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About this mod
A hardcore origin where the only backgrounds you can hire cost, at the lowest, 1k crowns.
Fundamentally changing the economic management of the early game, the origin also saddles you with an interesting dilemma: your men are all grey bearded veterans. They may be old, but their combat experience comes with a special trait - Desensitized
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
First of all, my eternal gratitude to the following:
JCSato - Not only did he inspire this mod with his excellent Men At Arms origin, he kindly contributed the code for the Desensitized effect - for I'm not nearly clever enough to code such a thing on my own. His mods, so varied that they include everything from unique origins with custom mechanics and twists to the old BB formula, to new equipment and variants of stuff already in game, are all so seamless and done to such a high standard they could pass as vanilla content with ease. I invite you to check them out at his Github.
https://github.com/jcsato
TaroEld & Waterplouf - Who showed patience and kindness to me at every turn when I asked them for help with regards to the giving out of the old/desensitized traits and removing unwanted recruits from the recruitment roster. I would have given up early on without them; I was having so many errors, I thought the mod was a goner for sure.
Calandro - A veritable repository of BB knowledge, he gave me some incredibly helpful suggestions to optimize and clean up my code, spotting a few bugs along the way and pointing them out to me so that I may fix them. You're the man, Cal!
ChildServices - For playtesting the mod, helping balance it and giving me ideas to implement into the origin, which have done wonders to improve it and fill it out with more content.
-- THE STORY --
A veteran of what feels like a thousand campaigns, you've fought your way up and down the continent, acquiring a wealth of experience along the way. The years eventually getting you, a board of snobbish officers discharges you out of the army an invalid, with a pittance for pension. Grey bearded and having learned no trade, you drift into the veteran's home, making the acquaintance of your old comrades, reminiscing about the old days and rotting away in idleness. After getting particularly drunk one night and getting a bit carried away with the memories of your time under the Colours, you and the others break into the storage room, seize back your old equipment, and sneak out of the veteran's home to die practicing the only profession you ever knew - soldiering.
Among the way you'll break old comrades out of their own confinement, scuffle with the militia, take on a not so grey bearded squire into the company, and rally old veterans from all paths of soldiering - be they raiders, knights or sellswords - under your banner, to live out your last days in a blaze of glory.
This is, of course, a brief summary of the events and writing of the origin, which I spent much of it's development time obsessing over.
--THE GAMEPLAY --
A hardcore origin, it encourages the slow growth of a company of professionals, rather than the rapid expansion of the company with common folk who can't swing a sword the right way as seen in most other origins, by limiting the recruitment pool to the following backgrounds:
Retired Soldiers, (these practically having the Old trait built in already, and being so underutilized in normal play, they've been made more competitive by not receiving the Old trait as the rest of the hirable backgrounds do, yet still receiving the Desensitized trait, so don't sleep on them - they may just make very good recruits this time around.)
Hedge Knights,
Assasins,
Beast Hunters,
Adventurous Nobles,
Gladiators,
Nomads,
Oathtakers,
Raiders,
Sellswords,
Swordmasters,
Witchhunters
What this means is that, while the men from these backgrounds are competent soldiers and proficient at their trade, they are expensive to sign on. Indeed, the main challenge of this origin is the economic difficulty - your men are much harder to replace, and far harder to hire in the first place, as the lowest a recruit will ask for will generally be about ~1.2k crowns, while the average recruit will cost you around 1.5-2k crowns. The rest of the added difficulty comes from the next mechanic of the origin:
All of your men, save for a few exceptions from events which you may encounter, have the Old trait. Being unable to convince the young and fit of the soldiery who lend out their services as swords for hire to enlist in a company of dying old men such as yourself, you turn to your fellow neglected old timers, abandoned by society and the armies under which they learned their trade, to fill out the ranks of your company.
Not all is lost, however, for while their reflexes may be dulled with time and their strength sapped away by the years, their time in the service has given them all a common trait:
Desensitized: No enemy surround resolve malus on morale checks, be they positive or be they negative.
