Comments - geolex

First off, hats off to you for the wonderful work you're putting into this mod for everyone's enjoyment.

I just wanted to add onto the point that was being made, in that, I don't know how familiar you are with historical arms and armor, but needless to say GW original creators were very knowledgable.
And to separate the traditionalist high-feudal Kingdom of Bretonnia from the Early Renaissance/Late Medieval Empire of Sigmar, they carried that distinction into their arms and armor.

Bretonnian knights (and infantry for that matter) will typically use XIIIth to XIVth century helmets (Great Helms, Mail Coif, Kettle hats, Nasals, ...)
Whereas the Empire troops will heavily rely on late medieval helmets (Sallets, Armets, Great bassinets).
Southern Realms rely on even more advanced (in time if not in protection) helmets, such as Morions and Burgonets.

This is part of Warhammer's genius of cleverly using real-world cues to quickly create very distinctive feels about those armies. Which might explain Sirmicou's violent (and unwarranted) reaction as well as their difficulty in articulating "what" FEELS wrong in those models specifically.

In the case of your models, No.1 is a fantasy design that looks goofy to people who know either the Warhammer or Historical models. The shape of the Helmet itself (outside of the balls) is appropriate, it looks like a bascinet which I'm not sure we see in GW's models, but would certainly fit the time period and aesthetic for Bretonnia. The faceplate though is taken directly from the Warden's faceplate from the game "For Honor", although it's been pretty popular so you might not have seen where the reference came from.
No.3 looks like an armet, which is perfectly historical but is the kind of helmet you'd see the Empire Knights (Reiksguard, Blazing Suns, ...) wearing, which would chip away at the visual distinction between those factions in the game.
No.2 is perfect, that is the stereotypical design of the Bretonnian Great Helm.

A full army wearing only those would be pretty boring visually so as a game dev myself I fully understand the need to add variety both for gameplay reasons (upgrading units) and visual flair.
For that I would suggest using the degree of ornament on the helmet rather than changing the design of the helmet itself (of which there are only a few) to signify both the experience AND social status of the knight.

The early cavalry could be using nasals, mail coifs or open-faced bassinets. Then the lower ranks of knight could use fairly basic and unadorned great helms with flat tops and sugar-loafs to break the visual monotony. Finally the higher ranks of the knightly order would use the kind of ridiculous jousting helmets that can be seen in GW's models, with massive horns, feathers, sculptures, ...

I'm happy to provide references both historical and Warhammer related for any of those helmets if that can help you. I've gone over even basic things, I'd rather not presume about what you know or don't know, I just hope this could be helpful to you.

I was looking at my steam page wondering what to play.
Thought I'd give this mod another go.
Last Update : 4 hours ago.

Neat ! Thanks for all the work you put into this, I'm eager to check out all the new content.

I've just started playing Medieval Kingdoms 1212 AD mod for Attila.

The system they have has 1 City per Province so so that they can all grow the same regardless of their starting status (settlements/city). And they have a script that can be run from any city with full slots (it seems) to increase the number of slots available if the player so chooses.

Maybe a similar system could be done here and would allow everyone to tweak their game how they like, and even change their mind during the game and add some slots while keeping it save-compatible.

Otherwise as stated, a good rule of thumb might be, full cities should be able to build 80% of the building chains that you have planned. And settlements could have maybe half to two-third as many slots.

And I think I'll spare this comment section my walls of texts ^^' thank you very much for your work on this mod, it was nice chatting with you, I'm sorry if I came out a bit defensive. Have a nice day. :)

As an aside, let me quickly say that I don't mind as much slot systems from Shogun, Empire and Napoleon, because they're mostly specialization withing a building chain, they don't prevent you outright from building all chains.

And it makes some sense that a city that has a barracks specialized in Cavalry probably wouldn't also have barracks specialized in artillery.

But saying you can't have walls because you already have a tavern is just incredibly gamy, frustrating, immersion-breaking and completely uncalled for.

Don't get me wrong I fully understand the reasoning behind the choice (hence my mention of gameplay depth and replayability).

