View Full Version : The Medieval Mod IV v 1.7
The new version of the mod is up at my webpage, and this is definitely the biggest upgrade so far. (so much for the last version being, uh, the *last* version.;) ) I initially went into the mod to re-do Crusades and implement the few changes discussed in the 1.6 thread with the Vikings and what-not, but once I got into it, one thing led to another, and another, and then I remembered a couple of things I had meant to do before, and then I saw this stuff in the units text that really needed fixing from what CA had set it to, and then... well, you get the picture.
I will try and be back tonight (been feeling bad the last few days) to further explain all this stuff, but you can view the readme through my signature here, or when you get the download. Installation is the same as in the last two versions, though you may notice that the mod is significantly bigger than before (about 1.4M). This is mostly due to the new units' pics and such.
Anyway, read over the readme, then read it again, then at least one more time, then go to the spreadsheet. I will try and sort it all out later.
Got it Wes. Thanks.
During unzipping an extra directory is created in front of the Medieval - Total War directory called Mods. IOW if you unzip to C: you'll put the files in C:\Mods\Medieval - Total War. Just wanted folks to know because I was scratching my head for a while trying to figure out where the files went when I unzipped them. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif
Wes
Just had my first CTD ever with MTW. Not sure if it is due to 1.7 or not at this point. I was moving at the start of my first battle when I had the crash. It was me (Turks) and Egyptian allies against the rebels in Lesser Armenia. I will reload from my last save after a reboot and try to repeat it.
Elmo
P.S. - OK, I rebooted and got to approx the same point as my previous crash. I saved just prior to the battle. Started the battle and while moving my troops forward to engage the rebels the game crashed again. I have a save if you have any interest in seeing it. Not sure what would cause the crash but as I said it has never happened even once prior to the 1.7 install. If nobody else sees this I will reinstall MTW and then your mod. In the meantime I'll probably defrag my HD while waiting to see if anyone else has problems.
Thanks, Elmo, I just zipped the damn thing up wrong again. I have just uploaded a fixed version, so if you already have it, be sure to check for the MM 1.7 on the Main Menu screen, otherwise you need to do as Elmo did and pull the files out of the "mod" folder.
I will list what I wrote down of the changes made in this version. I got to tweaking so many things that I am sure I left out a few small details, but that should not matter unless you already had the spreadsheet memorized.
Btw, it's really crucial that you keep a printout of the units' page handy, even if you had made one for 1.6. I didn't change any of the buildings except for the Charter House, so there is no need to do that one again.
I had not been able to read the 1.6 thread since Tuesday, so it was interesting to see the post about Kerns being useless. I agree with that, and fortunately one of the things I decided to do was re-work the Kerns, along with the other two javelin infantry units, the Murabitin Infantry and Almughavars. The readme and spreadsheet will give you more detail, but basically all three keep their javelins, while their defenses have been raised to that of Spearmen, Saracens and Pikemen, respectively.
And speaking of Pikemen, I raised the stats of all three versions by three or four points, spread out among charge, attack, defense and armour, while keeping their costs the same. I have been one of those who never understood why their stats were so low when their costs were so high, so maybe this will make them an attractive unit.
Swiss Halberdiers now have a defense (not armour) equal to regular Halberdiers. I didn't understand the defense descrepancy since they carried the same weapon, but more importantly they always dropped like flies in my battles. Oh, and their cost has been raised accordingly.
I increased the cost and building requirements for Vikings (and no, I had not messed with their stats prior to this), along with the req's for Woodsmen (a spearmaker), and restricting Gallowglasses to the high and late eras.
I tweaked the stats for Ghazi Infantry, Saracen Infantry and Nubian Spearmen. The Ghazi's trade some offense for defense, while the two spear units trade a little armour for speed compared to their European counterparts.
I adjusted cavalry speed to separate the units into basically 3 classes, heavy, medium and light. The readme gives more detail, but I think it is going to give some needed variance to that part of the game, especially pursuing.
I added a *whole lot* of buildings to the early and high eras, so that all non-Rebel provinces start out with at least a fort, town watch and spearmaker (or bowyer or horsebreeder). This should give the AI an alternative to producing large amounts of peasants at the start of the game, and help speed things along in the early going, so this is a win-win in my opinion.
But of course the biggest changes for this version deal with crusading units (and the building that enables them).
Chapter Houses are now unique, and have been placed in all the crusading units' capitals at the start of the high and late era campaigns, plus a couple of regions that give bonus valor to crusade units created there, just for an added twist.
Crusades now take ten years and 4000 florins to build, but they should create about 4x as many units as before. And since Chapter Houses will be, or probably will be, in your capital province, this means a long, hard decision about devoting an entire decade's time of your best province to making one.
I have not had time to playtest the effects of this yet, but I suspect it will make Crusades few and far between, as they were historically, but also they should be much more powerful, also as befits history.
I am really happy with the new unit setup for the Crusades, though it will take some getting used to for some of you. The chart and explanation in the readme does a better job of explaining it in detail than I can here, and I think trying to synopsize it here would cause more confusion than enlightenment. Therefore I will leave it to you to look over and post comments and/or questions. If you don't get something at first, reference the spreadsheet, which has been updated with everything, even the individual faction pages, and then read it over again slowly before rushing to the thread here. I feel sure that you will like it once you get it straight in your head.
And also keep in mind that I didn't start out to re-arrange things to much, it's just that I about went cross-eyed Tuesday night trying to figure out which faction had what using the old setup. This new one is both simpler, once you adjust to it, and also more adaptable to gameplay and closer to history, so I think this is a win-win-win situation.
And finally, Old Templar asked about shifting over to the Viking Invasion in the last thread. It may be possible, from what I read, to use our mods with or without it. If not, it may be that you would only need to get the exe from somewhere, so that you could make use of the new settings that will be available in the starting position and units files. And a lot of the interface upgrades seem to make it worth the money, in addition to the Viking scenario itself.
Anyway, that is over two months away, so we will have plenty of time to think about it.
Red Harvest
02-22-2003, 06:25
WesW,
Really like many of the ideas you have put out/incorporated. I'm not running your mods, but I have been incorporating selected improvements from them into my own "personalized" version of MTW.
The Crusades changes I especially like. A 10 year commitment makes far more sense. This should eliminate the endless stream of small, ineffective crusades. Coupling that with the ability to have a lot of high quality units in the Crusade makes even more sense. One of the biggest problems with Crusades was that the non-trainable units were well understrength before they got to target. Therefore, most of the money was wasted. With your mod several viable full strength units should be available even at distant targets. Also, the new size of the core crusade army should make my strategy of opposing them (even if excommunicated) very dangerous. In the past I had learned to oppose them, whip them in battle, and wait for civil war to develop in the origin faction when the crusade finally dissolved. Getting excommunicated with your mods could be a *really* bad idea
Hope that CA is looking at what you have done to: 1. Fix the obvious errors in the game/patch. 2. Get rid of the peasant fetish that the AI currently has. 3. Get trade working. 4. Make sense out of crusades (obviously). 5. Make sense of some unit builds being too late/unuseful such as the Lith Cav., Polish retainers. 6. Make javelin units work right...Spanish do OK with Jinettes but the Murabitin and the Almughavars don't work right. 7. Make sense of oddball mercenary units that are available such as Mangonels, specialty infantry/cav. 8. Sort out the advanced unit availability--esp. for minor factions and Poles/etc. (presently a bit strange.) 9. Improve Mongol abilities somewhat.
The parts of your mod that I'm not as comfortable with are some of the attempts at balancing Muslim units with heavy infantry type units. I want to see factional historic differences that make sense, even if it does make balance tougher.
Galestrum
02-22-2003, 07:29
could you please make a post here or elsewhere on how you are/were able to make more & better units spawn with a crusade - i know how to mod basic unit/building stats, but how do you tell a crusade what to spawn and how many?
Wes, thanks for this, I don't know how you find the time to keep updating these mods. I was considering doing one but have hardly begun on the reading. I'll have a look at v1.7, as I am finding v1.6 a really big improvement over the official game in terms of challenge from the AI. (BTW, have you tried the "large" unit setting? - I am playing v1.6 on it and think I prefer it to the default.)
Minor point - you might want to think about the changes you made to Swiss halberdier's defence and armour. The defence stat includes the effect of armour, so it is a little strange to boost one and not the other. The halberdiers represent late period troops clad at least in part in plate. The Swiss ones only light armoured. That the relatively unarmoured Swiss ones should drop like flies while the regular ones are relatively impervious makes sense. The Swiss ones are still worthwhile because you get them in the High period whereas the regular ones come in Late and halberds are pretty good weapons, AP and bonus vs cav. The correct usage is presumably fairly historical, as flankers protected by spear/pike units. I am not sure what your concern was here?
Bigger point - the documentation in the excel sheet seems a little short for the new changes. For example, changes from the original stats seem no longer shaded yellow and it does not have movement speeds so it is not possible to tell which cav is fast etc. You might want to review this for the next version of the mod. Also, is there any way to make your crusader unit txt file compatible with Gnome's editor? If we do have to dig into the txt file for the stats changes, Gnome's editor is so much better than wordpad.
My other big initial reaction is that I think changing the cavalry speeds to generic light/medium/heavy is a step backwards from the original game. In the original game there were three speeds - slow, for horses overburdened by armour (kats and Goths); the default normal; and fast, for some of the Arab and Eastern horse that it was difficult for the West European armies to catch. I think that was just right (ok, I'd get rid of the full horse armour on the lancers to justify their normal speed). Kats were famously slow - they kind of walked up to the enemy. And there just wasn't significant "light cav" in most medieval knightly armies. The hobilars, for example, were essentially mounted infantry with very inferior horses (think of the derivation of hobby horse). They should not be able to outrun knights. Knight's armour was not that heavy (80lbs or so), and their destriers were too good even to be ridden on campaign outside of battle. I don't know exactly what the mounted sergeants are supposed to represent, but it is either similar mounted infantry or inferior heavy cavalry, not faster "light cav". Having Western light cav might give an extra dimension to the game and make it more "balanced", as would giving the Islamic armies heavy foot, but I just think this is throwing away some of the historical distinctiveness of the game. The factions should have different strengths and also gaps in their line up leading to different fighting styles, otherwise we end up with a generic ahistorical strategy game with factions distinguished only by cheesy Age of Empires type unique units. Giving the Eastern/Islamic type armies fast cav is a useful and historical offset to the superior armour of the West (I'd also give them composite bows for similar reasons).
My preference with this mod is for a conservative approach to the units "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". The mod improves so much of the game outside of the unit stats, unjustified tweaking seems pointless. It's ultimately not a big deal for me, as players can easily unpick changes they don't like but I guess that for both you and players like me that doing that would not be the first best solution.
This post might seem like complaining, but I find your mods invaluable and just want to give some feedback.
Old Templar
02-22-2003, 21:42
WesW - I really appreciate the work you have done to "correct the shortcomings of CA's MTW". With Mod 1.7 however, I think you have been carried away to far from your initial intention.
IMO there are two different types of people/gameplayers (and a lot of people in between) who are interested in playing your Mod -
1.Group: Gamer who seek the trill of an individual battle, the battle taktics, the compatibility of different troop types in battle and other more action related game aspects.
They look for challenges in the battles.
2.Group: Gamer who enjoy a more strategic approach and are very happy with a decent battle scenario. They are looking for the AI to supprice with the strategically unexpected. These people look also for historic accuraccy (I realise that this is a game and not a history lecture) and the action and challenges in the pre-battle part of the game. I am one of them.
Like for a game company, the individual who makes the Mod will sooner or later have to decide which part is more important to the game, if you make the Mod for others as well.
Now to Mod 1.7 - I played two campaigns:
Danish/Early: The loss of early Vikings was no big deal. Income was secured relatively early and plentiful. For the first 15 years I build only ships and improved farm income.
The Germans had two stacks of troops in Saxony but never made an attempt to wipe out my measly 300 early troops in Danmark. They were initially strong but were completely annihilated by the French (THEY WERE OVERPOWERING IN BOTH OF MY GAMES). Spain was strong like in Mod 1.6. The Muslim factions remained unussual weak throughout both games (what a pitty). The SICILIANS ARE TO STRONG IN BOTH GAMES (historically completely incorrect) - they took over Greece and even Constantinople in the second game by 1220. The Kiev faction was completely set back. There were no moves and the faction remained small and obscure throughout the entire game. The English seemed fine in both games.
The second Campaign was with the Kiev faction/Early - no money (only F250 on the books year after year), very weak troops. I could not even defeat the rebels which attacked in 1210. Without the Vikings early and no funds to get to them soon it was a doomed game. There was nothing for me to do but pressing "Year End" for nearly 30 years - than I lost interest and quit. I challenge every "action gamer" to play this faction and end it succesfully at the time they would end the French or Spanish faction. Here again, France, Spain and Sicily dominated the game. The Muslims were cornered and did not play the usual role we saw in CA'sMTW and Mod 1.6.
Changing the stats on units is probably important for the action player and I appreciate the strive for correctness; but it is of no major importance to me. Possible, I would not even notice it and than in real life not all troops from the the same type are equal.
Most of all there are NO more crusades, none not even one in 50 years - what a pitty.
I have a Master Degree in History and I know it never took 10 years to historically arrange a Medieval Crusade, just one example:
The First Crusade started in 1095 with the first part of the crusade (Peter the Hermit's People Crusade (mostly peasants) leaving the same year the Pope asked for it. The second part of that Crusade with H. Vermandois, Godfrey/Baldwin, Bohemoud and Hugh arrived in Constantinopal in 1097.
People (at least the important ones) going on crusades had to be sworn in by a priest and received a robe with a cross. If they did not go on the assigned crusade shortly they were excommunicated until they went. While I agree to strenghten the troops of the crusades, restricting the start is a set back. I missed the Crusades or as they were called than "Pilgrimages". CA tried to create the game in consideration of historically events.
In the end it is your Mod and you can do what ever you like with it. I for one, liked Mod 1.6 (it is my Mod as well)which needed some improvements, but not to the extent of imbalancing the game that we see now in MOD 1.7.
I agree with Simon, "if it ain't broke, dont fix it".
This is not a complaint, just a friendly comment. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/mecry.gif
I switched from my usual Turks to the Kievans for my current game. It's only 1101 but I have 6 provinces with Moscovy next on my list. I have about 3K florins in the bank and have been building conservatively. It does take a while to get this economy going. Have yet to fight a battle as my large forces cause the rebels to retreat every time. I have ships in the Black Sea and the sea zone around Constantinople (can't recall the name) so trade is building. So far so good and having fun which is the main thing. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif Thanks Wes
Red Harvest
02-23-2003, 06:32
From Old Templar's description of the lack of Crusades there is still some tweaking to do. The problems I saw with the old crusade system in the original patched game were the shear number of crusades going on at the same time and the ineffectiveness of many of these same crusades.
While historically crusades might spring up over night, in the original game there seem to be about 10x as many as needed. It doesn't make sense to have giant high quality armies continuously spring up in one year. There has to be some sort of middle ground. Play Poland in original patched game and there was no doubt that the crusade frequency was ridiculously high. Silliest thing I've seen is having less than ten provinces and three crusades simultaneously moving through my lands (not targeting me.) So it looks to me like the answer will be somewhere in the middle. From the base value, increase the $ amount and time per crusade, perhaps six years and $2000 or so. Hopefully the AI will get a better supply of base troops but build fewer crusades. This should lead to fewer early stalled crusades that end up destroying the initiator. Wish CA had put in ability fo change targets to another province of the same faction IF (and only if) the target territory falls to another first.
As a side note, shouldn't Crusades be "Preferred" for General's candidates? Seems like it would be the natural focal point for leaders to spring up. Plus a crusade with a no star general is usually doomed from the outset...but I see a lot of these formed by the AI.
Well, this is just strange. I finally started a new campaign with 1.7 last night, as the English, High, Expert, and in the first 20 years I there have been at *least* four Crusades started. At one point, there were two Crusades marching through Spain heading south, and another heading north. The two heading south, a French one bound for Granada and a Sicilian one bound for Algeria, happened to join up at Aragon and proceeded in tandem to Granada. The one heading north was Spanish, obviously, and I remember a German one being declared earlier and perhaps one more that I can't recall clearly.
Before logging on tonight, I went into the units text and lowered the Crusade priority, convinced that my attempt to rarify them had failed completely.
I think we all obviously need to give these settings some more playtime before making conclusions. And this goes for most of the other controversial changes as well, as my experiences for a number of them are far different from the posts and emails I have been getting.
And remember everyone, the more changes I make to the game, the more likely it is that some of them will not suit you individually. The posts and letters I am getting from most everyone now are very enthusiastic towards the overall mod. I think that people are beginning to love it the same way they did the Medmods I and II for the Call-to-Power games, especially the Medmod I, which became almost a requirement among Apolyton visitors for both the single and multi-player crowds. (I still remember this one post where a new-comer was complaining that he preferred the original game, and that it was becoming almost impossible to find multi-players who were not using the Medmod I, with the effect that he had not been able to play the game hardly any recently.) People here wouldn't be making all these long, detailed posts regarding the mod's new features if they were got becoming passionate towards it.
I just want to remind everyone that most any significant change can seem uncomfortable at first, like a new pair of shoes that need breaking in. This is one thing that all my mods have in common- a certain amount of initial resistance to significant changes. And there is not a lot that I can do to assuage those doubts at first, other than to say that I never make changes arbitrarily, despite what it may seem like, and to ask people to have faith that the guy who has done so well this far is not going to suddenly go clueless as to what will help the game.
But this does not mean that I don't mess up sometimes, or change my mind after a while, and I always encourage people to keep posting about what they like and don't like. After giving it some thought, for example, I have restored the valour bonuses to Clansmen and Gallowglasses.
A couple of people have said regarding this latest version that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" in reference to various things, but then I see kudos from other people for the same changes. I will try and elaborate on specific changes that have been questioned, but in the meantime, play with this version for a week or two, and if you still think that some things aren't working, post with your observations and recommendations for improvements.
