Codex Alera Mod...???

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Love the Idea of this Modpack as I am a huge fan of Jim Butcher's books. 

So everything I say here is just you know more idea work or questions maybe as to why a s specific direction.

1) Why no Appia? Considering this would be towards the beginning of the furycrafting, wouldn't Appia be an appropriate faction to toss in there? Maybe as the actual base for House Gaius instead of a Faction specific one. Possibly toss in a few minor races too, such as Gauls, Germanics, etc since they are referenced in the books.

2) Couple of more ideas for the side effects of the crafting.

Earth-Increased food production or sole access to the +1 food spell.

Wind-Greater sight range

Metal- Lessened Morale Loss in Combat, definately the mining/production bonus

Wood- Maybe access also to the creature taming, add in new models for creatures like Gargants, Thenadants, Levithans, etc. (Although I could also see taming in the Earth side too)

Fire-Not only Morale Boosters, but debuffs too. Increased Prestige from fire units. Maybe something tile specific to tundra/Ice tiles, like the would give a minor morale decrease etc but fire remains immune to it.

Water-Diplomacy! And the increased child rate.

3)Children of the Sun! Also there are all those other names they mentioned in book 5 or 6 of all the races that fell to Alera. Make those guys into the Empire Equivalents, and all the above into the Kingdom equivalents. Then it becomes not only a game of pure conquest, but of solidfying your rule while maintaining the Realms power in the face of those enemies.

4) Siege weapons, gotta remember the Catapults, Trebuchets, and Ballistae.

That's all really i have at this time, I hope some dedicated modder takes this up as I would love to play this concept.

A lot of good ideas there Rebal, all well worth considering.

The thing about my initial concept is that it is intentionally not true to Alera's history. The most likely accurate history of Alera is that as humans were coming into their powers they were all working very closely together, and continued to do so until the empire was well founded. So there would be only one human factions because they would all band together to survive the non-human enemies surrounding them. So it would be a mod with about 10 total factions, humans, the 3 others clearly defined in the books, and the 5 or so mentioned in passing in the book. That would be a great mod too, but it would be a LOT more work than what I am talking about. You would need new models for all the races, very different tech trees, a ton of entirely different magic systems, etc, and for 5 of the races you would have to make all this up from scratch with no inspiration other than the races name. 

So that is why I went with the simpler concept.

1.) The 12 factions were chosen because their are 12 high lords in the books and there are 6 elements in the books. The math works out really well. So a 13th faction is iffy. However, it might possibly work as a faction lacking magic and using Catapults and such instead. Appia as a replacement for Gaius doesn't seem to work for me because it would lend legitimacy to one faction over all the others, which seems inappropriate for a balanced game system. The Gauls and Germania unbalance things unless they are worked into the nature of some of the factions. It would be a lot more complex, since the very nature of some factions units would change entirely requiring a lot more modeling, but it could work.

2.) Most of these sound like faction bonuses, like the faction "strengths" in the base game. A couple though sound more like spells. Basically they cover too broad an area to be grouped together like you have them, but they are mostly good ideas independently.

3.) covered in my initial comment.

4.) Unnecessary complication unless doing the magicless Appia thing mentioned in 1.

Arentol this is a great idea. In fact this is a mod I myself have been working on. I love Jim Butcher's stories and the Codex Alera books in particular. I've been going through the tutorials for everything that would be needed something of this magnitude and have experimented with most if not all of these aspects.

I have had some past experience modding previous games (mostly the awesome Mount & Blade game) but have never shot for something that would be released for others to (hopefully) enjoy.

I've done an outline of what I want to shoot for in a Codex Alera mod. So here's my pitch, don't know how much of it is doable so I'm taking it one step at a time experimenting as I go.

Races:

Alerans - Of course

Kalare Rebels - Added for ease of adding.   They would make me think of an evil Aleren faction.

