Naval battles
Hello everyone, it's finally here, the moment we've all been waiting for: The (beta) release of the naval combat mod.
Black ark preview video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEbfzqsJkwY
Preview video (older version, new vid coming soon):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpZ4cGpRpEk
For a description of the mod, please scroll down to the 'features' tab. For those of you who are interested, here is a short story about the development hell this mod went through:
We couldn't have known it would take this long when we first started on the mod, but we're pretty sure it was all worth it in the end. I'm going to start this mod description with a short story about the work that went into this mod. If you don't want to read that you can just skip to the 'features' part below.
It all started with my discovery of how to turn all sea into land in my quest to enable naval battles. This resulted in the rather funky situation where all generals suffered from a jesus complex - they all walked on water as if it was land. Though this looked somewhat rediculous, it did enable 'naval' battles of a sort, and I was pretty pleased with myself. Excited with my discovery I immediately posted about it in the map making discord channel, and launched a naval themed map making competition so that we would have some nice maps to work with. The competition was a success, and we got some really beautiful maps (see below), so at this point I was considering just adding these to regions and releasing the mod in that state. Goofy, but functional.
But no. I showed my discovery to Marthenil, and he latched on with his obsessive perfecionism, determined to find a way to have naval battles without jesus-jenerals. Thus begins our story. We came very close to finishing the mod with several -very- different solutions, all with their own unique drawbacks. As a result of that there were at least three moments where we thought we were within days of releasing the mod, only to find another issue which turned out to be a blocker.
The most annoying part of all of this were the black arks (blarks). Blarks have been a very consistent source of annoyance throughout these nine months, because as it turns out, they don't want to move when you turn all sea into land. I hate blarks. In the end we, or mostly Marthenil to be honest, managed a pretty acceptable solution for the blarks, and the mod is now at a point where we feel comfortable enough releasing it in a beta state.
It has been a grueling nine months of labor, but it was all worth it in the end for our baby is finally here. Despite the flaws and the bugs we feel that it's innovative enough for you all to enjoy, and we certainly hope that you will enjoy it.
Features
- Enabled naval battles - 9 new naval battle maps (see below) - Naval prebattle screens - Completely reworked black arks
The main feature is the addition of naval battles - instead of autoresolving all battles fought at sea can now be fought on islands instead!
This also comes with new sexy battle preview scenes!
Due to Marthenil's work, you should for the most part not notice any changes on the campaign map, with the exception of Black Arks, because those have been completely overhauled out of necessity.
Black Arks
The Black Ark is essentially a horde now, that can go both on land and water. While on land, it's called a Black Ark Raiding Party. It cannot grow, and it cannot build upgrades, on top of having only one recruitment slot and a 50% movement penalty. It can siege and occupy settlements. It can also recruit directly from owned province pools so no longer do you have to juggle with a second general to get troops in the black ark.
While at sea, it functions exactly like the black arks in the vanilla game with the added bonus that you can replace your general (so you can place a LL as the leader of the Black Ark).
The lord can now level up as a normal lord.
It can no longer grant bombardment to friendly units in the area of influence, but it can use them itself. This is sadly a limitation that cannot be worked around.
There are currently 9 maps included, with more to follow soonish.
The maps
- High Elf Beach Resort - Kazad - Bretonnian Isle - Kazad - Frozen Island - Kazad - Flooded Temple - Kazad - Gaze of Ualatep - SaSemar - Scattered Tropical Island - Ravenian - Solitary Forest Island - Ravenian - Solitary Tropical Island - Ravenian - Tidal Island - Ravenian
Due to the massive amount of backend changes, we cannot possibly test this enough on our own, hence the beta. Please report any and all issues so that we may fix them. People walking on water, boats on land, weird stuff, and so on.
Known issues
Portraits don't work properly at the moment. There is some clipping in some of the prebattle scenes. The mod is currently not compatible with startpos mods. It should be later, but not right now.
This mod requires a new campaign and is not save game compatible!
Required mods
The naval battle mod is split into two parts. This one, and the part 2 uploaded by Marthenil. You will need both. In addition to that, you need to subscribe to the main GCCM mod, the GCCM asset pack, and the two GCCM settlement packs.
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