Still challenge for challenge's sake a good game does not make.
In that case, it's challenge bought at the cost of frustrating the player and outright handicapping him for no reason. It breaks immersion, limits player choice, and takes away from the Empire builder experience, it's a terrible design.

Also the balance of building means you end up with entire aspects of your faction that are unused because the costs of buildings and research associated with them outweigh the benefits.
Some units might be decent and even fun but cannot be played because they use a specific building chain and you can't justify sacrificing a slot just for that unit.
Add to that poor scaling with higher difficulties penalties making sanitation and public order buildings mandatory restricting your options even further.

It also forces the world into stagnation, past turn 100 or so, all your cities are fully grown and nothing new will EVER happen until the end of the campaign.
Settlements will always be settlements, and cities will always be cities regardless of population, prosperity, or how many time they get razed.

You're also selling older Total War titles way short in my opinion. It wasn't just about build order, because population and region-specific taxes actually provided MORE depth in building up cities than modern Total War offers.

You had to choose which cities you wanted to develop based on your strategic situation. Offering very low taxes in areas to encourage rapid settlement to be able to build up defenses, while compensating for lost revenue elsewhere in the empire.
You could raise a small fishermen village to the status or world capital as a display of power. Turn arid plains into the birthplace of an empire.
Cities were not meant to be for ever. If they were sacked too often and trade shifted to another place, they would slowly be deserted.

You simply had more option and felt more "in control" which should ultimately be the goal of an empire Builder.

Overall, the system was more interesting, less restrictive and provided a more immersive experience where city's population and prosperity waxed and waned with the shift in the balance of powers. Instead of a mostly static world-map, where the optimal buildings are always the same and growth and taxes are no longer available for the player to use.

TL:DR - The amount of slots would depends on the amount of buildings you planned. Large cities should be able to build most (at least 80%) of the available buildings.

I always strongly disliked the Slot system. Any city should be able to grow to any size IMO, it's an empire builder after all. That being said, within the confines of the engine, I'd like it to be the least restrictive possible. The CA Designer that thought cockblocking the player increases gameplay depth and replay ability is a moron.

After some more hours in the Game, there is an absolutely game breaking bug.

Often when playing in a lord's army, the game simply pitches you in the same battle forever, reviving you after each battle. I've spent the whole day trying to grind my way through 350 Kislev troops, waging hundreds of battle back to back just to have the game crash on me each time I got close to succeeding (with no saves between battles). The only way to get back to PLAYING the game is to Desert or Revolt against the commander, which nukes your reputation and your rank.

Given how often this issue arises (3 characters, each one had the same issue in the first 100 days), it is simply impossible to make it work long term.

I'll have to put this mod away until this is fixed, so far it has unfortunately only been an exercise in frustration.

Hi, now that we must use an separate executable to launch the mod, is there any chance a Linux exe will be provided in the future ?

OH BOI XD You want to be a grammar nazi. Ok it's "Dwarfs" not "Dwarves". Gotcha !

Anyway, IRL comes first, keep up the good work. You still have some time before Bannerlord comes out (RIP ^^).

To be fair, I've never felt the Sakven to be too weak, they seem to be more than capable to take some cities and grow their power.

The main problem I've had with them is their stagnation. I was able to negotiate a peace treaty with Bretonnia on behalf of the guild master, but the war with Wood Elves seems to know no end.

No trade routes are being raided so no guild master cares, and Skaven are just constantly fighting over the western most wood elves castle.

Meanwhile Bretonnia is invading the Beastmens and the pirates are in bad shape. If only I could get my retarded liege to stop this pointless war and take Marigliano and some Beastmens castles and cities as to shield ourselves from a new war with Bretonnia. But nope, the AI wants this far away castle that we're completely unable to defend, and immediately retreat to the underempire to celebrate that "victory". By the time the Skaven lords are sober again, the castle has been recaptured. It's just so frustrating. So I'm basically raiding the northern wastes with my hardened jezzail platoon, waiting for the Skaven to stop being orks.