Old Templar said in his games that the Spanish were strong and the Muslims weak. In my games it has been the reverse, with the Almos taking out the Spanish rather quickly.
I had been trying to play as the Germans before switching to the English, and I have found the HRE as the most difficult faction to play in terms of trying to simply survive. You can be attacked at any time on any front by powerful enemies, your generals always suck, and losing a single province can lead to civil war. It seems that if you can conquer either the French or Italians, and defend what you have everywhere else, you will be alright, but oftentimes I was assaulted by huge armies within the first 6 or 7 turns, then ganged up on by everyone else, and the game was over. How have you guys faired as the HRE?
Simon, how do you increase the unit sizes? I have been wanting to try this for some time, now that I have a fast computer.
Elaborations:
Cavalry speed- The changes I made were pretty small, only about 10 or 20%. I also followed the recommendations that OT made pretty closely, in that Muslim and Eastern European units are generally faster than Catholic units, with exceptions for heavy units like Ottoman Sipahi, Khwarazmian Cav and Kats. If you say that historically the Kats were very slow, I will believe you, but in the game their defensive stats are lower than the heaviest Catholic cav, so I just can't see making them significantly slower than those units.
Basically, those three units mentioned above, along with Chiv Kn., High and Late Royal Kn. and the three late era Catholic units have run and charge speeds of 16 and 18, respectively.
Feudal Kn, Ghulam Cav, SotPorte, Pronoiai A., Early Royals, Boyars, Polish Ret., Lith Cav., Mtd. Crossbows and Mounted Sgts. are the default speed (20 and 22).
Horse Archers, Hobilars, Steppe Cav, Armenian Cav and Saharan Cav are 24 and 26.
This list is not official, coming off the top of my head, but it should give you a clear idea of my intentions.
If you compare these with the original settings, I think you will see that a number of units have not changed.
What I wanted to do was give lighter units a better chance to disengage from heavier units, and to be able to ride down fleeing heavy units if the opportunity arose.
This is another of those changes that I think you will like once you adjust to it, and is not too big to just ignore if you preferred the old settings.
Swiss Halberdiers- In my games as the HRE, dating back months, I eventually found that this unit was almost useless due to its weak defense. I tried the tactic of letting the AI engage my spears, then bringing this unit up through them to engage the occupied assailants, but it rarely worked well, and lord help them if they had to fight head-up with another unit.
I only increased their base defense to match that of regular Halberdiers, which makes sense to me since they both carry the same weapon, which is what I assume defense is based upon along with training.
This is also the same line of reasoning that led me increase the defensive stats of the Muslim infantry (non-spears). The Ghazi's defense value was -4 originally, which is equal to peasants, and far lower than any other infantry unit. I raised their defense to -1, which is equal to the *naked* Highland Clansmen.
Btw, defense is added to armor, not the other way around. I am not saying this to be smart, but to point out that you have to think about it this way to understand how defensive stats are figured.
I don't know if it is my fast computer or not, but battles move so quickly that once melee starts I always end up in a pattern of: pause, survey the battlefield, issue orders, unpause and count to three, pause, repeat. If I ever stop and observe a portion of the battlefield for more than 4 or 5 seconds, I began to see surrender flags appear because the battlefield has changed drastically somewhere.
I guess this is one reason I have improved defense at the expense of offense for some units- so that they don't get in trouble as fast. Also, the AI seems to change onto attacking these units (Ghazi, Swiss Halb, etc.) almost immediately even if it was already engaged with another of my units, so the tactic if engaging with one unit to leave my attacker unmolested doesn't work very well.
I have been thinking about reducing all speeds for all units by 50% to try and make battles manageable in real time, and to get out of this jerky stop and start routine. Do any of you know if this will work, or if you would welcome the change? I know that battles have been sped up considerably from Shogun, apparently due to players' requests, but they are just lightning fast to me.
I am most always conservative in my changes, and I never start tweaking things without a clear idea of what I want to create in regards to enhancements, or of what I want to fix with my corrections. And what is broken, or weak, is a personal opinion, though if it is frequently complained about then you can get a general consensus.
Also, I go by own experiences a lot. I don't think many people complained about building times, but after I implemented it I think most people consider it a big improvement.
I also didn't read much regarding the javelin units, but after I overhauled them I am now getting a lot of people saying that they had felt the same way.
It is true that some of the changes make a few units more average in their stats, but I always keep faction uniqueness at the top of my head. (This is why I have resisted adding new units to the game, like some other mods have done.) I don't feel that these changes sacrifice any individuality.
And as far as historical accuracy, remember that creating a large empire in the game is not historical, so who can say that the Nizaris wouldn't have started wearing more armor if the Egyptians had extended into Europe like the Turks did. The Muslim cavalry units gradually added more armour after the success of the first crusades, until they mimicked the Crusaders from some accounts. And the only one of the three Muslim factions depicted in the game to survive were the Turks, who developed the Janissaries to lead them to greatness.
I decided to take the yellow background out the rest of the spreadsheet's main unit page because it had gotten so thick by the time I was finished with this version that it was distracting. (The color is still present on the faction pages, though I think it is from version 1.5 or so. The stats themselves are linked to the main page, so they are updated automatically.) I thought about starting it out again as I make current changes, but this would probably confuse new users, who would assume that all the changes from the original version were marked.
The best thing to do is to print out the main page, preferably with a color printer, and keep it handy as you play. And use the Windows or Escape keys to minimize the game if you want to scan the readme or see if there is a comment on the spreadsheet that pertains to a question you have.
I always try and keep an overall vision of what I want to create with all these individual changes, and I think that you will find the mod to feel like a pair of very comfortable shoes once you get accustomed to it.
Simon, I use Edit+ 2 for my text work, and it does fine for what I need. I don't know what would need to be done to make it compatible with an editor. I have tried editors in the past for other games, and I have always went back to edit+.
I have a pretty good customized template designed for the units text, and it also works well for the other texts if anyone wants me to send them a copy.
Galestrum, look up Eat Cold Steel's post in the 1.6 thread for some info on manipulating Crusades. You can't tell the Crusade exactly how many and what kind of troops to create, but you can narrow it down some. AFAI can tell, the game spawns a certain monetary amount of units, probably modified by the level you are playing at, and regardless of the Crusades cost in the units text. Therefore the only way to increase the quantity of units is to decrease their cost, hence I created Crusader versions of some regular units to go with Crusade-only units.
Mod-makers need to keep in mind that you can change the cost and/or turns needed to produce a Crusade without affecting the units spawned in it.
OK I am going to DL this new version. I do have one suggestion though. Lets give this one a bit of time before and if 1.8 is done. I have only been able to do one and a half campaigns per mod really. I have not been able to play a Muslim faction with medmod yet, and I have never played the HRE in MTW because I always felt it would be too easy. I still want to try all those things out.
In terms of games here is the pattern I see in AI faction strength up to and including 1.6.
Danes kill French and HRE and English (talked about in detail already). French survive but are pushed to a corner and slowly waste away.
Turks die to Egypt and Byzantine.
Crusades and other factions kill Byz and push them out to a small area where they waste away.
Either Almo or Spain completely replaces the other, seems random which one wins.
Italy gets some fleets at first and looks good but is totally replaced by Sicily.
Sicily ends up taking the Mediterranean.....and the mid east strating with constantanople and moving down. I think it is because they are pretty safe at the start with no real border and they do so much trade.
Golden Horde. These guys piss me off. They appear with these HUGE stacks and take 2 provinces and then.....do nothing for turn after turn. Then when they do move it is to take one lame steppe province at a time. They whittle themselves down on revolts etc until they are just another weak faction. I want them to come in and hand Europe its ass, or better yet hand me mine http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif . When the mongols invaded europe the only thing that stopped them was the death of a Khan.
Well I am off to try HRE.
Why doesn't the unit stats list the speed? I am having difficulty telling which units are supposed to be light, heavy, and medium as relates to speed when deciding what to build for. Maybe a list in the readme dividing them into classes along the lines of what you did with crusades.
Also please change the walk speed on Horse back. Changing this is way too inaccurate.
Mr Frost
02-23-2003, 20:45
Why does 1.7 CTD at an apparantly random point during almost every campain battle {only one actually went the distance , and it was a small and short one} .
I was going to try to figure out how to install just what I wanted from the mod , but now time is a commodity I have rather less of to spare . I hope the CTD can be easily remedied .
Mr Frost
02-23-2003, 21:12
I now theorise that the CTDs might have been caused by playing campains of minour factions in GA mode {I like GA} . Somehow it might have effected the battles ?
I have seen 1.7 CTD's as the Turks and have been working with Wes to isolate the cause. My first battle as the Kievans did not result in a CTD.
Mr Frost, please post the faction you are playing and any other details that might help identify the cause.
Trousermonkey
02-24-2003, 04:44
Ok, just a comment; I think the speed is just right and doesn't need to be reduced. If all the units were slowed down proportionally it would mean I would spend more time at 100% speed while I line up for battle. The way it plays now, I can play the SP game without the pause key and often without resorting to speeding up time. I don't have any problems with battles getting out of control.
I'm afraid if the units are slowed down it will damage the continuity of the battles by reducing it to a series of fast forwards to get into position and then molasses slow maneuvers. At the moment I have no problems controlling the troops in real time and units are fast enough that I don't often have to resort to the time slider.
My two cents: don't slow everything down.
Tm
Tyrac, no problem with waiting awhile until the next version. I have found a few errors with 1.7 so far, but nothing that would cause a crash. I have been enjoying playing a battle-free game with the English, but that will change soon when I start playing after I make this post.
Tyrac, don't worry about the cav speeds. They are not big enough that it should impact what units you decide to build. My aim was to give lighter units a little more speed and manuverability, not alter the battlefield significantly. I will try and put the speeds in the spreadsheet for the next version, though, if only to mollify any uncertainties.
The walking speed for light units and mounted archers are unchanged. I only altered the heavy units that I keep close to my infantry so that they don't get out of formation when moving the whole army and get mixed up with the infantry.
I played a number of custom battles to various degrees of completion while making 1.7 in order to see how the new crusader versions looked, as well as adding things to some of the other cavalry units (anyone notice the swords the Sipahi of the Porte hold now?).
Anyway, I never had a crash during this time, though I have not had a campaign battle yet.
I really can't think of anything I did that would cause these crashes, unless it was the changing of cavalry speeds somehow. All the files I deal with are stats and the textures settings which determine how units look on the battlefield. I made all kinds of errors when I first started messing with the textures, and if none of them caused a crash, I can't see how these latest changes did, though I will keep looking for something.
When reporting crashes, list the era, faction, and individual unit types participating.
I found something that I was doing with the Turcoman Horse weapons and didn't finish for some reason. I looked and didn't see anything in my setup that would cause a crash, but your setup may be different. These are the hardest bugs to catch- those that mess up the players that dl the mod, but don't mess up my computer for some reason.
UPDATE ALERT: A 1.71 patch/update is now available at my website. It should correct the battlefield crashes some of you have been experiencing.
A couple of months ago, I found out that putting an empty file in the textures portion could make a weapon *disappear* while the unit was engaged in a certain motion, like fighting. Well, while studying units last week, I saw that my previous solution to the problem of units trying to use two weapons at the same time, which was to make the lance appear at the unit's feet, was not working well. So, I decided to use the empty file trick in these situations.
Well, apparently, doing this causes some type of instability in the program, leading to the possibility of a crash whenever the empty file was being referenced. Myself, I had been trying to find out what was causing crashes from the strategic map in my games, and only happened to try a quick battle to see if what Elmo had described in his email would happen to me, too. I had thought that his email must have been vague as to exactly when his crashes were occurring, since mine were occurring before I got to the battlefield.
Anyway, sure enough, my battle suddenly crashed, and after about 30 minutes or so I had narrowed down the problem to the Knights of Santiago units. Then I had to try and figure out what was different about them, since I wasn't getting crashes with other units. I finally remembered the empty files, and through testing proved that this was the cause. Then it took awhile to replace the other empty files and be sure I had them all, and to fix the referencing files so that the units would go back to using only a lance for all motions.
This still left me with the problem of my strategic map crashes. After hours of trial and error, I finally found that these crashes were due to changes I made in the units text after quitting my game last night. These involved setting the honor step value to a decimal number. Apparently this screws up the game too.
So, everything seems to be running smoothly again. I made this the 1.71 version of the mod. I also made a few updates and corrected several bugs from the 1.7 version.
I caught errors in the settings for the Almohad Urban Militia, Woodsmen, and Gallowglasses. Also for the Pomerania region bonus.
I gave Clansmen and Gallowglasses back their region bonuses, as I mentioned earlier, and the English now get cost bonuses for some of these units.
I made Vikings a little costlier to support, and made them undisciplined and their formation unformed. The Vikings were famous for going berserk, not for holding a shield wall ala Roman Legions. Maybe now they will be more even with Feudal MAA, though probably still some better.
I replaced the Camel Warriors' spear with a sword, which better fits their stats and review panel pic, and makes them look a lot better. They looked stupid to me with their spears.
I also upped the priorities for some of the more expensive ships that I guess I held off on initially, in order to see if the concept or higher priorities worked or not.
And lastly but maybe bestly, I gave Switzerland a goldmine and a general's star, to help both the Swiss faction and the HRE.
Now, this is about all I plan to do as far as changes for a while, so I hope we can set back and give the mod a good long test and see how everything works.
Wes,
Thanks for the very detailed replies to people's feedback. You are right about the initial conservative reaction to modders changes - each time I get the readme for the latest version of your mod, there are some changes that make my heart sink but after I sleep on it, I find it not such a big deal. My impression from v1.6 was that your mod is a great success in (a) dealing with the trade/ships issue; (b) improving the competitiveness of AI armies (I am seeing very few peasants). These are enormous improvements over the official game, especially for a veteran MTW player like most of the mods users. I also like the more historical maps you have researched. For me, any stats tweaking is very secondary to the importance of (a) and (b) and ideally, I'd like it be minimised (hence my early plea for a minimal and a full verison of your mods).
On a couple of specific points:
You can raise the unit size to "large" via the preferences/ options choice on the main menu. I forget which heading on the sub-menu it is, but it is towards the end of the list. When you get to the relevant page, there is a slider at the bottom that you can drag from "default" through to "large" and "huge". Huge doubles unit sizes but also build times. I prefer large, which raises sizes by 2/3 (along with costs). I don't actually like the larger units in themselves (they are rather unwieldy on the battlefield) but it does reduce the importance of reinforcements on the battlefield. This makes the game more challenging, as it is harder to hold off a numerically superior AI with a smaller, high quality force. It also reduces micromanagement a tad, as you have less units on the strategic map and build fewer.
On armour and defence, have you read the couple of threads on this posted in the TOC? They include contributions from CA people and my reading of it was that armour is the stat used to defend against missiles; defence is the stat used to compare with the attack stat when determining melee fights. So the armour stat is not added to the defence stat for anything.
The armour stat is very systematic and related objectively to the supposed equipment of the units. In the unpatched crusaders unit txt file apparently there is a listing of the armour types (eg mail, light mail, heavy mail, three-quarter plate etc) and this is also in the strategy guide. I went through the armour description in the strategy guide and armour stat for all the units and there was an almost perfect correspondance (Armenian cav was one possible exception, IIRC).
The armour and the defence stats are correlated, but far from perfectly. Weaponry makes a difference (eg spear units appear to have higher defence than swords, presumably as spears might be used to hold off an enemy, whereas swords relied on getting inter-mingled), but there are other things at work. Partly, I think CA were trying to model some less well trained, "barbarian" type units that relied on the initial charge to break the enemy and would get into trouble in sustained close fighting. (This is similar to the concept of the "warband" unit in the ancients/medieval minatures wargame rules system DBM). I think this helps explain the high charge, low defence of the Highlanders and Nizaris. I also suspect CA were trying to balance somethings up - for example, it is not clear why Feudal Sergeants had much lower defence relative to their armour than Chivalric Sergeants. I suspect it may be to make cavalry more powerful in the early period and less so in the high.
The only twist on all this is that the contribution of the shield does seem to be separate from both the armour and the defence, and is added to both as appropriate. I think this may be an innovation of the patch - certainly, all the armour values in the strategy guide appear to incorporate the effect of the shield whereas those in the patch txt file do not. I think CA made this change because sometimes the shield should contribute to armour/defence and sometimes it should not (eg if you are shot in the back or are meleeing with a 2handed weapon etc). Keeping the shield out the armour stat post-patch makes its variable contribution more clear and avoids the problems CA had in explaining to people pre-patch why the shield effect entered as a negative effect on armour/defence.
If I am wrong on all this, please let me know but it seemed pretty well spelt out by CA people in the two threads in the TOC.
Finally, on the horse speeds - I am just not convinced plate armoured knights were any slower than mail armoured ones. Plate was just not that heavy - people could leap onto their horses and even do somersaults in it. I too was puzzled by the slower speed of kats, but reading about them it does seem to be accurate. Recall they are ancient units - dating back to ancient Roman times - and do not have the full plate, but bulky "heavy mail". This is why their armour and defence is inferior to Gothic knights. I suspect it is the armour of the horse rather than the rider that is the key factor in determining the horse speed. The kats and Gothic knights - and a few others - are modelled as having full horse armour. [Actually, I am beginning to suspect that kats should not be in the game at all - I think they belong to an earlier period and that in the MTW period, the Byzantines used Frankish heavy cavalry (ie knights). However, I need to do more research to confirm this suspicion.] My personal view would be to make units with full horse armour the slow ones (ie keep chivalric knights at normal speed). I would probably remove the full horse armour from the lancers - lower armour/defence one point - and keep their speed up.
I would also keep the hobilars at the default speed. With their inferior mounts, I don't think they could outrun destriers and so should not be able to disengage from knights in combat. I am not sure if they are still specific to Britain and France, but I don't think fast light cav played a major role in either country.
