Friday Updates

Ah, Papal Favour... The answer is no though. Sure, we'll have only the Crusaders in the Prologue, but in the full version there will also be the Germans (thanks to the Baltic Crusades) and the Spanish (thanks to the Reconquista) as Crusading civs.


peugeot407

Oh, that's better, interesting too, now I'm getting more of a sence on how Moors will be different from Spanish (Race track vs. Papal Favour)

Well, our civs will be much more similar to each other than WotTA's civs, but I do indeed think that the Moors and the Spanish will prove to be very different.


peugeot407

Friday Update - Go to School

Throughout history, man has educated himself for many reasons: to better understand himself, understand his world, and to get killer new techs. This is what you'll build if you want to make your soldiers, buildings, sheep, ships.. more effective. If there's one thing I really like about this building, it's the books.

The Chapter House system is pretty cool (at least I think it is). It's based off of the embassy system from TAD, and below is a little doodle I drew out a while ago that shows how it works -- I was having a hard time matching up what with whom. For example, it shows that Spain has access to chapters associated with the Hospitallers, Knights of Santiago, the Order of Montesa, etc.

I did some of the design for the Knights of Caltrava. What is that? It's not up there, right? That's because we ended up scratching the Portuguese Order of Christ and replacing it with the Order of Calatrava. The neat thing about each chapter is that each has its own personality. Some chapters are obsessed with stabbing the enemy with sharp pointy objects, others help the peasants out, others inspire and denounce, others heal.

The Order of Calatrava was founded in Castile and closely associated with the Cistercian order. The Knights of Calatrava are warrior monks: they sleep in their armor but wear the same rough white cloaks as their Cistercian brothers. While the knights to to war with the enemy, the monks go to war with the minutiae of daily life. Below's the quick summary we have.

Chapter House gives a bonus to nearby gatherers
- Cistercian Monk: Monk that gathers, builds and gives a tiny bonus to nearby gatherers
- Knight of Calatrava: Mounted monk armed with a lance

cool, much better than an embassy.

To avoid dizziness, Chapter House IS NOT University/Madrasah. The picture is University, but General explain about Chapter House

Funny that you threw the Order of Christ out having in mind it ended up in Wotta, heh.
Also, I guess you're already aware there's at least 7 civilizations with asian UI ingame, and you can perfectly invent new consulate allies (as I, not perfectly I know, demostrated in Wotta) right?

BTW, the university picture doesn't load...

Funny that you threw the Order of Christ out having in mind it ended up in Wotta, heh.

We actually ditched it before we know of it's presence in WotTA, but it's ironic indeed.

BTW, the university picture doesn't load...

Does this link work?


peugeot407

Yes, that one loads. It's surprisingly similar to the Consulate, though.

It's the same model...


peugeot407

No update?

We do have something planned, don't worry. Sometimes though we're reminded of being humans, and are short on time when it's least convenient, that being Friday.


peugeot407

Friday (Saturday Update) - K&B's Top Models

I'm afraid this update will lack the pretty pictures many of you have come to expect. Progress is slowly taking place, coding is being copied, pasted, written, and rewritten. Some semblance of a testable alpha is even rumored to be lurking within staff circles.

So I'll discuss models. Thanks to some recent advances in AoE3 modding, throwing models into mods has become a reality, even if there are several restrictions that come with this modding revolution. You probably know that imported models, for example, lack build and destruction animations.

Thankfully map props don't require either. Hence the development of some unique K&B map props that you'll see either scattered naturally somewhere on the map, or purposefully placed as part of a barbarian village. Below is a model we (Peugeot) are working on bringing into the mod. Does it look a little old and Roman-y to you? Good, expect more of that.

And don't worry about the models and textures too much; these are some of the first drafts.

Cool! This will surely create some awesome maps!

Making great progress in coding has a curious way of making showable content scarce. One moment there's textures flooding in, the next everybody is coding things together, which is all immensely exciting for the team, but a bit less for all those who are achingly awaiting Friday Updates, since it involves less material to show. Unfortunately, I have to inform you that progress in coding is really good, or perhaps that is still a good thing.

