technically created this account to talk about this... that was a few years ago already. I never got around to actually making this thread.
Until now
So inevitably with every game a touch I eventually get the urge to... expand it in some way or another. I'm not quite the kind of person who feels like leaving a game as is. I need to expand it thematecally while staying true to the roots of it. This of course means I almost instantly jump into the modding community once I finish the basic experience of a game, which more often than not means the campaigns.
Given that I mostly play strategy games, and these in turn are mostly historically based, means that I more often than not end up doing a lot of historical research.
As for the purpose of this thread, it's not just self-promotion of course, since I'm not really looking towards more downloads or whatever, but because I've seen this community has loads of history interested folks, as well as gaming with a critical view, who I hope can give me comment and advice on my endeavours. Though ranting on what I'm currently doing is always fun I suppose. Feedback is of course looked after and appreciated.
Anyways, enough introductions, let's get to the gist of it.
So yeah, Age of Empires 3: Wars of Liberty.
This mod's been in development for... over 10 years by now in some form of another, and I've been working on it since about half of that time. It really expands a lot of what the base game has to offer while still feeling like it.
Well, that was until we decided to just bite the bullet and completly change the setting to the 19th century, more about that later.
So yeah, our latest release was the Haitian civilization, which was a doozy, so the mod started as a War of the Triple Alliance (the Paraguayan war) themed mod, so the roots were mostly centered on Latin America, giving it it's own techtree, civilization with unique mechanics, visuals and whatnot. It's gone a long ways since then, but it's always fun to go back to the roots. Haiti managed to do that while bringing something fresh.
Truth is there's been a recent immigrant influx from that country here that's really noticeable, especially since there weren't that many black people on the country before, and that probably brought the idea to the mind of one of my teammates. Doing research for this civ was... surprisingly complicated. Their military history is confusing though abundant, and their frequent coups and political bickering, while making the reading less dull, was hellish in the way of getting reliable information out to the world.
So we gave them 2 unique units, the Picket, which was mentioned often enough in history books from the Haitian Revolution and while talking about L'overture and the other was the Caco, namesake of the Caco Wars fought at the turn of the century.
Thing is, these civilizations have so-called "Royal Guard" units, basically special upgrades for 2 units that are meant to be the bread and butter of your army, in Haiti's case I chose the Zinglits, problem is, for the life of myself I cannot find where the hell did I find that name. I know it was a nickname from a presidential guard, but, since this is Haiti, finding out which president that was is like finding a needle in a haystack. That and, looking back, when I first proposed the unit I spelled them out as zing-lings. Google, and google books, don't have any results when I look up those entries. I know no one's gonna question it besides me and maybe other teammates who do research. But damn is it driving me crazy.
Ah yeah, and on the gameplay side of things the civilization is completly busted, because our balance guy is AWOL and turns out auras do stack fast. So we're probably gonna hot fix rather sooner than later and I'm now also doing some balancing working on the side.
As for future endeavours, there's plenty of interesting things I've been working on. For example a few months ago I came upon this so called "Female Caligula" who turned out to be Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar. Regardless of the authenticity of the claims of her cruelty, damn did it feel interesting to read about an industrial power in Africa out of all places during the 19th century. Lo and behold, that's exactly the century my mod is based around, so a week's worth of research later I had the entire civilization planned out.
...a month later, I kid you not, a Malagasy kid came to our website looking to help us with our ai coding. A malagasy out of all places. I of course jumped onto the chance and now the civilization is offically planned to come out somewhen this year. Of course we've also got an in-team ai coder now too! Which we were sorely missing.
It's not all smooth sailing, finding people to voice the units (which all civilizations have) is gonna be a hard task, even with a malagasy in team. We had the same issue with Haiti, but one of our collaborators is doing job teaching Haitian people, and he got enough volunteers to get us an eventual full voiceset, so well, miracles happen I guess.