Wes, thanks for the outstanding support of you mod. I only wish CA gave MTW half the support you are giving it
Excellent post Simon. Keep the historical perspectives coming please.
"Well, this is just strange. I finally started a new campaign with 1.7 last night, as the English, High, Expert, and in the first 20 years I there have been at *least* four Crusades started. At one point, there were two Crusades marching through Spain heading south, and another heading north. The two heading south, a French one bound for Granada and a Sicilian one bound for Algeria, happened to join up at Aragon and proceeded in tandem to Granada. The one heading north was Spanish, obviously, and I remember a German one being declared earlier and perhaps one more that I can't recall clearly.
Before logging on tonight, I went into the units text and lowered the Crusade priority, convinced that my attempt to rarify them had failed completely."
Well, isn't this odd, Wes I was just logging on to give you a report about my experiences with a new 1.7 campaign as the English in high and experienced the exact same thing http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/joker.gif
1. Crusades. Crusades are now better and stronger. Fewer useless troop types, no peasants and more feudal knights. However, I saw four or five crusades in the first 25 years. Historically, there were only 8 major crusades in two centuries, an average of 1 each 25 years, so this is almost exactly twice too much. They almost all failed as well. I kept close track of them through the .matteosartori. cheat and noticed that if a crusade needs more than 3 turns to reach it's objective province it deteriorates to the point of inevitable failure. This corresponds to my own player experience. The only player generated crusades that are useful are those that proceed directly by sea to their target. The idea of taking 10 years to build them and increasing the cost is very good
I would recommend lowering the AI build probability by 1/2 and reducing the cost by 1/2 of all crusade units as well from what you have it. Increase the cost correspondingly. Also include more strong units as crusaders. The crusade should ideally generate an army of about 4-5000 men.
If these armies were at least twice the size they are now (apparently about 1500) they would have a chance. As it is they degenerate so quickly they are still not much of a threat at about 1000 troops a piece after they reach a nearby province. In addition, they suffer because the AI doesn't consolidate troop types properly when they are reduced due to desertion. This results in many small or half-strength units appearing on the battlefield only to be defeated in detail.
Is there no way to increase the number of stars their general appears with? The same problem is true of the Mongols, as Tyrac notes. IMO, the horde doesn't attack, despite the huge stack size because of it's piss poor 1-2 star generals. After they lose a battle or two it gets worse. I've never seen the Horde make any real impact on Europe in this game. They ought to be such a threat that if the player doesn't deal with them they will eventually conquer everything on the map. Like Crusades, they really ought to put the fear of God into you We ought to think about this problem. I think there was another thread some time ago addressing this issue, but I can't find it. Your increases to the Horde are good in their way, but don't go far enough.
Here I have a complaint. I modded the game to be able to build feudal and chivalric footknights and then noticed that you had reduced the cost to 150 fl. I figured out that rather than add a CrusaderFeudalFootKnight you just lowered the cost so that they would appear in crusades (according to Cold Steel's post in response to my post in the 1.6 thread), however, I then had to go back and spend time editing the files to create separate buildable footknights and crusader-only footknights (with the lower cost so that they will appear in crusades).
First, footknights ought to be buildable anyway for historical reasons. This looks to be a classic case of where CA decided late before release not to include them for some reason, but left them in crusades and, as with other questionable decisions you have already modded, this ought to be changed. Footknights were present in considerable numbers in feudal armies. There were many poorer knights who could not afford destriers. See Phillipe Contamine's War in the Middle Ages for a discussion of the expense of providing suitable warhorses. Mounted knights were the medieval equivalent of modern tanks. Just as no modern army could possibly afford to equip it's entire infantry force in tanks or heavily armored vehicles, in medieval times no king or lord could afford to equip a very large army exclusively of mounted knights. For example, the first crusade (a very powerful force for those times) had 4-5000 mounted knights compared with around 25,000 infantry (of all types). Destriers had to be specially breed and were prohibitively expensive for all but the elite. Those footknights presumably represent poorer knights serving under a lord or captain. They could probably acquire decent armor and could ride to the battlefield, but you can't charge into battle in heavy armor on a palfrey (I mention this because it is an independent phenonmenon from the evolution of tactics during the later era favoring fighting on foot as a response to improved anti-cavalry weapons like the pike).
If you don't want to make footknights buildable, o.k., but you should create regular types (at the regular cost) and crusader types (non-buildable with the costs lowered to increase their representation in crusades), so that other modders can easily add them without having to screw around with deadpage_coordinates.txt, names.txt etc as I did.
2. For God's sake don't worry about those who say "if it ain't broke don't fix it." If people don't want to play a modded game, they have the regular one to play. For those of us who want the game to live up to its potential as a real challenge even against experienced players, because of improved performance by the AI, and to fix problems with various units and factions, this is the only way to go. For example, your decision to mod Swiss halberdiers makes a useful unit out of an unsuccessful one (they died like flies). I like the way they play now - a badly needed improvement.
3. The Byzantines. IMO the Byzantines (AI) still need
help. They build ships, (now everyone builds ships BTW - reducing the build times to 2 turns was key here), but they still don't keep a ship in the Marmara. I was not surprised at this since the ship and build prod values in my original mod were very similar to yours in 1.7, and I am very familiar with this phenomena. I've played many campaigns (at least partway through) in playtesting my own mods, based on Paladin's 1092 mod, staying neutral as the Sicilians and just keep hitting end turn, just to observe a number of campaigns, so I think my experiences are comparable to yours. The Italians also still don't keep a ship in the Adriatic despite building hordes, so Venician trade is still a problem.
I would strongly recommend changing the first sea zone for Constantinople in earl.txt to the Aegean Sea (you could move the port image too, but as DOC points out this is cosmetic). This will cause their shipping to appear there and define the Aegean as the home waters for Constantinople, which in turn should solve the trade problem (they have no trouble keeping shipping in the Aegean). Trade links throught the black sea from Crimea will still be cut by the lack of a ship in the Marmara, but Constantinople trade is key for the Byzantine AI.
I've finally reached the conclusion that possession of the Crimea screws up the Byz. AI. Even on Catholic_Trader, they still attempt to conquer asia and use all their troops to do it, leaving Constantinople relatively undefended. As with almost every campaign I've seen since I installed Paladin's mod back in November, they wind up losing and regaining Constantinople several times before ultimately losing it for good and without it they have no chance. Historically, they held this province, but do you think that CA could have deleted it from their possession because it caused problems for the AI? It might be worth seeing whether they do better without it, since they might not be lured into the depths of Asia while other factions attack them through the back door.
I just wanted to give my support for Cugel's points on the Byzantines. His observations on their AI behavior mirror my own.
Ok, thanks for the feedback on the Byzants, though I doubt holding the Crimea is having a big effect on them. I have observed, and it has been widely reported, that the Byzants have spent all their efforts in eastern Europe only to lose Constan since the game first came out six months ago. The first campaign I ever played with MTW, I chose the English, and decided to build my empire up in the rebel provinces of eastern Europe to avoid excommunication, and I met the Byzant empire around Chernigov. They had lost Constan, too. Unfortunately their behavior doesn't seem to have changed much since.
This may be why the designers made the rebels in Khazar so strong, to make the Byzants think twice about expanding that way, I don't know, but the rebels in the Crimea were set very weak, and the Byzants always seemed to take that province along with Moldavia right away.
What I could do is make the Khazars into a major faction for the early era, using the Golden Horde's names and so forth. I am pretty sure that we can add a couple of extra factions to each era, the hard part traditionally being making all the names and such.
Or, I could give the Kievans Khazar, and cut the Byzants off that way. I think they just expand into Europe because it is the easiest route, rather than taking on another faction.
Oh, and I will look into changing Constan's port sea. I don't know why I didn't think of that myself. What I may do, though, is try and eliminate the Sea of Marmara, expanding the Aegean into its territory, which would seem to solve even more problems.
As to Crusades, the file I included in the update had the lowered priorities for Crusades that I made before logging on and seeing what everyone else was observing. I had lowered them about 50% for everyone, so let's see what others report. I raised them back up for my current game, and Italy, France and Spain started making Crusades on turn 1. I am only about on turn 15 or 20, so I don't know what the other factions are doing.
Also, everyone keep in mind that Crusades can have more than 16 units in their stack. All the Crusades that I looked into had at least three rows of units in them, with one containing 40 units.
I may adjust their settings sometime, but I worry about making them so expensive per turn, or making them such a bargain for the buck that everyone builds as many of them as they can.
I don't know of any way to affect the generals that appear in Crusades. I had hoped that maybe they would siphon off some by virtue of being created in the capital provincce. It's too bad that CA did not set them like it does uprisings, which often contain good generals in them.
As for the Horde, the heavy cav and warrior units are "preferred" for generals, so they should regularly spawn 2-star or even 3-star generals. There is nothing else I know to do for them.
Cugel, you misread the new readme regarding the foot knights. I have switched the Hospitallers and Chivalric in the availability section of the spreadsheet. Chiv and Feudal are only available for Crusades, while the Hosp are available as regular units to the western factions.
Note: I forgot to mention last night that I color-coded the dismounting info column in the spreadsheet to show which speed category cavalry units fit into. I added a comment at the top of the column that details everything.
Regarding Hobilars, I made them faster to set them apart some from Mounted Sgts. The way they are now, the only difference (and their stats have not been changed in the mod), is that the Sgts have a little higher charge value. The Hobilar's lower building reqs might make it easy to rush out a lot of them in the early era, but this is not much for a special unit, imo. If they were not fast historically, well this trade-off has already been discussed.
Simon, the threads on armor, etc, are quite difficult to make sense of. I had to read the key points several times before I got it straight, I think.;)
Armor is indeed the factor used for missile defense, along with shields if the unit is facing the volley. Armor and shields are also added to the defense value for melee. This is why you have a setting as to whether a unit can melee with its shield or not. It is also why, I believe, defense values for spearmen are so low- they get about all their protection from armor and shields, along with a shield bonus against cavalry and the supporting ranks. If you invision holding a spear in one hand and a shield in another, you are not going to be able to parry with a swordsman very well. This is why spears have such a low intrinsic defense value. This is also why I lowered the upkeep of spears significantly, IIRC, in the mod- by the time you multiplied the factor by 100, they were among the most expensive units in the game to upkeep.
When you view the F1 battle screen, the armor value is already incorporated into the defense value, I believe. This is why the defense value shown is never less than the armor value (try this out for yourself.) Understanding how much of a unit's defense comes from armour can make a huge difference when it comes to armour-piercing weapons.
As you can tell, I have been quite busy with the mod and the barrage of questions and comments lately (the six hours between my two posts last night were spent entirely on fixing the two CTD problems), so if their was something you posted that I didn't address, just ask again and I should be able to notice it when things slow down a little during the next few days.
Oh, and finally, since there is so much interest in the Crusade settings- they are very easy to adjust. Simply open up the Crusader_units text, and scroll down to the last entries. The Crusade and Jihad units are the last two regular entries, right above the new Crusader units I added for 1.7. You can adjust the price and turns to build in the first few entries. I have pasted them below. (I substituted spaces for the tabs so that they would show up corrently here.) Cost you should recognize as the 4000 value, and turns to build is the 10 two entries after the price. Priorities for the various behaviors begin right after the Preferred entry. To get more units to show up in Crusades, you have to lower the price for the Crusade-only units. 7 are the units I added to the game at the end of the file, and the others are the OrderFoot, ChivalricFootKnights, FeudalFootKnights, KnightsTemplar, KnightsHospitaller and TeutonicKnights.
Crusade CRUSADE 4000.....0......10.......0.......80......1.......1.......PREFERRED
Red Harvest
02-25-2003, 07:40
I might have a "final" solution to the Sea of Marmara problem...although I haven't tried plugging it in yet...forgive me if it has already been tried.
Idea: Change the sea connections ("SET NEIGHBORS") so that it isn't actually used. Transfer the port to one side or the other, AND arrange it so that you can move directly from the Black Sea to the Aegean. Perhaps leave Marmara in as a "triangle" so that it can be occupied and doesn't crash the game, but it no longer blocks the flow of trade. Graphic will be the same so it will look a bit screwy, LOL. Hope they fix the root cause in VI (beta testers, make some noise!http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif Suppose this is a bit more difficult than I've stated, but perhaps it will get the creative juices flowing.
I've also got a game going with 2 year build time for base ships (3 for others). The AI has a number of boats in the water, even though I'm the Spanish and overran the Almo's Egyptians and Aragonese pretty early. I like this effect since the Egyptians and Italians worked together to allow a behind the lines troop drop that rarely happened in the past. Of course, the Egyptian King died in the attack and the faction disappeared, but it was a pleasant surpise. I'm having real trouble making dollars off trade because the AI has enough ships to prevent normal expansion.
Other main point I wanted to make was the discussion about changing overall troop movement speeds in tactical mode. I think it will cause insurmountable trouble, here is why: how do you change the speed of castle defenses? They will tear you up if you attack them at half speed while they are at 100% (OUCH Imagine a fortress assault.)
On the Horde issue, I think the main problem has been that they can't replace their early losses (would help if they had better generals though.) The only heavy unit they have is Heavy Cav. When I play as the Horde in late (my own quick mod) I find that they can't get heavy cav without substantial upgrades. However, when they capture territory it gets downgraded. When fighting against the Horde I always fought a battle of attrition, give up a province or two in a fighting retreat after cutting their heavy cav down. Once the heavy cav was whittled down they were easy to steam roll with spear units, arbalests, and light cav. Soon I had the initiative.
"Cugel, you misread the new readme regarding the foot knights. I have switched the Hospitallers and Chivalric in the availability section of the spreadsheet. Chiv and Feudal are only available for Crusades, while the Hosp are available as regular units to the western factions.
"
Yes, Wes, I see now that you've switched the Hospitaller and Chivalric Footknights (making Chivalric only available through crusades).
I just loaded up the unit_prod11 file in the Gnome editor, noticed that column 17 (buildings needed to make this unit) was blank for both chivalric and feudal footknights, and wanted to make them buildable (for the historical reasons I mentioned), so I added build requirements. Then I noticed that you had lowered the cost from what it ordinarily was to 75 and 125 respectively. Obviously, this was in order to make them spawn more in crusades as Cold Steel mentioned, but it meant that I had to create new crusaderFeudalFootknights (with the 75 cost) and add references to them in all the proper text files (after figuring out which these were, a simple name search didn't disclose all of them at once and I got error messages when I started the first battle and had to go back again and re-edit more files, etc.), as well as changing the price for the ordinary buildable ones back to the way they were(otherwise they'd be ridiculously cheap). I got it figured it out, but it took some time and I was simply trying to make life a little easier for others who might want to make similar changes. This is a fairly popular modification, I believe there's even a mod downloadable from the Org that does nothing else but make them buildable. If no-one cares, don't bother. I think feudal footknights are a nice cheap alternative to regular knights in some circumstances, and historically accurate, so I wanted them. As for Hospitaller footknights, {ARMOURER4,SWORDSMITH3,ROYAL_COURT4} seems a bit steep for them. Have you seen the AI build any of them? I doubt it would ever get the necessary buildings, but I'll have to see. You might want to lower those requirements. I think with the way the AI swaps around provinces and degrades their structures it will be tough to get the AI to build fortresses (which you'd need to build to have armorer4). I haven't seen the AI build one yet. There should be no units that only the player builds (because the build requirements are too steep for the AI).
As for giving the Horde better generals, someone mentioned some ideas on a thread some time ago. Hopefully I can eventually find it. If they had better starting generals they could be a much bigger threat.
Don't you still find that AI crusades are too weak? The 4 or 5 I've seen so far in my last campaign didn't accomplish much. Now that they take 10 years from your capital province and especially if they cost a bit more players's wouldn't be able to abuse them, but they'd finally be a good investment for the AI. Ten years without being able to build any other troop types in your capital is a real sacrifice. Frankly, I doubt I'd ever bother to make them unless they would appear with at least 3-4000 troops. Even then, I'd question the value since I could just as easily make equivalent troops and have much greater tactical flexibility. Perhaps if I could ferry the crusade by sea to it's destination, it would be worth it, but if it had to march over land, forget it (remember that one could build fewer ordinary units in that time, BUT ordinary units don't degrade by about 20% or more each turn, so the cost benefit ratio would only favor crusades that reached their target in 2 or 3 turns at most)
Maybe it's just me, but I haven't bothered with crusades much and am approaching this issue wholly from the standpoint of making the AI crusades worthy of the name.
They still aren't in my opinion and need further strengthening.
Hi Wes,
I don't think you are right about adding armour to defence.
Longjohn from CA was fairly explicit on this in the TOC thread:
"It's been discussed quite a bit already, and is explained in the strat guide.
Armour = defense against missiles
Defense factor = defense in melee.
The defense factor already includes the effect of armour, troop training, weapon type, and mode of fighting."
I can give you quotes from the Strategy guide too, if you like. (It says the kill chance in melee is determined by the attack value minus the defence value and a host of modifiers. You do add in the effect of armour upgrades and for AP weapons the attack stat is boosted depending on the defender's armour. But the armour stat per se is not a modifier.).
Basically, the defence stat already includes the contribution to armour so the game never adds the armour stat to it.
Before the patch MTW subtracted the effect of the shield if it was not appropriate (eg shot in the back). After the patch, the shield is added to both defence stats and armour stats if appropriate.
I am 100% sure about this, but if you doubt it, you could try an experiment with two heavily armoured units (eg knights) fighting, having lowered one's armour stat (only) to zero. I am saying they will have roughly equal casualities. If you believe armour stat is added to defence, I guess you believe the armour zero guys will get creamed.
In my opinion feudal knights are too cheap and kat too expensive; a kat unit costs more than 200 fl. more than feudal knights
ToranagaSama
02-26-2003, 09:12
Old_Templar
Quote[/b] ]The Germans had two stacks of troops in Saxony but never made an attempt to wipe out my measly 300 early troops in Danmark. They were initially strong but were completely annihilated by the French (THEY WERE OVERPOWERING IN BOTH OF MY GAMES).
