XIII Century AD

[wackyserious]

WORK IN PROGRESS (Open to suggestions and help)

12-13th Century Castle Simulator

A.K.A (Stronghold in 0ad mod, loljk.)

 

Repository: https://github.com/0ADMods/xiiiad

STRUCTURES
 

CIVIC CENTER:

• Village Hall (Village) | Town Hall (Town) | Citadel (City)

BARRACKS:

• N/A (Village) | Town Barracks (Town) | 1.) City Barracks 2.) Castle Barracks (City)

DOCKS:

• Village Docks (Village) | Town Docks (Town) | City Docks (City)

FORGE:

• N/A (Village) | Town Forge (Town) | 1.) Castle Forge (City)

FARM FIELD:

• Village Farm Field (Village) | N/A (Town) | N/A (City)

FARMSTEAD:

• Village Farmstead (Village) | N/A (Town) | N/A (City)

HOUSE:

• Village Dwelling (Village) | Town Dwelling (Town) | City Dwelling (City)

STOREHOUSE:

• Village Storehouse (Village) | N/A (Town) | N/A (City)

TEMPLE:

• Chapel (Village) | Church (Town) | 1.) Cathedral 2.) Monastery (City)

MARKETPLACE:

• N/A (Village) | Town Market (Town) | City Market (City)

 

OTHERS:

• APOTHECARY
• HOSPICE *Monastery
• TAVERN
• GUILDHOUSE *Town Phase
• COURTHOUSE *City Phase
• UNIVERSITY *Monastery

CASTLE STRUCTURES

WALLS

• Stone Curtain Wall (Hoarding Upgrade) *Town Phase
• Single Stone Wall (Hoarding Upgrade) *Town Phase
• Double Stone Wall (Hoarding Upgrade) *City Phase

TOWERS

• Square Lookout Tower *Town Phase
• Small Square Tower *Town Phase
• Large Square Tower *City Phase
• Great Square Tower *City Phase
• Round Lookout Tower *Town Phase
• Small Round Tower *Town Phase
• Large Round Tower *City Phase
• Great Round Tower *City Phase

KEEP

• Small Keep
• Large Keep
• Great Keep

UNITS

 

CITIZEN-SOLDIER

• Serf Spearman (Basic) | Militia Spearman (Advanced) | Sergeant Spearman (Advanced)
• Serf Archer (Basic) | Militia Archer (Advanced) | Sergeant Archer (Advanced)
• Serf Crossbowman (Basic) | Militia Crossbowman (Advanced) | Sergeant Crossbowman (Advanced)
• Mounted Serf (Basic) | Mounted Militia (Advanced) | Mounted Sergeant (Advanced)

CHAMPION

• Bannerman (1 Bannerman = 1 Fortress) - 1.) Provides military bonus 2.) Can train units
• Squire (Basic) | Knight (Advanced) | Royal Knight (Advanced)
• Mounted Squire (Basic) | Mounted Knight (Advanced) | Mounted Royal Knight (Advanced)

MERCENARY

• Mercenary Spearman (Basic) | Experienced Mercenary Spearman (Advanced) | Veteran Mercenary Spearman (Elite)
• Mercenary Swordsman (Basic) | Experienced Mercenary Swordsman (Advanced) | Veteran Mercenary Swordsman (Elite)
• Mercenary Archer (Basic) | Experienced Mercenary Archer (Advanced) | Veteran Mercenary Archer (Elite)
• Mercenary Crossbowman (Basic) | Experienced Mercenary Crossbowman (Advanced) | Veteran Mercenary Crossbowman (Elite)
• Mercenary Rider (Basic) | Experienced Mercenary Rider (Advanced) | Veteran Mercenary Rider (Elite)

HEROES

• Bishop
• Lord
• Marshal

[LordStark]

Sounds really cool.

I would recommend that you change village/town/city phases to hierachical ranks. Like you go from a Knight in charge of a small manor and then become a Lord and then finally a Duke or something like that. In doing so, I would also recommend you change the name of the Royal Knights to something else.