Canim - Narash Range (Vargs people)

Canim - Suar Range (The last Bastion of the Canim continent against the Vord in Canea)

Canea Vord - Traditional Vord

Alera Vord - The crazed queen's Vord

Marat

Icemen

This is of course a lot of work, beyond the easy stuff such as unit/spell/tech/theme creation some of these would require various degrees of 3d modeling, texturing and animation. I do have a little bit of experience with this but I'm no expert. But one of the main reasons I've always done stuff like this is to learn and become more proficient. And this is just my "wish list" I understand the challenge involved which is why I have them prioritized... ish

I've already started on designing the furycrafting system. This would be by using a mixture of spells and abilities. Since internal furycrafting does not require the manifistation of a fury I was thinking of having the spells that could be cast from the spell book only self targeting spells. Anything that would affect another unit would be used by the fury as an ability.

I've thought of making it a dual system requireing both arcane research to unlock spells within a book and tech research to unlock new books that represent greater knowledge of furycraft. This would also allow for the unlocking of "pioneer packs" which added fury craft skills for units other than the soveriegn. This would allow for such things as knights flora, terra and etc to be added to the game and balanced. The imbue essence spell would have to be taken out I believe. I haven't tested some of this yet but currently have a fire fury spell and have created the fury and given it skills. Not much I know but a step forward nonetheless.

I've also been toying around with converting the elemental shards to great furies, but that idea hasn't even reached the paper outline stage yet.

I have a lot of other ideas as to how to create the aspects that define the other races, ie Marat Chala, Canim Blood Magic, Vord's... Vordness. But am focusing only on Alera and consequently on the Kalare Rebels.

With all that said I like a lot of your ideas, it never occured to me to take the story back to the beginning and include some of the "destroyed" races. The amount of freedom in doing that both interests and scares me.

But to the main point of this extremely long first post is this.

Do you want to join forces, ideas and talents for this mod? Because I am definitely interested in the subject matter and in creating a mod based on it.

Just my 2 cents on this whole subject, as I literally 2 days ago finished the Codex Alera after 2 weeks of insane reading (I should NOT be staying up until 2-3 every morning reading, its just not smart when I have to get up at 7 the next morning...).

I think that the Codex Alera would DEFINITELY fit as a mod for Elemental.

The 2 mods suggested thus far are just that, 2 different mods.

Arentol's mod would be The Codex Alera: The Romanic Age.

Drasnov would seem to be The Codex Alera: The Aleran Age (or possible the Calderon War)

As a now huge fan of these books, and someone who LOVES the idea of a mod for this, I would love to help out with either of these mods. I would personally suggest that we pool our efforts and work on one mod, then the other once the first is done, we could almost make a series out of it. Further, here's a nickel of thought since I think my 2 cents got used up. Lets work on Arentol's mod first, since he has made it a point to be a 'simple' mod. Also, such a mod could/would easily be used as a base for a more complicated total conversion style mod set during the books.

Thoughts?

I definitely agree with you Drakonfire. Just the thought of what three people would be able to do vrs one is an exciting prospect. Plus it's always more fun to work on something when you have multiple viewpoints. And one of my first worries was that there would be no other modders that would be interested on working on an Alera project. So I think it's great that at least two others would be interested in doing this.

I also agree (seeing a trend?:)) that a mod with tighter constraints would be a good idea and that the "Calderon War" mod could easily grow out of a realized "Romanic Age" mod. I do like a lot of Arentol's ideas especially the layout of bonuses tied to the elements.

But one thing that does worry me about it is the amount of factions. It seems you would either have to differentiate between them enough to make each one seem it's own (which could be a lot of work) or they become too simular to each other. I don't know if maybe they could be cut down to fewer more distinct factions.

But I would be extremely happy to work with you, Arentol and Drakonfire both.

Currently I've been messing around with furycrafting and how to make it work. Trying to make it powerful enough to be a defining feature without being overpowered. It's really easy to see how Alerans were able to create such a large empire while surrounded by such disperate threats. Furycrafting is extremely easy to make overpowered.

