[Kelso]

So I was trying to think up a way to organize the Barbarian tribes in Rise of Rome. My first thought was to do 2 seperate sides, one the Germanic tribes of what is now Europe and the other side would be the Huns. But then I thought that splitting them up might cause the teams to be thinned out unit wise. So maybe it would be better if they were all under one team that was simple The Barbarian Tribes. But then some things just wouldn't make any sense. For one thing the voice acting for the units would be way off depending on what area of the map you were playing the game in. Also, there were no war elephants in Northern Europe, so being able to make them there wouldn't make any sense. So I was wondering what people think would be the best way of attacking this issue. My question stems from that- Would there be a way to code the large campaign map so that only bases in certain "regions" can make certain units. I'll use the elephant as an example. All your Barbarian bases in Europe lack the ability to train war elephants but all your Barbarian bases in Africa and Asia do.

[Ambershee]

Split them into factions with slighter differences - factions with otherwise the same units, but with slightly different numbers thereof and effect, i.e more armour / firepower, there's a bit of a difference in what you can do there

Is it really so difficult? I'm fairly confident that it wouldn't really be as difficult as you think to include different units for a pair of sides, although production wise I reckon your probably a LOT better off, I mean reskinning or slightly remodelling a unit to resemble a similar unit in a similar faction is much easier than dealing with multi-scratch based models, especially when there are THAT many animation sequences to deal with.

[Kelso]

I suppose the best way to go is to have the barbarian tribes have different factions where the units, graphically, are the same but they have slightly different attributes as you mentioned before. And then perhaps each faction can have several exclusive units to them.

[Ambershee]

That's pretty much what I was thinking, although not necessarily identical graphically, maybe different skin jobs for differentiation. I'm pretty sure you could easily also incorporate some harsh differences between the two anyhow, with different traits, such as the War Elephants you mentioned, and things such as horse archers etc for the other and so forth

[Kelso]

That solves that problem then. Now if I could just spur some more interest so I can get more bodies to work on it. Or maybe join an existing studio to get things moving quicker. *looks in smurf's general direction*

[Ambershee]

lol, yeah, the old general "there aint no staffage" problem that haunts us all . Hopefully we weill have a few hideaways to trawl through later

[Eradicator]

IMHO focus on two specific factions for the first release. If you have time and resources more can alwasy be added. Like Rome and the Britons or Gauls or something.

[Kelso]

The factions wouldn't be too different. Structures and units would have the same models but different skins. Its not that much more artwork time really.