This project aims to create a campaign for the main game which lack of it. This campaign will be, it's in the title, "The First Punic War". I've started a map named "Siege of Agrigentum", which is about a siege of the first Punic war, in August 2016. I've had no time to pursue making the map but now I have more time. And I decided to put this a step further last week by creating a team to start this great project.
First of all, the overall goal of the campaign is to be the most historically accurate possible, yet being playable and enjoyable. So, you will have noticed that there are 3 main goals that give pride of place to the playing experience being the least inaccurate possible. However, talking about historical accuracy, it should not ( and it has not to) affect the playability by for example, making a scenario where the player is put in a freaking impossible situation. This means that we will have to make evenly balanced scenarios, against historical accuracy because the vast majorities of sieges and battles were unbalanced. This goes the same for natural resources which aren't equally spread in reality. Having specified these 3 major goals, we can now go into the heart of the matter.
We're going to use as references: Wikipedia for the summaries and of course ancient contemporary (even better, witness) sources such as Polybius's "General History" which makes alone quite a bunch of very detailed describing pages.
At first, we will use civilization present in the game because all civilizations present here are all cousins to some that are present in the vanilla. We're going to use Athenians either Spartans to represent the different Greek cities that took part to this war. And for the Mamertines (literally "Sons of Mars") were a group of mercenaries from an Italo-Celtic tribe in Campania (they were hired by Agathocles, Tyrant of Syracuse during the third Sicilian war, and some have stayed because they liked the climate and the place, these ones have conquered Messana and ruled it for 20 years using it as a fortified pirate basement for coastal and in-land raids) can be represented by Gauls because this is the civilization they are the closest to.
But we will need some new unique buildings to be made. so we will need some people to do this.
Each member of the project is going to choose a event (siege or battle) and make a map on it. He will present regularly his work to be criticized by the other members of the team in order to be the closest possible to the best. by the way mapping in a collaborative way, meaning here everyone working on the same map, would obviously not be practical for multiple reasons.
We're of course going to use quite a lot of triggers all the way through this campaign.
I had the idea of creating (because I don't think it exists) a trigger to reduce the amount of HP, the attack damage and the speed of the units of the player who would play a besieged city unless he manages to create a trade line with his ally outdoors.
We will try to make cut-scenes by using the cinematic camera. Otherwise, we can make introductions in the AoE II style, meaning pretty drawings with a text scrolling and a voice-over recording of someone reading it. It could be an English native speaker or me in the absence of one because I can reach the perfect accent (believe me or not, I'm not overestimating my language ability, no self-celebration) with the help of the phonetic dictionary and I have a quite deep voice like you hear in many voice-over recording.
We're going to make the campaign with the Roman perspective because a player does not want to lose at the end of a campaign. What I've just said involve that we should make alternative scenarios to make the player win with Carthage which is obviously not what we came for. So, during the campaign the player is going to stick to Romans or their allies for the scenario in which they aren't present (because all the battles were not Carthage versus Rome).
In the campaign the player will have to stick to Romans or their allies but we will unlock the other belligerents in each map played alone. There will be a version of each map for the campaign and for the random playing of any map (the sole difference being the playability of everyone on the map by players).
- 264 B.C.: Battle of Messana (Romans vs Syracusans then Romans vs Carthaginians)
- 263 B.C.: Siege of Syracuse (Romans vs Syracusans)
- 262-261 B.C.: Siege of Agrigentum (Romans vs Carthaginians)
- 260 B.C.: Battle of the Lipari Islands (Romans vs Carthaginians) (maybe)
- 260 B.C.: Battle of Mylae (Romans vs Carthaginians) (maybe)
- 259 B.C.: Siege of Aleria (Greeks vs Carthaginians) (maybe as an extra)
- 258 B.C.: Battle of Sulci Tyrrhenica (Romans vs Carthaginians)(maybe)
- 257 B.C.: Battle of Tyndaris (Romans vs Carthaginians) (maybe)
- 256 B.C.: Battle of Cape Ecnomus (Romans vs Carthaginians)
- 256 B.C.: Battle of Clypea (Romans vs Carthaginians)
- 256 B.C.: Battle of Adys (Romans vs Carthaginians)
- 256 B.C.: Siege of Tunis (Romans vs Carthaginians)
- 255 B.C.: Battle of Tunis (Romans vs Carthaginians)
- 254 B.C.: Siege and Battle of Panormus (Romans vs Carthaginians)
- 251 B.C.: Siege and Battle of Panormus (again) (Romans vs Carthaginians)
- 251 B.C.: Reconquest of Agrigentum (Romans vs Carthaginians)
- 249 B.C.: Battle of Draepanum (Romans vs Carthaginians) (maybe)
- 249 B.C.: Conquest of Eryx (Romans vs Greeks)
- 242 B.C.: Siege of Draepanum (Romans vs Carthaginians)
- March 10 241 B.C.: Battle of the Aegates (or Egadi Islands) (Romans vs Carthaginians)
This has not been decided yet so it's just for example. For now, maximum 7 maps in the campaign and maybe some extras later.
Please refer to this thread for more information https://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?/topic/21948-the-first-punic-war-campaign-project/