Hardcore Med Mod??`

[ToranagaSama]

Hello all,

TS is just wondering if it might be possible to make any or all of the following modifications to increase the challenge of MTW:

1) Limit the number of Agents allowed:

a. Overall within the game (any suggestions as to how many?) Not sure if this s/b limited to just the human, or should also include the AI. Whatever the case, the goal would be to even the playing field for the AI by limiting the human’s prodigious use of Agents. Surely, the AI isn’t capable of using Agents as well as a human.

b. Per Province: there s/b a limit to the number of Agents allowed in a single province. This would serve to eliminate Agent “flooding”, such as with Spies, Bishops, etc.

2) Restriction of Governorships to Nobles/knights

a. Would this not be more historically correct? Shouldn’t this be more accurately reflected within the game. In any event, it should certainly make for more challenge. Income would be greatly effected toward the negative. Less income would certainly make for more challenge for the human. This would make for fewer 4 acumen governors, certainly early in the game. It would also mean no available Nobles, then no Acumen benefit until you do.

3) The extent of your Trade Empire s/b commensurate with the size and progress of one’s land Empire. I haven’t thought this one through, but the basic premises is there.

4) Limit the number of Ships allowed per faction in the game. This will serve to Limit Trade. In some way this might be managed to be connection with item 3 above.

5) Ships, the AI needs to be able to stack its ships into “fleets” after sometime of losing “single” stack battles. With the Med Mod 1.5 I witness the AI to occasionally stack 2 ships into a fleet, but nothing more.

6) When Abandoning a Province a player s/b able to choose which province to. Its quite irksome when making this choice to see your Stack appears where you don’t want it to be. Say you attack a province from Province A, and are counter-attacked and choose to abandon the province, you’d think the AI would place your troops back into Province A. Ideally, having a choice would be best, but defaulting to Province A will do just fine.

TS would greatly appreciate any discussion, comments, and most especially a couple pointers as to how I might get started and the difficulty that might be encountered. Is any of this possible, if so is this something a novice such as myself should attempt?

The above would be in addition to and in conjunction with the Med Mod.

Thanks in advance.

[ICantSpellDawg]

Quote[/b] ]) Restriction of Governorships to Nobles/knights good idea

would there be any way to put this in?

[Elmo]

TS

You have some interesting ideas. I'm not sure there is a need for 1a or 1b though. People who use flood tactics probably won't use a mod that prevents it. People who don't flood don't need the restrictions. Hopefully some of the mod experts will comment on whether some of the other ideas are possible.

Elmo

[cugel]

Just a few thoughts on your suggestions:

1. There's already a no-agent mod out there. It's not that hard to take them out of the game. Better would be to take out spies and inquisitors. I agree that people who use ridiculous tactics like flooding a province with spies or launching an inquisitor to eliminate another factions best generals won't be interested in such a mod anyway, and the rest of us who don't do that don't really need it. Still, having fewer agents would be less annoying and time consuming during AI moves.

You can't really eliminate emissaries or princesses without crippling the AI diplomacy. You'll notice that after the early stages it becomes impossible for the player to make alliances, ceasefires or marry with another faction -- i.e. as you become powerful diplomacy just doesn't work since the AI won't agree to anything, but inter AI diplomacy still continues. Thus, eliminating this feature makes the AI weaker -- the opposite of your intention.

2. The whole concept of governors during the feudal era is dodgy. These provinces tended to be distributed to the greater lords, but the entire political tension between feudal nobility and king is completely disregarded in MTW. The only way to emulate it at all would be to give all your provinces to low loyalty nobles (like 1 or 2 stars) and heirs (who would tend to rebel and form a rival claimant to the throne if you gave them half a chance)(you can't even make heirs governors anyway for some stupid reason) and suffer the consequences. I don't suppose that any player would want to constantly have to fear rebellions and there's just no way to duplicate the real political structure of medieval europe in this game. I could write at lenght about the real limitations inherent in medieval institutions but I'll limit myself to saying: "you can't get there from here." I would give this idea a pass.

3. This idea has been discussed ad nausea and it still comes down to this: it's no fun. What we want is to increase AI trade, not limit the player's. There are a number of people looking into this problem for mod ideas and it looks to me like a solution can be found along the lines that Wes W. and others have suggested in other threads.

4. Sure, you could lower the AI build probabilities or even eliminate ships, but why would we want to do this? I'll just re-iterate Kraellin's earlier comment about this point: shipping and trade were features added because we complained about the lack of them in Shogun Now you want to limit them because they don't work perfectly? This is neither historical nor a good idea. Movement by sea in that game was higly abstract and actually a broken feature. The AI should build more ships not fewer. There are problems to solve, but this isn't the solution. Let's not go back to the bad old days where the only way to move around the map would be to tediously invade every province by land. That got very boring in Shogun and is why I stopped playing it eventually. Building up a trade empire and alliances (at least as a variation on the tedious conquer all) is more fun to me and many other players. Unfortunately, GA doesn't really work right and there seems to be no way to mod them, since they're hard-coded (too bad too since a LOTR glorious achievment oriented campaign would be very cool).

5. I've seen some very large AI stacks of 10+ ships by the English and Sicilians. To the extent that the AI doesn't do this there's nothing we can do about it. It's hard coded that way and we can't mod it.

6. Again this is hardcoded and can't be modded. Besides, what makes you think that an army retreating before a superior foe can always choose which direction to retreat in? They would tend to retreat in a line away from their enemy so as to avoid being attacked If you retreat then you don't get to choose which way to go. That decision is made by the need to avoid the enemy http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif