The Progress of Version 0.3 (15 July 2022: War Overhaul and Dwarven Troops!) (Patreon)

Greetings Conquerors!

This week we have the introduction of Dwemer units and a much needed overhaul to wars and battles.

DWARVEN UNITS

The ability to recruit dwarven machines has been added! They are similar to mages in the sense that you need to research them in order to recruit them. You will also be able to level them up through research as well. They require gold and metal to build and recruit.

CITY BATTLES REWRITTEN

It's been almost a year since I've started making this mod and city battles and the war quests were one of the first things that I worked on. As a consequence, they are plagued with spaghetti code that is a bit confusing and runs pretty slow in game. Therefore, it became necessary to rewrite these from scratch and improve upon them. City battles will mostly be the same experience but with a few key improvements:

1. Things run ALOT faster. No more waiting 30 seconds for the hold to transfer to you and the quest to complete after you defeat the Jarl. Now all of that happens in a few seconds.

2. To combat the issue of troops stopping spawning early outside and preventing you from killing enough troops for the gates to unlock, I have changed it so they stop spawning once the gates unlock. I didn't do this initially because it caused 20 troops to still be outside when the player is told to proceed to the next objective in the city. However, the next change deals with this in an immersive way:

3. Prisoners of war can now be taken! Any excess troops that are outside or in the city when you defeat the required troops will either retreat and run away or surrender to your forces, to which you can store them in your forts and ransom them later. I'll have more info on this system later.

WARS REWRITTEN

As you have played through the mod so far you have come to know wars as the following: 1. Declare war, 2. Move your army unopposed to siege a city, 3. Hold the city when troops maybe come attacking every couple of days possibly attacking the same city each time, 4. Repeat.

Well say goodbye to this unrealistic system and prepare for a new dynamic and interesting  warfare system!

Firstly some small quality of life things: the maps are receiving a bit of an improvement: You can now see roughly where your armies are by looking at the map. Each army is represented by a small flag post with your banner on it. This helps tremendously with seeing which cities need armies in their garrisons.

Speaking of garrisons, after attacking a city, the attacking armies will now automatically fill that cities garrison so you don't have to go through the hassle of manually assigning them after each siege.

And now the bigger stuff:

The days of marching massive armies through entire holds without any issues are over! In order for you or your enemies to siege a city or move the army through a hold, you need to have what I call "Land Superiority" in the hold. Here's what I mean by this:

The faction with Land Superiority in the hold basically controls all of the roads and land in the hold(minus the forts and cities) and can freely conduct military operations in the hold like sieging a city, sieging a fort, or moving an army through the hold. This faction will want to have armies patrolling around the hold or another faction will come and take Land Superiority, denying the first faction the ability to garrison more troops in the city and also opening opportunities for the new faction to siege the city or fort. When a faction takes Land Superiority in a hold they establish a camp as a base (I am using the vanilla war camps for these as Bethesda was kind enough to include one for both factions in each hold and make them really easy to enable and disable).

For example: say you own Whiterun and you want to conquer Morthal. However, the Imperials have Land Superiority in Hjaalmarch and have 2 armies patrolling around the hold. In order for you to march your troops on Morthal, your invading armies will need to first deal with those two armies and establish Land Superiority and set up a war camp (credit to Simdrew1993 for supplying tent meshes and textures for the player's faction). This battle will occur as soon as your troops enter the hold and will occur at the Imperial war camp. Once you defeat the two armies, the lands around Morthal will be under your control and you are free to begin a siege of Morthal or the fort and prevent the Imperials from garrisoning more armies in the city. The resource production and trade in Morthal will also cease as your troops will deny any resources from entering or leaving the city, allowing an option of starving them out.

However, the empire will not just sit idly by while your armies hold Morthal hostage! They will try their hardest to eject your armies from their hold, getting sending more and more armies after each failed attempt. However there is also a chance that they will give up on Morthal and focus their attention on taking a different hold. If you left Whiterun with no armies to defend the hold, the Imperials will take advantage of this and send in their armies to establish Land Superiority. You will then be unable to garrison troops in Whiterun until you've ejected those Imperial armies from Whiterun.

As I said earlier, all of this applies to moving troops as well. You will no longer be able to easily send your armies to invade Solitude if the Rift is the only hold you possess. It still is possible, but you would have to achieve Land Superiority in at least three connecting holds in order to get your troops there! And this runs the risk of the enemy retaking Land Superiority in two of the holds and trapping your armies in the middle hold. This adds a major strategic component to the mod. For instance, if the Imperials start with every hold and you decide to first take The Pale and Eastmarch, the Imperials will be unable to send any armies into Winterhold and you'd have an easy time capturing it.

And there you go! I feel that this is a huge improvement from the repetitive nature of the previous system and should make warfare more dynamic and different with each playthrough.