I also recommend some kind of upgrade tree for female peasants. In my own mod the lord-player has the option to marry one of the woman and she becomes a Lady. She then offers various benefits (which I am still not fully decided on). One of the options that the Lady provides is the option of recruiting a small number of soldiers that are cheap and do not affect your population cap. The idea being that he father is also a noble Lord from another part of the Kingdom and would send aid on behalf of his daughter.

Once you have a Lady, you could allow other woman to become her maids - they would presumably begin obtaining some new resource like honour.

I also think multiple heros is another good option - with some heros offering and economic bonus (bailiff/steward) and others offering a combat bonus (Marshal/Master-at-Arms).

Knights/Vassals could offer increased population cap to reflect that they have people who have sworn fealty to them. That means if you have a Knight in your service, he will likely have some extra soldiers (population).

[wackyserious]

For the heroes here are my ideas:

Bishop (Economic bonus)

Lord (Economic/Military bonus)

Marshal (Military bonus)

[wackyserious]

 

Saving it here for reference, I found this at https://www.reddit.com/r/MordhauFashion

[LordStark]

Have you considered making the Bishop his own side? I read somewhere that in some places Bishops were basically Lords. Not sure how reliable the information is and I have not done any of my own research.

But my assumption was that a Lord of a castle is not going to have a bishop among his staff/retinue.

Depending on your skill with Java, it could make for an interesting opponent/gia who you can choose to tolerate or wipe off the face of the map.

A bishop (with warrior monks) would play very different to most normal sides.

Stewards tended to run the castle for their Lords and the Bailiff did a lot of the running of local villages in terms of economy.

The Bailiff could be upgradable to a Steward.

[Gurken Khan]

11 minutes ago, LordStark said:

Have you considered making the Bishop his own side? I read somewhere that in some places Bishops were basically Lords. Not sure how reliable the information is and I have not done any of my own research.

I just looked up one place I knew had a bishop with secular power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne#Middle_Ages

Bruno's story reads like fantasy, might serve as inspiration or just an interesting read.

[Lopess]

A suggestion: put water as a resource, and food and water consumables by the units. This can emulate this important part in ancient sieges. Put the project on Github (Modo 0ad) I will help with specific things.

[LordStark]

Quote

I just looked up one place I knew had a bishop with secular power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne#Middle_Ages

Bruno's story reads like fantasy, might serve as inspiration or just an interesting read.

I would say the story is not uncommon. Bishops seems to basically be Lords. I am still learning about the medieval period and there does seem to be some differences of opinion about different roles. However, I would emphasis that I lack any training in history and the difference of opinion may not be among historians - it could be between the uninformed and the historians. As my "sources" or only things like Quora and forums.

From what I have been able to find out so far (and there is forum/quora posts that contradict this), it seems that you might have the following in close proximity:

1. A bishop and his monks/warrior monks with the monks reporting the the bishop (and not the local Lord).
2. A Lord and his retinue and peasants/serfs/bailiffs/steward etc etc
3. Representatives of the King such as the Shire Reeve (Sheriff) and Kings Judges (at least in England after 1066).

It would be cool (if my information is accurate) if the game worked around the interaction between these three different groups. Even if you have different Lords playable - so you can pick between six Lords and then the Kings representatives and the local Bishop are separate sides that have a more unique role in the game. 

My thinking is the Bishop could be a nuisance in some way but also offer some advantages. As the game progresses the player might decide that the nuisance the Bishop provides is not worth the benefit and choose to declare war and wipe the Bishop out. Some of the nuisance:

1. The Bishop/Monks could randomly arrest your hero units or your lady for various religious offences. Not sure how this would be codes but I guess it would be something along the lines of one of your heroes "fades" away and a bishops cage suddenly gets upgraded with your hero (or Lady) in it.

2. The Bishop could randomly attack some of your units after declaring them to be heretics. The Bishop wouldn't declare war on the player completely, just on a certain area/village. This would obviously require changing the engine. 

