Reconquista: Total War

Reconquista

The mod “Reconquista“ focuses on the Christian recapture of the Iberian peninsula and the attempt of the Islamic factions to cross these plans. Another important location is the Maghreb in Northern Africa, where different Islamic factions, being as splittered as the Christian ones in those days, are struggling for supremacy. The Maghreb also provides an area of retreat to the Muslim factions and offers them the possibility to gather new forces for a new invasion in Europe. This might be helpful in case the Islamic nations lose their fight for the Iberian Peninsula early in the game or when the player is forced to pull back his forces. The regions of Europe that border the Iberian Peninsula in the North, especially Southern France, work in the same way for Christian factions when they are in difficulties. Parts of Italy, especially Sicily and the islands of the western Mediterranean Sea, temporarily came under the Muslim’s rulership and are also of special political interest for the Sicilio-Normans, the Kingdom of Aragon and the Italian Republics. Further regions necessarily extending into the used map and an option to colonize America in the late game complete the map.

1035 was chosen as start date, as plenty of small and fragile Christian factions existed in Northern Spain at this date, offering the player a great diversity of factions. The same applies to the different Islamic factions, where several different candidates started a second attempt to establish themselves as the dominating powers. Therefore two big teams face each other in the core area of the campaign map, but their team spirit is fragile and occasionally the pope has to remind the Christian kingdoms to work together instead of fighting each other.

It was difficult to decide which provinces will belong neither to the one or to the other side, as there wasn’t that much land controlled by rebels in those days, even if it supports more balanced starting positions. But as this mod is based on a computer game and not on a historical simulation, decisions were made rather in favour of rebellious provinces. Many of the central and western regions of the Iberian Peninsula will be controlled by rebels, which can be explained with the decay of the Taifa-Kingdoms and the resulting anarchy. The same fits for the Maghreb, where rebellious provinces demonstrate the fact that many inhabitants were more closely connected to their local patriarch than to an emir living in a distant city at the coast. The situation aside the big battlegrounds is similar, although more compact. France and the Holy Roman Empire will have to defend their territorial claims against insubordinate counts and princes first. The Italian Republics have to secure their claimed trade posts. In the western Balkans, Hungary and Croatia prevent other factions from obtaining new territories in the east without conflict.

Another important question results from the different strategic potential of the factions. Scenarios, in whom distant conflicts dominate the map and exotic empires arise after as few as a hundred turns shouldn’t be excluded but limited to an acceptable frequency. So the campaign’s development will be supported to follow historically comprehensible trails. From experience, in the first few turns the military and financial potential is especially important. Each faction will get financial support to improve the chances of survival for the more important nations without eliminating the smaller ones. To support the campaign’s main theme, the balance between Islamic and Christian factions has to be preserved in the medium term. The most important ways to change a faction’s probability of success in a running campaign lie within the game’s mechanisms and the events. The effect of unit balance on the strategic campaign is often overestimated by players, as it mostly affects direct military confrontations on the battlefield.

Many factors influence a faction’s power, but they can only be verified during the development of the mod. This concept represents historical considerations, but there is a fair chance that some parts have to be corrected or adjusted. Until a certain degree of progress, it is possible that some factions may be left out while other, new factions get included.