It would be really cool if you added some diplomacy features, so that I could convince my lord that this is stupid on my own initiative.

Any chance of getting Freelancer back, or did the last version definitively killed it ?

Playing a somewhat decent character is made really difficult, I mostly play skaven as I can RP as the worst ******* and attack villagers, as it is the only thing you can deal with at first.

Being able to join a lord army and gain some experience that way would be fantastic to make things easier at first, as well as adding layers of RP.

Ok, I did find strange that Di0 doesn't talk about any Gameplay changes he made and yet I found some people talking about this mod as also being a gameplay overhaul to bring DS to Skyrim. And with the gameplay video looking very different from vanilla Skyrim, I was kinda confused.

If nothing's changed then I guess this mod definitely is toe-to-toe with Skyrim Together in my dream-modlist.

Thanks for your answer.

Wow, that's a beast of a mod. Hands down the best end-game content for Skyrim I've seen so far. I wanted to know if you actively changed the gameplay (I've seen that somewhere but I don't find anything from you confirming it) or if the gameplay feel is just due to the bosses being OP (or another mod. Requiem ?).

If you did change the gameplay do you intend on releasing optional files for Quests, Loot, World-Spaces and Creatures that would give players who prefer other gameplay overhaul, or simply are more casual an opportunity to enjoy the fantastic job you are doing.

Very much looking forward for the mod anyway (You're just behind Skyrim Together in my list ;)), but I may have to play this content alone if it's too punitive, and I probably won't enjoy it as much. Thanks for your amazing work and keep it up :)

And thanks for taking the time to read and answer ;)

The border work was more of a joke there is only that much detail you can put inside a defined space before it looks over-done and messy (same goes for seraphims and indeed there is already a lot of stuff to show. And to show the weapons I think the unit idle stance might do the trick, with weapons pointing upwards, with your perspective it would only hide part of the torso which isn't needed to recognize the troop anyway while still letting the jetpack project from the back).

Yet I'm very happy to know that necrons and dark eldars will be reworked with the same perspective you used on the SoB and eager to see more of your amazing work.

As for the idea of having units be recognizable "in the context" I was expecting it, and it's just different approaches, I like to know very fast what unit I'm dealing with (and ideally what weapons they're carrying) without having a learning phase where I first link each icon to the unit. But hey just personnal preferences.

Anyway keep up the good work, looking forward to downloading your work as soon as it comes out.

And your mod join my following list ;)

This one is excellent, it doesn't have the "problems" (IMHO) I saw with your earlier works which is that the close-up icons looks very nice but they don't help very much (sometimes at all) telling units appart. These ones are a little more zoomed-out and they are excellent.

If I really wanted to be a prick I would say the (seraphims ?) jump-pack troops would be better with at least one of their bolt pistol showed in the icon (I mean they already have the jet-pack so it's easy to tell them appart, but it might be neat to know that this squad is more of a lightly armed one without having to look into the unit description, which can be a bit lenghty especially with mods. But hey i'm just being a prick these icons are amazing. :)

But yeah a little criticism about your work is about readability, the art is awesome but it can be difficult to tell appart at first glance units from one another (for example necrons Immortals and warriors are interchangable, you know the second one is the immortal because their icon comes after the warrior's one but that's it, swap the 2 and no one will notice :/ (Also the lord could easily be mistaken for a warrior in the icon)). So I would be all in favor of little less drama (no offense, they look nice and I don't mean drama in any disminishing way) icon with extreme close-up and show a little more of the units weapons, markings as to idenify them in a glance.

Secondly, I think it might contribute to readability to have the icon pop a little more, the V5 is obviously the best out of these : The gold border fits the adepta sororitas pretty well (maybe even a bit too plain, put some engravings and vitrals on there for ***** sake ;P), The art is outstanding, the units are very easy to identify, ...
Yet I feel like it lacks the more coloured V4 scheme to make it pop-out a little more and be more easy to read. Bu definitly the V5 is an improvement over the somewhat more cartoonish, tabletop-ish - DoW III-esque really - art of the V4.