Gosh, at last someone sees what I see This is the single biggest advantage the Danes have. The fact that the HRE simply doesn't steamroll them. You'd think that at some point the HRE would see all that money in Denmark and Sweden and go for it.
There must be some way to Mod a correction to this situation, BUT even if there is a way, a GOOD deal of "balancing" would be required. Otherwise, the result would be the HRE easily and repeatedly rolling over the Danes each campaign.
---
Regarding the Kievians. Oh, before that, Wes, you are the Master Modder, but dude, few of us are capable of keeping up with your modding proficiency. You are amazing.
I tried 1.5 and was having a grand time, but then you came out with 1.6. I decided to skip that for the moment and continue my 1.5 campaign, BUT then you've come out with 1.7. So I've skipped 1.6, quit the 1.5 campaign and started a new 1.7 campaign.
Might I suggest we subscibe to a Timetable, say 2 or 3 weeks between Major mod versions. This would allow folks to manage to play through a campaign and gain a better perspective upon the changes; in addition to allowing for deeper discussion and thoughts.
---
Back to the Kievians. You guys are right, to a point. My intitial thoughts are that this is a rather difficult faction to play, but that's cool.
Though, when I actually saw the map, it seemed the Kievians were in a good spot. Think about it, they start with Kiev, which has two tradeable goods and Lithuania with three tradeable goods. Also, they surrounded by Rebels and Seas. So far, so GREAT
The problem is that to take advantage of these great assets requires dual SIMULTANEOUS development. This is tough on the pocketbook, but can be done. The real problem is not the simultaneous development, BUT the fact that you need dual simultaneous, costs and maintenance for Ships
Since these two provinces are on two different seas, in order to gain trade benefits from BOTH provinces, you have to bear the costs for 2 ships and their maintenance per turn (sorta).
Actually, its a bit worse than that, with Lithuania, you'll need 3 ships to get to the North Sea (roughly 2 ports to trade with) and a 4th ship to get to the Channel and the big payoff (3 or 4 posts to trade with). A total of FOUR ships required.
[The key to Trading is "efficiency", as you can see getting that one ship into the Channel can really pay. In comparison Denmark can get there with 2 ships.]
With Kiev the situation is somewhat better, but still problematic. If your neighbors develop nicely and get a couple of ports onto the Black Sea, then a single ship can give you a trade return with Kiev; another ship will get you to Constantinople. This is about it at the very beginning.
The problem here is that Kiev only has 2 tradeable goods. So while you can start trading rather early, the return is not enough to fund Lithuania's development and to push your Kiev ships around toward the big payoff(s) round the pennisula where the Egytians have 2 or 3 ports in addition to the Byzantine Island port for a total of 4 ports to trade with; or you could go around toward the Adriatic (and Venice) with the usual 3 or 4 ports to trade with there.
Again, the issue here is that the above requires 3 to 4 ships w. their maintenance costs. Not possible to accomplish this while also developing Lithuania toward the Channel.
So, you guys are right Kiev is in a pickle.
So what to do?
You must abandon Lithuania I say again abandon Lithuania.
Timing in doing so is crucial, and I still have to perfect the timing, but abandonment is the core strategy. At the correct (early) moment, Destroy the buildings and gain the income from doing so, better than 1000 Florins to be had; then move your troops and invade Khazar
Khazar has THREE very tradeable goods and is rebel held. If you attack properly you won't even have to fight, though the rebels might retreat to the fort.
If they do so, then you must choose between, taking the fort and losing a few, MUCH needed, men. Khazar is VERY rebellious, on the order of Portugal and Scotland. So you'll need the men to deal with Loyalty. Yet savings in the cost and time to build a Fort may be worth the loss of men. Allowing the Fort to fall, may save the loss of mean, but will add the cost and time of rebuilding the Fort(,etc.). You decide.
Whatever choice above you make, the benefits of abandoning Lithuania and taking Khazar are great and probably the only viable option for Kiev. The 1000 plus Florins you receive from destroying Lithuania's buildings should serve to fund Khazar's early development for the most part.
The full benefit is that you no longer are faced with the "dual" shipbuilding costs and maintenance; and with each ship in the water you get the benefit of FIVE tradeable goods (Kiev w. 2 and Khazar w. 3).
Implementing the above strategy should do the Kievans quite well, with few close threats there's plenty of time for development. Rebels to the north, east and west of Kiev and to the north of Khazar with the Turks to South (they are busy dealing with the Eygtians and Byz.)
Now, with all the above done and accomplished the Kievians are still in a tough spot. As war between the Byzantines, Egytians and Turks will soon lead to the destruction of some of their ports, effecting your trade income negatively. This is inevitable, in addition to the fact that at some point you may want to take one or all of them on in battle.
So, you must plan your strategy accordingly. Rather than focus your trade empire upon the Eygtians' coast, I'd focus and go round toward the Adriantic (Venice and Scilily); with the Egytian trade income viewed as supplemental. Do not become dependant on this income.
Now, with all the above accomplished (or on its way), I'd re-take Lithuania. A bit of a chore as there may be mucho rebels (3 or 4 stacks) to deal with. Bribery never hurts I'd also look to take Livonia (and her 2 tradeables), and also the other neighboring province (forget name, but has 2 tradeables as well). Get some ships in the water heading toward the channel and you should be quite fixed for income.
Now, you can begin your conquest WESTWARD. Poland, Hungary, HRE, Spain and Almo, are all targets that should not effect your income negatively. OH and Sweden/Denmark are such tempting targets, GO FOR IT
Lastly, if you like to try some "HardCore Rules" to make things even more interesting, try these:
1) Limit your Kiev/Khazar ships from sailing past Scilily. At first the Adriatic was off limits, but that's a bit much I think.
2) Limit your Lithuania/Livonia, etc. ships from sailing past the top of Spain (forget the sea name) or not further than Portugal (which is more practical considering Portugal's difficulty).
Now, if you really want to have fun add these rules:
3) Govenors should be Knights (or equivalent);
4) Governors should be of Royal blood or at least married to Royal blood.
If you do not have units to meet the above criteria, then your province(s) should read: Govenor None Simply suffer through the consequences (see further comments in the Entrance Hall, "Governorships" thread).
These are the rules I'm using. The Kiev faction is so tuff to play (I made a few mistakes too), I adjusted my usual rules by adding the Adriatic for trading and item 4) "...at least married to Royal blood". Hehehe.
Well, that's pretty much how my Kiev Med Mod 1.7 campaign has shaped up. I've taken Lithuania and to my surprise was rebuffed in Livonia where my newly ascended to the throne King died a heroic but senseless death. The impetuous fool http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif thought the 3 stacks of rebels with a 3 star general would abandon and flee before his devine right to rule. Invaded with a 3/4 stack and his lowly 3 stars. Idiot The Rebel reinforcements just kept coming and coming. Luckily, I have a spare. Not sure if I'll finish this Campaign, because I want to get a better feel for the changesand for that I need to go play as the Danes (not sure but I might favor 1.5 over 1.7). I will certainly revist the Kievians as they are very challenging, not much room for error at the beginning.
Thoughts?
Ok, Simon, I believe you now. I ran some tests like you suggested, and the armor stat definitely didn't have an effect on melee. This is going to cause a whole re-evaluation of the units stats and costs (thanks a lot) http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/rolleyes.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif.
Also, could you elaborate a little more on the affect of armour-piercing melee weapons? I mean, if defense and armour are two un-related stats, then shouldn't the armour-piercing be factored against the defense stat rather than the armour stat?
Finally, and this is for everyone, do you think there needs to be more of an increase in stats as you move up the development line, e.g. from Feudal MAA to Chivalric MAA to Foot Kn.? Looking at the spreadsheet in light of this new info, Feudal and Chiv MAA have exactly the same melee defense when the shield is factored in. The only deference in them is the one point of attack and a little better morale.
Considering what a difference a couple of generals stars means to stats, this is why battles are often decided before they are even begun based upon generals alone, regardless of the troops involved. I have been considering this move for some time, and now seems a good time to propose it.
I had been using armour as a primary stat when deciding on troop costs, along with offense, defense and shield. Now I will treat it as a minor stat, as with charge, cav att and cav def, discipline, morale and honor, etc.
This is going to make the units much more bunched in price, as they are in ability it turns out.
If someone would like to try a solution to the Sea of Marmara on their own, I would appreciate the work taken off my back right now.
I posted details for some Crusade tinkering last post. The AI Crusades I have seen with 1.7 seem to do alright as long as they reach their destination within a few turns.
Maybe the solution would be for CA to to severely cut down on both the joining and desertion rate?
As for building requirements, the ones for Foot Knights are very high so that it would be very hard to get them. I mean, why have a Fortress upgrade if it doesn't give you access to enough units to make it worthwhile for anyone, human or AI? If the AIs are not building any Fortresses, then you need to change this, not make Fortresses irrelevent. I read that in the expansion, buildings will not be destroyed unless the castle is taken. This should help some, though they also said the same amount of buildings will be destroyed when it is taken.
I posted a thread a couple months back arguing that the financial structures only should be destroyed, and not anything else, other than maybe the castle itself if it is stormed. A couple of people posted with some historical examples supporting the current setup, but I remain convinced that this arrangement would be better for gameplay at least.
And finally, as to the rapidity of mod versions, I don't set out with a schedule in mind. I just play the game and read posts, and if I see something that I think I can improve upon, and I feel like it, I alter it for my own playing enjoyment. I also like debating this stuff, too, so I document it and upload it for eveyone else to try. After last week, I don't really care to do anything else big for a while, and we certainly have enough to talk about for a while, but if I am playing and something begins to irritate me, you never know... http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif
Hamburglar
02-26-2003, 17:50
WesW
Everyone seems to be saying they see Crusades but it looks like they are testing in the High era.
If I'm correct you added Chapter Houses in the High Era to everyone's capital and then like Crusader areas?
The problem with this is in the Early Era no one starts with a chapter house. I am on my 3rd 1.7 game and I have not seen a single Crusade yet in the Early Era. I've been stopping at High in each of my campaigns.
The thing is, all of these games were GA games. If you play an unmodded GA game you will see the AI definitely send out lots of Crusades, because every Catholic nation's major GA is to Crusade to Jerusalem. It gets massive massive points. They get points for Crusading to Edessa Antioch and Tripoli too if I'm not mistaken. I played one game as the English, and I really ravaged the French and got in a big war with the Germans so I thought they weren't launching them because of my interference. But then the next two games I played Kiev and the Turks and no one ever launched a Crusade in Early. Not a single one. Thus the only GA's the Catholics could really get in Early are Homelands and conquest, which kind of sucks. Even when playing as England it was really really tough achieving a Crusade GA because it took 5 years to build the Chapter house, 10 years to build the Crusade (not to mention saving money for years before that), and then it took many many many years to walk from Wessex all the way to Palestine. Making a chain of ships is almost impossible because of all the naval wars that always happen the moment you get in Italian-Sicilian waters (The Spanish are crazy with that now too) I had to add in thousands more men as well because of the desertions as well as fighting through all that Muslim territory. In the unmodded game Chapter Houses weren't unique so it'd be possible to launch Crusades from Jerusalem after you took it into the other parts of the Holy Land for points, but now you can't really. By all means the designers intended you to make Crusades in Jerusalem because it gives a bonus to Knights Templar.
Maybe you should have Chapter Houses in the capital territories in the Early era like you do in High. I think there's a certain tag in buildings that make them not get destroyed when they are invaded - like farms. They almost never get destroyed when you invade. Yes I know this would get rid of the "Crusade disbands because of loss of CHapter House" but that rarely ever happened in the game anyway and it is kind of unrealistic.
Or is it possible to make Chapter Houses buildable in only certain provinces?
Because building them in Rhodes, Palestine, and Prussia in Early should be possible since they both give bonuses to Crusader knights.
the Catholics need to be able to achieve their GA's. Lowering the price of them and the building time might be good since they really aren't that powerful. Because you can only build them in your capital province or just one other province they have to march a LONG way to get to the Middle East and by the time they even enter Muslim territory they've lost a lot of good troops and picked up a bunch of useless peasant type troops.
Other than that everything seems to be going pretty well.
Hell, maybe produce an "unmovable" Varangian Guard unit or two that cannot leave Constantinople. Should help in its defence. I dunno if its possible to make an unmovable army though.
I'd second the point about player (and AI) crusades being crucial in early GA games. They are the highlight of my games on early as England or HRE (ie most of my games). However, I have not tried v1.7 and don't have opinions on the changes in crusading yet.
Wes - on the armour piercing, with AP melee weapons, I believe the attack stat against foot troops is raised by (armour-1)/2, rounding down fractions. So if you are attacking a unit with armour stat 3 and you have an AP weapon, your attack stat is 1 point higher. [For mounted defenders, the corresponding adjustment is (armour-2)/2.] So the AP property only benefits you against foot targets with armour of 3 or more (ie mail or better). But the foot targets are still better off with more armour even against attackers with AP weapons, as the armour stat is already included in the defence stat. (If they were unarmoured, ie armour=1, their defence would be two points lower.) Basically, AP weapons halve the defensive benefit of armour.
The reason this modifier is run off the armour stat not the defence one is that the armour stat is effectively part of the defence stat. Basically, CA are working to some implicit formula, defence stat = armour stat + factoring in the "defensiveness" of the weapon type+ some other factors for training, posture etc. AP affects the defence stat via the contribution of armour, but does not modify the non-armour determinants of the defence stat.
AP works differently with projectile weapons and some say the AP modifier has much less dramatic effects there.
When you are reviewing the defence and armour stats, it probably makes sense to keep the armour systematic as it is now and vary the defence bearing in mind that the effect of the armour should be incorporated in the defence stat. This is the reason I was leery about raising the defence of the Swiss Halberdiers without altering the armour - it was inconsistent with what CA did with the other units.
On the low value of the CMAA upgrade compared to the FMAA, this was an issue discussed before the patch and I think something was tweaked in response, but it does not seem to have been the combat stats - presumably, it was the cost. I am not sure this issue is such a big one for the SP gamer, as we tend to field the best army available against the AI almost regardless of cost. Bear in mind that even a one point increment to attack (or deduction from defence) leads to a 20% increase in the kill chance. This is a good buy given the support cost rises only 17% (The support costs not the purchase costs are the overwhelming part of the economic cost in the SP game). Additionally, the evolution of FMAA to CMAA does not represent a big change in combat technology - only the introduction of transitional armour and maybe slightly better weapons against armour.
I agree that the failure of the transitional armour to boost the final defence or armour stat - aftering factoring in the shield - seems a little odd. I was wondering about raising the gap between the armour stats of the main types (none=1, light =2, mail=3, transitional=4, plate=6) to two points (none=1, light=3, mail=5, transitional =7, plate=9) rather than one. But on reflection this might throw the delicately balanced combat system too far out of whack. A simpler thing might be to set the shield modifier to 1 for armour of 4 or less. I would keep the shield modifier to 0 for plate, as plate clad knights do seem to have dispensed with shields as being redundant. Any such change would have to be relected in the costs, of course.
The point about the importance of the command of leaders is valid, but typically in big battles the command ratings don't differ too wildly. I would say a 2-command point difference was the most common edge (more for some eg early Byzantine, less for others, eg early HRE). This translates into +1 attack, +1 defence, +2 morale, which does not seem excessive. When a high command leader steamrollers a low command army (typically not the AIs main army), I rationalise this as an invading army walking over a lower quality garrison.
Red Harvest
02-26-2003, 23:00
Wes,
I'll try to take a look at the Marmara issue and see if I can get my idea to work without screwing up the game. I'll be in "uncharted waters" with this type of mod (BAD PUN) and I won't have much time for a while, but I'll see if I can get it to work.
Simon,
I think the difference in morale (+2) of CMAA is at least as important as the +1 melee and +1 attack, although the +1 armour protects them from arrows better as well. Altogether, CMAA is a big upgrade from FMAA. Stock FMAA is narrowly bested by similar upgraded Vikings (contrast is -2 defense, +2 morale, and armour piercing for the Vikings vs. FMAA). CMAA whips the vikings handily. All of these are "fine day" steppesinland map, A1, V1, W0, "normal", summer, temperate.
Hamburglar
02-26-2003, 23:38
Yeah there really shouldn't be that drastic a difference betwen CMAA and FMAA. Historically, the weapons + armor of the foot swordsmen didn't get all that much better, and even if you're looking for it as "challenge" or "gamebalance" wise then the CMAA is barely more expensive than the FMAA and all it takes is a swordsmith workshop instead of a swordsmith. It's not as if you have to upgrade a whole lot of buildings to make the new unit, as is the case for example between Feudal and Chivalric Knights.
The CMAA is good as it is - it's a reliable stock infantry unit that is better than its predecessor. Upping it's stats will open up a whole can of worms because that also essentially weakens the Orthodox and Muslim factions as well. Also, I rarely ever see the AI build Chivalric units because of province trading so we shouldn't make them too overpowering anyway.
Red Harvest
02-27-2003, 00:35
Quote[/b] (Hamburglar @ Feb. 26 2003,16:38)]Also, I rarely ever see the AI build Chivalric units because of province trading so we shouldn't make them too overpowering anyway.
Amen to that. Province swapping is a big strategic problem and the AI does not seem to appreciate that losing a high tech province is a CATASTROPHE Additionally, the AI rarely disbands unneeded florin sucking peasants and spearmen so that it can purchase high value units later. It builds units until it hits a support limit and gets stuck with the obsolete. While my armies are modern, the AI armies rarely are.
"Amen to that. Province swapping is a big strategic problem and the AI does not seem to appreciate that losing a high tech province is a CATASTROPHE Additionally, the AI rarely disbands unneeded florin sucking peasants and spearmen so that it can purchase high value units later. It builds units until it hits a support limit and gets stuck with the obsolete. While my armies are modern, the AI armies rarely are. "
You've really hit the nail on the head Red Harvest This is the most important reason that the strategic AI fails to put up much of a fight most of the time. The Byzantines seem to suffer from this especially, because they tend to lose Constantinople, without which they are doomed, no matter which other provinces they hold. No good human player ever loses his home province or even his most developed provinces, because he knows that this represents 50-100 years of development down the drain The AI doesn't care. I haven't noticed this aspect of the game improving much under 1.7, but I've only been playing the one campaign so far.
