Iron Cross, Darkest Hour, brainstorming, and the future

[cplhicks]

Hello all,

While I may have been absent lately, the thought of resuming this mod has been hovering in my mind in the midst of other things going on in my life. I'm going to pose a few open questions to the community for your perusal.

Given the announcement of both Iron Cross and Darkest Hour, where should the Draka mod be?

I'm undecided on this question at the moment.

As far as I can tell, the pros to stay with AoD are:

a. No time-consuming migration to a new platform
b. Overall familiarity
c. Rare and Oil plants
d. National ideas

Cons are:

a. Will people remain with AoD once Iron Cross and Darkest Hour are out? I have no intention of maintaining multiple versions for multiple games.

Pros of merging with Iron Cross and NOT Darkest Hour:

a. Bigger map
b. More tech teams and tech tree to integrate
c. More events

Cons:

a. Time, I'll have to put in quite a bit of effort to make the new stuff play nicely with the old, if it can be done at all, and the chance that nobody will play it with Darkest Hour out.

For Darkest Hour, with or without Iron Cross, pros

a. Longer timeframe, allows a truly Draka century if WW1 is included.
b. Bigger map
c. Tech trees and teams
d. Events

Cons:

a. Massively more difficult to port, even more so than with Iron Cross alone.\
b. Removal of features, like oil and rare plants, also national ideas (unless someone hears otherwise)
c. Balance. That's the main reason I haven't released anything in a while, imagine trying to keep the Draka in check for 20-odd years between wars. Nothing would look right in 1936 without some draconian events to keep them in check.

How about some feedback, folks?

 

[Simonsyndaren]

Yea i have also thought about that.

 

[LordInsane]

a. Massively more difficult to port, even more so than with Iron Cross alone.\

How about some feedback, folks?

Not necessarily. To merge with Darkest Hour Full, maybe, but even then I suspect Iron Cross might actually be more daunting. A simple conversion, however, should be relatively easy, from what we know (the Modding DD, for example).

I will say that I recommended against Iron Cross-conversion - if nothing else, because as things seem to be going, it'll be a notably smaller platform than AOD, at least if taking into account that IC is an expansion that can be applied to three separate games (that is, making your mod 'IC-adapted' doesn't necessarily mean much, since there are three possible variations of that).

Darkest Hour... much as I want to say 'keep it AOD', I haven't got much to say. It'll be some time until is released, though, so maybe you should continue working on the AOD version until Darkest Hour is released, or at least is closer to release, and decide then?

 

[tuore]

Cons:

a. Massively more difficult to port, even more so than with Iron Cross alone.\

Ahem. It took the Kaiserreich team very little time to port. You only have to check the provinces and add owners to the new ones. That's just about it.
And you know, if you just hint Fernando Torres or MartinBG that you're interested in converting the mod, they'll likely give you access to the DH forums and beta.

 

[cplhicks]

As I understand it, being "IC adapted" primarily refers to the starting on-map IC and maybe some modifiers for individual nations. Obviously, this would differ on different map types, but if they're anything like the E3 map, they've just left the old map roughly as-is and added a bunch of higher numbered provinces sandwiched in-between. If that's the case, then it's not as terrible to convert as you might think.

The other possibility is creating a deliberately unrelated scenario for 1914 and setting an end date of 1922 or so. This would allow us to do most everything in that Darkest Hour, though I'm still not certain how we'll like that compared to AoD

 

[gianlucad]

I do not think we need to port the mod to Iron Cross, because it really didnt make a huge success, I would recommend adapting the mod to DH and updating both the AoD and the DH versions, since they are alike, except probably with the AI. The event command list has been increased in DH, which is good, but I hope it doesnt inferfere with porting the mod from AoD to DH.


And we still need a bigger team


EDIT: Creating a 1914 scenario is a good idea, although I recommend putting the start time to 1910 so that we could prepare ourselves for the war to come...

Also, how about making a series of small scenarios (ww1, ww2 and drakan invasion of India) rather than making a huge scenario spanning from 1910 to 1964?

 

[mikey1871]

well, now that both IC and DH are out and both have had at least one patch. my opinion is that IC is a much better WW2 section than WW2 in DH. Yes, WW1 is really cool in DH, but then DH is a very nice attempt for making a WW1 game. The WW@ scenario in DH sucks. Sorry, but I much prefer the IC or AOD or C.O.R.E. versions of WW2.

I do love the new engine though.