Things to keep in mind as it may give you some insights :
- I am a big fan of warhammer, tabletop players, played DoW I almost since release (I bought DC on release and I had already been playing Vanilla and WA for quite some time by then) so IMO, me not being able to tell to units appart (which might not be your objective and it would be perfectly fine) kinda tells something about the art being somewhat too ambiguous.
- I really like black/anthracite-Red/crimson/burgundy color schemes and I am not a big fan of plain and/or light grey-ish/whit color schemes, so my last criticism is probably also a matter of taste.

Can't edit it anymore but by the way : I play ACOK 4.0 (figured out you might want to know ^^').

Pike castle prison break (and maybe siege ?)

Trying to get a prisonner out of pike castle seemed easy enough with that big bridge on which ennemies can only come one after another. Until you realize that they never get to the bridge because they are stuck in the keep with no way out (and no way in) so you have to resort to shooting them to death through the hole in the keep's wall. Problem is when you are on your own with a crossbow, 30 bolts clearly isn't enough to get rid of 6 shielded man looking straight at you. There is a door on this keep which is a destructible object, which when destroyed reveals ... a wall.

So yeah I can't escape because I haven't killed defenders who clearly have no way of ever reaching me, but that I can reach either. Thus Alt-F4 is the only way out.

Looks like the problem is more about the empire great cannon than it is about the Nuln one.

I also ran the game (fresh medieval II install & new CoW DL) on my laptop, played as Vampire counts , waited for the wissenland to attack (they did --even though almost every event on this campaign was different-- with a much bigger army --18 units-- and .... it crashed again)

So it seems like this crash is not much PC dependent (as my pc and laptop config varies greatly --I can give you my specs if you want to create a list of crashes and specs of the computers involved-- different OS, GPU generation (both NVidia though), CPU generation (both intel though), different RAM, different display resolution (even different ratio)).

If this crash is consistent, then :
- the bad news is : no way to fix it on our own by tweaking our PC :'(.
- the good news is : Wissenland always attack the vampire counts at Blood Keep very very early in the game (in about 10 turns at most), and it always crashes when they do so, so quite a dev' friendly bug as you can reproduce it at will and figure out what happens.

A little feedback for the devs about the weird siege bug:

- A crash that happens 100% of the time on my game is the BloodKeep being besieged by Wissenland (in the really early game like 5-6 turn) with an army not that fancy at all:
- a few swordsmen
- a few hallberdiers
- a few spearmen
- 1 empire great cannon
- 1 pistolier as command squad
summing up to 12-14 troops.

- They built a ladder, 2 battering rams and a siege tower.

- The warhammer.bat tip did it for me, but I ended up with flagless troops and a really choppy game with characters jumping a few move lenght at a time on the world map.

Anyway, Your "mod" is absolutely amazing (I even wrote "game" at the beginning ^^'), I played RotDG for quite a long time but it never felt quite as good as it should have been, the download was a f***ing mess, there were crashes everywhere and the devs never answered on modDB you had to go full russian on their own forum. I'm quite enthusiastic about what you're doing, your mod is way way better than RotDG in terms of ease of use, stability, balance (**** archaon, 12 full stacks poping out of nowhere at the 5th turn is a big NOP ! it'll happen no more thanks to you :)), and you even achieved to add more races and to extend the world map.

The game is not quite good enough to be played for hours ( mostly because of crashes in facts ), but you already fixed -in V1.0.1- 75% of all the stuff that was wrong with RotDG and that as of 1.5.1 they've still not fixed.

Thank you and keep up the good work !

Mandrakes are Old girls, I knew it ! Damn dark eldars ! Real mens don't uses infiltration to come and slaughter their ennemy ...

HIDING IS FOR THE WEAK !

Actually it have already be done, 44Go, of hard work, but well, it's still unfinished, so yeah you think the mods is awesome when you see manticore, deathstrikes, ... but when you're inside it's so broken and unfinished that it CAN'T be fun.
It's not because they are bad, they are not bad at all, it's our fault, to expect them to release it so early.