This was why I suggested that modifying the column 11 AI building combos to link development would be a good idea. Wes doesn't want to try this and I suppose it would require a lot of playtesting, but ultimately I believe this would be the best solution. The reason is that the AI doesn't build the proper structures in the proper order. It's rather haphazard. If it builds the Fortress, for example, it should build the merchant guild and other buildings to take advantage of that. If it has the money, it should build fortresses, so as to unlock the higher tech units, etc. Problem is that it doesn't seem to do this, and it also doesn't tend to rebuild it's denuded provinces. I think that if VI changes the game code so that structures only degrade when the castle is assaulted, that will make a HUGE difference, since I've almost never seen the AI assault a castle. It doesn't even know how to build or use siege engines, so it can't assault citadels or above (your ordinary swords and spears can't even attack these structures).
If we solve the Sea of Marmara problem this will still leave the Venice problem. There is no way get the Italians to keep a ship in the Adriatic so trade from Venice is still cut off, and we can't solve the problem the same way, since Venice doesn't border on any other sea. Perhaps we could get rid of the adriatic as well, and expand the Dodecanese sea or something. I note however, that the Sicilians manage to keep ships in the Adriatic, it seems to me that only the Italians don't, and I have no idea why.
BTW Wes, don't worry about when you release new versions of the mod. We appreciate the work you've done on this so far and whenever you have an improvement to offer, make it available and we'll playtest it and let you know what we think.
Gregoshi
02-27-2003, 05:26
William de Valence posts this from the Entrance Hall:
-----
Has anyone else experienced CTD everytime you enter battle as the Almohads?
So far ive fought 2 battles as the Turks and have not CTD
but I have had no joy with Almohad. I will have to try other Factions.
I would also like to thank WesW for the mod as I have enjoyed playing them.
-----
I've asked William to be more specific about the CTD in the EH thread.
Red Harvest
02-27-2003, 06:39
Good news I've tested the "Marmara in parallel" mod and it works I've only tested it in Early playing the Byzantines, so I don't know how the AI will handle it as Byz. I do know that the stinkin' Sicilians sent a dromon past me into the Black Sea and sunk one of my ships, unprovoked And for some reason I'm happy about this, LOL. They went from the Aegean right to the Black Sea, so the AI wasn't stymied by the new path. I've been able to move ships directly from: Aegean to Black, Aegean to Marmara, Black to Aegean, Black to Marmara, Marmara to Black, Marmara to Aegean so the connectivity is all OK. I relocated the Constantinople port to the Aegean like Cugel suggested in another thread. This gets trade to working (tested to confirm) with the outside and should have it working with the Black Sea as well, whether or not there is a boat in Marmara.
To get the graphics to look right I changed the port coordinates to "22450 16700 6". Looks decent although I might move the port a little further inland with X = 22500. Like the 6 orientation (roughly 7:30 hour hand position on a clock). Port orientation is 0 to 7 with 3 being straight up, 7 straight down.
Still looks a bit confusing having it parallel though.
Anyone know if the main map picture file can be edited? I would like to try to "airbrush" out Marmara. (I lack proper tools to do this however...and perhaps the artistic talent...but let's not go there.) I'm hoping that I can effectively eliminate it from the game, but haven't tried that yet. Next up: see if Marmara references can be removed from the Early.txt and still get the game to run.
None of this will fix the glaring strategic flaws left with the naval/trade AI, but it helps. Really liked Wes' idea about requiring a port to build a merchant and combining that with 2 year ship builds. Not any reason for the AI to squander it's money on a merchant without a port.
Thanks for the info and opinions regarding the infantry units. I guess I will leave the ability stats alone, then.
Thanks for the AP explanation, Simon.
I haven't heard any opinions about the Khazar province and the Byzantines expanding into Europe. In light of TS's last post, maybe I ought to put the Novgorods back in, and also keep the Kievan faction, but give it Khazar instead of Lithuania? This would "populate" that part of the map for the early age, and would provide the human a challange if he wanted to try and hold off the Horde when they come charging in.
Finally, I made the mod for campaigns, not GA games, so I am not going to do something that hurts the campaign games in order to repair the GA ones. I have made a note to include Chapter Houses in the early era for the next update, and to maybe re-arrange the provinces that have them from the capital province to another one too, so that the sacrifice to build them is not as bad.
Keep letting me know about things that hurt the GA games, and I will keep those in mind, but if I have to choose between enhancing the campaigns or messing up the GAs, I am going to choose the campaigns.
I have also thought before of taking the Templar bonus from Jerusalem, since the Muslim factions are a little shorted in this area, and place it in one of the provinces bordering Paris. I would put France's House there as well.
The bonus for Templars in Jerusalem suggests to me that at one point the Crusader units were going to be buildable as regular units in some provinces, but the concept changed somewhere along the line. Starting a Crusade in Jerusalem just seems backward to me, so moving the region bonus to a region where some crusades actually started and where the Templars accumulated their greatest power, outside of Palestine, seems to be a better fit, imo.
Hamburglar
02-27-2003, 10:09
But campaigns are GA games. They're the same exact thing except you get points for doing certain things instead of just conquering the globe. By playing a GA game if you conquer the map you still win etc. It just provides a more interesting game. But a GA campaign IS a campaign. It can start in Early and goes all the way until 1453.
As for making Crusades in Jerusalem, it was pretty viable. A church and a chapter house are pretty easy to get and then you get some Crusade units and can launch a one province Crusade. Attack concurrently with units you already have in Jerusalem and its decent. Good extra units as well as pleasing the Pope and more influence for your King. Launching a Crusade from Palestine to Antioch or Tripoli is the same thing as the Spanish launching those short ones from Castile to Cordoba or Granada.
After the "official" Crusades were over the Crusader kingdoms that were established quite often went on the offensive with Order troops.
Hamburglar
02-27-2003, 10:48
Hey I just got to thinking.....
This would be a whole lot of work but a penalty for not having "supply lines" would be not being able to produce troops.
For example, like Catholic factions can only produce their "best troops" in Western Europe. Like for example, all knights and heavy infantry can only be produced in for example Iberia, Britannia, France, Germany, Italian peninsula, Denmark, etc. That way if you send a Crusade flying into the heart of Muslim territory you're going to need to support it with mercenaries and lower level troops unless you can get a line of ships over there. I know it'd be hard to implement I just thought it'd be a cool idea. You could do the same for Muslim factions with like Ghulam, Kwarzimian, Sipahi, Nizari (they're heavy inf now) only be able to be produced in Africa, Iberia, Asia Minor and Middle East. It could be extended to have Boyars only available East of Poland as well as Katas and Varangians only in Constantinople and surrounding areas. I guess Jannisarries would be able to be produced anywhere because technically they did come from captured Christians and such.
I just got a little carried away but maybe its food for thought. Possibly just having things like Knights be only available in Europe and such would be cool. I just think it adds a little more flavor to the game.
Also about province bonuses....
Should Syria have a bonus for Hashishin? A lot of the bonus territories seem just kind of random. Maybe people here could chime in and we could make them more historical?
Like for example Kwarzimians came from Northern Asia minor so maybe something up there should have a bonus. Georgia?
And just a weird thought? Shouldn't regular Armenia instead of lesser Armenia have the Armenian Cav bonus? Just seems kind of weird. Its 4 am and I'm just kind of rambling on here. I like this mod too much thats why I always try to change it haha.
Also - Gallowglasses in High era seems kind of off. I really don't know much about them but in their unit description it says they are something of a relic, not a new development. More like almost from Viking times. So maybe they should be back at the Early age?
And I promise this is the last one.... You might already have this in the mod and i might not have seen it but maybe have the Pope start with some Swiss units as his personal guard. It'd make him tougher to wipe out which he should be. Even though they would be "out of era" its still possible to do because those Welsh Longbowmen in Early are "out of era" too.
I'm just gonna shut up now.
I'd second Hamburglar's last comment, Wes. When you start a campaign you choose period and you choose conquer the world or glorious achievements. My feeling is that a lot of veteran MTW players choose GA. (Good idea for a poll, if there was not one already). I do because conquering the world is too time consuming (too many battles) and rather ahistorical. The GA goals are usually (a) homeland defence; (b) conquest; and © the interesting ones, most notably four crusades to the Middle East (IIRC, to Palestine, Tripoli, Antioch, Edessa) before 1205 in the early period for most Catholic factions.
The Crusading GAs add a lot of flavour to the game - I think at one stage, it was being titled "Crusader: Total War". Trying to get off four crusades in the early period is a real challenge for most Catholic factions, largely because you need to establish a trade route to the Middle East to avoid the horrific overland attrition. When you get to the Middle East, all hell lets lose as whichever faction holds it usually is not too weak, as those provinces are pretty rich. I'd recommend you try it as one of the major Catholic countries (maybe England is best for this), as it is a lot of fun.
I don't see that you should have to choose between supporting conquer the world games or GA games.
BTW, there is a poll up at the moment that last time I looked said most players started their campaigns on early.
ToranagaSama
02-27-2003, 11:59
Quote[/b] ]I don't know if it is my fast computer or not, but battles move so quickly that once melee starts I always end up in a pattern of: pause, survey the battlefield, issue orders, unpause and count to three, pause, repeat. If I ever stop and observe a portion of the battlefield for more than 4 or 5 seconds, I began to see surrender flags appear because the battlefield has changed drastically somewhere.
I guess this is one reason I have improved defense at the expense of offense for some units- so that they don't get in trouble as fast. Also, the AI seems to change onto attacking these units (Ghazi, Swiss Halb, etc.) almost immediately even if it was already engaged with another of my units, so the tactic if engaging with one unit to leave my attacker unmolested doesn't work very well.
I have been thinking about reducing all speeds for all units by 50% to try and make battles manageable in real time, and to get out of this jerky stop and start routine. Do any of you know if this will work, or if you would welcome the change? I know that battles have been sped up considerably from Shogun, apparently due to players' requests, but they are just lightning fast to me.
Wes, I need to ask how long have you been playing Total War?
I have probably the fastest "system" on the forum, if you want know my specs just ask, but just to give a hint, I have a $500 Custom Modded Case w. 7 fans (originally had 9). The point here is that your system speed is not the issue.
My advice is to give modding a pause and speed a week playing w/o pausing. Accept your losses and keep pluging away at the battles. I am wholly confident that your "unpaused" skills as a General will improve considerably. Any questions, feel free to email.
What you are considering is near blasphemy, in fact it is http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/dizzy.gif
---
Quote[/b] ]I made Vikings a little costlier to support, and made them undisciplined and their formation unformed. The Vikings were famous for going berserk, not for holding a shield wall ala Roman Legions. Maybe now they will be more even with Feudal MAA, though probably still some better.
Thanks for listening, looking forward to seeing how this plays. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/pat.gif
Quote[/b] ]I also upped the priorities for some of the more expensive ships that I guess I held off on initially, in order to see if the concept or higher priorities worked or not.
Please, well someone outline the "Tech Tree" for Ships, for some reason, with the new mods, I can't see to figure out how to build anything other than Longboats.
The first level shipyard, will give me Longboats, but I build the second level shipyard and get nothing. Is this as it should be? I think so; and if so, then I take it that even though you don't directly get second level ships with the second level shipyard, it still needs to be built? (I'm http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/confused.gif ) What do I need to get second level ships as a Christian and Orthodox faction? That wasn't clear at all, was it? http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/dizzy.gif
Quote[/b] ]And lastly but maybe bestly, I gave Switzerland a goldmine and a general's star, to help both the Swiss faction and the HRE.
VERY COOL Now, maybe I'll have some strategic reason to care about this province.
Quote[/b] ]Now, this is about all I plan to do as far as changes for a while, so I hope we can set back and give the mod a good long test and see how everything works.
Excellent My sentiments precisely.
Quote[/b] ]2. For God's sake don't worry about those who say "if it ain't broke don't fix it." If people don't want to play a modded game, they have the regular one to play. For those of us who want the game to live up to its potential as a real challenge even against experienced players, because of improved performance by the AI, and to fix problems with various units and factions, this is the only way to go. For example, your decision to mod Swiss halberdiers makes a useful unit out of an unsuccessful one (they died like flies). I like the way they play now - a badly needed improvement.
Wholeheartedly agree with Crugel's opinion. If you play a mod such as Med Mod, it should be because you have exhausted the Original game and have gained such experience to note its shortcomings, especially the subtle ones.
IMO, the philosphy behind the MM s/b to make the greatest challenge possible while maintaining historical accuracy, though not at the expense of gameplay.
I also agree with Old_Templer, that there are different types of players and that the MM can't be all things to all players. TW is a "strategy" game so the emphasis s/b upon Strategy Players over Action Players, as OT puts it, I prefer the term Warmongers. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif
Quote[/b] ]I've finally reached the conclusion that possession of the Crimea screws up the Byz. AI. Even on Catholic_Trader, they still attempt to conquer asia and use all their troops to do it, leaving Constantinople relatively undefended. As with almost every campaign I've seen since I installed Paladin's mod back in November, they wind up losing and regaining Constantinople several times before ultimately losing it for good and without it they have no chance. Historically, they held this province, but do you think that CA could have deleted it from their possession because it caused problems for the AI? It might be worth seeing whether they do better without it, since they might not be lured into the depths of Asia while other factions attack them through the back door.
Let me add my endorsement of Crugel's observations as well. For some reason the Byz. seem to view the Crimea as more valuable to defend than Const. This often leads to Const. losing its port, effecting other factions negatively with regard to Trade. In my Kiev 1.7 campaign, The Turks consistenly attack the Byz. relatively weak defense of Const. The take it, and the Byz move troops to take it back, this happens repeatedly, despite the Byz. having ample troops and resources to deal decisively with the Turks. The Egytians will often jump into the fray to take their turn at holding Const. for a few turns.
The Byz. will put 2 sometimes 3 stacks into the Crimea while leaving Const. lightly defended with troops. Often a 1/2 to 3/4 stack to Zero stack, nada. Even when they choose to re-take or defend Const. Often an almost full stack will be left in the Crimea. I
n regard to Gameplay, the Crimea is worthless, especially so with the Byz. sea capabilities and power.
Quote[/b] ]Or, I could give the Kievans Khazar, and cut the Byzants off that way. I think they just expand into Europe because it is the easiest route, rather than taking on another faction.
Wes, let's have more discussion before implementing changes. On the surface, I think give Khazar to the Kievians may be a good idea, but if so then should they also have Lithuania? See my post regarding my Kiev 1.7 Campaign to see what I mean.
Also, with Khazar given to the Kievians, or if made into a new faction, strategically, this will mean that the Turks will need to guard their border more strongly. The AI as do humans tend to guard their borders with Rebels less strongly than their borders with other factions. It'll be interesting to note how this will effect the contest between the Turks, Egytians and Byzantines. Perhaps Constantinople won't get stomped on as much.
Just some things to consider with this change. Take Lithuania and give Khazar to the Kievians. Solution for two problems in one stroke maybe. Simon can you comment on the historical aspect of this?
Quote[/b] ]What I may do, though, is try and eliminate the Sea of Marmara, expanding the Aegean into its territory, which would seem to solve even more problems.
I don't like this idea, Strategically, this means one less ship will be needed to reach the Med or vice versa to get to the Black Sea. Making things possibly too easy in some cases. For instance, Kievians with Khazar will need one less ship to get out into the Med. (See my previous post my Kiev 1.7 campaign.)
What problems will this solve?
Quote[/b] ]Finally, and this is for everyone, do you think there needs to be more of an increase in stats as you move up the development line, e.g. from Feudal MAA to Chivalric MAA to Foot Kn.? Looking at the spreadsheet in light of this new info, Feudal and Chiv MAA have exactly the same melee defense when the shield is factored in. The only deference in them is the one point of attack and a little better morale.
I definitely think some tweaking is in order. When the changes to the Vikings was proposed, I reviewed the unit stat file and it basically confirmed most of what I had observed with actually experience.
As I posted in the 1.6 thread, I felt the "stat" relastionship between Peasants, Vikings, Sargents and FMAA ((in addition to the other faction specific near equivalents) needed to be looked at. When I reviewed the stat file I compared most of the Catholic "foot" units.
IMO, an overview perspective of all the foot units s/b looked at.
To answer your questions specifically, you need to define further what you mean by "increase", but yes the relationship between FMAA CHMAA and FTKNTS s/b made more defined. As Foot Knights are very expensive and for the later portions of the game, CHMAA s/b the pre-eminent foot soldier.
Precluding Peasants, the heart of an Early King's army (gameplay wise) should generally consists of FMAA and Sargents, with Viking and/or Peasant filler(; and a unit or two of Knights).
Sargents should support FMAA (say in a flanking role), with Vikings (if one can afford them) used as "shock" troops; otherwise the role of Peasants would be to support Sargents.
The cost and upkeep should reflect these roles (or something like this).
In the Early to mid-High period, Foot Knights s/b relatively prohibitively expensive in cost and upkeep. Leaving the CHMAA to be master of the foot solider (possibly precluding some "special" faction specific unit(s))
Red Harvest
02-27-2003, 16:27
Quote[/b] (ToranagaSama @ Feb. 27 2003,04:59)]What I may do, though, is try and eliminate the Sea of Marmara, expanding the Aegean into its territory, which would seem to solve even more problems.
I don't like this idea, Strategically, this means one less ship will be needed to reach the Med or vice versa to get to the Black Sea. Making things possibly too easy in some cases. For instance, Kievians with Khazar will need one less ship to get out into the Med. (See my previous post my Kiev 1.7 campaign.)
What problems will this solve?
