The major changes include:
1. Split troop trees. Commoners recruited in villages, professionals recruited in towns and castles. To recruit professional soldiers, you need to be affiliated with the faction and have at least 200 renown. So far I like the split trees. It makes the game more challenging but also more realistic IMHO.
2. A new line of mercenary type troops but with regular troop cost like the manhunter and swordsister line. They are called "adventurers" and begin as farmers and then progress up to level 25. Farmer -- novice adventurer -- seasoned adventurer -- hardy adventurer -- leader adventurer. There is also a mounted adventurer that upgrades from seasoned adventurer. They are melee and throwing weapons experts (at least as they advance) and are well equipped. While they are not hired in villages, towns, or castles, you can find them in enemy parties as prisoners. I also re-added mounts to the sword sister and created a shield maiden (I know- really creative name) that is essentially the same as sword sister but not mounted.
3. I have replaced the two-direction spear attack animation with a different spear animation based on that from WFAS. The old animation I used added the underhand spear thrust and used Papa Lazarou's animations, so many of the other animations changed just to get the new spear attack. The new animation only adds the overhead spear attack, modifying the overhead musket information in the animations. I definitely like the new animation better than the previous one and it doesn't adversely affect the use of spears from horseback like the old animation did. It tests well, providing good damage for both regular and overhead attacks. Plus I was able to make the changes in the module system, which I prefer over adding the changes to the compiled text files.
4. Some tweaks to improvements building times and effects made in the module itself.
5. Added some more OSP arms and armors and a few of my own. Improved some of my old textures.
6. Fixed some of the problems with new town scenes.
7. Integrated the "ethnic faces" face mod and slightly modified the sarranid faces.
Planned changes not yet integrated:
I am still working on expanding the Edric Streona quest and than adding some new quests that are related to the 4 newish NPCs. I got the idea from Silverstag. The Streona quest, while currently finished, has only one step. I would like to make it multi-stepped so that the pesky Streona will be able to give grief more than once.
I am also working on few more scenes, two scenes for bandit lairs in the Khergiz and Kelton lands and a camp scene from which you can review your troops. There will likely be a scene or two added for the expanded Streona quest, including an old-style hill fort. I had thought about making the hill fort so that the player could capture it and keep it like any other castle but would need to figure out how to prevent other AI lords from capturing it first. I assume they wouldn't seek to capture it if they had neutral relations with the party possessing the fort. Once the player captures the fort, it will become fair game for AI parties to attack. I will clearly need to look into the code for this, perhaps adapt some code that already exists.
I am also considering whether to add custom kingdom troops. As it stands now, once you become king you can change your culture to any of the 8 cultures without any limitations (I had to modify the Diplomacy script to allow this). I feel that this provides a good variety of choices, since there are 8 different factions. Some players have asked me to add custom kingdom troops so as to permit the player to pre-design his/her kingdom troops using Morgh's tool.
Those of the changes I have made or have plans to make. Hopefully Bannerlord won't come out before I finish!