All your men are accustomed to combat, and are far more brave than your normal, young recruit would be, demonstrating by their courage under fire that they aren't quite in the grave yet - will that prove enough to make up for their old age?
Starting with 4 well equipped retired soldiers, you start understrength and must find a way to make up for that deficit by hiring and equipping new men to fill out your roster by any means necessary, before you lose the advantage your starting equipment provides to the ever increasing hordes of ever so slightly better equipped enemies.
All these mechanics should prove to be a nice change of pace from the usual BB formula and strategies, making you approach the game in a meaningfully different manner.
--CHANGELOG--
1.1: Balanced starting equipment and brothers:
-1h weapons have been reduced one tier each, though armor and longsword remains intact.
-One brother has been changed to a Raider background.
-Missing stars on all brothers have been assigned.
-Longsword user reduced to Level 2.
-Added custom background: Arbalester
An equivalent of the Hunter, the stat range remains the same, though they have been given better equipment and a crossbow, bringing their price up to the baseline of the origin. They can be found in any settlement containing a Barracks, where they have a chance to spawn.
-Event fixes:
Old Man event has been fixed; the town where it takes place will now turn hostile as intended.
Minor typo fixes in the Squire event.
Work has picked up significantly, so I wasn't quite able to put out as much content as I'd have liked this update. More events and custom backgrounds to come in a week or two.
1.0: Initial release.
--CLOSING REMARKS --
Modding has proved to be a rather enjoyable venture, particularly as an outlet for my writing, though only you can be the judge of it's quality. While I don't believe the mod suffers from any want of content, more events may be added in the future as I gather and explore new ideas for events.
If you have any such ideas for events, general suggestions, feedback on the mod or wish to report a bug, I encourage you to reach out to me at my Discord,
Mr. Hornblower#0297
If you're a modder picking apart through the code and having issues understanding a section of it, feel free to reach out to me there also. If you wish to replicate an aspect of my origin within one of your own, I encourage you to make usage of my code and modify it to your needs freely - I'll be a happy man if the code is put to use in making other, new and wonderful mods to add ever more content to our preferred game.
JCSato - Not only did he inspire this mod with his excellent Men At Arms origin, he kindly contributed the code for the Desensitized effect - for I'm not nearly clever enough to code such a thing on my own. His mods, so varied that they include everything from unique origins with custom mechanics and twists to the old BB formula, to new equipment and variants of stuff already in game, are all so seamless and done to such a high standard they could pass as vanilla content with ease. I invite you to check them out at his Github.
https://github.com/jcsato
TaroEld & Waterplouf - Who showed patience and kindness to me at every turn when I asked them for help with regards to the giving out of the old/desensitized traits and removing unwanted recruits from the recruitment roster. I would have given up early on without them; I was having so many errors, I thought the mod was a goner for sure.
Calandro - A veritable repository of BB knowledge, he gave me some incredibly helpful suggestions to optimize and clean up my code, spotting a few bugs along the way and pointing them out to me so that I may fix them. You're the man, Cal!
ChildServices - For playtesting the mod, helping balance it and giving me ideas to implement into the origin, which have done wonders to improve it and fill it out with more content.
-- THE STORY --
A veteran of what feels like a thousand campaigns, you've fought your way up and down the continent, acquiring a wealth of experience along the way. The years eventually getting you, a board of snobbish officers discharges you out of the army an invalid, with a pittance for pension. Grey bearded and having learned no trade, you drift into the veteran's home, making the acquaintance of your old comrades, reminiscing about the old days and rotting away in idleness. After getting particularly drunk one night and getting a bit carried away with the memories of your time under the Colours, you and the others break into the storage room, seize back your old equipment, and sneak out of the veteran's home to die practicing the only profession you ever knew - soldiering.
Among the way you'll break old comrades out of their own confinement, scuffle with the militia, take on a not so grey bearded squire into the company, and rally old veterans from all paths of soldiering - be they raiders, knights or sellswords - under your banner, to live out your last days in a blaze of glory.
