After playing some Fantasy Mods and then reading this thread, I'm amazed at some suggestions that have been missed.
Of course, these may be too ambitious, but
Implement Species Directly:
Currently, modders seem to be using traits, religions, and a huge amount of scripting to implement Species/Races. It sort of works, but the results are typically full of holes and bugs.
To make things simpler, add the species as part of a character’s definition. Characters are Human by default (for compatibility), but modders can specify additional species, subspecies, and groups of species in the files.
Species information can be used by default to specify or influence things like:
- Portraits
- A flag that disables events for this species unless the event specifies otherwise (to exclude generic events that don’t really work for this species).
- A flag for animal companions (like dragons).
- Info for things like “evil species”, able to pass as other species, immune to normal methods of death, etc.
- Ages of adulthood/old age.
- Lifespan and infant mortality.
- Default marriage preferences (should be overridable by culture, religion, or traits).
- Reproduction rules (normal, parthenogenesis, parthenogenesis+normal, one-gender species, only reproducing by event, etc), including weighted rules for specifying what species the offspring will be in cases of intermarriage (for some one-gender species, this is based on gender of the offspring). Cross-Fertility would also be moddable. And gender ratios.
- I hesitate to say it, but certain cultures or religions could also be specified as preferred or disfavoured based on species, since a lot of fantasy settings have alignments that certain species are assigned. Standard traits could also be weighted by species.
Finally, of course, a lot of triggers and other script based things would have to be added to support scripting using species, subspecies, and species_groups.
Colonization:
The standard engine for CK II does not allow empty provinces : every province must have a ruler. However, plenty of fantasy mods feel the need to get past this. They usually implement a rather awkward method where a dummy pseudo-species like ‘Ruins’ or ‘Wilderness’ is created to serve as the species of incapable count of the province. To colonize or seize the area, you declare war, send in the army, and after you win, a scripted event chain is used to ‘colonize’ the place. This is really twisted, and also sometimes you get Ruins marrying people or similar wierdness.
So, for these mods, try and implement some sort of actual unclaimed province with no ruler and no court. Using the “Conduct Diplomacy” button would not show a ruler but could still provide some interaction options, like colonization, treasure-hunting the ruins, raiding, etc, if the right conditions are met. Most of this could be controlled by scripts, but some hidden info could be used to control how large a force the ’tribal people’ might raise to resist a colonization or raid.
A related option would be a way to mark a province as uninhabitable, in a way that could be removed by event to make it a wilderness or uninhabited.
This should be done in such a way that the same province can have different states at different start dates.