peugeot407 wrote:
I hope that answered all of your questions, and didn't disappoint you too much (though I fear it might). We have actually very recently released a Friday Update on the Turks, and while it wasn't posted here, you can see it here (click). A previous Friday Update may also be interesting, it can be found here (click).

Updates, historical reasearch, textures .. everything is perfect in this mod. I just can't wait to play.

Ps: Nice guess, but I live in istanbul btw, as a native Turk

After almost a month without any Friday Updates, we were finally able to make one. K&B has had some reorganization lately, but I hope it helps us to finish Prologue much faster. Anyway, let's get to the point, shall we? We had thought of this feature before, and we surely aren't the only mod, but we are the first to fully create it. What I'm talking about are Weather Effects.


Did someone say about stormy weather?

Rain, storm, snow and fog have been included in some maps of other mods, that's right. But, they are just visual things and don't affect the gameplay at all. So, what if they would? This is the whole point in this feature, different weathers affect the gameplay a bit though not too drastically. I think now it's good to tell about different effects we have:

Rain: Rain starts slowly, but eventually gets hard. After a while, it slows and rainbows start to appear. Rain spawns, as we call them, "baby trees", which eventually grow to normal trees. During rain, you build buildings slower, but you gather food faster from Farms.

Snow/Blizzard: It suddenly starts to snow, and you won't probably see as well as you normally would. Due to cold snow, units have less hitpoints, but all treasure guardians even less, making them very easy to kill. Some patches of snow will appear on ground, but they will melt quite quickly.

Fog: Fog particles appear around the map and visibility will go lower too, making all units have decreased Range and LOS.

Storm: The clouds go over the sun and it becomes dark (not too dark though). A small rain suddenly changes to heavy. Lightning bolts come from the skies, harming any units or buildings. Just hope they hit your enemies!


How do I feel so lost in this fog?

Naturally, are fitting for that area, so you don't get snow in Sahara. The only exception is Unknown map, where it is possible to have all of these effects, in a random order! In "normal" maps it is also possible to have different combinations, like first rain and then storm, but this is yet to be done.

As for when the effects happen, they all have the same sequence. There is always a starting timer of 4 minutes and then a random timer between 2-4 minutes before the weather effect starts. Each effect takes 2 minutes and from then effects happen every 2-4 minutes. We still might end up changing the timers, but that is easy, thanks to Misterscp for a very handy trigger "technique". And oh, more weather effects are possible, so just suggest them.


There is a gold mine at end of rainbow...



Oh no, still more maps for K&B? Yes, you heard right:

Don't worry though, this is the most extravagant of my map ideas, the others are not as special.

K&B salutes... Mrs. Nun and Herr Peppness. Not hard to realise who made (textured) them?
K&B refutes... Nokia. They started making smart phones too late and are therefore collapsing.

Thanks to AOE_Fan's lightning-like progress on scripting, we finished most of the Prologue maps a long time ago, but a lot of them weren't quite done yet, as the appropriate Barbarians hadn't been textured and coded yet. We're currently busy trying to get those done, so that the maps really are fully done. These are the latest two Barbarian units to be finished:



The Sudanese Warrior is the unit that belongs to the Sudanese subciv (who'd have guessed?), and it's crap. Well, perhaps not really crap, but it's not a particularly good fighter either. This is offset by the highest buildlimit of all Barbarian units though, so an group of these Sudanese chaps is not necessarily useless in battle. The Sudanese will appear mostly in African maps, such as Sahara and Savannah. The Steppe Pony is the unit that belongs to the Alans, a subciv that will appear mostly in maps of the Caucasus and the more southern part of the Eastern European steppes. The Alans were famous for their excellent light cavalry, and the Steppe Pony is exactly that.

Now, as a little extra, here's the concept art spangopola made for the Sudanese Warrior, on which the unit texture is based.





I'm not going to say much about this, but I can tell that we've got something special in the pipeline for a future Friday Update...

Ohh perfecto. Just need to find a way to upload this damn video...

K&B salutes... Mario Monti. No slow introductions to austerity, 6 years added to the Italian pension age in a single day. If only all European leaders could be this convincing...
K&B refutes... Middle Eastern buildings. It's almost impossible to texture them without making it look like copying WotTA's Lebanese immigrant buildings.