But let's get back to this so called victorian setting. We realized that having Spain fighting with, like, Conquistador tech against Civil War era americans was a tad odd, so we decided to modernize the entire civilization, in some cases like Japan and Germany it implied complete overhauls, the Aztecs were basically turned in a completly different civ, finding an historical justification for it was difficult but the outcome was amazing, and some others were easier, like India and the Sioux where the job was already done for us.
However some things stuck out like a sore thumb, as I posted years(?) ago, which looking back is the first time I tried to use this website as I originally intended, naval combat was a completly different beast in this new century. Sailboats were on their way out and Steam, hell even Diesel, was becoming the norm through the period, which officially is Hobsbawn's definition of the 19th century, with some exceptions being made for the cool factor/and or gameplay.
The way to approach it was to completly change the naval combat system, which being fair wasn't much of a loss because it was really awfully implemented in the first place into this game, we designed a full rock-paper-scissors counter system with Sloops - Ship-of-the-Line & Cruisers countering each other but, since getting new models in is easier said than done, it's all paper by now.
Another of my future endeavours is releasing the Korean civilization, which was announced all the way back in 2011. It was my project to join the team, but I underestimated the fact that:
1. Most of the Asian UI features were hardcoded and it took us 6 years to hack the exe into letting us add more of them.
2. This particular century is known amongst the international scene for being an historical blackout in regards to sources of Korean history.
So it was hell to get anything done, the Korean gaming community is a tad difficult to contact given it's isolationist nature, historians are doubly so, and even Latino korean specialist give me a wild eye when I tell them what I wanna do research for. So this was a tad painful, to say the least.
As far as I know, and I hope I'm not wrong, the Joseon Court was still deploying 16th century Turtle Ships by this century, so their unit roster's gonna be a tad funky. Hopefully nobody notices tho.
So yeah, this is just my introductory post. Hope it may be of interest to someone. Feel free to comment and give advice on things I may be researching, hell, I haven't even started on other games I also mod. And hell, I hope to update this frequently. I certainly do have the material to do so.
Until now
So inevitably with every game a touch I eventually get the urge to... expand it in some way or another. I'm not quite the kind of person who feels like leaving a game as is. I need to expand it thematecally while staying true to the roots of it. This of course means I almost instantly jump into the modding community once I finish the basic experience of a game, which more often than not means the campaigns.
Given that I mostly play strategy games, and these in turn are mostly historically based, means that I more often than not end up doing a lot of historical research.
As for the purpose of this thread, it's not just self-promotion of course, since I'm not really looking towards more downloads or whatever, but because I've seen this community has loads of history interested folks, as well as gaming with a critical view, who I hope can give me comment and advice on my endeavours. Though ranting on what I'm currently doing is always fun I suppose. Feedback is of course looked after and appreciated.
Anyways, enough introductions, let's get to the gist of it.
So yeah, Age of Empires 3: Wars of Liberty.
This mod's been in development for... over 10 years by now in some form of another, and I've been working on it since about half of that time. It really expands a lot of what the base game has to offer while still feeling like it.
Well, that was until we decided to just bite the bullet and completly change the setting to the 19th century, more about that later.
So yeah, our latest release was the Haitian civilization, which was a doozy, so the mod started as a War of the Triple Alliance (the Paraguayan war) themed mod, so the roots were mostly centered on Latin America, giving it it's own techtree, civilization with unique mechanics, visuals and whatnot. It's gone a long ways since then, but it's always fun to go back to the roots. Haiti managed to do that while bringing something fresh.
Truth is there's been a recent immigrant influx from that country here that's really noticeable, especially since there weren't that many black people on the country before, and that probably brought the idea to the mind of one of my teammates. Doing research for this civ was... surprisingly complicated. Their military history is confusing though abundant, and their frequent coups and political bickering, while making the reading less dull, was hellish in the way of getting reliable information out to the world.