This would solve the "Byzantines never use Constantinople trade and none of the AI factions will establish a trade route from the Black Sea" problem. Fewer useless seas like this is a good thing, since the AI mismanages them (yes, I know they should be strategically important, but because of the naval AI they are worse than useless.) The fewer places the AI has to put boats, the better the chances it will benefit from trade like a human. It's an attempt to get around some of the bizarre AI behaviour.
Hamburglar
02-27-2003, 18:13
But upping Chiv MAA also makes Muslim/Orthodox units more "obsolete"
Upping their units is not really a solution either because it begins to throw off a delicate balance. As it is I think that ChivMAA are definitely better than FMAA.
Its not as if they have any sort of "steep requirement". To go from FMAA to CMAA you need to build one tiny cheap building - don't even need an armory or anything.
And as it stands I have rarely ever seen the AI build CMAA so if we are going for challenge here then I don't think upping their stats will really help us. You say the heart of the army should be CMAA and CSeargeants but I find it a rarity to see an AI army in Late even based on having lots and lots of Feudal MAA and Feudal Sergeants. Upping them will let you just cut through AI troops all the easier.
"Good news I've tested the "Marmara in parallel" mod and it works I've only tested it in Early playing the Byzantines, so I don't know how the AI will handle it as Byz. I do know that the stinkin' Sicilians sent a dromon past me into the Black Sea and sunk one of my ships, unprovoked And for some reason I'm happy about this, LOL. They went from the Aegean right to the Black Sea, so the AI wasn't stymied by the new path. I've been able to move ships directly from: Aegean to Black, Aegean to Marmara, Black to Aegean, Black to Marmara, Marmara to Black, Marmara to Aegean so the connectivity is all OK. I relocated the Constantinople port to the Aegean like Cugel suggested in another thread. This gets trade to working (tested to confirm) with the outside and should have it working with the Black Sea as well, whether or not there is a boat in Marmara.
"
Great Red Harvest Could you post your changes to early.txt here so that we can copy them and playtest them to see how they work?
I might then copy your approach for the Adriatic so we can see if this helps the Italians as well. I think we ought to do the same thing with the Ionian sea and Adriatic. The Ionian sea doesn't have any ports in it, but the AI still posts more ships there than almost anywhere on the map (except for the Channel and Straits of Sicily). For some reason, the Italians never keep a ship in the Adriatic so their trade from Venice is cut off, but they keep plenty in the Ionian Sea. Since the Ionian Sea plays no useful role we could extend it into the Adriatic. Then the Italian AI would have the trade income from Venice and might not be crushed so early in the game as they seem to be most of the time. In early after 100 years, the Italians are almost always gone in my experience. I've never seen an Italian super-power state emerge in any campaign (often the Spanish or the Almos, sometimes the Egyptians, sometimes the Turks, English, or even the Danish (!http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif, but never the Italians).
As for the Byzantines, I believe that serious consideration should be given to removing Crimea from them. TS is also right on this point. One only need consider: What is the proper strategy for a human playing the Byzantines?
I think we will all agree that the Byz. player has 2 choices:
1. Strike East. Conquer the Turks first and leave strong forces in the west to defend against any attack by the Hungarians.
2. Strike West. Leave strong forces in Constantinople to guard against a sneak attack by the Turks and take out the Hungarians first.
After you've dealth with the immediate threat, maybe you can expand from Crimea and Kiev into Lithuania, Kazar and the rest of Asia if you want to, but
3. Strike North from Crimea into Kazar, Kiev and Lithuania while leaving Constantinople unguarded against the Turks and Hungarians is NOT a viable FIRST option.
The AI chooses No. 3 every time in my experience. In playtesting over the past 3 months I tried numerous campaigns using different starting AI personalities for the Byzantines. No luck. The AI is programmed to take rebel held provinces first for some reason. If they don't hold Crimea I bet they are much less agressive in trying to conquer Lithuania and Livonia while losing their home province.
Conclusion: Something must be done to help out the Byzantine AI. I think Wes is on the right track giving Crimea to the Russians.
I don't suppose that static armies are possible either. But, if they were that should be another consideration. Put large static armies in each factions' home province to keep them from losing their home province. Don't think it can be done though. Perhaps there's some other idea along these lines? What could we do to make each faction's home province tougher to conquer in order to help out the AI?
Wes, I also think you're right in emphasizing the campaign rather than the GA. We can only work with what we're given. We can access the campaign through the early.txt, unit_prod and build_prod files. GA is hardcoded. Every thread I've read on the subject has concluded that GA is hopelessly broken and, absent a patch from CA isn't likely to be fixed. It's too bad, but we ought to focus on what's most easily fixable, not on things beyond our reach. I haven't heard that GA problems are going to be addressed in VI either. I suspect there's nothing that can be done.
I'm also afraid that slowing down the unit speed to make battles more managable in real time is also not a good idea. What happens after the two battle lines have met? It's then that stuff really happens while you're looking elsewhere. Slowing down movement speed won't help your spearmen last longer in combat. Unless you have a quick mouse hand and know what you're doing (i.e. you're good at MP) you are going to have trouble at this. It takes practice.
I've been trying for some time now to fight all battles in real time and it's tough I sometimes get my clock cleaned by the AI (in all fairness the fact that I have a trackball mouse which doesn't help) That said, I don't think the game moves too fast. It's kind of fun to have to think on your feet. I used to pause the game and consider the battle from every angle, advance the action and then pause again, etc. Sometimes I still take that approach, but more often I try to keep things moving. It's a different challenge. I really doubt most people would welcome this change.
Hamburglar
02-28-2003, 09:25
Okay to help stop the province destruction here is a solution that might work.
We all have noticed that certain buildings almost always get destroyed (border forts, ports) and certain buildings almost never do (farms). I don't know if theres a flag or whatever that needs to be checked to make sure that these buildings don't get wrecked but if it could be checked for things like Chapter Houses and troop producers or something then that'd make the province changing less dramatic.
Also, just some "flavor" changes. I mentioned before that Syria maybe should get a Hashishin bonus because thats where they came from but also maybe they could just have an Assassin valor bonus. I know its possible to have valor bonuses for special agents because something in Iberia gets them for Inquisitors.
Lastly, my main point - an idea for the Golden Horde. A big problem when people play the Golden Horde is that its almost impossible to build Mongol Heavy Cav and such. I think a way to make the Golden Horde campaign more realistic AND make the Mongols more of a threat is this.....
Step one would be to make all Mongol units a lot cheaper and have MUCH lower building requirements. Keep them at the same power. For example, Mongol Warriors only need a Bowyer, Mongol Horse Archers need a Bowyer and Horse Farmer, and Mongol Heavy Cav need a Horse Breeder. Also make their support costs VERY low or even practically nothing. As it is the Mongols can't produce any troops when they arrive because they are way past their support limit and will exist forever in negative florins.
Step two is disable the Mongols from building ships in any way.
Step three is make Mongol units "Mongol Heavy Cav, Mongol Horse Archers, Mongol Warriors" all ONLY trainable in the "steppe border" provinces. I'm really not all too familiar with their names but for example Armenia, Georgia, Khazar, and then the two or three above that border the eastern edge of the map.
This makes it so the Mongols are really like the Golden Horde. All of their "true" Mongol troops are coming in from Asia and thus its not like they are "produced" in those steppe provinces but rather they arrive there from Asia like in Shogun. This would make the Mongols very powerful the closer they are to their border so it makes them hard to eliminate but the farther they get away the longer their supply lines get (lack of boats means moving men by land as well).
I think certain units should be buildable for them anywhere, such as Spearmen, Peasants, Archers, and Urban Militia because those just represent local conscripted peasants rather than true Mongol troops. I think this idea would make fighting the Mongols a BIG deal because over in the Eastern border areas they are just gonna keep on coming.
I think this will make the Mongols a MAJOR threat. This will also make the Mongols truly a horde - they shouldn't really have support costs. The game acts as if the only land they own is Khazar, but their empire stretched all the way to China. I think a lot of that wealth would be able to support the troops in their European expedition.
People have complained about the Mongols being such a nonentity but I think that if they have very little support costs and cheap troops they will truly be able to flood into Europe like they did historically. As it is right now they barely ever make it much farther than the Crimea. The farthest I've ever seen them go in dozens of campaigns is Wallachia and thats pretty bad.
Does anyone have any ideas on this or think it will work?
ToranagaSama
02-28-2003, 15:09
Quote[/b] ]Step two is disable the Mongols from building ships in any way.
Step three is make Mongol units "Mongol Heavy Cav, Mongol Horse Archers, Mongol Warriors" all ONLY trainable in the "steppe border" provinces. I'm really not all too familiar with their names but for example Armenia, Georgia, Khazar, and then the two or three above that border the eastern edge of the map.
This makes it so the Mongols are really like the Golden Horde. All of their "true" Mongol troops are coming in from Asia and thus its not like they are "produced" in those steppe provinces but rather they arrive there from Asia like in Shogun. This would make the Mongols very powerful the closer they are to their border so it makes them hard to eliminate but the farther they get away the longer their supply lines get (lack of boats means moving men by land as well).
I've very little experience with the Mongols as opponents. In my campaigns we they have appeared to any effect, the AI factions usually manage to deal with them to their detriment. I don't believe I've ever engaged them. So, I have not direct comments.
Your comments above appear VERY interesting. I would especially agree that Mongols should not build ships. The last line above sounds like very good gameplay. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif
ToranagaSama
02-28-2003, 15:27
Quote[/b] ]But upping Chiv MAA also makes Muslim/Orthodox units more "obsolete"
I understand your concern, but this simply means that these units will need to be tweaked as well.
Quote[/b] ]Its not as if they have any sort of "steep requirement". To go from FMAA to CMAA you need to build one tiny cheap building - don't even need an armory or anything.
Again, its all just a matter of experimentation and tweaking. If the build requirements need to be upped then so be it. Doesn't mean it will be simple nor easy, but that shouldn't preclude an effort.
Quote[/b] ]Upping their units is not really a solution either because it begins to throw off a delicate balance. As it is I think that ChivMAA are definitely better than FMAA.
Right, that's why I proposed that an "overview" of all the foot units is needed. Tweaking a "single" unit may very well throw off the "delicate" balance as you suggest.
Quote[/b] ]And as it stands I have rarely ever seen the AI build CMAA so if we are going for challenge here then I don't think upping their stats will really help us.
Right, so the problem to solve is to figure futher methods to get the AI to build better, not to dismiss the idea.
Quote[/b] ]You say the heart of the army should be CMAA and CSeargeants but I find it a rarity to see an AI army in Late even based on having lots and lots of Feudal MAA and Feudal Sergeants. Upping them will let you just cut through AI troops all the easier.
What I am attempting to outline is NOT how things are NOW, but how things SHOULD or could be. What we should endeavor to achieve.
The question regarding CHMAA is what incentive is there to build them with such a relatively insignificant difference between them and FMAA (, and I would add between FMAA and Vikings). Examining what I've just said, one could conclude that there is little need to building any foot units other than Vikings; and I've seen posts where some people have/do just that. So tweaking is definitely desirable imho.
The goal in tweaking the stats s/b to create a commensurate incentive to build at a commensurate cost.
Granted, the flip side is to get the AI to make proper use of these and all units.
As it is, with OMTW (need more playtesting with MM) I build CHMAA just as a "role-playing" factor. Gameplay wise there's little significant difference compared to FMAA.
We just need to get deeper into the stats and what their real effects are. It would seem Simon's observations may take us a long way toward this.
Reading Simon and Wes' conversation regarding Armour, kinda makes one stop and re-think the stats.
From my observation with another heavily modded game, tweaking takes a LOT of time, debate and playtesting. It won't be done satisfactorily the first, second nor third time. Crap, the game I'm talking about is Total Annihilation and the mod that is the equivalent of Med Mod is still being tweaked today. YEARS after the first incarnation of the mod (in addition to the demise of the game's developers).
I don't subscribe to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". My philosphy is more "if ain't perfect, then tweak tweak tweak". If CA had the time and resources, I'm sure there are alot of things they'd change and add, but since they don't its up to us (or should that be Wes http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif ).
ToranagaSama
02-28-2003, 15:37
Quote[/b] (WesW @ Feb. 27 2003,02:43)]Thanks for the info and opinions regarding the infantry units. I guess I will leave the ability stats alone, then.
Thanks for the AP explanation, Simon.
I haven't heard any opinions about the Khazar province and the Byzantines expanding into Europe. In light of TS's last post, maybe I ought to put the Novgorods back in, and also keep the Kievan faction, but give it Khazar instead of Lithuania? This would "populate" that part of the map for the early age, and would provide the human a challange if he wanted to try and hold off the Horde when they come charging in.
I have made a note to include Chapter Houses in the early era for the next update, and to maybe re-arrange the provinces that have them from the capital province to another one too, so that the sacrifice to build them is not as bad.
Keep letting me know about things that hurt the GA games, and I will keep those in mind, but if I have to choose between enhancing the campaigns or messing up the GAs, I am going to choose the campaigns.
I have also thought before of taking the Templar bonus from Jerusalem, since the Muslim factions are a little shorted in this area, and place it in one of the provinces bordering Paris. I would put France's House there as well.
The bonus for Templars in Jerusalem suggests to me that at one point the Crusader units were going to be buildable as regular units in some provinces, but the concept changed somewhere along the line. Starting a Crusade in Jerusalem just seems backward to me, so moving the region bonus to a region where some crusades actually started and where the Templars accumulated their greatest power, outside of Palestine, seems to be a better fit, imo.
Quote[/b] ]Finally, I made the mod for campaigns, not GA games, so I am not going to do something that hurts the campaign games in order to repair the GA ones.
Whew Quite correct, presuming the goal is to make the "Campaign" as challenging as possible, then the reality must be faced that persuing such a goal may in many instances result in conflicts.
Take Crusades, which everyone seems so fixated upon, in a non-GA Campaign where one is seeking the "greatest" challenge (which means giving the AI as much advantage as possible), Crusades have NO Strategic value. Seeking the greatest challenge, includes refraining from "Cheesy Tactics" such as, in the Early Period, sending a Crusade to take Venice, Const., Flanders, etc. and/or to using them to deal with the Almo. Doing so just makes the Campaign too simple and easy. [Cheesy Tactic]
Other than used for the above Cheesy purpose, Crusades are Strategically and Tactically useless; and simply add a "historical" flavor (for those that need that).
Regarding the AI's capability to launch Crusades, as I've stated previously, enhancing the AI's capability to launch Crusades has a Negative Gameplay effect. As the AI will most typically launch Crusades at the same above listed targets to the detriment of Gameplay. Think about it, not only does the AI engage in negatively effecting "Province Trading", these same provinces, ADDITIONALLY, will be under assault from AI/Human launched Crusades.
In addition to all the above, is the "Annoyance" factor for the human player of rediculous numbers of AI crusades existing at a give time; as well as the poor financial decision making capabilities of the AI with regard to launching Crusades (see 1.5 or 1.6 thread for deeper comments).
I conclude, that while Crusades obviously have a very direct benefit for GA Campaigns, that is "point accumulation", for non-GA Campaigns, Crusades, at best, are worthless from a Gameplay standpoint; and at worst, are deleterious to Gameplay.
It would seem I am alone in this viewpoint. Personally, I do not wish for the AI to launch Crusades at other AI factions degrading AI faction's ability to challenge "ME" the Human player.
In light of the "factual" correctness (in terms of gameplay) of the above, it must be viewed as quite "contrary" the desire for Crusades (and to "strenghten" them) AND the desire to preclude the "denuding" of provinces, particularly "key" provinces, such as Constantinople. Constantinople is probably the most Crusaded upon Province in all the game.
I am not a High Period player, prefering the "build-up" required in the Early period (I believe the progression is Early, Late, Hight, correct?), so I cannot comment directly, but I believe the MM s/b left as is with regard to Chapter Houses and the period the mod places them.
In the Early period the relative preclusion of Crusades should allow for the AI to develop its provinces, particularly its key provinces to a greater degree than previously. I believe this is the ultimate goal, is it not.
As "most" seem to desire some Crusading, then relatively excluding Crusades to the High period makes the most sense. As a result of the "advanced" development of the High period the AI will be more capable of dealing/defending against Crusades. Though, I can't help but think that any successful Crusade upon a "key" AI province would be a unrecoverable blow deletrious to Gameplay for the Human player.
I am at a loss to comprehend how Crusades can be viewed differently with regard to non-GA Campaigns.
Obvious, with regard to GA Campaigns, the situation "may" be different.
http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/idea.gif
Perhaps, the best compromise for GA players, could be for Wes to provide an adjusted .txt file and two zipped version, i.e., "Med Mod 1.71_Crusades" and "Med Mod 1.71" (abreviated Crusades).
Well, this is tricky ground. So far, the poll I started in the main hall shows most people prefer GA games, but the response rate has been very low. I'd certainly hesitate to switch to v1.7 if I could not crusade on early. But I don't have any good suggestions on how to proceed yet.
On the CMAA, I was surprised to see it is very popular with the MP crowd. The attack stat (4) looks low but relative to most other units, it's pretty top of the line. As I said, the one point increment in attack from FMAA to CMAA, is a 20% improvement in lethality and is worth the cost to me. Most folks can't get Vikings, so that is not so important a comparison although I did not realise how similar the units are in effectiveness. It's an interesting issue how to treat unique units like Vikings. I guess my view would be that they should be a little unbalanced, so that florin-for-florin, those privileged to have them should want to buy them. So I would not be upset if the Danes decided to stay with them and not switch to CMAA.
Hamburglar
02-28-2003, 19:29
Having Crusades only available in High just completely wrecks the historical accuracy. All the really big ones occured during the Early era. The first was massive and succeeded in taking over a lot of the Holy Land. The second was pretty much a failure. The Third is the one you hear about a lot with Barbarossa, Lionheart, and Saladin, and it had mixed results, and the 4th one was the one that took Constantinople.
Crusaders after that were all somewhat smaller affairs or done by Spain to the Moors or the Germans to the pagans.