What I've got right now is that the sovereign is like a great lord. Able to control multiple furies which he can gain through study in furycrafting. So far I've been messing with it being in four levels: Basic, Advanced, Expert and Mastery levels. These each unlock a fury based on the element under study, which in turn has access to abilites (spells) that where normally tied to the manifestation of a fury in the books.

This leads to a problem, depending on how you look at it. If a sovereign were to (through intense study and practice) gain mastery over fire furycrafting he would have four different furies ranging from the small weak fury that he first gained up to the strongest he was able to gain at the end. This seems to fit the books thematically (I think I remember Great Lords having more than one fury of the same element, I really need to read through the series again though). I don't know if there is a way to replace a spell with it's "Upgraded" version but I am looking into it if the multiple furies approach is impossible to balance. Part of me likes the idea that your soveriegn gains power as he learns furycrafting until he's powerful enough to be a First Lord.

I'm also still looking at creating "Elemental Shards" that would be representative of the Great Furies and would allow for cataclysmic strategic spells to be cast. ie The volcanic explosion that destroyed Kalare.

But if the multiple furies would work I have all the Fire/Water/Earth furies added and testable in game. Most still need skills added to their abilities and need their values changed for balance reasons but that's all the fun stuff right?

So what are your thoughts? (Sorry for the long post, always get verbose when tired)

I had a sudden idea strike me as I was reading this. Since people in Alera are "born" with Furycrafting, but can eventually 'claim' a new fury, I think it would be a kind of cool idea for the Romanic age to focus more on claiming furies than simply -getting- them. Could lend itself to a questing system for the mod. The furycrafting 'research' could be like the current adventure research and reveal new, more powerful furies to be claimed, thus giving access to more powerful furycrafting (or 'spells'). And as to the Lords having more than one Fury of each kind, that is true. In the last book (First Lord's Fury) it is mentioned that Aquitaine had about 11 Fury's. 

For balancing issues, I think using a mana pool would be the way to go. Each time a more powerful fury was claimed, the Lord's mana pool would increase, so that the weaker furies(spells) could be used more often, but the larger furies would be limited (while getting a LOT more bang for the metaphorical buck).

As to the uniqueness of each faction, I think that could be achieved using a GC2/AoE system of similar but different tech trees, with maybe a specialized unit/ability to differentiate each one.

Them is my thoughts for now. Yours?

"For balancing issues, I think using a mana pool would be the way to go. Each time a more powerful fury was claimed, the Lord's mana pool would increase, so that the weaker furies(spells) could be used more often, but the larger furies would be limited (while getting a LOT more bang for the metaphorical buck)."

I think all those points are great but I am interested in your ideas for the use of furycraft. So for the weaker furies are you thinking of setting them up as spells that the Sov casts or as summonable creatures. Maybe have most of the crafting being in spell form and only the most expensive/powerful furies able to manifest on the strat map?

Since this is during the "Romanic times" are we thinking of having crafting limited to a few people (ie Sovereigns and Champions) or are we considering allowing the player to design, or at least build, units with their own crafting ability? I think if we do allow units crafting ability it should be in a limited way, more in line of the crafting that the common people would have, not the citizenry. While people like Max would champions.

I like the idea of unlocking more furies as quests. Since claiming a fury could become a dangerous and involved process depending on how powerful it was.

As to the AOE ref, that would be a good way to simplify what scared me the most, tech trees. Also adding specific bonuses like the OP was saying is a good idea. What I like the most though is the idea of special units, (I know I only played as Briton in AOE for the Longbowmen:)).

If you can keep ideas like this coming this could turn out to be an exciting project. I'm going to start looking into the tech trees with a specific focus on how adventuring/quests can accomplish this.

Just want to say that as yet another Butcher fan, I think this mod is great, and look forward to trying it once you get a stable build...

