To Kraellin

[Edratman]

I like what you accomplished in that mod. I've got 6 factions plus myself trading now. Of course I started first so I have a big treasury edge on the AI. I going to try adding a little to the ship figures for the AI. I also gave the higher shipyard and trade figures to rebels. Livonia builds ships and they are the Pirates of the Baltic. No trading, just attack anyone. Cool.
I also jacked the build numbers 100 for all the + happiness buildings. It really quiets down revolts for the AI. I'm only up to about 1270, and I only see revolutions in the provinces with a revolt factor higher than 0. (Probably try taking several provinces to 1 next time around).
I also changed the prerequsite for chapter house to castle 9. It got rid of those weak assed crusades and allows a lot more trade by eliminating those wars with the best trading areas.
There is definately a lot more money in the game and the AI seems to play a lot smarter with money.
By the way, I used my base mod and added your build factors. It is similar to yours (still has the land bridges), but I have more trade goods than yours: in fact all inland provinces have either 2 or 3 trade goods. This made Poland and HRE much tougher than usual.

[Kraellin]

edratman,

yeah, the ai trading thing numbers were purely experimental and i wasnt totally happy with the ai still not building enough ships, but what i got did make a better game, so it was better than a poke in the eye.

i love the idea of a pirate faction. making the rebels as that is a great idea. i may have to try that also. i had hoped by making the danes 'barbarian raiders' that they would fill that role somewhat, but it didnt work quite the way i thought it would. still, the danes are better. i'd be interested in hearing how you tweaked the livonians. also, wouldnt it be cool if pirate raiding got you income for doing so.

yeah, jacking the happiness stuff up for fewer rebellions is definitely an option and particularly helpful for the ai. i can go a whole game and almost never have one for myself, so it's sorta unfair that the ai has so many. i like that idea as well.

interesting idea on the chapter houses. i've not fooled with them, but i like the crusades and jihads. also, i believe you can alter the crusade strength, so you might wanna look around in this forum for the data on how to do that.

yup. i think the more money thing definitely helps the ai out. even with no other mods, i think that alone would be enough to increase the difficulty in the game and that was one of the complaints early after the release, that the game, even in expert, was too easy. adding more money overall makes it tougher to conquer someone completely.

btw, i dont know what the limit on how many trade goods and resources for a given province is, but i suspect you could have one of each goods and each resource in every province if you wanted. i had up to 5 trade goods in my earlier versions and several resources in some, so i suspect it's only limited by how many actual resources and goods that there are in the game.

i've also one question for you. you said you have 6 factions doing trading by ship now. have you found any of them starting wars frequently by attacking other faction's ships? i found the ai doing this a lot to me and other factions and thought, boy, that's stupid. why ruin your good trade routes and income by all this warring? it makes me curious if some of your other modifications are affecting this or not, like the happiness buildings; are they lowering the need for war as well as rebellions or are you also modding the base ai behaviors?

K.

[Edratman]

Kraellin

The limit on number of trade goods is definately 5. I've tried 6 and it would not work.

I cannot honestly say if the AI is attacking ships. My experience is that if my ship is attacked by the AI, I'll stay away from that sea zone until I can put at least 2 ships in it, preferably 3. By then the war has evaporated from the diplomacy screen. I don't have enough time to check everything every turn.

I also seldom, if ever, have a revolt so that is why I thought of tweaking the + happiness buildings. It seems to be working.

I didn't specifically tweak Livonia. Your changes to port and shipyard left the rebels values unchanged, I merely put those factors for rebel build numbers.

I like the crusade change. Earlier Giljay said the AI is driven to achieve its GA goals, and crusades are the biggest points on the board. Now it seems the AI is very protective of its home provinces, probably because it is the most points.

Also I came up with a quick way to play test a mod. I set myself up as Sicily, but keep only Malta. I put 6 late era ships at Malta which makes the island off limits to the AI. I don't bother doing anything but hitting end year and watching the game using matsaori(sp?). I can knock off 100 turns in an hour or so (depends on how many cold ones I consume and have to get rid of).

By the way, the campaign I'm playing now has Polish ships trading, never saw them before. Must be led by the famous Waterski clan.

By the way, salt is also a trade good. I tried the other resources as trade goods without success. Are there any new ones you found? A couple of new ones would be good to minimize the non-trade effect.

