With painstaking effort and plenty of help from the FtG design team (or at least a programmer ) and great help from posters on this forum, the Aberration 1.08 for EU2 has now been converted into a playable mod for FtG.
I am calling it a beta because there might be plenty of minor conversion problems remaining, and because I've been promised a slew of events and will probably tinker with a few files more before claiming that it is a true "For the Glory" release.
There, then. Now that the disclaimers are done with, what is Aberration?
Aberration was created mainly with one thing in mind - ahistoricity.
In Multiplay there was a lot of roles decided ahead of time, by our own hindsight. Some of these roles were even affected by the game engine, like Portugal and Spain having the Treaty of Tordesilla. Others were enforced, by editing if needed. Like to get a Netherlands colonizing nation because history said that there used to be one, no matter how well Spain or Austria might have been able to quell the insurrections in this particular game.
Similarly, in Single Play, if would often be annoying to see Spain constantly fail at Colonizing the Americas and Conquering the Natives, or closer at home to see the Ottoman Turks fail at Becoming a Menace and Threaten Christendom at the heart of Europe.
The solution was a stroke of genius, as simple as it was straightforward. Altering history even before the game begins. Suddenly the game can not lull you into a sense of being a re-enactment of history and turns fully into a what-if scenario-simulator. A what-if scenario made to favor the underdogs of history, because who doesn't sympathize with the underdog?
That the remake also was made with Multiplayer in mind and offers a larger number of approximately equal-powered nations to play with is only icing on the cake.
So, the world of Aberration is.. well, different.
Granada has managed to stave off the reconquista with a battle about as lucky as the one which allowed them to conquer Spain in the first place. This means that the phenomena of Spain and Portugal are more of rallying cries than hard realities.
Meanwhile Byzantium managed to avert the disaster at Manzikert and have declined much slower than in our timeline. This meant that the Ottoman Turks had no European power base to retreat to when they insulted Tamerlane, and the Anatolian highlands are as fragmented as ever.
And at the third corner of Europe, things are as much the same as they are different. Finnish nationalism was stronger, or just better supported by Novgorod and orthodox missionaries, than in our timeline, so the Swedish conquest of Finland faltered and died with merely the province of Finland, while the Norwegian fortress of Vardöhus was burned down or conquered soon after its inception. This left Sweden a slightly weaker nation and its noblemen slightly less obnoxious in the Kalmar Union. And with Norway using Scottish support to deny the same union, Denmark was more prone to give a little in return for what they got, forming a more stable Union of Kalmar which might well hold fast down the ages.
But will it, or will it all fall apart again? That is up to you as a player to decide?
And what has happened to England? (Gone) France? (Gone) Austria? (Gone) The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth? (No Lithuania means no PLC, so also Gone) Why? How? What has come in their stead? This, and more, will you learn if you download Aberration today!
(Instead of the beta version, you should download the pretty much finalized version, thanks to ViktorVVV)
I am calling it a beta because there might be plenty of minor conversion problems remaining, and because I've been promised a slew of events and will probably tinker with a few files more before claiming that it is a true "For the Glory" release.
There, then. Now that the disclaimers are done with, what is Aberration?
Aberration was created mainly with one thing in mind - ahistoricity.
In Multiplay there was a lot of roles decided ahead of time, by our own hindsight. Some of these roles were even affected by the game engine, like Portugal and Spain having the Treaty of Tordesilla. Others were enforced, by editing if needed. Like to get a Netherlands colonizing nation because history said that there used to be one, no matter how well Spain or Austria might have been able to quell the insurrections in this particular game.
Similarly, in Single Play, if would often be annoying to see Spain constantly fail at Colonizing the Americas and Conquering the Natives, or closer at home to see the Ottoman Turks fail at Becoming a Menace and Threaten Christendom at the heart of Europe.
The solution was a stroke of genius, as simple as it was straightforward. Altering history even before the game begins. Suddenly the game can not lull you into a sense of being a re-enactment of history and turns fully into a what-if scenario-simulator. A what-if scenario made to favor the underdogs of history, because who doesn't sympathize with the underdog?
That the remake also was made with Multiplayer in mind and offers a larger number of approximately equal-powered nations to play with is only icing on the cake.
So, the world of Aberration is.. well, different.
Granada has managed to stave off the reconquista with a battle about as lucky as the one which allowed them to conquer Spain in the first place. This means that the phenomena of Spain and Portugal are more of rallying cries than hard realities.
Meanwhile Byzantium managed to avert the disaster at Manzikert and have declined much slower than in our timeline. This meant that the Ottoman Turks had no European power base to retreat to when they insulted Tamerlane, and the Anatolian highlands are as fragmented as ever.
And at the third corner of Europe, things are as much the same as they are different. Finnish nationalism was stronger, or just better supported by Novgorod and orthodox missionaries, than in our timeline, so the Swedish conquest of Finland faltered and died with merely the province of Finland, while the Norwegian fortress of Vardöhus was burned down or conquered soon after its inception. This left Sweden a slightly weaker nation and its noblemen slightly less obnoxious in the Kalmar Union. And with Norway using Scottish support to deny the same union, Denmark was more prone to give a little in return for what they got, forming a more stable Union of Kalmar which might well hold fast down the ages.
But will it, or will it all fall apart again? That is up to you as a player to decide?
And what has happened to England? (Gone) France? (Gone) Austria? (Gone) The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth? (No Lithuania means no PLC, so also Gone) Why? How? What has come in their stead? This, and more, will you learn if you download Aberration today!
(Instead of the beta version, you should download the pretty much finalized version, thanks to ViktorVVV)
Should work with 1.3 beta : http://www.mediafire.com/?szpj3nn7gb3jedf
(copied cultures.txt, religiousevents.txt, randomreligiousevents.txt, religions.txt and their corresponding English localization files from Vanilla FTG 1.2 in the Aberration folder, + minor fixes)
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