A game is meant to be fun, so if the actual state of the mod don't allow it to be fun, there is no reason to release it unless as a modders ressource.

The eagerness of people concerning this mod is what killed it ( at least it put it to a halt ( no way to know, if the mod is still on hold, but it was after the release of the Alpha version, from the words of the team ), every body wanted to see huge things, and so when the huge things where released just for demonstration purpose, everybody started to complain about how broken it was and completely missed the point, it have dimoralized the team ( perhaps even a little bit of anger, after 10 years of hard work ... ).

So, I don't thinkthat they would anymore release anything before they are sure that it is pretty much flawless, and for a huge mod like that it can take a long time ( it have already been there for 10 years after all).

This looks like a "pretty decent" ( Über-underestimation ^^ ) amount of things to test, if you need any more BETA-testers, you have my full support and half my life expectansy to try it out ^^, just tell me what you expect me to report.

The Interface seems to be messed up, a big black square on the bottom left corner ( it takes around a third of the screen ( 1680x1050 screen ) just cover everything. So the only way to guess what you're clicking on is by the green glow when you hover the choices ( problem is, you don't know what you could have done, if you had filled some prerequisites ( but which one ? )
For example, I am a Nord levy ( tier I ) Robb Stark wants to promote me, but the only options that shows up ( via the green glowing thing ) is "Wait a week", so I probably that I don't fill some prerequisites, but i don't even know them, and there is no way i can have a real overview of the choices I can make ( in an RPG, which ( as any ( good ^^ ) RPG ) rely mostly on choices ) it's a little bit handicaping.
If you can upload a fix I would be very grateful, sir.

The better way to remain true to the canon about rarity is to add a limit on how much weapon you can equip, because if you just up the price according to the rarity, then most of the powerful artifact ( 'cause, either way, they are "more artifact" than powerful ) won't be played anymore ( unless you want to field it just for fun ).

So you put price according to the power, but you put limit according to ... well ... canon limits. That way everything's fixed, and you can still play this marvellous weapon without having to choose between a gun and a Baneblade ^^

And you HAVE my support but I won't vote for a mod I've never played, and I won't play a mod I can't even understand because of his language. There is so many mods out there which I know about the value, that I simply can't elect some pictures "ModDB mod of the year". I would vote when I would have Ingame feelings, and so I need the game ... ( I've used "I", but I think that "we" shall be true as well ).

You've done an amazing job, but let us try it out and you would have as many feedbacks and support as you want. Nothing against you, or russian people in general, it's just some principles I have, I can't take a stand for something I've never tried myself, pictures looks absolutely amazing but they still ( only ) are pictures.

Best wishes and good luck, and once again, the problem isn't your job guys, I am the problem ( at least my principles ), YOU are russian, YOU have developped YOUR perfect mod, so You developped it in YOUR native language, and YOU were cool enough to share it with US, so nothing wrong here, but if we can't enjoy the mod, we won't vote for it, no matter how good it is.

I hope not to be thought of as a moralizer, but you looked like quite disappointed and depressed of our reaction. So I take the time to explain my choice and to avoid conflict ( Dawn of Coalescence died because of this ).

+1, if you want non-russian votes give us a non-russian version ^^

Appart from that your job is quite awesome, you remind me of "Rage of the Dark Gods" mod team, a pretty ******* great mod, but a really poor communicating ( hard to download, to install, ... russian forums only ... ). no hard feelings and Good Luck for the competition, you deserve a lot of votes ( a lot of russian one at least ^^ ).

You said in the early june that the next release was only a matter of days or weeks, anymore information about release dates ?

Anyway great job ( if i NEVER play Orks, too much random and melee for me, except grots, I really like grots especially grot tanks, that's craszy, and strangely in a way they are BADASS ( yes the grots are badass ^^ ))

prepared to sign

Thanks, it works.

Is it needed even if you want to play the non-"newraces" mode ?
In this case it could be this. I would try it now.

Thanks