Its almost a month since my last blog, this is partly due to a holiday in Brussels (to celebrate by big 5 0 birthday) and partly because the stage of the mod I was working on has suffered from the modder’s equivalent of mission creep,
I had been planning to bring the leaders file up to the same state of coverage as its units equivalent. Among other things this included doing leadership tiles for the various Balkan principalities. However as there was so much material available the coverage of the mod as now grown to include Balkan and Byzantine armies right back to the mid 14th Century. Something I had not planned to look at until all the 16th century armies I had planned were done. So look out for the armies of the 2nd Bulgarian Empire the Desperate of the Morea and the Catalan Grand Company.
Its also true that I fund that the part of the Units file dealing with generic Balkan troops was nowhere near extensive enough for even the 16th Century armies I had originally planned. I am therefore working on a batch of 30 plus “Late Medieval Byzantine & Balkan” images to be added to the “units” file. I am also about halfway through the relevant generic leader images the first two lines of which are included in the extract from the “leaders” file included below.
You will see that since my last post I have also added leader tiles for the Holy Roman Empire, some additional Ottomans, both sides of the German Protestant Peasants revolt, the 16th Century Balkan states I had originally planned as well as middle and Late Hungarians.
Also posted below in its entirety is the part of the “leaders” file dealing with specific personalities. Here you will see that a couple of the minor 16th / early 17th century Balkan potentates appear twice. This is because they each ruled (briefly) different principalities at different times and more than once to boot.
lik here to edit.
Enjoy
Ian
26 Swiss leader images added to the REN II mod this week. Of these the 24 generic and regional leaders and flags are shown below.
You will see that where flags are square I have started to show them the right way up to get a bigger and clearer image whereas for other rectangular flags these are rotated 90 degrees to the right for the same reason. Rather than show the 2 specific Swiss leaders added I thought I would show the whole of that part of the “leaders” file given over to specific leaders and preview the 39 personalities in the mod so far. Here they are.
Next up leadership for armies of the Holy Roman Empire.
Best wishes
Ian
Here, (along with a few Saxon, Danish and Swedish Leaders) to round out the Italian Leader images are the 16 images I have added to the mod for specific Italian generals.(mostly from the period of the Italian Wars) You will see that almost all of them have their family or personal coats of arms in the background rather than a national flag.
Where I am displaying a block of leaders like this any Royalty will be displayed first starting with the earliest to reign, the remaining leaders are then placed in the alphabetical order of their first names.
Here for example we have the one Royal, King Ferdinand II of Naples at the start followed by the Condottieri Alessandro Vitelli. On the row below one in from the left is the infamous Cesare Borgia. The details of each and every leader together with their position on the leader file grid (necessary for scenario design purposes) is given in the latest version of the “Leader Image Planning Grid” file which will be included in the next beta release of the mod.
To make sure I identified all the suitable leaders for whom usable images were available I worked through a very useful gazetteer of the battles of the Italian Wars put up on the web by Wikipedia at
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=battles%20of%20the%20italian%20wars&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&sqi=2&ved=0CDIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FCategory%3ABattles_of_the_Italian_Wars&ei=uYHsUPXDCcjB0gXBzYHYDg&usg=AFQjCNHpr2bh0g_9GVhv65xf3L-NkCXJvgThis provides links to the Wikipedia articles on each of the battles. In turn these articles give a list of commanders providing links to Wikipedia articles on each of these also.
Of course this information was provided for all nations major commanders so in order to save time I also made up leader tiles for all the relevant Spanish, imperialist, French, Swiss and few English leaders that I came across and or which images could be tracked down. The 30 or so leader tiles have been put to one side and will greatly speed matters up when I come to add the respective nationalities to the mod. As it happens the Swiss and Imperialists are the next two sets of leaders I am going to create for the mod.
Enjoy
Ian
Happy New Year. Over the Christmas break I have added a further 90 generic leader and flag images to the REN II mod. There are 20 generic Lansquenet and Later 16th centenary mercenary leaders. 10 generic Lansquenet flags and 4 for Lansquenet units in French service including 1 for the “Black Bands.
I have also done flags for the forces of the German Protestant princes and cities of the Schmalkaldic League, Denmark and Sweden. Finally there are 48 images for flags and generic leaders for the various Italian states. Work on numerous specific leaders / characters is also well advanced but not ready to show yet. For particular leaders and members as specific noble families, (where these are available) I will be putting the relevant family coat of arms or family banner rather than a national flag in the background behind the figure. Here they all are.
