DerpHammer mod for 0 A.D. Empires Ascendant

Welcome to another little news post!

While I’ve been quiet the last few months, I have worked a lot on DerpHammer. So let’s go over some things, shall we?

Buildings

For one, the Empire and Dwarfs got some much needed graphic overhauls to their buildings. The old models I shared in a previous article felt a bit to simplistic and outdated. So I remade many of them to make them better fit in with my newer unit models. Obviously I’m aware of the danger that is the eternal remake cycle and doing my best to avoid it.

One building type also got a minor tweak: Temples will now exclusively train Healers while Wizards will get their own type of building to be recruited at, tentatively known as the Wizard’s Tower.

The new Empire buildings mostly still look like they did, just with added detail to make them look less bland.

Dwarf buildings on the other hand had a bit more drastic changes. I was never fully satisfied with how they looked so many of them were given a new direction and their roles were swapped around a bit. (some of them are also heavily based on Dwarf Fortress)

Orcs & Goblins will mostly keep their buildings as they currently are.

Vampire Counts have yet to receive a proper building overhaul, mostly because I’ve been reworking their unit roster over and over again. Speaking of roster reworks!

Units

In the Big Changes Ahead article, I announced that all factions will now be limited to a roster of 15 units (this does not include stuff like Generals, Wizards or Civilians). While this is ultimately an arbitrary number, it does help me better structure factions (though trying to fit the exact number can get messy).

Going into exact details about roster changes would probably be better saved for its own article so I won’t get into that here.

Another thing I plan to go over in a different article is unit stats. Trying to balance everything around 0A.D.’s vanilla factions was very arduous and slowed me down greatly. I’ve since found a better and faster method of directly translating Warhammer Fantasy stats over into DerpHammer. As I said, I’ll go over this in a future article.

What this means though is that implementing future factions should be much easier then the almost 3 years I’ve been spending on the first 4.

State of the Mod

So where are we at?

In terms of units, all 4 factions are basically finished. Some auras and abilities still need tweaking but that shouldn’t take to long. In terms of buildings, there’s still some more work to do. Vampires still need an overhaul as I said earlier, and stat-wise buildings as a whole still use vanilla 0A.D. values.

The big aspect left to tackle are technologies. While I could just use the vanilla 0A.D. technologies, many of them don’t really work for the DerpHammer factions so I want to create my own. Deciding the effects, names and costs of technologies is harder then I thought however, which is keeping progress a bit slow on that part.

Other then that, there’s some minor things that need fixing. Unit portraits are all placeholders for now, certain maps give error messages, several units don’t have proper corpse models, etc. These are things that will be fixed eventually but right now don’t actively prevent the game from working.

The gist of all this is that while I sadly won’t be releasing a new version this year either, I have made a significant amount of progress!

Hopefully this continues into next year, until then thanks for reading and see you next time!