Friday Update: Qal'aat news - Knights and Barbarians Mod for Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties

Here's this week's Friday Update, by a freshly returned-from-Britain me. It is rather short, but it is still in some ways quite important. Apart from featuring rather a major gameplay feature for some civs, it also highlights just how we do things at K&B.

Featured this week is the Qal'aat, a unique building for all civs in the Muslim civset, which are the Turks, Saracens and Moors, the former two of which will feature in the Prologue. As anybody who speaks Arabic or happens to have watched the picture below will be able to guess, the Qal'aat is a defensive building. In fact, it is the strongest defensive building available to Muslim civs, and it replaces the Castle. Unlike the Castle though, the Qal'aat is not the same throughout the ages. Fair enough, there are techs that improve Castles a bit, but the Qal'aat can be upgraded throughout the ages, a bit like Towers, with techs that first turn it into the Strengthened Qal'aat and then the Fortified Qal'aat. If this sounds familiar to you, that might be right. It was originally planned in "Old K&B" for Southern European civs. At some point this idea got ditched, and considering we didn't want an arbitrary set of civs to have it, we didn't use it again, until we realised that it would make a great deal of sense for Muslim civs. This is something we do quite a lot in K&B, taking previously ditched ideas, improving them, and then using them in another way than they were originally planned.

All three versions of the Qal'aat

Because this Friday Update is quite short, and while we're at pictures that tell something about how we do things at K&B, here's a little bonus:

A draft texture of the Voulgier

The Voulgier will be a unique unit for the French, and this is a texture of it. Except it isn't. It's just a draft version, a first idea that is yet to be transformed into a number of actual textures for the unit. By first making a draft version like this, not only does the end product become better, but one can also get more of an idea of what is possible with different models and bits of texture.

We're currently busy redesigning the religion choices for some civs, and this is Synecdoche reviewing the religions for the Vikings.

K&B salutes... Jack Andraka, for inventing a revolutionarily quick cancer test using internet search engines...
K&B refutes... flatness. Being back in the Netherlands after more than two weeks of hilly Britain is something that I'm still getting used to.

- Quoted from peugeot407