I want to give the mod more flavor. Up till now I added features, fixed bugs, and made the GUI. But everything is unpolished. Next thing is more interesting combat logs, specific items/tradegoods for every civ, a new evil, but friendly civ (has any other mod done this?) and some renaming to better fit a certain style. All this should add to the atmosphere, but there is one thing I just cant decide about:
Tradegoods. Caravans currently bring crafts, toys, instruments, somethimes hundrets of them. NO ONE every buys them (except to melt them down) and if a caravan gets raided, you are stuck with a ton of clutter. I now have two options to handle this:
1. Removing of all reduntant (useless) items from other civs. This means they only bring things you might actually be interested in buying. But this also means that the caravans are rather bland and lack character.
2. Making 1-3 custom toys/instruments/tools/clothing for each friendly civ
Making 1-3 armor/ammo/weapon/helm/boots/gloves/pants for each friendly civ
This would mean that the caravan has unuseable stuff, but you get civ-specific items, humans bring chessboards, elves wear light, beautiful detailed armor, dwarves trade toy-merfolk-farms... this would add more atmosphere, but might produce more clutter, if the caravan is killed, AND you have to scroll through a longer list of unwanted goods while trading.
I will make a poll about this. The obvious idea I had is to make this optional, but I am not sure how easily this can be done for such a big change. A lot of tags in the entity file would be altered, and testing is very difficult, since I have to wait for at least one caravan from each civ to test it.
Test shows that even if the number of types of toys/instruments/tools is reduced, the amount is not. Dwarves only have drums and toy-forges currently, but bring plenty of them while trading.
Here the plans:
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FRIENDLY## bring everything they have. (and corpses)
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Make all gloves and boots rare (for caravan guards and the occasional war), this removes the itemcount by 4 for each unit, but still allows quite a good armor covering.
dwarf = bring everything, have special constructs and cave animals and underground plants. Difficult to mod, since you play with the same entity
human = bring a smaller selection, mostly upgraded things, 2handed weapons, platearmor, towershields, blueprints.
elves = bring ironbark/steeloak items, good arrows, good selection of bows. aboveground/good plants.
new friendly evil = bring unique evil mats, weapons with special attacks, slaves (intelligent pet race), evil plants/drinks.
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INVADERS## bring clothing, armor and weapons. (and corpses)
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Remove all gloves and boots from invaders, this removes the itemcount by 4 for each unit, but still allows quite a good armor covering. Can I also remove backpacks and flasks from them, without ill effect ? If yes, how ?
kobolds = leave a bag of stolen goods upon death
this way people want to hunt the thieves down. this bag can be processed to release it's content, similar to the fossil treasure chests and would be full of precious metal bars, or valuable items. Small chance for an easter egg maybe ? Also leave smallish armorpieces and daggers of course.
goblin = smallish versions of weapons/armor, wrongly written warhammer language?, not for dwarves. max 5(6) items. (helm, armor, pants, weapon, shield, (ammo))
orcs = waaaagh stuff, wrongly written warhammer language? Crude versions, ill fitting, not for dwarves. max 5(6) items. (helm, armor, pants, weapon, shield, (ammo))
warlocks = masks, creepy cloaks, curious (special attack) knives and staves. max 3 items. (helm,armor,weapon)
frost giants = natural armor/weapons, leave nothing.
automatons = bring guns, bullets, leave only weapons/ammo. Maybe a special item corpse with something technical ?
undeads = nothing, dont want clutter.