Thursday, September 13, 2007

Chainmail

So I been playing this Battle For Sicily mod for Mount and Blade now.

At first I thought it was crappy 'cause it ain't real intuitive in the beginning and it don't throw any cool junk in yer face and razzle dazzle you right off the bat with dog-riding orcs and samurais and all that.

But once I just sat down and gave it a half hour I got totally sucked into it and now I love it and I'm thinking about screwing around with the source code for it, 'cause the dude who made it is definitely a genius.

And it actually has a lot of cool and fluffy stuff, like models for all different sorts of italian villages and several different types of seige fights (which can get pretty laggy laggy, but nothing a guy who had a guild of two hundred people in EQ can't handle heh).

And it also has an awesome little village-to-seaport ecomonic engine, and although you start out as a shmuck, running a village for your liege lord and collecting taxes, raiding caravans and hunting bandits, eventually you'll end up running yer own province and sacking enemy villages and campaigning against neighboring provinces and you'll have your own minions that'll collect your taxes for you.

So give it a try.

The easiest way to play it is to be a Norman Knight from an Aristocratic background, hook up with Messina ('cause its a seaport, and seaport towns are healthier and wealthier, seaports tend to stabilize your economy), and get a bunch of Norman Knights to go riding around and crushing everybody.

Once you get to Catania you'll have a decent seaport province that you can use to crush the rest of the map with.

Or, you can play it like I do, where you make yourself an Evil Arabian Prince and ride around with a bunch of maniacs in Turbans and a West African Dude from Zanj (who never seems to cheer with the rest of the men when we win a battle), selling french guys into slavery and saying Peace Be Upon You, Brother heh.

They suck compared to the heavy Chainmail armies of the Normans and the Greeks but I like bloody battles where I lose a lot of my guys ahaha.

Trust me, you should try this one.

3 comments:

W.Churchill said...

As soon as I learn how to 'tighten up the graphics to level 3' in class I might play around with making a mod, playing with the models and stuff

All I've done so far is make an ogre snowman that looks like it was pasted together by a 5th grader

Ole Bald Angus the Monk said...

Well this guy released his source code, and this mod is WAY more complex (with all sorts of mini-games) and organic and ingenius (and fun) than all the other ones I've played, with the military strategy sim built on an underlying economic engine where towns need to trade with each other (and not be hassled by bandits and enemy patrols) to stay healthy and stuff.

Its all historical and edumacational for time travellers and stuff, too, you could just travel around the map and talk to the merchants in every town to find out all about the economics of ancient sicily heh.

This is definitely the one to use as a base, even if yer gonna do an Ogres Versus Pixies mod or something, everything the player does, no matter how tiny, feels like it matters and has an effect in this one, y'know, all the energy from the hamster wheels get captured and goes somewhere and stuff.

Bringing a cartload of booze to a miserable little timber town in the mountains makes all the villagers happier (although they'll take care of themselves, for the most part, as long as they produce something worth some money and they got a little capital to buy tools and stuff and access to a place where they can get 'em).

That's the coolness.

Well, the huge and bloody battles where you clothesline guys off their horses and watch them get dragged for a while before all your peasants start hacking them to bits are the coolness, but that thing with the villagers is pretty goddam cool, too heh.

Its got some stuff that wasn't finished, the guy who made it obviously had a LOT more ideas, like owning your own boat and inter-faction rivalries between lords or something, but you'll have to check it out and see it for yourself.

The only complaint I really have is that I want to rule the whole place for myself and my vassals, and not give away the provinces I conquer, or have to move to and rebuild a recently defeated province after I conquer it, y'know, 'cause I conquered 'em so that I could get at their resources for my original province, and not just to clean up the caravan trade routes between allied provinces, I'd prefer an Every Province For Itself Mod, where you could get your liege lord killed somehow (without cheating), and some provinces would eventually become huge Monopolies and stuff, after eating other provincs (it takes them so long to defeat each other without the help of a player that I don't see a good reason to keep it the way it is, where every province is limited to five or six vassals, and they can never claim new territory for themselves, just for balance reasons or something).

But whatever, until you messed with it, there ain't no sense in blabbering about all the details, really.

W.Churchill said...

dude, your one of the best blabberers on the internet. I'll check it out later tonight