My primary concern with Furycrafting is that of manifestation. I think the smaller/weaker furies should be enhancement or utility spells (things like revealing an area of the map, etc, something that a limited fury could accomplish with difficulty) while the larger furies would equate to larger stat/ability enhancements. The problems comes when you consider that in Alera, once a fury is manifest, the person summoning them loses the passive/active enhancements that fury grants. I'm by no means even a novice at actual modding, this is probably going to be my first true attempt at it (aside from some futzing around with files in the past, but that doesn't count). I have no idea how complicated it would be to have passive bonuses/enhancements disappear upon the summoning of a fury. In order to balance this, I'm thinking of splitting the difference, each fury claimed would add stats and enhancements (maybe some traits we could mod in) and give access to a summons of some kind. But neither of these would be as powerful as Butcher alludes to in his books (a high lord can literally decimate an opposing army of legionaires, according to Butcher's writings, but I think that would be unbalanced for gameplay.)

I'm not really sure I answered any of your questions there, mostly I think I just rambled, but if that struck any inspiration with you, let me know.

As to having crafting limited to a few people, I would definitely think that is the way to go. In the original post Arentol mentioned Knights would be similar to Champions in the vanilla game. I think that is the way to go, so that in the beginning of the game it would be a sort of marshaling of champions, then building of armies to be supported by those champions.

Complete side note: Magic research victory should result in the discovery and subsequent 'construction' of Alera. (thoughts?)

I definatly agree on the unbalanced part, just with the really weak furies that I've been testing they just become too powerful in large numbers. I think that limiting the "summoning" of furies to the more powerful might be a good idea, but that's a balance issue that can be handled later. as to the stats and enhancements that should be really easy. And as to losing those bonuses we can just put detrimental affects for when you cast the manifest fury "summon" spell. I haven't tried this yet but it should be easy to test, will post later on that.

I've been checking around for how to put the gaining of furies as quests and am having a little bit of a hard time but I think I've just about got it figured thanks to Novaburst and his post about creating the "Dawn Quest" mod.

Champions will be easy to make and tie to the modified adventure tech tree. Plus I've started messing with the tech trees so there will be no problems (or hopefully not that many) creating those.

This I really like. But I was thinking that since the adventure type quests are being used to gain furies why not merge the two tech trees. We can make it so that a tech gained through the "fury gaining" tree is a prerequisite for the knowledge of constructing Alera. I also like the idea of doing some kind of "master quest" type thing for her creation where the player would have to find pieces of her to win the game. If I remember right she was created when various peices of the country Alera was brought to the capitol.

What do you think? And keep the ideas coming.

(I feel almost as if we've hijacked the OP's post)

Edit01:By merge the two tech trees I mean have them rely on each other for that one tech. So a player can't powerhouse through the modded "lore" tree and get her and win without haven't to gain furies for himself. I think that winning should be from either military conquest, the construction of Alera, or whatever diplomacy system E:WOM uses. (don't know what the diplomatic victory currently needs to be fulfilled.)

This thread makes me want to read that series, I have only read his dresden books and liked them alot...sorry for beinga bit off topic.

Was messing with creating custom quests and we can reward the player with spell books which contain the abilities/enhancements/spells of that particular fury. I believe that you can also change the stats of the sov as a reward then giving him the bonuses we were talking about.

Any thoughts how to go about a quest that gains a fury? What should the player go through?

You should read them. They are excellent. Also, unlike the Dresden series (though I LOVE that series too) The Codex Alera series is finished, and is only 6 books long. One word of caution though, for me at least, the first book was frustrating as hell. Every 2 pages something seemed to go wrong, and even when it went right, it was wrong. If you this aggravates you as much as it did me, you might wonder about continuing to read the series after book one. DON'T STOP. After the second book, you should probably have all the other books on hand because you'll just want to know what happens next. It is an awesome series of books.

I like the idea of making the two tech trees rely on one another a lot.