I'm also thinking of eliminating iron for the metal smith. If anything iron would have been the most valuable trade commodity and I think everyone would have been at a similar position regarding that. Besides, I'm tired of moving units around for upgrades, just for the time factor.

I did some minor changes to base AI behavior. All Catholics are one of the trader choices. The Orthodox and Muslims have less options and I've left them at the original settings.

By the way, my base mod puts a fort3 in every province also. Helps HRE mostly it appears, but it also toughns up the rebel provinces.

[Kraellin]

hi ed, (name shortened for ease of typing :)

good to know, the 5 instead of 6 trade goods. i had only tried as high as 5.

what i was trying to see was, if by raising the overall happiness of your provinces through making the 'happiness' buildings easier to build, if the ai would lighten up on the number of other faction ships that it attacked. my burgundians, for instance, were a small faction to start with but would build ships, but then they'd almost immediately attack another faction with ships, thus starting a war, and it was pretty much a suicide move for them. so, if you observe any changes there, let me know.

yeah, the ai needs a break on rebellions. i'll most likely do something similar in my next tweaks.

roger re the rebels.

yeah, i'd forgotten about the GA points thing carrying over into the conquest game, so, if altering the crusade thing helps the ai protect itself more, this is going to be an interesting game balance thing. where i mostly like having the crusades is when i get overly aggressive against other catholic factions and the pope steps in and excommunicates me and then calls for crusades against me. that's a pretty cool item to relegate to almost never happening now because you cant build chapter houses. but, if it helps the ai protect itself more (one of the things it tends to be poor at) then, i guess it's going to be a trade-off thing of being more offensive or more defensive. nonetheless, it's an interesting catch on your part and does open the door on yes another way to balance the game issues and factions.

yeah, i was going to do something similar, just hitting the end turn button, but i end up always seeing opportunities that i want to take advantage of as a player and jump in anyways :) i also tend to turn the matteosartori on and off just to keep things somewhat in perspective while testing.

waterski clan? lol. i've seen turkish ships, burgundians, aragonese, french, german, danish, english, spanish, egyptian, byzantine, italian, novgorod, and even the papacy, but never the poles. fun, isnt it :) i did limited tweaks on the whole shipping thing before, but the next one i'm going to go hog wild and turn it on for everyone....way up and see what happens.

yeah, there is one reference in the files to salt being both a trade good and a resource. it's the only one i know of that swings both ways. there is also a reference to 'saltfish', but that may just be a typo where someone left the space out between 'salt' and 'fish'. the trade goods i know of are: butter, cotton, dyes, fish, furs, gems, grain, glassware, hides, honey, ivory, linen, oliveoil, pottery, saltfish(?), salt, silk, spices, sugar, wax, wine, wood, and wool. the resouces i know of are: copper, iron, gold, salt, and silver. oh, and there may be a resource of 'forest(s)' also...not sure...untested, but i've seen a reference for it somewhere.

removing iron for metal smith? interesting choice. you'd certainly get more factions having stronger units. what i'd like to see CA do with all this, is strengthen the whole trade thing so that you could trade with factions for the things you dont have, but that you need to keep your economy going or tech tree rising. it would add just that much more to the strat side of the game. and, it could force some interesting diplomatic situations as well.

yeah, i didnt tweak all the behavior stuff either, but apparently i must have tweaked something for the egyptians because they ended up being a very strong shipping faction. also bear in mind that by only giving the catholic factions stronger trading, you are depriving the muslims of the potential involved in trade routes and that's going to hurt them down the road pretty badly.

a fort3 in every province? wow. in a way, that actually helps the human player. when i bribe a rebel army, i always bribe where a fort exists if i can, so that the newly bribed unit, if attacked, can retreat to the castle and hold out till i bring in reinforcements. and, even if it's not attacked, that also means i can start building units right away in that province. and, i can sometimes bribe the unit residing in the fort, but not the one standing in the province and again bring in reinforcements while the guy in the fort holds out. i do a lot of bribing in my games :)

a lot of this stuff is just personal choice stuff. your way is your way; my way is my way. neither is right or wrong more than the other. it's all mostly fun. i do like hearing what other folks are doing with this stuff. someone else always comes up with something i never thought of before and it often inspires changes in my own mods, like your pirating rebels. i love that one and will definitely be trying it myself.

my biggest problem right now is that i've got all these ideas and not enough time or knowledge or patience to implement them all at once and now they're talking about an expansion pack and even the next major TW game. gah

K.

