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Westeros M2:TW mod- Alpha Map


Marcus

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One thing to note, Ran, is that the player can convert castles to cities and visa-versa based on strategy. Playing in Vanilla, I'll usually have my settlements near the front lines be castles and the ones further from the front be cities. As I press forward, some of those castles will be converted to cities.

If I'm Russia, for instance, Moscow and Novgorod will be cities and Thorn, which I've conquered from Poland, is a castle. I change them again after pushing forward. My city-castle ratio is usually 3:1. That makes for an akward situation in Westeros, where castles outnumber the cities 3:1 if not by more.

Plus, a player could convert Harrenhal and Casterly Rock to cities if they want, and Oldtown to a Castle...and that's kind of odd.

Is it possible to code out the ability to switch back and forth, and then make the limited numbers of cities worth a higher amount of gold in order to rebalance that? It would make holding the cities - KL, Oldtown, etc...very valuable, which is in fact quite realistic to the setting. Otherwise, is Oldtown with fighting for when I can just take Horn Hill and convert it to a city and grow the population with farms?

Yes you can switch castles in and out. In fact, you can change how much population is required to turn a city into a larger city. For instance, in one of the current mods for M2TW, you cannot convert a large city into a huge city until you reach 60,000 population.

The coding should allow us to make some settlements/city sizes unreacheable. That way, through the course of a campaign, perhaps only Oldtown and King's Landing will ever reach/be Huge City status. The rest of the cities may reach Large City at most. Furthermore, exterminating a population will be a HUGE thing as it will reset your population to 500, meaning that it can be a massive setback to someone who loses their city.

Economics and so on can be changed pretty easily. In fact, I have a hunch that simply allowing trading buildings to be built in castles will increase their economic worth manyfold.

Oh by the way, does anyone have a link to the UK version of the map?

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If towns are the sources of peasant levies and economic structures, it would seem likely that these are rather widespread in most of Westeros... though they are not often large conglomerates. Many of the holdfasts may be more akin to small towns than actual castles. The lands surrounding Winterfell, for example, are the equivalent of a town, though they are spread out. Once winter comes, however, this town converges on the usually empty 'winter town' outside the Winterfell walls, and becomes a more proper town.

What this means for a game dynamic, however, is a bit more murky. From what I understand of the mechanics, I would make most of the locations towns, rather than castles. Castles I would reserve for either strong defensive fortifications (i.e. Moat Cailin, etc.) or the seats of lords powerful enough to raise well-armed and armored troops (i.e. Riverrun, etc.)

A couple of follow up questions though:

- Are there different levels of towns? Is there a significant mechanical difference between a town and a city, or is it just size, population, and wealth generation?

- Do towns and cities provide defensive benefits, or is this limited to castles and fortifications?

- Are there different levels of castles? Wooden holdfasts, stone keeps, and large walled castles? Or just stone castles of different sizes?

- What is the Wall currently comprised of? Is it mechanically impassible, or is it a really abrupt mountain range that can be traversed?

Edited to ask:

- I take it that there can be only one site of interest (castle/city) per territory?

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Yes, one per province. Now let's see.

Yes, I forget the actual names, but there's five levels. Town, large town, city, large city and huge city, I think. You have to "upgrade" a city before you can access the next tech tier for buildings.

Defensive benefit? Not really. They have a wall of some sort around the outside, some with arrow towers and whatever units you can muster, mostly militias.

Motte & Bailey, Castle, Fortress and Citadel come to mind, but perhaps I'm missing a level. The latter two have second and third levels of defenses, ie a Fortress has 2 sets of walls, and outer and an inner, and a citdal has 3 levels.

As for the Wall, I know not.

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For battle purposes: Towns and castles are both walled structures at which you can stage real-time fights.

Towns are generally square with a single wall (actually, the very smallest towns don't even have a wall). The wall can be a wooden palisade, for the small towns, or giant stone fortifications for big cities, but always just a single wall. Once past the wall, you fight in the streets and try to hold the town square. Vienna pretty much looks like Milan which looks like Rome and so on. The only differences are basic architectural looks (Northern Europe vs. Southern Europe and so on) -- the shape and function is only changed by the size of the wall.

Castles are just like towns, but can have multiple circuits of walls. The small castles (Motte & Bailly) are just a wooden wall. They have a keep, but it's just there for looks -- all the fighting happens along the wall and in the streets. Castles do have little towns within their walls.

Bigger castles will have stone walls, and then two stone walls with the town between the walls. Really big castles, called Citadels, will have three rings of walls and the inside walls will be "uphill" from the others, creating a nice concentric look. Again, they all look largely the same, only varying based on the level of the walls constructed.

I think the names for the levels of castles are Motte, Castle, Fortress and Citadel. There might be a fifth category in between.

Population has to meet certain threshholds to build bigger walls. That threshold can apparently be changed to suit the mod.

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My thought regarding the Wall was this:

It *is* possible for wildlings to climb the Wall... so it might be appropriate to have the Wall as a very narrow mountain. Units *can* cross, but very slowly. Moreover, it would confer very strong benefits to the defenders. This would also allow the Night's Watch castles to be towns instead... which would make more sense in some ways, as they aren't very defensive. (Although, at the same time, the population of the Night's Watch would likely never grow enough to increase the size and therefore defensive strength...).

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Ahh. *head explodes* Okay, I'm going to try and organize this.

Conversion from castle/city can be removed. Some buildings can be given to castles so everyone isn't always broke. However, if we make too many castles into cities, cities won't be all that important any more.