You could have the "King" AI basically give you missions and require you to assist him in various tasks. If the player fails to assist the King or is not able to the King eventually turns on the player.

So each game is like a world with up to six Lords and then the Church and the King acting in the background and offering both benefits and downsides. The Lord-Players overall benefits (auras/upgrades) would change based on their relationship with their King and the local Bishop.

Last suggestion. A major problem with Stronghold was that the peasants did not carry enough resources. This make it vital that resources and granaries/storehouses be located close together. That meant it was too a players advantage to place farms around the granary and storehouses near the woods. The various smith buildings would be placed close to the armoury. The outcome was that the better players tended to not really have a castle - because it meant peasants had to walk too far to drop off resources. Instead, the player crammed everything in next to each other as close as possible to the appropriate store facility.

You can avoid this issue and encourage the player to build castles that don't look so crammed up by having the peasants carry a greater load of resources. This means that they require less trips from the fields/forests/mines to the store facilities and so even if they have to walk a long distance in the grand scheme of things it is not such a big deal. 

It also means that you don't get a huge line of peasants constantly walking in and out of your castle and instead you can have 2-3 walking to one part of the castle (the granary) and another 2-3 walking to the storehouse and another 2-3 walking to the armoury and any given time. The castle/village all of a sudden looks like a place where different people are going about their different business. There are no longer columns of people (which always seemed to break emersion for me).

You can also require that farms need to be located a certain distance from the granary - but this does not fix the peasant-trains. The only way to get rid of the peasant-trains is to have the peasants carry a lot more so that they are going in to the castle a lot less often and spending more time working on site (in the forest/mine/farm etc etc)

 

[wackyserious]

At the moment, I just want something generic that is still close to the base game, well with more units and buildings like castle structures.

This will be mostly be a possible resource for more complicated mods, I am almost done with the units and will likely upload a partial copy of this mod over at 0admods.

My current problem are the structures, I can mostly deal with units and props, structures remains a problem for me.

[LordStark]

Another suggestion - use lots of different kinds of storehouses so that the peasants are travelling to different locations in the castle/village. Once again, it means that they will not form a long column of people always going backwards and forwards to the same location. That is not how castles/villages would look in real life. People would be going to different places at different times. So you can have:

Granary (Grain)

Woodstore (wood)

Stoneyard (stone)

Smith (metal)

Butcher (meat)

Market (fruit)

Imagine if you have all these different locations within your castle/village for different things while at the same time your peasants collect a lot more of each resource before they bring it back. What you will end up with is a village/castle that looks like people are going about their daily business - people will be travelling in all different directions within the castle. And it won't be crowded because at any given time most of the peasants are at their place of work outside the castle.

 

[wackyserious]

I will likely name the mod as XIII Century AD (Somehow similar to Bigtiger's but mine will be have a more generic feel)

For an instance I am naming my first faction as Westerners (code: west), to somehow represent the Western Europeans at the time of the 13th Century.

Then the Easterners (Eastern European) Southerners? (Southern European) I am not quite sure what word to use to refer to the Islamic faction.

[Lion.Kanzen]

40 minutes ago, wackyserious said:

Then the Easterners (Eastern European) Southerners? (Southern European) I am not quite sure what word to use to refer to the Islamic faction.

they and the Europeans called them Ismahelites.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmaelites

The definition is older. From early Iron age.

[wackyserious]

Is Saracen an offensive term to use? I am trying to brand the mod in the perspective of Western Europe.

[Lion.Kanzen]

Saracens (Lat. Sarraceni, Fr. Sarrasins) was used in the period of the crusades as an indiscriminate term for Muslims. Originally designating one ethnic group in the Arabian Peninsula, by late antiquity it had become a synonym for Arabs, and it was employed by Latin chroniclers of the eighth and ninth centuries to describe the Muslim Arab invaders in the Mediterranean region. In the twelfth century, chroniclers of the First Crusade (1096-1099) and poets of the chansons de geste (Old French epic poems) applied the term to Turks, Arabs, and other Muslims, creating a colorful and wildly inaccurate portrait of Saracens who worshipped pantheon idols, the chief among them Mahomet. At the same time, theologians offered polemical refutations of the Lex Sarracenorum (Law of the Saracens), as they generally called Islam. The travel narratives and romances of the later Middle Ages often blend literary topoi of pagan Saracens with more realistic depictions of Islam. The term Saracen gradually fell into disuse by the seventeenth century, to be replaced by Turk, Mohammedan, and Moslem.