[Edratman]

I can agree your your "GAH". I've got the same problems, too many good ideas, not enough time to implement or even try 1/2 of them. Every time I make a change I have a nagging thought that I forgot some other great concept that I really wanted to try. (When you get to my age you become accustomed to that.)

You are right, it is all a matter of preference. A person gets a thought track and likes to follow it. I've got over a dozen mod choices on my "Early" startup menu, but I never go back to old ones, I just keep trying new ones. I hope everyone keeps trying things and posting them so I can "borrow" what I like.

I like your concept of trading for goods. If iron was a resource and a trade good which could then be counted as a resource, then trading would have a real function other than being a cash cow. (CA- HINT, HINT. Probably too complex a change for a expansion, but worth considering for a future game.)

The fort3 idea turns out to help me with adjacent rebels only, and then only in the earliest stages. I find bribing rebels without shipping contact to the king is a sure revolt and sometimes I will bribe a rebel province to put a stonger force in it to oppose the AI. The AI now likes to invade rebel provinces quicker because it doesn't have crusades as a point gaining option. And I'm probably going to make all initial rebel held provinces revolt factor 2 on my next change. The thinking is that I view them as independent kingdoms and they should have an impetus to revolt, so bribing a small garrison will almnost surely bring on a revolt unless you can reinforce immediately because neither I nor the AI can build + happiness buildings quick enough for revolt factor 2 provinces.

As for non-catholic factions, they only have 3 behavior choices, none of which includes a trader option. I did not do anything to limit them, CA did that.

I didn't turn off crusades, I just made it take longer for the AI to initiate them. I'll let you know what happens when it gets to that point, if I get there and don't start new mods. (Don't hold your breath. Hopefully someone else will experiment with various options and report back.) I actually tried it because I don't crusade because I learned it always cuts off major trade options. That is the big secret in the game, money is everything. Once you learn to trade and amass a treasury, some sort of victory is assured. I don't play the conquer the world game, mainly because the turns take too long to accomplish and I want to try a new mod anyway by the time I get there.

By the way, the + happiness building boost takes assassins out of the game, everyone has the second watchtower. I just put an assassin in every province for defensive purposes. Don't know how to change that. It would be nice if stars would help an assassin avoid watchtower death. I think that stars have no effect on avoiding that.

Another option for the Polish fleet is the Fishing Poles. (my surname ends in "ski").

[Edratman]

Another change that I found beneficial was reducing the support costs of early royal knights by 33%. It helps the Danes. I think the abundance of heirs and their early royal knight troops shifts the Danes to "poverty sticken" or "close to support limit" or one of the other alternates listed in the build files. So it looks like the lower support cost allows them to stay within their expansionist_trader designation and they then expand into Sweden and Norway reliably. My thinking on the AI is that just compares numbers of troops, not quality, so it thinks 6 units of peasants are better than 4 units of royal knight, for example. Thus the Danes with all those heirs and royal knights cannot build numbers of troops because the income/support ratio kicks them into some other action/decision tree. (Reducing the number of heirs should work but I don't know how to do that.) That is why I think the Danes are so easy for the player but performs poorly for the AI.
Nothing seems to help Aragon. They are surrounded by 4 large powers and seem perpetually doomed to self inflicted suicide by attacking one of them. They don't have the heir problems of the Danes, but Spain as the AI almost always jumps into Cordoba initially, limiting Aragon to one rebel province which it must compete with Spain, England and France for possession. It has a decent income, so it seems to be able to amass a fair sized stack which it throws at an adjacent province where it has numerical advantage at the first opportunity it gets. But unless that province is owned by someone already in a balanced struggle with someone else, this move almost always fails from what I have seen. I guess CA put them in for some historical accuracy and like history they are doomed to be absorbed. (I made a mod to play them and after 10/20 turns decided I didn't like them and quit. I'm sure that is a common result of modding.)

