Frequently asked questions (FAQ) Thread

Please post here questions you have about game mechanics or other occurences you experience while using VanillaMod
I will answer each question hopefully within a few hours of you posting it and add it to the FAQ list in this post as appropriate. This is another chance for you to contribute even if all you have done was to examine the readme!

Some general changes to game mechanics that have not been mentioned in the readme but you may come across:

- You can build diplomats at any town hall or library structure as normal, but you can only upkeep 1 diplomat per council chambers or higher.
- Spies are limited to 1 per brothel, but the limit increases if you have a tavern or higher.
- Build times are slightly reduced to allow for a slightly more fast-paced game in terms of research and development.
- Fortresses and huge cities can train 4 units per turn and citadels can train 5 units per turn.
- You can recruit up to 2 agents of the same type per turn from a settlement now.
- Made bribing more useful by increasing the chance of success slightly and decreasing the bribing cost. It is now actually possible and viable.
- Priests have a slightly higher chance of denouncing heretics and witches per level but heretics generally have higher piety.
- Settlement towers are more reliable and have a good chance of incinerating siege equipment now on higher levels, making artillery more useful.
- Artillery construction is highly limited to prevent the AI from spamming it. Most late gunpowder artillery is available as normal however.
- Ship construction similarly has been limited to reduce spamming
- Gunpowder infantry fires more reliably
- Pikemen will be more likely to continue poking and when drawing swords will be easier to get back into pike mode.
- Aztecs are now formidable opponents
- The AI is less likely to randomly blockade your ports and break its alliance.
- Early units slowly phase out as buildings progress
- AI armies are more varied and generally a lot more difficult to beat with a balanced force
- AI will always attempt to train the maximum amount of men it can resulting in huge stacks
- The AI will defend its settlements much better when at war with several enemies.
- Mongols and Timurids will no longer likely remain idle.
- 2H Sword, Axe, Halberd animations are improved and sped up.
- The AI will act a lot more smartly in field battles and somewhat better in sieges
- Various fixes and tweaks to traits and ancillaries

What version of Medieval 2 Total War is this built for?

VanillaMod will work for both Medieval2 version 1.2 and 1.3. In fact, it will work with 1.0 and 1.1 as well, but it is recommended to have at least 1.2 due to AntiTraits.

I was looking for a Vanilla Mod that only updates AI (campaign and battle).

I have noticed that you have edited the unit stats from the original Vanilla version. Were the unit stat changes needed? The more changes one makes the more removed the game becomes from the original Vanilla version...

You have also changed the building tree - you can now build catapults in large towns (instead of cities).

Are there any other changes that we should be aware of? :inquisitive:

Please list all changes made, so we can judge how far removed this Mod is from the Original Version.

Thanks!:beam:

Hiya,

Unit stats were changed to rebalance the game as pointed out in the readme. As per 1.2/1.3 with the shield fix, many units now have stats that are not congruent to their purpose or price. Similarly al late period non shield cavalry were a lot worse than those early shielded ones at a higher price, so other than eyecandy they didn't do much. This was fixed to make each unit good at what it does at the right price. If you have suggestions regarding balance errors however, I am happy to revise them.

I did not change where you can build catapults however.

Thanks for the reply! :beam:

About the unit stats, I was just worried that it might make the game unbalanced. Did you sue the Ultimate AI 1.6 unit stats?
I thought they would have fixed the unit stats in Patch 1.2.
Obviously they didn't???

Its sad that this great is so bugged! :no:

I was playing Ultimate AI 1.6 but found that the mod too heavily modified the original game.

But your mod is perfect. Better AI and unit stats. And Vanilla is more fun too!

Thanks! :2thumbsup:

Hello its me again....:book:
How did you arrive at the new Unit stats? Did you use other Mods as guides?

And could you please explain, just for my benefit, why the old Vanilla unit stats were unsatisfactory...please...and what were the problems...

Thanks! :laugh4:

Hi,

I arrived at the balance through testing for months locally, not by looking at other mods, so the balance will be different from LTC for instance.

As for why it was needed in my opinion, is for instance cavalry easily beating spearmen with minimal casualties, pikes not being reliable at all (this will be fixed in the next update), halberds not fighting correctly and 2H unit stat issues that made them useless in melee. Similarly, dismounted knight units had their stats lowered somewhat and adjusted by availability so you can't just rely on DFK for the entire game but getting the higher footknights is actually useful for instance.

Archers now also have a varying accuracy by their level, gunpowder infantry is more reliable and artillery hit somewhat better but have less ammo, so the trebuchet won't fire forever for instance, but will hit better and do more damage (i.e. trade off and better vs units)

Explosive rounds are also effective againt units now rather than just being eyecandy

Another update! Thanks for the great work! I really appreciate it! :2thumbsup:

I hope this new version will work with my VanillaMod 0.9 version saved games OK.

Thanks again! :2thumbsup:

Congratulations for the mod, but I got a problem:
In the KOTRfixREADME.txt , is writen this:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now to apply those fixes, you will need to run your medieval game exe sing a shortcut or a bat file.
The target of said file should read similar to this:

C:\Medieval\medieval2.exe --io.file_first

Where "C:\Medieval\" varies depending on your installation but medieval2.exe --io.file_first should be constant.