This is, of course, a brief summary of the events and writing of the origin, which I spent much of it's development time obsessing over.
--THE GAMEPLAY --
A hardcore origin, it encourages the slow growth of a company of professionals, rather than the rapid expansion of the company with common folk who can't swing a sword the right way as seen in most other origins, by limiting the recruitment pool to the following backgrounds:
Retired Soldiers, (these practically having the Old trait built in already, and being so underutilized in normal play, they've been made more competitive by not receiving the Old trait as the rest of the hirable backgrounds do, yet still receiving the Desensitized trait, so don't sleep on them - they may just make very good recruits this time around.)
Hedge Knights,
Assasins,
Beast Hunters,
Adventurous Nobles,
Gladiators,
Nomads,
Oathtakers,
Raiders,
Sellswords,
Swordmasters,
Witchhunters
What this means is that, while the men from these backgrounds are competent soldiers and proficient at their trade, they are expensive to sign on. Indeed, the main challenge of this origin is the economic difficulty - your men are much harder to replace, and far harder to hire in the first place, as the lowest a recruit will ask for will generally be about ~1.2k crowns, while the average recruit will cost you around 1.5-2k crowns. The rest of the added difficulty comes from the next mechanic of the origin:
All of your men, save for a few exceptions from events which you may encounter, have the Old trait. Being unable to convince the young and fit of the soldiery who lend out their services as swords for hire to enlist in a company of dying old men such as yourself, you turn to your fellow neglected old timers, abandoned by society and the armies under which they learned their trade, to fill out the ranks of your company.
Not all is lost, however, for while their reflexes may be dulled with time and their strength sapped away by the years, their time in the service has given them all a common trait:
Desensitized: No enemy surround resolve malus on morale checks, be they positive or be they negative.
All your men are accustomed to combat, and are far more brave than your normal, young recruit would be, demonstrating by their courage under fire that they aren't quite in the grave yet - will that prove enough to make up for their old age?
Starting with 4 well equipped retired soldiers, you start understrength and must find a way to make up for that deficit by hiring and equipping new men to fill out your roster by any means necessary, before you lose the advantage your starting equipment provides to the ever increasing hordes of ever so slightly better equipped enemies.
All these mechanics should prove to be a nice change of pace from the usual BB formula and strategies, making you approach the game in a meaningfully different manner.
--CHANGELOG--
1.1: Balanced starting equipment and brothers:
-1h weapons have been reduced one tier each, though armor and longsword remains intact.
-One brother has been changed to a Raider background.
-Missing stars on all brothers have been assigned.
-Longsword user reduced to Level 2.
-Added custom background: Arbalester
An equivalent of the Hunter, the stat range remains the same, though they have been given better equipment and a crossbow, bringing their price up to the baseline of the origin. They can be found in any settlement containing a Barracks, where they have a chance to spawn.
-Event fixes:
Old Man event has been fixed; the town where it takes place will now turn hostile as intended.
Minor typo fixes in the Squire event.
Work has picked up significantly, so I wasn't quite able to put out as much content as I'd have liked this update. More events and custom backgrounds to come in a week or two.
1.0: Initial release.
--CLOSING REMARKS --
Modding has proved to be a rather enjoyable venture, particularly as an outlet for my writing, though only you can be the judge of it's quality. While I don't believe the mod suffers from any want of content, more events may be added in the future as I gather and explore new ideas for events.
If you have any such ideas for events, general suggestions, feedback on the mod or wish to report a bug, I encourage you to reach out to me at my Discord,
Mr. Hornblower#0297
If you're a modder picking apart through the code and having issues understanding a section of it, feel free to reach out to me there also. If you wish to replicate an aspect of my origin within one of your own, I encourage you to make usage of my code and modify it to your needs freely - I'll be a happy man if the code is put to use in making other, new and wonderful mods to add ever more content to our preferred game.