Hey all,
just wanted to keep a thread for logging my progress with my current mod project. October Winds is, as the thread title suggests, the name of my Russian Civil War scenario/conversion. Working on this has thus far actually been quite challenging - as there is no editor as of now, I'm writing events that transfer ownership of hexes to the involved factions before you make your first move. From a player's perspective you will simply be presented with the new map when you start the game, but counting all those hexes and adding them by hand and trial and error is actually quite the effort. You will notice that the borders are not 100% accurate yet, but I wanted a working model for now to start basing other work on. Fine-tuning the borders will be a continuous task later on.
The main scenario I'm working on is set in May 1919, during the high water mark of the Whites. Yudenich is poised to march on Petrograd. Admiral Kolchak's forces and the Southern Whites in the Don have a real change at threatening Moscow and possibly even linking up their lines with a daring assault on Tsaritsyn. The communists have been defeated in Finland and the Polish Republic is gathering strength in preparation for a potential renewal of hostilities with the Bolshevik government. Everything is at stake: The Whites can crush the Soviet Republic or the Bolsheviks can rout their enemies and establish supremacy throughout Russia and possibly beyond. This makes it the best scenario to begin with in regards to engine limitations I think, as the actors are now more or less established at this point. A scenario with an earlier starting point is possible, but will require additional scripts for emerging White forces - this is something for a later point, if I'll still have the motivation for it. (Finland and Poland are at war with the Soviets in the picture for illustration purposes only of course, to show the borders.
I noticed some interesting things during development thus far. As I'm adding the provinces by hand, the original owner of the provinces stays the same. This is a relatively big problem for newly created factions like Poland or Red Hungary, neither of which exist in the main game and thus have no national provinces, and can thus never use any cities to full effect with the default settings. On the other hand there's Finland, which already has cores on its provinces in the main game and can thus use its cities to full effect. I've already removed the limitation on units only being deployable in 'native' cities owned by a faction so as to allow the Whites or Poland to produce troops, and I'm planning to remove the limitation on unit production after a faction lost a capital city as well (as again, new factions will not have 'native' capitals). Same goes for the slow recovery of PP after a capture, this will have to be changed to be immediate so the Whites can start gaining PP right away from the start, as they only 'recently' conquered these territories in engine terms after all, as they were given to them by event.
I'm not sure if you can add new factions to the game (my first attempt to do so in the factions.lua resulted in failure), so for now I'm operating under the assumption that I will have to reuse tags already in the game by absorbing nations that are unlikely to become part of the war into their neighbors so as to free tags for civil war factions. Nations like Portugal, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland and the Arab Revolt are prime candidates for this. In my screenshot above, the Baltic countries and Central Asia are not yet part of new factions as I have not yet determined whether they will get independent tags or not.
Depending on how many tags I can use, I will divide the Whites into several factions and also create a separate entry for the Ukrainian Anarchists. I definitely will try to have Hungary in as well to give a Red player the option of expanding the war to Eastern Europe to gain more PP.
[img]http:///i.imgur.com/azvk95J.png[/img]
Can't miss appropriate capital symbols for the factions either, of course.
[img]http:///i.imgur.com/0LZPzJt.png[/img]
Finally, I'm working on new counters. Right now it's a still looking a bit odd, but I plan to use a XXX, XX and X scheme for infantry units and use appropriate NATO counters for them.
Anyway, that is my current progress as of right now. Next up the table are creating some needed new units like Trotsky's Train, creating appropriate victory conditions, flags for the various factions and changing the combat and recruitment mechanics to reflect the kind of engagements in Russia. I'll probably wait with changing core game mechanics until after the next patch though to make sure that I'm basing my edits on the latest version.