I think it should be a variety, sometimes it might be simply going and defeating the fury (as the in game equivalent of 'claiming'). Sometimes though it might be more difficult, like having to wake the dang thing up (maybe by exploring a certain tile of the map that are the fury's territory or something, like Gerados did not like people trespassing on him in Calderon). Maybe some times it could be a rumor about a troublesome wild fury that the local townspeople will tell the Lord or Knight about and they have to track it down. It could be any multitude of quest type things, obviously it will be limited by what we can fit into the game/come up with and there will be repetition if we allow too many furies to be claimed -- maybe that is how we can limit a Knight as opposed to a Lord/Sovereign, give them claimed Fury caps of some kind (not sold on this idea, just thought it up)

Hmm... Since I'm so weak on the actual modding process I feel like I'm not accomplishing much other than spouting ideas I'm not even sure are possible. Anything I can do to help, Dras? (and I'm gonna PM Arentol and see if he is still interested in this or if he won't be able to help, since it does seem like we have taken over the thread/idea posted by him originally, and I don't want anyone to feel put out about all this)

Can champions initiate and complete quests? I've spent a lot more time messing with the files of the game instead of playing it lol so I don't know if they can. I was thinking of having champions as preset characters that do not gain furies. Of course if they can do the fury claiming quests then we would have to find a way to limit it or stop them from it depending on what direction we go with them.

Like you said repetition could become a big problem depending on how many types of furies are available. there would be six different furies to gain if we just did one of each type. that would mean if we wanted a progressive system of gaining stronger furies over time with the tech tree it could be from 6 to 12 to 18 or more quests to get them.

This gives me an idea though. What if we termed the current lore tech tree as a "personal study" tree where the sovereign was training and developing his crafting (much like Tavar in books 5/6). We could term it as the Sovereign learning with the weak furies that he gained as a small child. (Septimus did set his nursery room on fire at age 5.) This could allow for a progressive fury system using the adventure tech tree to unlock the opertunity to gain more powerful furies without overwhelming the player with running around doing quests. And it would ensure that a player with no interest in the adventure tech line would have some standard utility spells.

We could maybe tie this with the idea that each factions leader is stronger in their factions chosen elements by starting them off/allowing them to tech "personal study" tree in those elements. This could help add flavor to the individual factions.

Yeah I feel kind of guilty since he created the post so I hope he's not upset about what we've been doing one way or the other.

As to the other thing, this mod (even with only Aleran factions) is huge. There is so much to not just create but to fit together in a logical and playable way.  I've been doing a lot of practice work on the XML side of things and plan to brush up on my python skills but for this project we need a unifying vision. (sounds a bit corny but it's true) As the person that's read the entire series the most recently and has a track record of interesting ideas I nominate you for this position. We need an idea maker/expert that keeps the focus of the mod at the needed place going in the needed direction, also someone with a broader view of how everything will fit together, and that's a skill I've always had an issue with. As long as that's something you would want to do. We're doing this for fun so I think we should keep that in mind. No one should be forced to do anything they don't want to there's enough work for everyone lol.

I've been looking at a lot of other peoples mods, (props to Gnilbert, who's amazing modding skills has given me great insites) to kind of get an idea of what's doable and what's too hard to do to be practical. The people on this forum are amazingly skilled and very helpful. 

I was thinking that we should find a way to slice this mod up to workable parts that we can work on. Ie. one faction at a time one section of that faction (Tech tree, fury abilities, units, specialty units, buildings etc) at a time. But since this is the first total conversion I've done I don't know if that is the best way to go about it.

What do you think?

(Also depending on OP's decision on participation and whatnot we should get this added to the stickied mod list so it doesn't get buried under other posts all the time )

Edit01: Also because I have school during most mornings and work nights I will probably continue to post at weird times.

I just did a quick and dirty test with Janusk. I managed to complete the quest to kill some rats using only him. I however have spent less time playing the game than I would like as well. My computer is a little finicky (I am in the process of acquiring a new one). I'm not sure how much champions can grow, but given the fact that they have stats and can be imbued by Sovereigns to be able to cast spells as well, I assume their growth is similar to a sovereign. So some sort of limitation will be needed. I'll think on this and see what I can come up with.

I like the idea of one fury each element for each level, as sort of an optional "gotta catch 'em all" sort of thing. Overall though, I am less concerned with repetition if we know how many times sometihng is likely to repeat (for instance, if we know that at most each player will have at most 20 Fury quests, we could try to come up with 10 different quests, thus ensuring that each quest is performed no more than twice.)

