It's been an awfully long time since Insularis Draco last showed signs of life on this platform. However, it should be clear this does not in any way mean that the Dev Team was inactive. On the contrary, I think I can state without hyperbole that this might have been the most active stretch of modding we have done since the inception of Insularis.
We were so busy, in fact, with modding that we completely forgot to acknowledge the fact that Moddb itself awarded us the Historical Accuracy Award in December! Thank you so much to the people of Editors Choice. It's always great to get encouragement when you're spending your time on mods, an activity largely devoid of glory :)
Today I'm going to shine the spotlight on one major addition which vastly improves immersion and the overall quality of the mod, which, incidentally, is approaching a first full release very soon:
CUSTOM SETTLEMENTS
Due to the permission of De Bello Mundi and Europa Barbarorum II teams and the hard work and expertise of Makanyane, we have now eliminated all vanilla settlements from the mod. Every available settlement level for every culture is now historically accurate and fitting to the atmosphere. Because of an embarrassment of riches, we have even increased the amount of Castle-type settlement levels to 3, with the levels ranging from small earthworks defended by palisades to large scale Hillforts with extensive wooden fortifications. Have a look below:
Roman City
Hilltop Stronghold
Non-Romanized Town
Partly Romanized Brittonic Large Town
Hillfort Gatehouse
Apart from the Battlemap settlements there's also been a huge improvement on the Campaign Map front:
We've been given permission by the DaC developer TheEliteDwarf to use two more defunct Wildmen settlements which now serve as Goidelic/Pictish and Brittonic first level Hillforts. FEB from the Mossflower TW mod then improved on the Brittonic one by adding an actual hill under it. I think it looks great.
Brittonic Earthwork:
Pictish Minor Fort, Large Town and Earthwork:
This all got me interested in customizing Strat Models myself and I then tried my hand at creating a Roman Castrum Stativum model, in three levels:
If you made it all the way to the end of this Feature highlight, thank you!
I'll be back soon with more news on the development of Insularis Draco focusing on the large number of new and redone/reshuffled units!
Great work! Love seeing M2TW mods getting more dev diaries)
Yeah, recently decided to 'promote' my stuff more as I felt the outside world really couldn't know all the work I was putting in!
Awesome work, keep it up!