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!