Another unfortunate event is the daily pain called 'school'. I've been reasonably busy this week, and as such my promise of a double Friday Update hasn't quite worked out. So what I did instead is create a quick showcase now, and finish what I intended to release this weekend, so that you'll still have your double update, be it not on a Friday. I hope that'll satisfy all your K&B-related needs.



peugeot407

PS: Please don't mind my grammatical error in the last sentence of the picture, I'm a little too lazy to fix it.

Ok, I won't mind, but only for this time.
It's good to see you found a use for the surgeon, I wouldn't have expected to see him in this mod. Also, lol, at first I read cannon of the order and I was like WTF? Then I saw, ah, canon, the description kinda sounds like aoe2's Teutonic Knight, I wonder what's going to be the unit of the teutons in this mod...

The Teutonic units will be evil looking, I can tell you that.

As they're planned to have something to do with [an important belligerent in the campaign] [oops...]

As promised, here's the full update. All kinds of things that are of course entirely out of our reach caused it to be released on a Sunday rather than a Friday, but so be it. For this double update, we'd like to showcase to you two things, the first being a unit like in older Friday Updates. The unit in question is the Goth Old Guard, one of the Barbarian units in Knights and Barbarians. While I cannot go into spoiler territory too much, I can tell you that this unit is going to be in the Prologue. The frankly amazing concept art is by spangopola, the texture by peugeot407.


The second part of this update is of a more important and probably more interesting nature. It's the Man-at-Arms again! I've shown this unit more times, but since the last time, we've made some changes to the unit, the most obvious of these being the use of new models for the helmet and shield. Both models are also used by the Templar Knight which has already been showcased, as well as some other units. Heater shields and pot helmets lend themselves to use for many medieval units, I'm sure you'll understand.


Another large change is the recent addition of the Muslim version, which I guess will need some explaining. K&B will feature civs from completely different parts of the world, all with their own traditions, not less so where arms and armour are concerned. Of course we could have ignored this and gone for the simple solution as seen in Age of Empires II; give all civs the same basic units with the same textures. We chose not to do that. Instead, every generic unit will have two different versions, one for Christian civs and one for Muslim civs. The former will be used for the Italians, Byzantines, Crusaders, English, Spanish, French, Flemish, Germans, Vikings and Slavs, and the latter will be used for the Moors, Saracens, Turks and Mongols. Of course each civ will still have it's own UUs, a fact that in this particular case leads to the texture shown only being used for the Turks, as the Moors, Saracens and Mongols will all have UUs replacing the Man-at-Arms.

Anybody who has played the Age of Crusades mod will notice something familiar about the Muslim Man-at-Arms. Well, they're right. The first two textures are straight from AoC, the last two are based on AoC textures, but slightly touched. Why do we do this? Well, since the merge of K&B and AoC we've set a target of using as many AoC textures as possible for Muslim units. This is not because we're lazy, but partly because we see this as a way to treat AoC content honourably, and partly because Argalius made much better Islamic unit textures than we ever could.

That's it for this Friday Sunday Update, I hope it's been sufficient and do promise to be more on time with future updates.


peugeot407

As I said in wotta forums:
Goth UU weak against ranged infantry? Sacrilege!
Really though, it even looks like aoe2's Huscarl, also, the proportions are quite different going from the concept art to the actual unit, Sword and Shield got considerably large...
But good nonetheless, it's a shame it won't appear often having in mind it's a native settlement unit.

On the man at arms, wow, they look so different, one actually has to wonder how such different units share the same stats. Speaking of wich, why do turks have men at arms? I believed they were only going to have janissaries (in all 3 variants)

Well, they do indeed have Janissaries, but alongside them they have a set of generic units. The really unique civ in this perspective will be the Mongols, with only a single infantry unit, but shame of shames they'll not be in the Prologue.

As for the Old Guard: Can't disagree, the concept art looks better than the texture.


peugeot407

I find it weird seeing a man-at-arms in such expensive and well made armor and weapons. But besides that, great job guys.

As I said in wotta forums:
Goth UU weak against ranged infantry? Sacrilege!

Actually, the Goth Old Guard is good against all infantry, so also ranged infantry.

@Peugeot: Amazing textures, I love the Muslim Man-at-Arms!

May I comment at that gorgeous texture .

I find it weird seeing a man-at-arms in such expensive and well made armor and weapons.

Actually, Men-at-arms where professional soldiers, so they got higher pay and well could afford better arms and armor. I know it may sound like they're peasant levees, but they're not.