I don't see how Crusades are a cheesy tactic either - Muslims can launch Jihads which are insanely cheap and I've seen plenty of them sent after my Crusaders. Toranagasama, it seems as if you want none of the AI's to fight each other and just to save all of their energy for fighting you. I believe you get the best fight when one of the other AI's is quite successful in its wars and becomes a major threat. For example, those Crusades the Spanish launch: If they're meant for the Almoheads then they help eliminate them, and even if they're meant for the Holy Land they tend to march through the Almos and kill a lot of them.
I guess a Crusade and non-Crusade file would work.
But what do you think of my Mongol changes I proposed? I figure the downside of that would be that a lot of the Eastern powers would get raped by the Mongols pretty bad. But, thats how it actually happened so I'm a supporter of that. I like playing "Medieval" total war with as much accuracy as possible, not just some wargame with swords and spears that has not much to do with the period.
Old Templar
02-28-2003, 22:53
I have been playing Mod 1.7 and reading the comments here, since this thread was started by WesW.
Here are some of my observations -
1. Crusades - the number of crusades seems to depend largely on the time period the game is in. In Early, I saw very few (significantly lower numbers than in Mod 1.6) which is probably caused by the higher cost as well as the longer time it takes to build them. Money in later periods is more readely available; hence, the AI builds more crusades at later periods. Reducing costs and development time by 25% to 50% would make more crusades available in Early which is historically more correct. The crusades should be strong to accomplish their goals; it is desirable to equip them with multistar general. CA increased the income of the Egyptian and Turks to cope with the high frequency of crusades and balanced the game this way, but it seems that fewer crusade have no unreasonable influence on these two factions. Recent changes of province ownerships in the region may have weakened these two factions (at least in my plays); they are not as powerful as the were in Mod 1.6.
2. Russians - At the actual time the game starts in Early (around AD1100), Kief, Nowgorod and Lithuania existed already as factions.
Nowgorod: was founded (around AD 900) by three Varangian/Viking brothers (Rurik,Beloozero and Truvor). Muskovy was still a rebell province at that time. The Mongols conquered Muskovy but never Novgorod. CA's programming reflects this, since I rarely saw the Mongols taking Nowgorod. Vikings and Boyars (only they were not called Boyars than, but "princely Druzhina", first reported for Oleg's campaigns) were the mainstay of the Russian military for a long time and well into high medieval times.
Kief: Around 1070, Oleg, Prince of Vladimir with two of his brothers reigned in Kief. The Kief faction raided primarily the east slavonic tribes in Smolensk and Pereiaslavl. They also had longstanding feuds with the Bulgarians, the Greeks and even conquered Constantinople. None of these more advanced factions possessed ever Khazar (territory of very powerful Parthian tribes).
To make the Mod more agreeable to the history of the region and also enhance gameplay for the experts, I suggest to make Nowgorod, Kief and possibly Lithuania seperate factions; with Kief and Moldavia or the Crimea as one, leave Khazar as strong rebell province (stronger than it is now), Nowgorod alone (increase trade-furs, wax, and honey), Livonia a rebell province and Lithuania a seperate faction or a very strong rebell province.
All these slavic factions ought to have Vikings and "Boyars" (as mainstay of their armies for all game periods, but they should be easier to produce). I wonder, whether there is a way to seperate the unit strenght of the Scandinavian Vikings from the stats of the Russian Vikings. By the way, the Scandinavian Vikings occupied Pomerania at the same time period, just in case some changes must be made to Danmark.
This is just a proposal based on history - you may want to incorporate all or part of it to make it more difficult for the expert player ("warmonger").
I still use both Mod 1.7 for myself and Mod 1.6 as a teaching tool - one group of students plays another group while the history is discussed as gameplay proceeds.
CA tried to be historically as accurate as possible but still kept the game character (game balanced).
"Regarding the AI's capability to launch Crusades, as I've stated previously, enhancing the AI's capability to launch Crusades has a Negative Gameplay effect. As the AI will most typically launch Crusades at the same above listed targets to the detriment of Gameplay. Think about it, not only does the AI engage in negatively effecting "Province Trading", these same provinces, ADDITIONALLY, will be under assault from AI/Human launched Crusades."
TS - I suggested in the 1.6 thread that we mighthave to do away with AI crusades IF we couldn't make them work better for the AI, and everyone jumped down my throat Crusades are a very popular game feature for players and in part those people are right - medieval warfare in the 12th century without crusades just is missing something
My only point was the same made by you, that crusades as programmed by CA don't work well for the AI because it lacks judgment about how to use them. It launches crusades when it shouldn't and that weakens it. In addition, the AI crusades are pitifully weak and far too numerous. Since I made those comments, Eat Cold Steel responded by telling us how to mod the number of units that appear in crusades. Now there's no excuse for our not getting them to work right.
Wes has lowered the cost of crusader units so that more of them appear in each AI crusade. He now believes that they are strong enough, I respectfully disagree. The first crusade historically had about 4,000 crusader knights and 25,000 infantry of all types (not including the allied forces of the Byzantine Emperor). Now THAT's a force that put the fear of God into the pagans http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/joker.gif
My point was and is that a crusading force of about 4,000 troops with a good general would be a serious threat that would make the player sit up and take notice For instance, as the Byzantines I sometimes would attack the Hungarians. This would inevitably result in lots of crusades launched at me, but why would I care? They were all piss weak by the time they reached me I once defeated 4 crusades in 1 battle (it wasn't even that hard). The player should be AFRAID of a crusade being launched against him. It should be a BIG DEAL, that would require you to marshall all your forces and get ready for a serious assault, not a mere annoyance "what?? Not another stupid crusade?"
Wes' changes to make crusades take 10 years to build and cost 5000 fl is a very good one. Now players will think twice before launching crusades, since you're giving up 10 years production and considerable income to build one. They should be correspondingly tough though. This can be accomplished by lowering the cost to 1/2 of the values Wes currently has, a change I may make to playtes and see the results. My current view is that despite the changes for the better the crusades still peter out if they don't reach their targe in 3 turns. This means the real point of crusades (to conquer the holy land) is impossible for them unless they go by ship (which the AI does sometimes, but not always).
"But what do you think of my Mongol changes I proposed? I figure the downside of that would be that a lot of the Eastern powers would get raped by the Mongols pretty bad. But, thats how it actually happened so I'm a supporter of that. I like playing "Medieval" total war with as much accuracy as possible, not just some wargame with swords and spears that has not much to do with the period."
I totally agree that the Mongols ought to be MUCH tougher. I suspect CA didn't make them as tough as they really were because they didn't want casual players whining "I keep getting wiped out by the Horde They have 12-15,000 troops and It's Not Fair." http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/rolleyes.gif
Well, that's probably what the 13th century east Europeans thought too If we want to model history to any degree at all then there should be a very good chance that the Mongols will win and take over Europe It should be a fight to the death every time In reality, if the Khan hadn't drunk himself to death they would have conquered any country they wanted to
Making the support costs for Mongol troops very low or zero would go a good way towards creating a proper challenge from them and I would support this idea. This is to make the AI Mongols tougher, not to make life easier for player Mongols.
Hamburglar
03-01-2003, 03:01
Yeah my changes idea would make life easier for the Mongol player, but the majority of people don't play Mongols since you can only play them in Late anyway and most people don't play late. I think everyone tries them once for a kick and that's about it really.
I think another way to possibly make the Mongols stronger is to up the size of their units - have their horse units have something like 80 men and put their infantry up to like 140.
I think this would make it too hard because they'd have such local superiority though.
All in all I think having their units be cheap, low tech, and no support costs be the answer as long as you have them only producable in the borders. This will be a solution enough that close to the edge of the map they will fight you tooth and nail but the farther they get away the harder it becomes for them, although not that hard if they don't take too many losses.
I'm really an idiot in modding - all I know how to do is change unit size and price but if someone could try this and test it that'd be cool.
Red Harvest
03-01-2003, 08:25
Cugel,
Tested "No Sea of Marmara" briefly and it seems to work as well. I'll try to post some of the changes this weekend when I have time. It is not particularly difficult. Don't know whether I will run into hardcode problems later because of some AI script or a future "storm" in this now removed sea. For all I know it will become some sort of Bermuda triangle, LOL.
The Mongol unit size is a factor, as well as the high upgrade requirements and lack of any low level units. Hamburglar has some good ideas although I would probably be more conservative in the distance I would adjust each item. Definitley agree that going into battle with a lot of 40 man units leaves you very outgunned since you are limited to 16 units on the field.
Hi everyone. Nice to see the discussions coming right along, though I think a couple of you need to review my relatively short post on the 27th, as significant ink has been used on erroneous beliefs about a few things. For instance, when I proposed altering the MAA stats, I was just using them as an example. If I decide to alter things, and I have (see below), I always planned to take a fresh look at everything else, too.
Btw, I have restored the heavy cavalry units to their normal speed, though their running speed is now 2 less (from 20 to 18), but their marching and charge speeds are the same (22). I think this is going to spice things up a little, though it can be seen better in the new spreadsheet. (I have also added infantry speeds to the SS, as I am paying them more mind now when factoring costs and settings.)
In addition, I also didn't mean that I opposed re-working the building links, I meant that I thought it would be a very hard thing to do correctly. I think someone would have to sit down and chart all the present links, and then have enough knowledge about the units to come up with links that would be beneficial to all affected factions. This is an area where the designers should have a good handle on things, but if someone were to map all this out and set me a copy, I would look it over and see if anything popped out at me.
Also, does naval combat seem screwed up to you guys? It seems to me that speed is more important that attack or defense. In my games, my Caravels almost always lose when defending, even to Barques, Longboats and Galleys. These ships all have better speed than Caravels, and get the first lick in if we attack each other. I have set about all boat speeds to 2, and I plan to try this out.
Note: I get into a couple of long rants below, so prepare to be here a while. I think they are needed though, especially in light of all the effort you guys are putting in with your posts. I gave the technical dissertation at the end so that you can see that, imo, you guys are spending a lot of time and effort on the wrong approaches and/or assumptions about the game. Hamburglar, you in particular have been proposing a lot of thoughts, but few of them can be implemented, or else they won't work as intended if they are implemented.
For example, I agree that farms don't get destroyed like buildings for some reason, but whatever flag sets this is not in the buildings text, unless maybe it is linked to the revenue producer tag. If someone wants to test this, I would be interested in hearing the results.
HB (Hamburgler), there are notes at the top of the buildings and units text which describe all the settings. I did find one setting in the bldg text which was not covered, but I wrote a description for it myself and stuck it in the text. (And it took me *forever* to figure out why the settings didn't match the game effect once you got beyond that position in the file. Once I figured out there was a "missing link" (tab) in the file, though, it was easy to figure out its effect.)
I spent a lot of time cleaning up the notes in the units text, which were practically unusable before, and I also made them into an easy-to-read Word doc that you get with the mod each time. Anyone reading this can read over that doc and figure out what can and can't be done with units. (same thing for bldgs, though you just have to read the text file notes.)
For instance, buildings can't be limited to certain provinces.
Btw, HB, I discussed in an earlier thread that I plan to begin a separate discussion sometime on restricting units to certain provinces like you proposed. I grow tired of games after I have a couple dozen provinces because I can spit out so many units each turn that I can roll over everything easily. This would be for a 2nd version of the mod, though, and I keep coming up with more work that needs to be done with this version, so I haven't started the thread yet.
So anyway, I got bored with my last game a couple of nights ago, and guess what I started doing? (Wes hears some muffled snickers.) No, not that
I decided to add the Chapter Houses to the early era, and then decided to look at helping out the Mongols, (Nice point, HB, about reducing their support to very low levels on the reasoning that their off-map empire would make up the balance.), and then I noticed something about the units- spearmen's defense moved up 2 notches per era, while the offensive stats of swordsmen and cavalry only moved up about 1 per era. So, I have spent last night and tonight re-working the entire unit chart based on the belief that all the stats, not just defense, need to increase by 2 per era. This has led to some significant increases for the attack strengths of swordsmen and knights by the time you get to the late era (it goes early, high, late, TS). Btw, what I did was use the earliest units as a baseline, and changed the more advanced units accordingly.
I have not finished with the Muslim units, so I still need at least another night to finish the spreadsheet and then modify the units text, but I am really happy with how things look on paper now. (Simon's post about the armour progression helped me see things better when looking at the chart.)
This re-arrangement has caused a shift in era availability of some units, but for most this put them back in their original era, like Arbalests, so it should be familiar to everyone. I also moved Crossbows to the early era, and left the gunpowder units to the late age. Anyway, I think most everyone will be pleased when they get the spreadsheet.
I also took the opportunity to add a couple of new twists to the game. I differentiated Gendarmes and Teu Sgts by giving the Sgts a little lower defense, but greater charge and speed. Their description gives them as a step up from Mounted Sgts, but then they had no lance. This never did make sense to me, so now their weaponry and stats really do make them a step up from Mtd Sgts.
Lithuanian Cav can now shoot their bows without having to dismount, and they are still available to Catholic factions and have even lower bldg reqs, so they should be a more important unit.
I have generally upped the strength, lowered the bldg reqs and will drastically lower the costs of the Mongol units. I have also added a lot of buildings to the eastern european provinces in the high era. Btw, I think someone mentioned the fact that the Mongols are routinely drained from putting down peasant revolts, so I made sure to add town watches and watch towers to their territory.
I grouped Billmen with the militia units and made their req a town watch. This really worked well to me. I described them in the comments as an English rural militia, and made Halberdiers unavailable to the English (they now have the same req.)
Once I had my stat progression down, I was able to easily configure all the one-faction units to give them nice differences to everything else. The Swiss units have consistent differences compared to the regular varieties, for instance.
One thing that might take some getting used to for everyone is that the militia progression forced me to make the town watch's req a Keep rather than a Fort. (Spearmakers and Bowyers don't need the Watch anymore.)
Below I have laid out my general plan and reasoning for each age. Most of it is no different than the current setup, but I wanted you to see my thinking.
The early era is the Feudal (Keep) era, with Feudal Sgts, MAA and Knights accompanied by Urban Militia the standard units, with Archers and later Crossbows to counter the evolution of knights. (Basic Spearmen, Peasants, Archers and the odd special unit are the only units you can get with just a Fort and add-ons.) Knights still need one level higher of a Castle than the other unit types, btw.
The high era is still the Chivalric (castle) era, with Chiv Sgts, MAA and Knights. Now, though, Militia Sgts will not be available until the high era, and Halberdiers until the late, which I believe is the original position for Halbs. Arbalests come on the scene to counter the growing armour of the knights.
The late (Citadel) era, which historically saw the decline of the armoured knight, now sees Pikemen and Halberdiers joined by dismounted (foot) knights as elite swordsmen, accompanyied by knights and horses armoured to the hilt trying to keep the ideal alive in the face of new armour-piercing and gunpowder units.
I will wait and play-test this all myself for a while, so those lurkers out there should not hold off on getting the 1.71 version if you haven't already.
I still haven't heard any inspired thought on how to handle the Byzant problem. I think this is one area where people don't seem to have absorbed my comments on it from a few days ago. To me, Crimea is irrelavent to the real problem, unless you want to give it to a faction. The real problem is the Byzants going on from there into Khazar and on up through the rest of the Rebel territories. I think that assigning even more rebel troops to Khazar would be bad because 1)the Byzants would simply build up their forces to the necessary level and still invade and start the same old routine, and 2)a really strong garrison right next to the Kievans would force them to match it, and thus cripple their ability to expand at all.
I guess I should go into a little programming lesson here, based upon my studies of the Call-to-Power series, where we could see all the AI settings and many of the equations.
I first made a name for myself as being about the only guy willing and able to study them for months, along with some computer pros as play-testers, and come up with significant improvements in AI performance. And I am simply being honest when I say that improving the AIs financial ability for MTW was child's play compared to that (sorry Cugel). I am sure that all your strategy games are basically the same in these topics covered below.
When an AI takes its turn, when it comes to units, it normally first surveys the strength of the troops bordering its provinces and compares this to its own strength for each province, with modifiers for multiple provinces, and I believe in MTW's case with the Castle structure added to the defensive total. It then sets about to station a large enough force there to match the threat.
(I think this is why the Byzant's don't guard Constan like they should- they factor in the strength of the Citadel or Fortress to their troops when doing their "force-matching" for the border provinces, without considering the damage done to the province when forced to retreat to said structure. This will change in VI, which should help the Byzants enormously.)
Modifiers for faction relations are also added to the mix, for both offense and defense, and this is where the Rebels come in. I think we would all agree that the AIs treat rebels as different than normal factions. They discount them on defense, and are much more willing to attack them than normal factions. This is why I don't think you can change the Byzant behavior as long as you leave a line of rebel provinces open to them. I'm not sure that they will defend Constan much better even if you do stop them from going into the Steppes, for the reasons above, but I feel certain that more rebels will only delay the same old behavior.
After computing defense, the AI then goes into its offensive evaluations, comparing provincial attractiveness, enemy forces, its own troops and whatever political modifiers (though these last are set way too low I think we would all agree).
And I mention this section because this is where the programmers really dropped the ball, imo. If a neighboring province passes the initial tests for attacking it, the AI *should* run the defensive routine again, to see if it will have enough troops left in or moving into its province to defend it from the remaining border provinces' troops. If it doesn't, it should not attack, but in MTW it does attack, even if it means leaving no troops to garrison its base. I think we have all seen this time and again, and, coupled with the current setup of buildings being destroyed without the castle being taken, is the number one remaining reason, with the current improvements made to finances, that the AI doesn't develop into a worthy opponent over the course of an era. This is what causes the merry-go-round of desertification that everyone complains about. And this stuff should be basic "ones and zeroes", to borrow a sports term, for a strategy programmer. I mean, I am just a lay person really, and if I know this, then anyone with a degree and a little experience should have learned it a long time ago.
(ECS, if you are out there, I would really like this pointed out to the AI coders.)