Okay, a to-do list:

Coldmoat added west of Goldengrove.

Planky Town added

Castles to be made cities:

Sunspear

Stoney sept

Maidenpool

Saltpans

Duskendale

Harroway

Kayce

Tumbleton

Gulltown-city

King Landings to be made a castle

Oldtown-large city

Ashford

Fairmarket

Should conversions be turned off?

Edit: There are six levels of settlement: Village, Town, Large Town, City, Large City, Huge City

There are five levels of castle: Bailey, Wooden castle, Castle, Fortress, Citadel.

Also. There's been no comments on climate so far. I posted some winter pics. How's the snow line?

Thoughts on including a non-conquerable eastern continent, for mercs?

3rd Edit: Are the locations in Post 1 correct? Also, if you look at Nightsong and Blackhaven on the westeros map, then on ours they seem off. Same goes for Horn Hill.

Another quick edit: Frozen Shore screen up, I missed it the first time. It's screen 53.

Awful lot to do. Thanks for all input so far.

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Ocean can defenitely be made to stop voyages to north of the wall. Ashford is defenitely in game.

Changes so far:

Gates of the Moon added

Karhold river added

Hornwood moved a bit south and west

Twins moved closer

Mountains of the Moon province removed

Stoney Sept moved next to river

Lakes & rivers near Torrhen's Square fixed.

Harrenhal moved

Brightwater Keep moved back to Tyrell

Access north of the wall is limited to through the wall only

Horn Hill & Nightsong moved to proper spots

Coldmoat & Planky Town added, House Crowl & Stane removed, House Magnar now is all of Skagos

Oh and if anyone can tell me how far snow goes down south in Westeros, it would be helfpul. I know in AFFC, Jaime states that snow falling in the riverlands meant snow in Lannisport and KL. But anyone have an idea how much further?

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Couple of comments:

- The Starks shouldn't be barred from going north of the Wall. I can't remember exactly where this is mentioned, but I believe Eddard had considered calling his banners and going beyond the Wall to wipe out Mance and his wildlings. If the Stark player has the time to send troops North, he should be able to...

- I'd imagine the snows go at least as far south as the Reach... I don't know if snows will fall in the flats of Dorne (though likely in the Dornish mountains). Of course, we won't have confirmation of this 'till GRRM unleashes the Winds of Winter.

- I think conversions between towns and castles should be barred. Given the timeline that we're considering (where a turn is a few days to a few weeks), there wouldn't be time to generate such a conversion...

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Couple of comments:

- The Starks shouldn't be barred from going north of the Wall. I can't remember exactly where this is mentioned, but I believe Eddard had considered calling his banners and going beyond the Wall to wipe out Mance and his wildlings. If the Stark player has the time to send troops North, he should be able to...

- I'd imagine the snows go at least as far south as the Reach... I don't know if snows will fall in the flats of Dorne (though likely in the Dornish mountains). Of course, we won't have confirmation of this 'till GRRM unleashes the Winds of Winter.

- I think conversions between towns and castles should be barred. Given the timeline that we're considering (where a turn is a few days to a few weeks), there wouldn't be time to generate such a conversion...

Well if you have a treaty w/ Nights Watch for military access, I do believe that allows you travel through their castles into the North w/o problem.

I barred them by goin by sea though.

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Yes, we barred sea travel so you cannot sail North of the wall and conquer the rebel/wildlings nations there. If a Stark players wants to gether an army and march through castle Black, by all means. However he shouldn't be able to stick an army on a ship and sail north to conquer Hardhome. Beyond the Wall isn't supposed to be there for conquer. It will be in the middle game when the wildlings actually attack, but not before.

If there are major issues with this, we can put it back.

There's lto of things to be discussed from the end of my previous post. Also, what IS our timeline? 1 turn=what? Month? Two weeks? Week? Anything less than a week, and that's pushing it... Also, we need lengths of summers and winters, for setting season length.

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I think a 1 turn = 1 week/2 weeks is closest to the books. I mean, 3 books (and an civil entire war) encompassed, what, 2 years? If we upped it to a month, that's only 24 turns to fight all of Westeros (and the Night's Watch vs. the Wildlings would be even shorter if you played either of those factions). If we did 1 turn = 1 week, that's 104 turns of gameplay to get through the "known" events of the book. Which comes down to a couple of months of gameplay for people like me who only play a few turns once or twice a week. the more hardcore would blow through this in maybe a month? (How many turns does the average player go through per session?)

I could be convinced otherwise, though. ;)

As for seasons....shit. that's tough, considering from AGOT-AFFC, we transitioned from late summer to early winter. In the books, they were enjoying the longest summer in memory, which was 10 years or so. And the corresponding winters are even longer. Ran will have that data -- and one of the other M2:TW might have a good idea how to deal with slowly mutable seasons.

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Could we get a screen shot of the Bay of Ice south of the Frozen Shore? I ask this because Bear Island is the seat of the Mormonts who play a major role in supporting Robb during his stint as King of the North + Trident.

Looks great so far, thanks for taking the initiative and doing great work, now we need to get George to play :)

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...I completely missed Bear Island....

I'll post it when I post shots of the fixed areas for approval. :)

Edit: As for number of turns, I've played 256 turns to date, and I started first week of december, so if I played every day (and I havent) that would equate to 7 turns per session. More likely about three times that per session, and I'm by no means a hardcore TWer.

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