Thursday, June 22, 2017

African progress

Although it may look otherwise, finishing the implementation of the African continent is still my main focus, even though I've been slacking a little recently. But now that I started working on it again, I thought it was time for a progress update.

Right now the mod is a bit of a mess, Swedish are not finished (finished their names though, thanks for contributing!), all African maps are not in and there might be a few "Out of sync" problems as well. The Patcher is also in trouble. It's a lot to do and little time to do it.
But I promise you this, once I finish, everything will look neat and tidy and will play just as good.


With the intention of adding more African natives, finding good houses to use for Dahomey was hard, and the only solution I had was to use Indian houses and maybe retexture them. But it wasn't ideal, so I thought I should try something else. 
After a lot of consideration, I decided to use the Age1 Egyptian houses from Age of Mythology, who would fit my needs just right (plus a sleek pyramid to serve as the KotH monument on African maps).

Working with models, however, is not my expertise. But with help from wyteraven (King's Return mod) I managed to successfully import models into AoE3.

(work in progress)

But this is not all, for a more authentic African experience, I will be adding many new animals, custom ground textures and proper treasure guardians.
Plus another African native tribe, the Zulu. Again with help from wyteraven, the Zulu will have their own new buildings, units and all that.
This will bring the number of African natives to 3, which will be joined by Sufi (in northern Africa) and Jesuits (in southern Africa; without the Asian look, of course).

There are also 4 new African maps to be released, 2 of which are done and 2 of which I still need to work on.
One of the new maps, Great Zimbabwe, will have each player start in a Star Fort!
Something like this:


Actually it's exactly this, maybe a little more compact around the towers. It might also feature a capturable fixed gun (from the campaigns) to help you lay siege to your enemy!


Another thing I want to talk about is the Immigrants technology. In its original form, the Immigrants tech makes houses useless, has no counter and makes the Sioux free pop bonus and the Spanish TC pop card pointless.
All of this, plus the fact that many players still want a bigger population limit although I explained all problems related to this, gave me an idea for a new Immigrants tech.

I want to change Immigrants so that, instead of doing what it does now, it will convert all your existing villagers into immigrants, who are the same thing but do not take up pop.
So if you have, let's say 100 villagers (which means 100 pop) and you research the tech, 100 pop suddenly becomes available for military units.
But this will only affect your current villagers, so if you lose them you will have to train normal villagers.

I might need some opinions on this idea so please, do not hold back.

Thanks for playing!

22 comments:

  1. Happy to have news. I look forward to all that is released, nice work ! ;)

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  2. Thank you for the great work!! BTW that idea about converting villagers looks perfect

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  3. Sounds awesome! Thanks for the update

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  4. I'd be okay with the settler conversion into immigrants... Alternatively, would there be a way to make villagers use up half of a population point or does it need to be a whole number? If so, the Immigrants tech could change that, sort of like the Professional Handler card for the Indians lowers elephant population cost. I don't want to clutter up this post, but on a related note, are there plans to modify the Sharia tech from the Sufi settlement? I've never seen the point of researching it, as I rarely get close to my villager cap, unless I'm playing as the Dutch or Ottomans. Does anyone else actually make use of it?

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    1. Pop can be modified but cannot be made 0 (if it's bigger than 0 in the first place), that's one of the problems which made me think of this alternative. I thought of changing villager pop to 0 but it is not possible, modding limitation.

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    2. Can you make it just like the ships'? Actually, immigrants look like ships' a little bit but exact ships limitation would be fit villagers so no population size just a limit

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  5. Neat ideas! Great to see some progress is still being made.

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  6. I just played the French for the first time since the last upgrade, and I really enjoyed it. My only quibble is that the flatbowmen can not seem to use their ranged attack when in a defensive stance. Otherwise, I love it! Thanks, as always, Mandos.

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    Replies
    1. Ah, a bug that slipped through. I will fix it right away.
      Thanks.

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  7. Nice news, my friend and I are having some trouble when trying to patch. It says "The remote server returned an error". How can we fix?Thanks!

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    1. We had the mod hosted for free, now that server went down.
      We no longer have where to host the mod.

      You can still start the mod via age3m.exe, the patcher is only for updating.

      As for the patcher, we need a new free host. No alternatives yet.

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    2. I've never played your mod before so with the patcher not working, should I just copy paste all the files from the drive to the bin folder and run the exe? I think there is a typo in the drive files btw - Campaigm folder

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    3. It's not a typo. Paths can only be changed in the exe but not made longer or shorter, just changed letters, so Campaign became Campaigm. Just some minor sacrifices I had to make.

      Yes, age3m.exe should be along the other exes in the "bin" folder, same with the mod folders. And run age3m.exe.
      You might want to also set age3m.exe to run in WinXP SP3 compatibility mode, or else settings won't save (both Steam AND the patcher do this automatically).

      Delete
  8. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  9. Hi bro
    Great News ... Great work I saw the pictures and I like so much
    but I have a questions
    - I had installed the Improvement MOD 5.4 with " Installer "
    so if i will install this last update " African progress"
    should I install it on the game directely (Game with Imrovement MOD 5.4)
    or should I install it on a fresh game
    Please give me an advice

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    Replies
    1. Fresh game, the newest mod version is not compatible with 5.4.
      Currently we no longer have a server for the patcher so get the mod from Drive:
      https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BxZxW4IntQ3cNGx5Wk1mYXdHVUE

      It goes in "steam/steamapps/common/aoe3/bin", run "age3m.exe".

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  10. Replies
    1. fixed, just input serial number aoe3 asian dynasty

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  11. i guess for the japanese monk u should bring back the shrine building again isn't it ?

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  12. This sounds really awesome! You have my blessing.

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