Sudden thought: What if each tier in the adventure/fury tech tree unlocked 2 tiers of fury? One that was Lord class only and one or two that were Knight class? I'm not sure if this would be possible, but from my limited knowledge of programming it should be with an if/else tag, right? Since each Lord will have multiple knights, this would give each player a chance to customize their knights growth as well, by sending specific knights after specific furys. I have NO idea if that workable or not though.

This I like.

 I would gladly be the idea/organizer guy. Though at some point I'd like to pick of the rudiments of XML and even python. I've actually found a basic python tutorial I'm going through, but XML is a little fuzzier, any ideas on where to start there?

As to Arentol, I did PM him, and will email if later today. I'll give him a couple days to respond at which point it will have been about a week since his last post. If I don't hear anything I'll make a new thread for this (so that I can edit the opening post for updates) and get it in the stickied list. At any point of course I'd welcome his input, the more heads knocking ideas around here the better.

It might be easier to focus on a specific area for the actual modding, so our scattershot of ideas doesn't bog you or anyone else who participates down. I'll see what sort of order I can come up with, and since you seem to be lead programmer on this particular venture, you might want to see if there is a particular order of 'ease' so you can snowball up to the hard stuff, or even if there are easy things you can hand out to someone like me (flavor text/renaming, etc).

and don't worry about the weird times, I work night shifts most days, but then some days I open my store in the morning, so my schedule isn't all that predictable, ah the glory of forums

EDIT: Arentol has emails disabled on his forum account, but I did send him a PM the other say, so we'll see what happens.

I think I'm going to start looking into creating a custom race/faction (I've only messed with modifying current ones, poor gildar they have so many testing changes they work nothing like they used to lol) That way we have a base to work off of for the crafting/units/techs etc. What do you think?

I think creating a new faction as a basis for everything is the way to go. Maybe start out with Gaius, working on the passive bonuses for the faction (don't worry about balance right now) and custom tech tree. From there it should be a simple matter of altering each of the other custom factions from the template of the Gaius faction.

Might be easier to go something like this:

Faction

Whole Tech Tree (the non-limited 'master' tree from which all the others will be derived), at least names/placeholders for each tech.

Units

Furies

Questing

Finalize techs and begin integrating units/furies/questing.

From here it should be a simple matter of creating each new faction off the basic template, altering each custom tech tree slightly (maybe throw in a couple of unique techs for each faction)

I think the final step should be balancing/tweaking/final flavoring.

I am happy to help with flavor text/renaming/whatever other miscellaneous things I can. How does that roadmap strike you?

On the nature of the tech tree I do have a question... anyone know what the whole of the current tech tree looks like? I'd love to get a look at it and begin thinking of ways to modify it to fit the world of Alera. 

I've already started on Gaius, it's now a selectable faction with it's own logo (just a black falcon on yellow/red the closest one to the Aleran flag I could find in the games shipped logos.) and all that basic stuff. I like your list it makes a logical branching from the basic stuff to the auxiliary. I'll try making and adding generic bonuses linked to the faction much like the current faction bonuses but just linked to House Gaius.

The kingdom factions all use the Amarian tech tree and the Empire factions use the Trog. You can find the outline of which tech is in which catagory by looking at the "TechTree_Amarain.xml" file (conversly the TechTree_Trog for the Empires). The individual techs (IE. discriptions/modifiers) are in the Techs_Amarian and Techs_Trogs. The CoreTechTree.xml file seems to be only for the display of the techs inside the research window and some kind of discription that changes as you level up the techs. I don't really know about that last one, I don't think you really have to mess with that to just get the techs in.

Hope that helps!

Perfect. Thank you very much!

Alright, it has been around a week since Arentol posted. Tomorrow, if he hasn't responded yet, I am going to create a new thread to keep track of this and submit it to the mod sticky thread.

Sounds like a plan! Woohoo we're gonna be official!