Overall to-do-List / Plan of Action

As you can see, I generated another sub-forum in this section, as I found this thread was not fitting into any other category - because it is related to the entire mod and even the Cold-War-Techtree.

It is an early list of things to do - and in which order to do them.
You know my "doctrine" of gameplay-first: Graphics and fancy stuff can be added later, early on it is important to have a playable version, mostly to keep myself motivated when I can see progress in terms other than graphic
This does not mean that we will not add counters for newly created units, but this will only scratch the surface of artistic involvement.

So, where are we standing right now: We have a lot of ideas that are very nice - now it is time to implement them, clear out what is good and feasable and what is not.


1.) Technology
-start up with Infantry, Armor, Navy
-thinking about aircraft, doctrines & secret weapons
-waiting for Zerli to finish hiseconomy mod, because I really like this approach and it would be very feasable for a CW-environment.

-Most important here - making clear figures how the unit-stats improve from technology-upgrades, as linear approach might not be that good. Discussion in the Tech-Tree-areal.


2.) Units
-create basic unit stats; rather easy, because only basic models have to be taken into consideration.
-switch land-units to battallion-size
-creating enhanced units for CW-era
-balanced naval components, etc.

-All in all, a rather easy task, as much of the unit-tweaking takes place in the Technology-definition. Those two steps must thus be linked together quite much!


3.) Scenario Setup 1946/1947/1948 (to be discussed still)
-Borders
-political setup; pol. System, ruling party, party org/popularity
-Technology setup
-OOB

4.) Events & Decisions
-For the transition of the vanilla-situation into our alternative timeline
-For our timeline from CW-scenario start onwards
-For several alternative outcomes of the alternative timelines or different transition into alternative timeline...

5.) Testing, Balancing, Bugfixing

6.) Adding fancy graphics...

7.) Party?


Please add things that I might have forgotten!
Discussion of certain topics please in the related subforums of either CW-Techtree-development or Fatherland-development.

Black Guardian wrote:As you can see, I generated another sub-forum in this section, as I found this thread was not fitting into any other category - because it is related to the entire mod and even the Cold-War-Techtree.

It is an early list of things to do - and in which order to do them.

Good to see someone else is still posting to this forum as well
Your approach is good, I have seen way too many overly ambitious mods that fall to the trap of dealing with minor graphical changes without getting the basic fundamentals right at first. Zerli's mod and your own ideas about economic cycles and gradual industralization and change of the nature of economies over time align nicely with the background story of Prisoners of Silence - in a fashion parallel of OTL Soviet downfall the Neuropean economy gradually stagnates due ever-increasingly inefficient bureaucracy and growing military spending while the Western free trade economies prove to be much more responsive to changes. Meanwhile Soviet Union and China and the growing Third World powers like India and Indonesia have plenty of opportunities to transform and expand their economies into new directions as well. In summary I really do hope that such changes can indeed be implemented, since they would bring much new content to the game.

I have plenty of 8-hour night shifts and spare time due my current work, so I think I could take a look and post some suggestions to points 1, 3 and 4 during the coming week.

Good to hear another approval for this list. I showed it to General Grant, yet he is still busy with college-stuff for the next time. I am sure he will participate as well once he is less stressed.

I will leave you for a week as well today, but feel free to post suggestions into the forums, I will read them as soon as I return next Sunday. Have a nice week!

Even thought it's currently a tad silent here, 1.3 is looming on the horizon and there are several aspects of the mod we could work on while waiting for it. Going down to actual number-crunching on units and doctrine effects would be a good place to start, and since my working schedules are really lax until early December I could easily start working on this part of the mod. What do you think, should we still focus on the general outlines or start moving down to the smaller details?

Karelian wrote:Even thought it's currently a tad silent here, 1.3 is looming on the horizon and there are several aspects of the mod we could work on while waiting for it. Going down to actual number-crunching on units and doctrine effects would be a good place to start, and since my working schedules are really lax until early December I could easily start working on this part of the mod. What do you think, should we still focus on the general outlines or start moving down to the smaller details?

I´m sorry for the quietness, which is to some extend my fault. Last week I have taken a week off and did not spend much time on my Pc. Now, the semester has begun again and I am slowly increasing my workload again.
However, sadly, the overall number of Participants for the mod is still very low. General Grant himself has a lot stuff do to right now and cannot play HoI3 on his old machine, apart from him, it is only me and you (though I was contacted by another person interested in supporting us, yet he has not participated here in any way by now...).

I dislike discussing ideas on the basis of a 2-man-show, especially as we do not have any idea of what could/will work with HoI3 and what does not - Certainly, modding this giant game is nothing I do want to do alone or with only 1 participant! Thus, we need more people who are interested in helping us. Gaining more support and promoting our concept is badly needed, if you ask me. We need something to present. General outlines cannot be presented that impressively - furthermore, we have agreed on a certain basis, in most areas it is only a question of detail and compromise between minor differing opinions...

To come to a conclusion: Yes, feel free to move on to details, but please take care of the fact that it should have some good and visible effects in time, not too much work below the surface. Technology is definitely a good point to start.

My preferred field is still event-coding, maybe some technology-modding.

Still, what is really, really, really needed is a person (or a group) who accepts the enormous challenge to mod the scenario-setup! Not so much OOBs (I could help out with coding those as well), but assigning every province to its respective owner at Scenario-start!
Upon this, we can base the other parts of the mod, do playtesting, build in OOBs, Tech-setups, testing events, etc.
The only problem is to find someone willing to go through all the province-files...
(By the way, is there a map of the Rest of the World, apart from Neuropa, as well in your AAR? If not, could you prepare one?)

Black Guardian wrote:
I´m sorry for the quietness, which is to some extend my fault. Last week I have taken a week off and did not spend much time on my Pc. Now, the semester has begun again and I am slowly increasing my workload again.
However, sadly, the overall number of Participants for the mod is still very low. General Grant himself has a lot stuff do to right now and cannot play HoI3 on his old machine, apart from him, it is only me and you (though I was contacted by another person interested in supporting us, yet he has not participated here in any way by now...).

Well, this is a freetime hobby for everyone so it's completely understandable. Especially since there are so few of us. Hopefully our ranks will grow, since a two-man show is unlikely to ever get anything done. Well..I'm optimistic nevertheless.

Black Guardian wrote:To come to a conclusion: Yes, feel free to move on to details, but please take care of the fact that it should have some good and visible effects in time, not too much work below the surface. Technology is definitely a good point to start.
My preferred field is still event-coding, maybe some technology-modding.

I'm aware of this, simply stating that "this mod is going to include x" without having any early content to show is not going to convince anyone to join and contribute. We need results, hence I plan to use my spare time to do some early testing.
As for modding, my earlier experience from HoI2 is limited to modifying unit stats and map data so the modding-friendly structure of HoI3 is definitively a bonus.

Black Guardian wrote:Still, what is really, really, really needed is a person (or a group) who accepts the enormous challenge to mod the scenario-setup! Not so much OOBs (I could help out with coding those as well), but assigning every province to its respective owner at Scenario-start!
Upon this, we can base the other parts of the mod, do playtesting, build in OOBs, Tech-setups, testing events, etc.
The only problem is to find someone willing to go through all the province-files...
(By the way, is there a map of the Rest of the World, apart from Neuropa, as well in your AAR? If not, could you prepare one?)

True, and I'm willing to help in this work. There are few maps available, but I could as well directly contact this guy you mentioned and cooperate with him to get the latest data correctly in?

You see? It´s a completely different dynamic when working together in a 3-man-team Finally some motivation to do things without having to do everything on your own.