Tempest mod for Mount & Blade: Warband - Viking Conquest

Tempest: A Polished Viking Conquest

contains various bug and graphic fixes and updates, new items, countless detailed and thoughtful changes regarding game texts and changes in general for better immersion... and more.

Tempest aims to function as a major update to Viking Conquest.

It includes, but is not limited to:
an overhaul of items in consideration of immersion, realism, and historical accuracy;
an overhaul of troops, from the player to the various soldiers, from the AI lords to the different kinds of merchants (e.g., the clothing of various styles and colour themes for each culture in regards to immersion);
consequential changes or updates in various details regarding the above-mentioned overhauls;
countless corrected or updated game texts, especially those concerning historical linguistics and game concept consistency;
various UI fixes and updates;
an overhaul of family relations according to literary accounts or historical records, but also to a degree complying with what Viking Conquest already has;
a fixed and updated stamina system;
a fixed and updated trait system;
various updates regarding recruitment (e.g., mixed cultures of Norsemen and Angles and of Norsemen and Frisians);
updated agents (e.g., with different dressing styles) in many scenes for immersion;
many updated item assignment systems regarding lord robbery, levy, etc., for immersion;
some updated random events;

... and more; every detail is worth noticing.

Tempest full version includes all files needed for a new game; all patches require being put on top of the full version, which may have been overwritten by a previous Tempest patch.

It is not savegame compatible and is for singleplayer only. Both the storyline and sandbox should work as intended. Many texts involving the storyline have been updated, so they may not be as familiar as before, but the storyline itself has been left untouched.

It does not have translations available at the moment. English texts may be revised if there are future updates. Accents and special letters for common modern orthographies of Old Norse, Old English, Old Irish, etc. are not supported at the moment, so any accent marks (that indicate vowel length or word accent) are ignored, and special letters are rendered in the standard Latin alphabet of the 26 letters.

Mount & Blade: Warband has an old engine and does not support modules that include a large amount of resources very well. Tempest may crash due to that reason, and, so far, I have not yet come up with any good solutions without compromising the game content. Meanwhile, an alternative to the original Warband engine is Warband Script Enhancer 2 (WSE2), which contains various engine updates that, supposedly, keep more resource-demanding modules free from memory-related crashes.

Furthermore, feel free to report any bug, and if possible, please mention whether it is an existing bug from Viking Conquest or a new bug introduced by Tempest. Being specific is highly appreciated, such as describing whether it is a bug reported by the game engine (often with in-game red messages popping up, indicating what the error is) or a logical bug that makes a game behave in some unexpected ways.

No module compatibilities are supported.

The main idea is to have a major update for immersion, realism, historical accuracy, and various bug or graphic fixes. Adding all kinds of new game features or having a graphic overhaul to completely alter the gameplay experience is not the main purpose; at least it hasn't been and probably won't be in the near future. Speaking of the future, which is not exactly foreseeable, there may or may not be another major update that would deal with literally all game texts, from the storyline to all the sandbox quests and conversations, from grammar fixes and adjustments to punctuation and (de)capitalization. Many of which have already been updated; it's just that so far there's no more time for me to check and potentially fix everything line by line to guarantee their perfectness, and I will get very busy again very soon for probably a long time.

Everything Tempest has added or updated is built on top of what already exists within Viking Conquest, so that the original immersion that Brytenwalda has carefully created and brought to the player with their great effort is not lost. Viking Conquest itself is a masterpiece when it comes to immersion, realism, and historical accuracy. In many ways, it is inspiring and even educational, of course, if a player is interested and mindful enough. Tempest is the result of an effort to push that level of work to its limit while presenting the same, if not a better, gameplay experience.

Although, when it comes to realism and historical accuracy, they sometimes need to comply with the game mechanisms for a good gameplay experience. Not to mention that not every little detail of history can be exactly known or understood, and not every kind of realism is helpful when implemented in a game. There is always a balance between what is known and what is possible, between the practicality of real life and the practicality of games. Tempest is not claimed or pretended to be history itself. It is eventually created to add to the good times that Viking Conquest has already brought to everyone, myself included.

I have been slowly working on various details even before the source code for Viking Conquest was released. Thankfully, the Brytenwalda team released it later, making everything here possible. The project has been on and off, and many changes have been made and remade over the years. I am glad that I finally had the time during the past months to pick it up again and reconsider everything more carefully with the help of the knowledge I have gained over the years, so that this is finished at a stage where it seems to be releasable. It takes time, patience, passion, and skills to notice and locate certain bugs, come up with logic to add or fix things, and do research on the historical and linguistic aspects of the game in order to improve immersion, and I hope you will enjoy all the effort.

Do not extract anything from the brf files or use the textures for any other purposes. Viking Conquest's binary resources are not permitted to be used for anything other than Viking Conquest and its modules. In Tempest, many new item models have been created with the existing Viking Conquest resources, and many existing ones, along with some textures, have been fixed or changed, but none of which are meant or permitted to be used with anything other than Tempest itself.

Do not reupload it anywhere else.