As above does not always work for some systems, the path may alternatively have to be similar to this:
"C:\Medieval\medieval2.exe" --io.file_first
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
But I can't understand how to change the target of the file. I can't create any merchant or spy in my campaing. How can I aply your fixes? I ran the bat file but nothing changes.

Hiya,

The shortcut should look something like this:

https://img217.imageshack.us/img217/...benanntzi7.jpg

Change the section marked red to where your medieval2.exe is located.

Alternatively, if you have troubles getting it to work this way, put following into your medieval2.preference.cfg:

[io]
file_first = 1

Save the file, mark read only.

KOTRfix only changes traits and VnVs in the nonPBM version, so it will not affect agent recruitment. If you have issues with recruiting agents, these will most likely be due to another mod.

I did what you said about the "file_first = 1" stuff, and I hope that the fixes are aplyied :)

But, anyway, The only mod that I got is yours, and I can't recruit any agents. Isn't there any file that I can change to solve my problem? I got only 1 diplomat, 1 merchant, no spy, and no assassin. And I can't recruit nothing more thant it.

Hmmmm what does it say when you try to recruit agents? Agent limit reached?
This would only happen if you got VanillaMod installed (it limits the amount of agents (spies and diplomats) you can hire to 1 per basic building and higher for advanced), but not if you only got KOTRfix.
Merchants and Priests are limited by default by the game, although that can be switched off.

My fault FactionHeir :), everything is fine, I used to play without your mod, and it were easyer to recruit agents. Sorry for the trouble.

FactionHeir, I'm sorry if this is posted elsewhere. I didn't see it.

Does the update to Kingdoms have any effect on your mod? I've already installed that, but I want to use your mod.

At this time what files need to be downloaded and installed? I see a couple of threads in the discussion section about Battle AI changes and emergency fixes. Are those still current information if I have a new download of the mod?

Hiya,

Welcome to my small forum and thanks for giving my mod a try.

The Kingdoms update affects kingdoms.exe and the CA-made mods only. As VM is based on medieval2.exe, it will thus not have any effect on it. However, if you run VM with the kingdoms.exe (not sure if that's possible - can't try it myself), you would hypothetically get any improvements made in the patch for your game as well.

Either way, VM does not require kingdoms to be played effectively.

At this time, all you need is 0.93 Full and the Emergency fix. Please do note that you will need to create a folder called VanillaMod in your medieval2 directory.

Hope that helps ~:)

P.S.: I have also closed the other thread and made notes in the download link thread on what is needed as a result of your query

hi faction heir, i did not know where to post this at so forgive me if this is in the wrong thread. i was wondering how do i change the limit on the army size to unlimited? i know im supposed to change the preference.cfg file but since i am using vanillamod. how do i go about doing it? :help:

open the VanillaMod.cfg (making sure Vista doesn't create a second copy while you do that) and find the line "unlimited_men_on_battlefield" and set that one from 0 to 1. It may already be set to 1 depending on which file you used.

in my vanillamod.cfg file there is only these few lines



[features]
mod=VanillaMod
[video]
widescreen=1
[game]
allusers=1

Add this under game:
unlimited_men_on_battlefield = 1

[features]
mod=VanillaMod
[video]
widescreen=1
[game]
allusers=1
unlimited_men_on_battlefield = 1

am i doing it right? sorry if this is a dumb question. i need to get things right instead of revisiting it later. :wall:

thanks factionheir for the help. i appreciate it.

Yes that's right, make sure Vista reads the right thing though ~:)

the limited agent change seems to be bugging my rus campaign.
i make the building in nov specifically to recruit early diplomats, and i cannot make any.
even after i take over a handful of other territories, and lose my princess, it says "agent limit reached".
2 agents exist for my faction.(priest+spy, no diplos). i have 4-5 settlements.

while i can see the need or want for capping agents, it seems a little bit much and unnecessarily disadvantageous early in the game.
not sure if you wanted it to be like that, or not.

edit:
ah i see now. you made it "council chambers or higher".
my bad.
is it possible to mod the script then if you arent going to allow diplos being created from town halls?

Yes, in export_descr_buildings, you can add the agent_limit line to town_hall (all types) as well to allow town halls to provide a limit bonus. It will lead to large amounts of AI diplomats eventually however.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by FactionHeir

The Kingdoms update affects kingdoms.exe and the CA-made mods only. As VM is based on medieval2.exe, it will thus not have any effect on it. However, if you run VM with the kingdoms.exe (not sure if that's possible - can't try it myself), you would hypothetically get any improvements made in the patch for your game as well.

---

Some of the changes and improvements to Kingdoms necessitate new fields in various XML and export_*.txt files. That appears to be why the Retrofit mod was made in the first place. To get VM to use many of these improvements you'd need to merge the two mods. Even with a diff program this is proving somewhat difficult as I'm not versed enough in M2TW to know which changes you've made that would be possibly conflict (or are better done differently) with Kingdoms.

It would be great if you could make a version of VM to slot in over the retrofit mod; the two would complement each other nicely.