As with all leader and unit images for the mod, details of the identity of each and every images have been recorded in the relevant “Leader Panning Grid” and “Unit Planning Grid” files, fully updated versions of which will ship with the next beta version of the mod I plan to release later this year.
Complements of the season
Ian
Just in time for Christmas here are another 100 images I have added to the unit file. A few more Balkan troops, camp followers and baggage, but above all 76 early 16th century and 15th century Hungarian images.
These are of two types. Firstly national Hungarian units for use in the early 15th and 16th centuries, and secondly mercenary units of the Hungarian "black army" with which the Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus had some considerable success in halting and reversing the Ottoman advance in the Balkans in the later 15th century. Please see the images in question below. These are the last images I will be adding to the "units" file for a while as I will now be focusing on bringing the "leaders" file up to the same level of coverage. Have a great Christmas.
Kind regards
Ian.
150 additions to the “units” file to show this week. The breakdown is as follows “Landsknecht Style” Mercenary Artillery = 5 unit portraits, Italian States Units = 50 unit portraits, Later 16th Century Western European Mercenary Infantry & Artillery = 30 unit portraits, Swiss = 32 unit portraits, and German Imperialists = 33 unit portraits. Please see these below.
In addition there are another 30 unit portraits for Balkan troops (Stradioti & Croats etc) already made up which I will add to the file once I have made up and added another 20 or so “Other German Troops” to enable the mod to deal with the German Peasants War of 1525-1526, Once these and the Balkan troops are added I will do late 15th Century and Early 16th Century Hungarians and then go back to the leader file to bring its coverage in to line with the available unit portraits.
Finally I now have a decent block of annual leave book between Christmas and new year so should be able to get another beta version of the mod ready for release with 1 or more scenarios early in 2012.
Enjoy
Ian
I have not blogged for some weeks but I now have quite a lot of progress to report. First off, play testing for the battle of Marj Dabik 1516 between the Ottomans and the Mamluks has gone well. The scenario is now fully functional both when played against the AI and against a human opponent using Hot Seat. The only thing left to work on is a revised version of the two AI scripts.
Once this is finished I will release a full preview version of the Modd including this scenario as well as a scenario design resources pack.
While play testing the scenario it became clear that this game works much better using the "divisional colours" option. I have therefore redesigned the two zoom levels of 2D counters for the game, to take full advantage of this feature. In some ways, these now look much more like the 2-D counters that ship with the HPS Panzer Campaigns & Great War Campaigns series, although they are much more colourful. I have added horizontal colour bars to both zoom levels of counter, so that the colour of the counter centre is still visible when the "Divisional Colours" option is used.
Please see below a screenshot from the scenario showing the action on the Mamluks left wing, at Marj Dabik along with another showing the 2D zoom in level from the battle of Seminara, 28 June 1495 (from the start of the Italian Wars) showing a wider range of unit counters. Finally I have included another screenshot of the same battle in the 2D zoomed out view.
Over the last week or so I have also added an additional 50 unit portraits to the "units" file. Before starting work on the armies of the various Western European states I thought it would be a good idea to provide some generic mercenary images, as all of these armies hired in large numbers of foreign troops under contract, particularly the ubiquitous German Reiter cavalry and Landsknecht mercenary infantry. See this screenshot below for the new images added.
Finally, anybody who is interested in speeding up production of this modd by taking on producing versions of existing scenarios, and indeed new ones, is very welcome to come on board. Drop me a line using the private message facility at wargamer.com (you can find me in the HPS “Musket & Pike” section) and we can take things from there. You would get access to the latest version of the modd (credit for any scenarios’ included) and any updates as and when they are made.
Kind regards
Ian
Added this week troops for the West African Songhai Empire along with some extra firearm equipped Arabs and further Arab command figures to cover the armies of the Moroccan Saadian dynasty. All told, 25 unit portraits and 11 leader portraits have been added to the modd. Screenshots of these are included below..
I am now going to halt graphics production for the moment, and concentrate on producing some scenarios for the modd using the graphics I have already. As flagged in earlier posts, work on the battle of Marj Dabik 1516 is already underway and I hope to start play testing of this in October.
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