[Kraellin]

the aragonese are a difficult faction to tweak so that they're worth anything. however, that's not all bad. i dont want all factions being the same so that the player can play a tough game or an easier game. to get them a bit tougher when the ai is handling them, i give them an additional province to start, though not navarre. and part of the trick to getting them going is exactly what you touched on; you need spain and the almo's to be in conflict and france and the hred to be in conflict, so that nobody looks to the aragonese. the other thing i tried to do with them was to make them big ship builders so that they could invade to other places through the sea, and i've had some success in that regard, but not quite enough. the same is true of the burgundians, though they tend to last a bit better in my mod and maybe only because they get a little more income from the provinces i give them initially.

yeah, for the danes, i simply gave them more starting money and a bit of extra units or buildings, i think. this gives them enough extra money that they can start raiding a bit. oh, and i made them barbarian raiders and tweaked the barbarian raider ai stuff up more for ship building. so, i've had them take norway and sweden, or invade england, or invade livonia or some place like that. this works fairly well when the ai is handling them, though i still need something a touch more for them. they are still somewhat weak. what i really wanted to discourage with the danes was that silly attacking of the hre where the danes always end up losing, and i've accomplished this somewhat by adding forces to the hre in saxony or whatever that province is that adjoins denmark. the danes, as the ai, are still somewhat of a wildcard. they seem to be just too aggressive to be able to maintain what they capture, but then, in my mod, that's ok. i like the variety of game play this brings. a nice wild card faction that can influence other factors, but isnt necessarily a world conquerer.

i'm currently staying away from all unit tweaks, including support costs, so your tweaks there are of interest.

yeah, i played with the revolt factor on a couple provinces also. this is also a nice wild card thing. you can also use it with non-rebel factions to somewhat keep the ai from expanding too quickly, particularly if you've tweaked the happiness buildings up for everyone, this is a good way to province by province tweak it down again. i had to do this with the swiss when i added them. the swiss are really a later era faction and they were just killing everything by being in the early period, so, i make switzerland and the other province i gave them, high rebellion provinces. thus, if the swiss move their units out too early, they get backstabbed and it slows their expansion down considerably. i also gave them very few units to start and if someone does attack them and take their provinces, then the attacker is also most likely going to get a revolt and it will be a loyalist revolt, so the swiss are right back in the game again. it makes a nice offensive and defensive counter.

yes, the muslim factions only get the 3 behaviors. i modded the expansionist one to include the extra ship building stuff but didnt give that behavior to all, just some. thus, if given the chance, the egyptians will be pretty good sea traders, where the turks might build one ship after 100 years :)

hehe, one of these days you're going to have to actually play your own campaign and see what you've got ;) that's where i currently am and it's become a really tough game in the later years. i finally managed to wipe out the egyptians through assassination, but then the almo's re-emerged and took a TON of the old egyptian holdings before i could scoop things up too much, so i'm almost right back where i was with the almo's as i was with the egyptians, except for the shipping. i now AM the king of the seas and that's going to help.

the trade game vs the conqeust game is one where i'd like to see CA develop things more as well. it would be nice if there was a game mode for, like the GA mode, for building a trade empire, instead of trying to conquer everything. you'd still have battles and conflict and so forth as raiders and opponents tried to bust up your empire to prevent you from winning, but the emphasis would be on building an empire through a different sort of conquest, the monetary conquest. in this mode, i'd include things like allowing for vassal states, huge bribes to bribe entire provinces to your side immediately, much better shipping for everyone, land trade routes that not only work province to province, but also include routes off the board to simulate the old spice and silk routes and so forth. add in the actual value of things like iron and salt (didnt the romans actually use salt as currency at one point?) and that one buys and sells and tie all that into the tech tree and even influences and diplomacy, and you've got a completely new game mode without nearly the amount of coding it would take for a lot of other interesting additions to the game.

the whole, do i trade or do i fight or do i try to talk to my opponents to influence them is a badly neglected aspect in this game, and a lot of other ones as well. it actually amazes me that CA would move on to a completely new era and emphasis as opposed to expanding mtw into its true potential as a strat game. the possibilities in mtw are pretty incredible. i could easily see 3 expansion packs for this game just to expand into all the potential this game has and THEN move on to another era and faction emphasis.

hmmm, takes assassins out of the game? not sure i like that one, but, assassins can still be used effectively, at least by the player. you simply move them in groups and accept that you're going to have attrition each turn. also, my observation is that the level of the assassin does make a difference in avoiding watch towers and such, but it's hard to say for sure. it's more observable when you get some 3 and 4 star assassins going. they do seem to slip through the defenses better.

your overall game seems to be going more towards the peaceful trade game. higher happiness, fewer revolts, fewer crusades and so forth. i've somewhat done this as well, but not to the extent that you have. keep me informed on how it goes, and do try and play a game for more than 10 years ;)

K.