Lord Vekta: do you want to do a joined map project?

[EaglePrince 230]

Wow, this is a great map indeed!

 

With maps like this you are really tempering anyone to buy Crusader 2 as soon as possible! :)

[Lord Vetka 63]

Thanks EaglePrince, it's starting to look like a map now, still lots of work to do.

 

There is a bit of a problem with the editor, the buildings get placed on the plateau, if you raise the ground a little and place a keep there, in game you can't get up on the top, the sand is blocking the door to the top of the keep, I found this on a few maps I've made, a bit of raised ground and the keeps do not work properly, to fix the problem I've lowered the ground back to plateau and the keeps work fine. So any kind of texturing you do to the ground becomes useless where the keep is placed. Most buildings placed in game will show them sitting a bit low on textured ground but they do still work, kind of like the walls sinking into the hills.

 

We are experimenting with the village to see what will work best, this village has 2 village halls, they work fine, and 4 village barracks that don't seem to work, Nigel managed to figure out how to get the carters to transport the goods you want, that is setup in the editor, to bad you can't place any thing in the village when playing the game.

 

How do you guys like the look of the village, the buildings were placed more for perception and to test the village, there is one more village needed on the other side of the river, Nigel I have an idea where we can color in 2 villages in 1, it might work if I take the existing village and color in half of it making 2 villages with 1 wall.

 

Ideas are welcome from other players, we are almost done with this map, that does not mean we can't make a new map! Or changes to this one!

 

Nigel, I saw your email and the map, I made a few changes to the stairs and towers, took the troops off of the towers, what a bear that was, but it can be done, this has been a learning experience, in a good way!

 

Now I'm going to post some tips on using the editor in a thread I saw earlier.

[Lord Vetka 63]

I have done some more work on the map, and thought I would post a screen so you guys can see the progress, we now have Two Cities, one is Crusader and the other is Arabian, the map is coming along fine!

 

[Nigel 71]

Lord Vetka and I tried the map last Friday. It is coming along nicely.

We are also learning a fair bit about the map editor in the process. Hopefully we will soon be able to try it out with 4 players.

 

Some early impressions made with the map editor:

 

 

 

 

Edited November 17, 2014 by Nigel

[Lord_Chris 251]

Wow, that's looking really, really good now! Have you considered uploading some of the best to our gallery?

[Lord Vetka 63]

The map is coming along fine, we are at the point of doing some online testing, maybe by the end of the week or... you know how things can go:-)

 

Those close up screens look good, Nigel you take better screens than I do, it would be good to have a few more like that in the gallery.

 

Today I will finish cleaning up the iron and stone areas and remove some of the farmland as well making you need to take the village sooner. For now each village will deliver 3 goods, food and ale.

 

We could add in some weapons work shops and deliver some weapons as well, or any other goods, any thoughts?

 

Keep in mind that the cities have been divided into to 2 villages, so there are 4 villages on the map, one for each player.

[Nigel 71]

  Quote

Wow, that's looking really, really good now! Have you considered uploading some of the best to our gallery?

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:) Thanks for the nice compliments.

 

To be honest, those pictures are slightly tampered. I made them with the map editor using the "Free Camera" option and then I changed the sky from the map editor to blue using a simple paint program.

 

So those images are not something a player will be able to see in-game (unless he finds a way to free the camera movement).

But if this is still acceptable for the gallery, I will be happy to upload them.

Edited November 18, 2014 by Nigel

[Lord Vetka 63]

Those screens look great, the touch ups you did made them look even better, more like that would be great! Thanks.

 

I said I would do some work on the map yesterday, but the day got eaten up, but I will do some work this morning and send the map over to you for some more detail in the cities.

[Lord_Chris 251]

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But if this is still acceptable for the gallery, I will be happy to upload them.

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The gallery images aren't moderated like the downloads. There's no such thing as an unacceptable image unless it's completely unrelated or utterly pointless.

[Nigel 71]

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.... There's no such thing as an unacceptable image ....

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Well, I could think of a few, but let's not go there.... :P

 

 

I will look into how uploading works and upload them later.

[Nigel 71]

The map is coming along nicely.

 

The cities are now fully fit out with buildings and I did some balancing work this week.

The way I did it was, that I conquered 1 city and build a market, set it to autosell all goods that were delivered by the city and watched the money collected over 20 game-days (with nothing else on).

 

The cities are delivering goods worth about 3200 gold in those first 20 days.

The Arabic city is only slightly more productive than the Cursader city with 3268 versus 3195 gold pieces.

That is a difference of 2.2% - I guess we can call this balanced.

 

I think we are ready now to move into 4-player testing. So if anyone is interested, please let us know.

It would be great if we could find some time next week for a test game.

[Lord Vetka 63]

Well, that's an accomplishment, build a map with 2 cities split into 2 villages each and have them balanced, great!

 

It will be good to test this map with 4 players, it's been a fun project, I look forward to seeing what you did and playing it.

[Nigel 71]

Heheh, it was not too difficult actually.

