Once again, Happy New Lunar Year!
To think that I'd say this without delivering anything more substantial... Eesh!
Let's see what we got so far:
We managed to actually release an Open Alpha for the public to use. Thanks to the team, the map was expanded to include more of Indonesia as well as increasing province count in various areas (except for China). There was a semi-merger with the Umbra Spherae mod (the more senior map expansion) which improved the quality of this mod by having access to resources and material which would have taken us more time to make.
Now for some short-comings:
Though there has been a release, it is full with a plethora of bugs where with the current build, it'll crash within five years of in-game playtime. Also, development has come to a stand still, mostly due to me being inadequate with communications. The overhaul of some scripting with the official expansion packs have been great for the game, but nightmarish for us modders. Finally, we still haven't got a workable start date for the other Bookmarks.
It is quite clear that the current development is struggling to say it nicely. Personally, I feel that I have not done well leading the team. I would like to continue leading and bring a revival to the development for this mod, but I would like to ask the community if that is a good idea. If not, I must ask if there are any willing volunteers to take on this behemoth of a project in what would be a third re-iteration of the mod.
Regardless of that, I would like to open up the development thoughts I had for this mod.
As I have mentioned when I first took over the mod, the mod will be split into separate Projects for the purpose of splitting up the workload. The flagship, Sons of Heaven, was the main thing which introduced what everyone was expecting. The accompanying second, Khans of Mongolia, was supposed to be a map expansion with new horde mechanics until Paradox released Horse Lords, which made it redundant somewhat. These two projects are well underway, it is just a matter of completing the map, history, and everything else. The so-called secret third project, is Sunrise Invasion. This project was something I was going to do on my own once all of the history and base mechanics (decisions/events) were complete. As you can tell from the name, it is literally just a carbon copy of Sunset Invasion, except from the East rather than the West. Finally, the fourth and final project for Tianxia, is Genghis Khan or Temujin (name pending). The intent of this was to expand the Khans of Mongolia in regards to story and narrative, much like Charlemagne did for the Karlings. I do believe Horse Lords added some stuff regarding this, but it can always do with some improvements.
Once the map, culture, and religion was complete, the next step was to have a mod for the converter so that you could continue your campaign into Europa Universalis IV. This shouldn't come as a surprise, since most people who play this game have a grandeur of not only painting the map their ideal colour, but also do it through all of time. Once all of that was done and if there was demand for it, the idea would have been to make more map expansions into Africa and then the Americas, with new projects being called; Traders of Sahara, Chieftains of Zanj, and the Warchiefs of America (names pending).
These were just my thought which I had shared with the team, but now have decided to open up to the community.
Anyways, have a good holiday (if you're on holiday) or just a nice day in general and enjoy this image which I (again) lifted from Google.