 

The origins of the Latin word Sarracenus are obscure; the hypothesis of its derivation from the Arabic sharqiyyin (the plural of sharql, “Easterner”) is not universally accepted. Roman writers used the term to designate one ethnic group in eastern Arabia. By the third century, the term designated all of the nomadic Arabs of the peninsula. Some authors affirmed that the Saracens worshiped idols of stone. The theologian Jerome asserted that the Saracens were the descendants of Abraham through his handmaid Hagar and their son, the “wild man” Ishmael (Genesis 16:12); they thus should be properly called Hagarenes or Ishmaelites, but they falsely called themselves Saracens, claiming to be the descendants of Abraham’s legitimate wife Sarah. This etymology was taken up by Isidore of Seville and many subsequent Latin authors. It no doubt seemed to fit the experience of those who chronicled the conquests and raids of the Sar- raceni in the seventh and eighth centuries. Very few chroniclers showed any interest in the religion of these invaders, and those who did showed little awareness of the rise of Islam; they contented themselves with repeating what they found in Jerome and Isidore.

 

https://erenow.net/postclassical/crusades/834.php?s_pt=source2

 

[Lion.Kanzen]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saracen

Ptolemy's 2nd-century work, Geography, describes Sarakēnḗ (Ancient Greek: Σαρακηνή) as a region in the northern Sinai Peninsula.[2][3] Ptolemy also mentions a people called the Sarakēnoí (Ancient Greek: οἱ Σαρακηνοί) living in the northwestern Arabian Peninsula (near neighbor to the Sinai).[2][3] Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical history narrates an account wherein Pope Dionysius of Alexandria mentions Saracens in a letter while describing the persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor Decius: "Many were, in the Arabian mountain, enslaved by the barbarous 'sarkenoi'."[2][3] The Augustan History also refers to an attack by Saraceni on Pescennius Niger's army in Egypt in 193, but provides little information as to identifying them.[13] 

 

Edited July 4, 2022 by Lion.Kanzen

[LordGood]

I've wanted to do this for a while now

[Stan`]

3 hours ago, wackyserious said:

I will likely name the mod as XIII Century AD (Somehow similar to Bigtiger's but mine will be have a more generic feel)

For an instance I am naming my first faction as Westerners (code: west), to somehow represent the Western Europeans at the time of the 13th Century.

Then the Easterners (Eastern European) Southerners? (Southern European) I am not quite sure what word to use to refer to the Islamic faction.

You can take all the stuff under generic / that's what it's intended for. I wanted to make a generic civ along with the polish and teutonic. But I lacked inspiration.

[wackyserious]

1 hour ago, LordGood said:

I've wanted to do this for a while now

We neeeeeed buildings :-)

[wackyserious]

[wackyserious]

[wackyserious]

Done with the initial unit commit. I need help fixing errors and adding simulation file placeholder for structures (Either Spartan structure set or Gaul structure set?)

Repository: https://github.com/0ADMods/xiiiad

[Stan`]

9 minutes ago, wackyserious said:

Done with the initial unit commit. I need help fixing errors and adding simulation file placeholder for structures (Either Spartan structure set or Gaul structure set?)

Repository: https://github.com/0ADMods/xiiiad

If you do placeholders please don't copy actors reference those of the public instead.

[wackyserious]

22 minutes ago, Stan` said:

If you do placeholders please don't copy actors reference those of the public instead.

Yes, I do that when I use building placeholders, thanks for the reminder!

[wackyserious]

Stepping outside of my comfort zone and started modeling some village phase houses.

[Lion.Kanzen]

23 Century?