I should say that the villages are perhaps not balanced between them, I only balanced for the city as a whole.

Having said that, the villages are pretty symmetrical, with the same number of buildings in each, so I dont think they whill have much difference between them.

 

With that, all I had to do was to "measure" the Crusader city, then keep that constang and adjust the Arabic city to give the same outcome.

I ended up having to add additional carter posts to the Arabic city for delivering apples.

 

 

One thing I learned:

Once there are enough production buildings, it is actually the number and position of the carter posts, that determines how much you get out of a city. That may be an important piece of information to keep in mind for future designs of capturable estates for other maps, too.

[Lord Vetka 63]

The map is almost done now, I hope it plays as good as it looks, most of the testing we have done shows that it should be a good game. When we have 4 players testing we will know.

 

If you want to join in the online testing, please let us know here!

 

We would like to be able to test this week.

 

I have to say Nigel, building this map has taught us a lot about the map editor and the game, and we have learned from each other, like moving things after being placed or deleting things, and changing buildings in the objects panel, and importantly, how the villages work...maybe the next time we make an invasion scenario!

[Nigel 71]

Yep, this has certainly given us more than just another new map: a lot of new experience with this map editor and quite a few new ideas for the future.

 

 

 

As fate will have it, my real life is getting pretty busy next week. The only days I will be able to do a test game would be Thursday and perhaps Wednesday late evening.

 

That said, Lord Vetka, if one of these days works for you I would certainly try do put a test game in. Or if you and Chris, or someone else want to have a go at it on one of the other days, by all means do. I will put the latest version of the map in an email to you.

[Lord_Chris 251]

I'm going to be really busy until at least Thursday of this week, so I'm not sure I'll be able to have any time at the moment - sorry.

[Lord Vetka 63]

No problem this a map project not a rush project, I did some detailing and plan on doing more later today, if we don't get the map tested this week there is always next week.

 

If Thursday works then maybe we could do a test run, Nigel might be able to play on Thursday, anyone else want to test with us? 2vs2 with 2 cities split into 2 villages each, so each player gets a village!

[Nigel 71]

We did play a test game on Thursday - even managed a 2v2 with two other guys joining us.

It went really well. An exciting game to play and we did not find any real glitches that would be a show stopper.

 

Here is a screenshot of the greatest lord curves after the match:

 

This graph shows two things.

 

1. The map is pretty well balanced. All 4 curves run almost in parallel for the first 25 minutes (we had 5min PT).

 

2. The map can offer exciting battles. The curves go zig-zagging, which is always a sign for several varied battles that happened in the game.

The more boring games tend to have curves which only constantly increase until a single battle point at the end.

 

(ok, the curves show one more thing, namely that Nigel and Lord Vetka are hopeless at MP and lost this battle, but let's quickly skipp over this minor detail an move on....)

 

 

I have made some more screenshots to show impressions of the map.

Of course you have to remember they are from the map editor with free camera movement.

 

Edited December 8, 2014 by Nigel

[Nigel 71]

This one is the mosque in the Arabian city.

 

 

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And the streets of the city at night.

 

 

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I am putting spoiler tags around them, so you dont always have to load those "heavy" pictures when reading this page in the thread.

And yes, we are limited to 2 attachments per post (which is reasonable, I guess).

Edited December 8, 2014 by Nigel

[Nigel 71]

Two more pictures from outside of the cities.

 

The lonely camel.

 

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Desert by night.

 

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Edited December 8, 2014 by Nigel

[Lord Vetka 63]

Very Nice! Those screens look really good, you do a great job on those. :)

 

That was a good test, even if the other 2 players played rather than test, which was good actually, Yes I know we got our butts kicked:-) But we did produce a top notch map, it will be a fun map to play and looks good doing it.

 

It was a good fun project Nigel, I look forward to doing more in the future, not sure how far I can go, my PC is at the limits, start getting a lot of troops on the map and I start to stall and it gets jerky to the point of not being able to grab units with the mouse, I might be able to clear it up a little with a few setting changes, that will be another thread.

 

I think the map will be posted soon, maybe this week!

[Mathew Steel 151]

It's been a while since I looked at this topic but to see all the improvements over my vacancy it's a great thing to see. The map looks great (the screenshots have been well thought out), it looks like both of you have been putting a lot of effort into creating this fine map :)

[Lord Vetka 63]

The map has turned out very well, we are happy with how it turned out, it plays great in testing and looks good doing it to:-) Nigel does a great job on those screen shots.

 

The map is now done, just a few more little adjustments and it will be posted, we hope this week.

[Lord Vetka 63]

"A Tale of Two Cities" is now finished and can be found in the download skirmish section!

 

Thank You every one who helped or commented as we went along, it was a good fun map project, and we hope to do more.

 

Enjoy your stay in our A Tale of Two Cities map!

 

Download - http://www.stronghold-nation.com/downloads/file/229-a-tale-of-two-cities/

[Micha! 27]

Nice to hear. Are you planning to release it on workshop too?