World According to Kasperus - Watk4 Working thread
Introduction
Since I joined the club of FTG-owners I might also claim a spot in the scenarios - forum. As - in contrary to what might appear - the 'original' watk is also still being developed by the original creator, albeit not exactly at a very high speed...
.
This project does not by any way 'copy' the other watk-related projects here. I do not plan to do any FTG-conversions of any watk 3.x release, in whichever form. Watk 3 has been a closed chapter for me pretty much since the release of EU3. And I'm pretty sure that the conversions being done already, as well as cool-toxics watkabaoi are more than worthy evolutions of my little map project back then and I likely couldn't do it better so why bother?
This project is the continuation of my post-watk project, known initially as 'kgeca', later the watk4eu3, and since I got disillusioned with EU3 - Watk 4. It is meant to bring together a number of idea's I could not get to work anymore within the constraints of the old vanilla-based map, and which required starting making a whole new map from scratch. Projects like that take a lot of time, and also my private life got in the way. But still, over the past 3 years I managed to do quite a lot of work on this project and I hope that FTG is the right motivator to finalize it.
Background
First of all: New map. It will be different than the one used in all previous watk-releases. As said - it is a map redrawn entirely from scratch, using a different projection. Done primarily to enable more provinces in Europe. Which caused Europe to become larger. Kind of an aproach alike to that done on mymap, though with - imo - less distortion of Africa and other continents as a side-effect.
Other important aspect: discontinuous provinces. Or provinces with rivers running through it, sometimes provinces being composed of multiple parts not bordering eachother. All in order to make maps more accurate. Gameplay was considered less crucial at this point - watk 3 was about gameplay, watk 4 is about details. Everybody has the right to change his might after all.
Last map-related aspect: less seazones. Or better: more evenly spread seazones and seazones sized more in accordance to actual distances. I always wondered why Europe has so many tiny seazones, while most seazones around the equator were much larger. While obviously this should be the other way around. This was not the primary reason to decrease the number of seazones in Europe - region limit was. But it provided a reasonably sounding excuse.
What remains the same (or similar) is the approach to political/geographic design. Which alike in watk 3 is also here strong toward a good representation of colonialism and especially aimed to represent the 17th and 18th century border-changes as accurately as possible, though this time less the 19th century one's (especially in Europe I wanted more accurate late middleages). Which means less PTI overall (even less than on watk 3 in certain area's) and possibility to build up colonial empires with fitting 18th/19th century borders.
FTG enables me to add more countries, cultures, religions and goods, and this is certainly something that is intended for this mod. The base scenario ought to be primarily the watk vanilla though, although I might adjust my opinion on it in the future - heck, finishing this will take enough time to reconsider basically everyting...
Current Progress and Planning
For my EU3-map I had a complete world-map done and that formed the base for watk 4. However, the lack of detail possible there made me to redraw it once more. Europe and Africa were done during 2007 already and I intended to do a intermediate release with other regions only adjusted. However early this year I revamped most of that and also redid all of inland Asia, that way having no more projection-conflicts on the 'old continent'. During last summer Oceania, Australia, Indonesia and Japan were reimplemented and I started redesigning North-America. The last is currently 2/3 done and design is planned to be done this year yet (I'm not setting any ambitious deadlines nowadays). South America is meant to be done in early 2010 then. Stuff like province-setup is being done as part of design, though FTG will force me to rethink cultures, goods and religions obviously.
Regarding post-map stuff - hard to say. A base scenario is the intention, but I might be willing to try to delegate further works on that to others interested and more able to do actual modding. Will it be downloadable before the summer of 2010? One can always hope
So for now that's it. If there is interest in it then I will keep updating this thread on progress (which might not be extremely fast). Or post screens and such, though there is nothing ingame just yet.
Introduction
Since I joined the club of FTG-owners I might also claim a spot in the scenarios - forum. As - in contrary to what might appear - the 'original' watk is also still being developed by the original creator, albeit not exactly at a very high speed...
. This project does not by any way 'copy' the other watk-related projects here. I do not plan to do any FTG-conversions of any watk 3.x release, in whichever form. Watk 3 has been a closed chapter for me pretty much since the release of EU3. And I'm pretty sure that the conversions being done already, as well as cool-toxics watkabaoi are more than worthy evolutions of my little map project back then and I likely couldn't do it better so why bother?
This project is the continuation of my post-watk project, known initially as 'kgeca', later the watk4eu3, and since I got disillusioned with EU3 - Watk 4. It is meant to bring together a number of idea's I could not get to work anymore within the constraints of the old vanilla-based map, and which required starting making a whole new map from scratch. Projects like that take a lot of time, and also my private life got in the way. But still, over the past 3 years I managed to do quite a lot of work on this project and I hope that FTG is the right motivator to finalize it.
Background
First of all: New map. It will be different than the one used in all previous watk-releases. As said - it is a map redrawn entirely from scratch, using a different projection. Done primarily to enable more provinces in Europe. Which caused Europe to become larger. Kind of an aproach alike to that done on mymap, though with - imo - less distortion of Africa and other continents as a side-effect.
Other important aspect: discontinuous provinces. Or provinces with rivers running through it, sometimes provinces being composed of multiple parts not bordering eachother. All in order to make maps more accurate. Gameplay was considered less crucial at this point - watk 3 was about gameplay, watk 4 is about details. Everybody has the right to change his might after all.
Last map-related aspect: less seazones. Or better: more evenly spread seazones and seazones sized more in accordance to actual distances. I always wondered why Europe has so many tiny seazones, while most seazones around the equator were much larger. While obviously this should be the other way around. This was not the primary reason to decrease the number of seazones in Europe - region limit was. But it provided a reasonably sounding excuse
.What remains the same (or similar) is the approach to political/geographic design. Which alike in watk 3 is also here strong toward a good representation of colonialism and especially aimed to represent the 17th and 18th century border-changes as accurately as possible, though this time less the 19th century one's (especially in Europe I wanted more accurate late middleages). Which means less PTI overall (even less than on watk 3 in certain area's) and possibility to build up colonial empires with fitting 18th/19th century borders.
FTG enables me to add more countries, cultures, religions and goods, and this is certainly something that is intended for this mod. The base scenario ought to be primarily the watk vanilla though, although I might adjust my opinion on it in the future - heck, finishing this will take enough time to reconsider basically everyting...
Current Progress and Planning
For my EU3-map I had a complete world-map done and that formed the base for watk 4. However, the lack of detail possible there made me to redraw it once more. Europe and Africa were done during 2007 already and I intended to do a intermediate release with other regions only adjusted. However early this year I revamped most of that and also redid all of inland Asia, that way having no more projection-conflicts on the 'old continent'. During last summer Oceania, Australia, Indonesia and Japan were reimplemented and I started redesigning North-America. The last is currently 2/3 done and design is planned to be done this year yet (I'm not setting any ambitious deadlines nowadays). South America is meant to be done in early 2010 then. Stuff like province-setup is being done as part of design, though FTG will force me to rethink cultures, goods and religions obviously.
Regarding post-map stuff - hard to say. A base scenario is the intention, but I might be willing to try to delegate further works on that to others interested and more able to do actual modding. Will it be downloadable before the summer of 2010? One can always hope
So for now that's it. If there is interest in it then I will keep updating this thread on progress (which might not be extremely fast). Or post screens and such, though there is nothing ingame just yet.