- Quoted from peugeot407

If you think that Nuns by Pepp is his first and last -- bad English -- Random Update, then you're wrong. You may count yourself lucky, or unlucky, because Pepp proudly present, his second Friday Random Updates!



In this Friday Update, I will present you three mercenary units that you'll find in the game. They are the Corsair Ship and the two Russian Auxiliaries.

The corsair ship is a mercenary unit who will replace the role of Privateer in Knights and Barbarians. This unit will work just like other K&B's ships, attack with ballista. These pirates accepted the Letter of Marque from certain nobles, paid to fight another nobles. They came from Turkey, Barbary Coast, or at the early medieval age, Scandinavia.



Now you're going to go to Russia. Just like Serbia or Hungary, Russia don't get a place in K&B as a full flagged civilization. So, following the main rules, we make it a mercenary. However, due to the fact that in the middle age Russia was divided into several countries, we decide to choose two, the so called Kiev and Novgorod. So then we present you, Kievan Druzhina.



After seeing a quite bad textured Druzhina (Pepp/I will retexture it again), now I'll present you the a bit better textured Novgorod Dvor! Dvor will replace the function of Manchu Horsemen in Knights and Barbarian. Here you go:





This is what Matti said, yes, I did no edit to what he said:

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, my computer had crashed during the night and there was only 50 Mb left!!!!! :x :x :x

K&B salutes... Now K&B has a new leadership structure and new "political" structure. Everybody has their deadline, so nobody will be lazy, *cough*.
K&B refutes... SkyDrive. It let us to upload just 100 MB, while we need more than two GB. Matti suggest google thingy and a li'l fight happened.

- Quoted from Pepp

Have you got fifty spare minutes in your life? Have you got absolutely nothing to do, yet don't want to get bored? Watch our premiere commented gameplay video! It pits The Dude, playing as the Italians, against AOE_Fan, playing as the Byzantines. The video isn't perfect, but as this is our first time, we hope you'll forgive us that. I personally think The Dude did a cracking job at commenting here, even if he goes offtopic on occasions, and mispronounced both my real name and my forum name.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WKVyHmbCq5c

As The Dude pointed out multiple times during the video, the Team Alpha version that was used for this video still had lots and lots of bugs in it, but we prefered to get a video out as soon as possible, so we hope you'll forgive us. The wrong sounds, unupdated unit stats and missing icons will of course be fixed, in those cases where they haven't already been...

Any guesses as to what you think this Feudalism feature The Dude mentioned will be?



As was clearly visible in the video, some stats aren't quite right yet, and improving them is a regular theme in our team forums:

Sounds good for me. I honestly see no reason to train siege units, as halberdiers do the same thing. Sappers should be much better against buildings and siege tower shouldn't be so unnecessary.

K&B salutes... History of Disease and Medicine class. Apparently it bores spangopola to death, and there are even rumours that it affects the quality of his concept art.
K&B refutes... The fact it takes several hours to up- or download something that is 2 GB.

- Quoted from peugeot407

[This message has been edited by Aoe3_Badger (edited 06-02-2012 @ 11:26 AM).]

We are moving to the next topic that was on our poll few weeks earlier and show few in-game screenshots of Chapter House, a building unique for the Crusading civs (only for Crusaders in Prologue). We have talked about this feature in some previous updates too, so you might want to search them up.

To get to the point, here are two screenshots, taken in the editor:

[PNG, (2.13 MB)]
The selection screen of Knightly Orders for Crusaders.


View of Chapter House with Teutonic Order selected, in middle of a Crusader city.

As for a little bonus, Persian_Fusilier has been doing rather fantastic looking icons for our Barbarian techs, and we wanted to show a few of those:





Our Historian/Researcher Synecdoche has been doing some improvements for livestock lately, and I think you will hear more about it someday...

So, if you've been following my posts lately, you may have heard that I've been reworking the Livestock system to give it a greater sense of viability in K&B than in any other AoE game or mod.

K&B salutes... The starting of schools. It's always nice to become well educated, but everybody thinks school is boring.
K&B refutes... Arresting of Pussy Riot. This shows once again how democratic country Russia is.

Your photos makes me disappointed at my own mod...

[This message has been edited by A Real Chinese (edited 08-18-2012 @ 10:07 AM).]