So we gave them 2 unique units, the Picket, which was mentioned often enough in history books from the Haitian Revolution and while talking about L'overture and the other was the Caco, namesake of the Caco Wars fought at the turn of the century.
Thing is, these civilizations have so-called "Royal Guard" units, basically special upgrades for 2 units that are meant to be the bread and butter of your army, in Haiti's case I chose the Zinglits, problem is, for the life of myself I cannot find where the hell did I find that name. I know it was a nickname from a presidential guard, but, since this is Haiti, finding out which president that was is like finding a needle in a haystack. That and, looking back, when I first proposed the unit I spelled them out as zing-lings. Google, and google books, don't have any results when I look up those entries. I know no one's gonna question it besides me and maybe other teammates who do research. But damn is it driving me crazy.
Ah yeah, and on the gameplay side of things the civilization is completly busted, because our balance guy is AWOL and turns out auras do stack fast. So we're probably gonna hot fix rather sooner than later and I'm now also doing some balancing working on the side.
As for future endeavours, there's plenty of interesting things I've been working on. For example a few months ago I came upon this so called "Female Caligula" who turned out to be Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar. Regardless of the authenticity of the claims of her cruelty, damn did it feel interesting to read about an industrial power in Africa out of all places during the 19th century. Lo and behold, that's exactly the century my mod is based around, so a week's worth of research later I had the entire civilization planned out.
...a month later, I kid you not, a Malagasy kid came to our website looking to help us with our ai coding. A malagasy out of all places. I of course jumped onto the chance and now the civilization is offically planned to come out somewhen this year. Of course we've also got an in-team ai coder now too! Which we were sorely missing.
It's not all smooth sailing, finding people to voice the units (which all civilizations have) is gonna be a hard task, even with a malagasy in team. We had the same issue with Haiti, but one of our collaborators is doing job teaching Haitian people, and he got enough volunteers to get us an eventual full voiceset, so well, miracles happen I guess.
But let's get back to this so called victorian setting. We realized that having Spain fighting with, like, Conquistador tech against Civil War era americans was a tad odd, so we decided to modernize the entire civilization, in some cases like Japan and Germany it implied complete overhauls, the Aztecs were basically turned in a completly different civ, finding an historical justification for it was difficult but the outcome was amazing, and some others were easier, like India and the Sioux where the job was already done for us.
However some things stuck out like a sore thumb, as I posted years(?) ago, which looking back is the first time I tried to use this website as I originally intended, naval combat was a completly different beast in this new century. Sailboats were on their way out and Steam, hell even Diesel, was becoming the norm through the period, which officially is Hobsbawn's definition of the 19th century, with some exceptions being made for the cool factor/and or gameplay.
The way to approach it was to completly change the naval combat system, which being fair wasn't much of a loss because it was really awfully implemented in the first place into this game, we designed a full rock-paper-scissors counter system with Sloops - Ship-of-the-Line & Cruisers countering each other but, since getting new models in is easier said than done, it's all paper by now.
Another of my future endeavours is releasing the Korean civilization, which was announced all the way back in 2011. It was my project to join the team, but I underestimated the fact that:
1. Most of the Asian UI features were hardcoded and it took us 6 years to hack the exe into letting us add more of them.
2. This particular century is known amongst the international scene for being an historical blackout in regards to sources of Korean history.
So it was hell to get anything done, the Korean gaming community is a tad difficult to contact given it's isolationist nature, historians are doubly so, and even Latino korean specialist give me a wild eye when I tell them what I wanna do research for. So this was a tad painful, to say the least.
As far as I know, and I hope I'm not wrong, the Joseon Court was still deploying 16th century Turtle Ships by this century, so their unit roster's gonna be a tad funky. Hopefully nobody notices tho.
So yeah, this is just my introductory post. Hope it may be of interest to someone. Feel free to comment and give advice on things I may be researching, hell, I haven't even started on other games I also mod. And hell, I hope to update this frequently. I certainly do have the material to do so.
