July 2 Progress Report news - Calradia 1050 A.D.: Mercenary Uprising mod for Mount & Blade: Warband

While there are several ways to customize player kingdom troops, I chose to integrate the Native Mod Compilation custom troops into my module since there was decent documentation within the NMC module system. I made a few changes to the some of the troops and am still working on their inventories. So far, the customizable kingdom troops work well. You will be able to click on a custom troop that you have in your party and then select how you want them equipped from an inventory. You will have the choices of a number of weapons and armors. I am trying now to create inventories that are consistent with the rest of the faction troops and still provide some nice variety and choices for the player. The key is making it so that the custom troops are not over or under powered in terms of equipment relative to the other factions.

One concern in using the custom player kingdom troops is that now all "captured" villages will produce the troops of their new faction instead of their original faction. For many players this is a desirable state of affairs, although I prefer that village retain their original culture. I don't know how this will affect the way NPC lords recruit their troops. So far, it appears that companions-made-into-lords in the player's faction will recruit their own culture's troops as they do in native Warband.

As it stands now in this new version, upon becoming King, the player's culture automatically defaults to player faction culture rather than Swadian culture as in native Warband with Diplomacy. I don't know what happens if the player decides later to switch from Player faction culture to another culture (such as Vaegirs). Diplomacy 4.2 seemed to have some issues with changing cultures from the default. For example, before I added the custom kingdom troops, I found that if I switched from the default Swadian culture to another culture, the troops recruited from castles and towns would remain Swadian while the castle and town guard troops would switch to the new culture. This could be a function of the new scripts I added for castle/town recruitment or could be something in Diplomacy itself. At any rate, I expect that this will still be the case with the new custom kingdom troops. The player should be cautioned to not change cultures but instead stay with the default custom culture.