If you want a really cheesy strategy to try sometime, just send at least one unit into every enemy province that you can reach every turn. You will probably ride into an empty town once every couple of turns.
I know that every development house has its guys to "plat-test" the game, but normally these guys are looking for bugs, and in MTW's case fighting pitched battles, and not sitting back and observing how the AI is performing strategically.
CA made some big improvements and tweaks to the tactical AI in the patch, but their not seeing the giant hole in the AI described above even by the time the patch came out spells out in black and white as to what all their emphasis was on. And they did a great job with the tactics, I think we will all agree. I have played the game since September (there TS), and I am still learning things from the AI in almost every battle. It's just too bad that the strategic shortcomings don't allow the great tactical AI a chance to show its stuff like it should.
Well, I have to get some sleep now.
ERROR ALERT: I have just found out that there is a bug with the Nubian Spearmen unit. This bug should not be present in any other unit, so you guys can fix this one yourselves.
Simply open up the Crusader_build_prod13 text file, search for NegroSpearmen (the second hit gets you the unit entry), and change the setting ARMOUR_LEVEL( 0 ) to ARMOUR_LEVEL( 1 ). This will fix the crashes.
Sorry about that.
Interesting post, Wes, especially on the Byzantine problem. However, I am very much against raising att and defence stats by 2 each era. I would prefer you need to look at each unit on a case-by-case approach and use the stats to model what the unit is supposed to represent.
This is easiest to do with armour, which is a big part of the defence stat, as it does improve over the period in clear significant steps (mail => transitional => plate). If defence stats are jumping by two, I think that often is because of systematic changes in armour (eg unarmoured foot get mail or mailed knights get transitional + horse barding etc). One interesting exception is the move from Feudal Sergeants to Chivalric ones, where the defence stat leaps (+4) far more than the armour one does (+2). I am wondering if this is supposed to capture a move to longer spears and possibly more professionalism.
On the attack stat, I would hazard it does not change so much because the underlying technology of each type of weapon (sword, spear etc) does not change in nearly so big a way as armour does. Here, the innovations are more switching to the pike and AP weapons like polearms and axes. These are fairly well caught in the official game but no doubt could be improved.
There are also gameplay considerations. A +1 to attack (+20% lethality) from FMAA to CMAA is worth it for me and most MPers. A +2 attack, +2 defence will change the game to make it much more research/upgrade oriented like Civ and other games. I think the tech changes in Medieval warfare were more slow and subtle than that.
Hamburglar
03-01-2003, 19:41
Yeah I agree with the above. Victories should more be based on generalship, not getting the "cooler" units.
Looking in history books there really didn't seem that much difference in the basic man at arms over the entire medieval age with the exception of pole arms and better armor being developed. Their swords were pretty much swords - they didn't really come up with any more advanced sword technology.
Also, putting the town watch up to the Keep makes Urban Militia only available with a Keep, right? I dunno about this, I always thought of them as rather a very low level unit that shouldn't really need much development to produce.
I put my Mongol post in the main forum too just to see if other people would want to make them stronger.
"Modifiers for faction relations are also added to the mix, for both offense and defense, and this is where the Rebels come in. I think we would all agree that the AIs treat rebels as different than normal factions. They discount them on defense, and are much more willing to attack them than normal factions. This is why I don't think you can change the Byzant behavior as long as you leave a line of rebel provinces open to them. I'm not sure that they will defend Constan much better even if you do stop them from going into the Steppes, for the reasons above, but I feel certain that more rebels will only delay the same old behavior."
Good post, Wes. I thought this was all quite obvious, which is why I advocated giving Kiev and Khazar to some faction (the Russians?). An alternative would be to create a new minor faction (we have 3 slots available from 17-20 don't we?) and give that faction Kiev and Khazar.
Obviously, the AI factions treat rebels differently from other factions. This even makes sense. Attacking a faction involves an overall struggle against numerous provinces, attacking rebels only involves the 1 province, since rebel provinces act independently (they sometimes retreat troops into a neighboring province, but that seems to be about the limit of their cooperation) and are much less aggressive.
My point about Crimea was this: I never observed the Byzantines attempting to launch a major invasion of Asia before I installed Paladin's 1092 mod back in December, which gave them Crimea. Perhaps I didn't observe a representative sample of campaigns and other players see this all the time in the unmodded game. I don't know. It may simply be an issue of timing. Without a foothold in Asia, the Byz. would have either to launch a sea invasion (and they sometimes don't even keep a ship in the Black Sea) or march across Hungarian provinces to reach Asia (meaning war with Hungary). I suppose that I could remove Crimea from them and playtest a few campaigns to see, if I get the time this weekend.
In either case Wes, you're quite right about the reason for the AI failing to keep its provinces. Unfortunately, I haven't heard that CA is going to address this with VI (didn't Cold Steel say that only minor changes to the AI were planned)? My guess is that we're going to have to wait for TW:Rome to fix this. If, in fact, you are correct about the AI taking into account the defense value of the fortress, increasing the AI production of higher tech facilities (including fortresses) will only make this problem worse (since the AI would rely increasingly on its castle defenses and station the fewest troops in its most advanced provinces).
This would then require more extreme modifications to fix and frankly, I don't know what to suggest. I tried back in January giving the AI factions more income, with the idea that this way it would produce more troops and thus, hold on to its provinces better. Well, it produced tons more troops, but it only seemed to use them offensively - it would just launch massive attacks and leave it's provinces empty just like before (very likely for the reasons you suggested Wes).
All these problems would probably be not too difficult to fix if the code were accessible. CA didn't do us any favors by hard-coding so much of the game. Frankly, the only part of TW that anyone would try to rip-off is the battlefield AI. The strategic part of the game has (as you know) been done better elsewhere (Civ. is only 1 example). http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/rolleyes.gif
Red Harvest
03-02-2003, 00:01
Wes,
Your description of the whole province swapping bit and the observations of the algorithm match what I have seen. I believe you are right about the AI not understanding that the castle defenses do not prevent loss of the province (and therefore lots of money.) In fact, I see major province retention as an economic excercise. There is some layering of the strategic AI that is apparently missing. This would include the failure to do a defense check before launching an offensive. However, this points to another problem: the AI should build up to the assault. This requires multi-turn AI planning and preparation rather than the single turn calc it presently is inclined to do.
I can see this playing out as follows in a sample algorithm:
1. Strategic AI identifies province and/or faction that is a good target. (This is preceeded by step "zero" where agents, etc. are used to gather intelligence in depth about the factions and provinces involved to get a world/regional picture rather than an "identify a single target" approach that it now appears to take.)
2. AI determines if immediate attack is appropriate course, or if build up is required. (This includes offense and defense checks you mention. It also includes estimates of forces available following combat, likely loyalty of the province, etc. to avoid rebellion--something else we know is lacking in the current algorithm. It must also see reasonable chance of surviving determined counterattack.)
3. If build up is required, then AI must check finances and determine whether or not it can muster an invasion force in time (before going into the red.)
On the other hand, to keep the AI from becoming utterly predictable, occasional feeler type attacks (if already at war) or even the "leave some provinces poorly defended" style attacks (that we presently have) might also have a probability of being launched and be based on a "personality type".
Another thing that plays into the province swapping is the poor defensive choices of the AI. It rarely fights It abandons provinces far too easily and frequently when it would be better served by "bleeding" the attackers. Certainly it should be doing this in major upgraded provinces. This is exacerbated by the fact that the AI tends to keep "good runners", "weak defenders", "poor attackers" and the like on the payroll rather than disbanding them.
The key to the strategic actions still must be AI florins management, just like the human faces. The AI must do better at maximizing income and reducing expenses, while at the same time building up offensive armies, and improving troops. Things like trade become critical. When the AI faces a condition where it is running ever larger deficits then it has a new branch to select from: 1. Improve economics by reducing forces (peasants and spearmen be gone!http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif and/or 2. Desperation attacks against high value targets (also works to reduce forces/upkeep.) 3. Pinpoint attacks against neighbors to kill off king/or heirs so that remaining provinces become rebel and can be taken one by one to boost florins.
The florins management problem is obvious with the Danes' failure to take Sweden very early. I suspect this might be improved by adding more units to Denmark at the start so that capturing Sweden is a less demanding task (for the AI).
Galestrum
03-02-2003, 02:53
the vikings never took constantinople http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/tongue.gif i know what event you are referencing, but it is wrong, i just re read that event a few days ago http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif
and Khazar was effectively destroyed as a power before the game starts by the rus and byzants, although it would be cool to see some more minor factions in the east like you said http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif
Galestrum
03-02-2003, 03:05
I know this is about your mod, but i have been working on my own mod for quite sometime myself and perhaps can help you with some of my insights.
Regarding Byzantium, i removed all land connections to constantinople from turkey thus, land attacks from the east cannot happen, greatly reducing the chancees of the great city being lost and reflecting history as well.
I have also tied all unit production to castles instaed of buildings. For instance, all feudal units can be produced by a Castle4 (FSgts, Fmaa, hobilars etc), a Castle allows (archers, spearmen etc), A Castle 7 (Chiv Sgts, CMAA, etc), noble units req. some form of court or palace.
Town watches produce all the Levy/peasant type units that have poor morale (crossbows and militias among others).
I have been testing this for a few weeks and am pleased with the results, now the constant swapping of provinces doesnt dramatically harm the AI, as they can build a whole series of units with just the various levels of castles.
I have also increased the cost of castles to reflect the monetary investment of the building which are now useless, and to more accurately reflect the great cost of castles historically (castles were great monetary undertakings), in addition to increasing costs of church buidlings. so far so good.
regarding crusades, while i disagree with the massive increase of cost and time for crusades, i understand the problem that you are trying to address. I have made a post about the possibility of moving crusades between ports like agents do. If this can be done, it would solve the "loss of units/weakness" issue of crusades.
anyways good luck, modding can be a pain in the arse, i find myself modding more than playing cuz i had major problems with this game in its original form, hopefully soon ill get this done and play a game all the way thru http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif
take care http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smokin.gif
Red Harvest
03-02-2003, 07:19
Played around with crusade settings briefly following some of WesW's ideas and others. I've settled on the following mods for crusade units so far:
1. Crusade cost $2000. Felt it was too cheap at $1000, this seems more reasonable, but still do-able for the AI in Early.
2. Left build time at 4. Hurts too much to make it much longer since the main province is out of action for so long. I might try 6.
3. Cut crusade specific unit costs approximately in half except for "fanatics", just cut them about 25%. This gets the core crusade up to a reasonable number of units (matching the doubled crusade cost as well.) Note that my mod has foot knights buildable, so they are not on the crusader list (except that I think I'll make the Hospitaller foot knights into crusade only unit for *all* crusade factions so that crusades give foot knights and order foot.)
Only played with this a bit so far but it seems to make powerful crusades rather than impotent ones. One thing that is a problem with building strong crusades: there is no such boost being given to the Muslim factions for their Jihads. With a mod that gives crusades to Sicily, Hungary, Danes, and Poles, the poor Muslims would already have trouble simply due to sheer numbers of threats. If the crusades have new additional punch as well, then the Muslim armies are seriously outgunned in such a combination. This is something to consider for overall balance. I've left most factions as "non-crusaders" for this very reason.
Hamburglar
03-02-2003, 11:31
Could make Jihads a bigger deal - more expensive, more powerful.
Galestrum, it would be interesting to see what your crusader_unit_prod11 values are. Perhaps you would upload the results to the test area of the org? Severing the land bridge between Turkey and Constantinople has real merit, but it wouldn't have saved the Byz. in my current campaign, since they were overrun by the Hungarians (who in turn lost it to the Egyptians who had wiped out the Turks). Still, every little bit helps. I'm going to try this before my next campaign.
Red Harvest I would still like to see the modifications you made to early.txt to get rid of the Sea of Marmara problem (I assume you just changed the set_neighbors ID::Constantinople)? How did you avoid the error message problem that (I believe) DOC experienced? If you would please post them (just the changes obviously) I wouldn't have to work it out for myself http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/tongue.gif
http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/joker.gif
Wes is right that these types of changes won't really solve all the problems with the Byzantines. He may even be right that they will still lose Constantinople. But, I did notice in the pre-mod game that the Byz. were much more passive (I used to assume that the Orthodox_Stagnant behaviour setting had something to do with it). They often sat there like the Danes in early. This prevented them from becoming a major power, but they didn't lose Constantinople in the 1st 50 years either.
Jo_Beare
03-03-2003, 00:17
Haven't played 1.7, but did play 1.5 and 1.6 and enjoyed them very much. Went back to making my own mod, but I have been following some the concerns in the present thread.
Just a couple thoughts on the Byzantine problem. I moved up the rebellion rates for all provinces up to 3 and for capital provinces up to 6. I gave mosques, grand mosques, cathedrals, and churches a +60% for loyalty. I placed a church or mosque in every province and placed a cathedral or grand mosque in any capital province. These pretty much negate the high revolt risk as long as they are in place.
So if the Turks attack Trebizond early on with a small force it is likely that Byzantines will have a loyalist revolt there fairly quickly. It is even more so for Constantinople. The one problem is that once the church and cathedral is destroyed it may be somewhat difficult for the (AI)Byzantines to hold on to Constantinople until a new church is built.
I beefed up crusades by having bishops increase zeal instead of converting. With the large number of churches and bishops, zeal usually gets up to +80% within about 20 years. I also gave the crusading knights (-5) for christian peasants in the rebellion column in the crusaders_unit_prod11 file. I usually get crusades a little over 2000 in size, but about a third of them are knights. Makes it a little more challenging for the Muslim factions.
I decreased the farmland values by about 25% and increased the upgrade factor by 2(+40%, +80%, +120%, +160%). Along with this the time to impliment is longer but the cost is lower. The first upgrade is free and the second one is 500 florins. Inns, Bars, and Brothels all contribute money(20 florin) are all free to build. All coastal provinces have one item of trade except for capital provinces which have two. All inland provinces have three trade item except for capital provinces which have four. So this way if the player or the AI get into a financial bind it can spend some time trying to dig itself out of a hole. Naval support is reduced by 2/3 so that large navies won't drain the bank account the turn they sail out of their home waters.
I also changed castle build chain. I think a direct linear one makes more sense. Fort to fort+motte to fort+motte+bailey to keep... seems to be a more natural progression and eliminates leap frogging by going from fort to keep.
I reduced the cost to free for the first three levels of the castles(wood) and the build time to two for a fort. I just think that the garrison with the available tools could construct these structures in little time and at little or no cost.
Just a few thoughts that may help address these issues (Constantinople, Crusades, Desertification)
JoBeare
Hamburglar
03-03-2003, 00:46
I think a lot of those are really good ideas JoBeare
Some of those rebellion probabilities might be a little high? I think Portugal is 4, right? And I've NEVER seen the AI hold onto Portugal for very long before a massive revolt. Also it seems that the Russian faction always has a big problem in keeping all those steppe people in order. They usually fight their huge wars against the rebels and no one else. I guess the "Church Factor" could help it and with such high zeal maybe high piety governors might be best.
I definitely agree with the fort ideas. I think every province in the game should at least have a fort in it. It's such a pathetic structure and having it take 3 or 4 years to build really is a lot of time. I think I could build it with my father and brother in less than that time. Building a castle is a big deal but a dinky wooden building with a wall around it can be done in no time.
I agree with Galestrum when he said building units could be linked to castle development for most "basic" units. If having "Just" a castle would make it too easy to get things, a solution is to make units semi-castle linked.
For example, building a Keep gives you automatic access to Feudal Sergeants and Feudal Swordsmen if you have a swordsmith or spearmaker. A Castle will give you automatic access to Chiv Swordsmen and Chiv Sergeants if you have a swordsmith or spearmaker. No need for for the buildings to have swordsmith workshop, guild etc because the AI has a lot of trouble doing these.
All sorts of units could be linked to the castle. For example, a catapult requires a keep and siege engineer. A trebuchet requires a castle and siege engineer, and a mangonel requires a citadel and siege engineer. Same could be done with bowyer units - Crossbow units available with a Keep and Bowyer.
I can see powerful units like Knights being a little harder to get. For example, you'd need a Castle, an Armoruer, and a Horse Farmer for Feudal Knights. Chivalrics would require the same thing plus a Citadel. Late Era knights could require the same thing except a Fortress too.
I think this would be a MAJOR step against province desertification and I'm confident we will see the AI producing Chivalric units in large numbers, which we never saw before.
Letting the AI have good armies will really boost the challenge of the game. People say that lots of Expert games are challenging, but thats while fighting several countries at once and its "difficult" if you lose a few unimportant provinces and get them back eventually. I think a war against almost any single faction should be a REAL struggle - that if two countries went 2 on 1 against you it'd be VERY serious and EXTREMELY hard to win. People winning the game in the 1100's just shows how easy it is. You should have to FIGHT every step of the way and lose provinces QUITE a bit. (Although now it won;t be so devastating since the province won't lose 80 years of development)
Red Harvest
03-03-2003, 06:20
Cugel below is a list of the two mod changes I did for "No Marmara" and "Parallel Marmara". Not sure if this is everything, might have forgotten something.
Changed the following for No Marmara (be careful about tabs and order--kept tab counts the same as they had been for each line, meant adding a tab at end of line after Marmara was deleted in some instances.)
Worked on the first attempt...
SetNeighbours:: ID_CONSTANTINOPLE ID_BULGARIA ID_GREECE ID_NICAEA ID_TREBIZOND ID_AEGEAN_SEA ID_BLACK_SEA
SetNeighbours:: ID_AEGEAN_SEA ID_CONSTANTINOPLE ID_NICAEA ID_GREECE ID_BLACK_SEA ID_DODECANESE_SEA ID_SEA_CRETE ID_MIRTOON_SEA
SetNeighbours:: ID_BLACK_SEA ID_CRIMEA ID_KHAZAR ID_GEORGIA ID_TREBIZOND ID_CONSTANTINOPLE ID_BULGARIA ID_MOLDAVIA ID_KIEV ID_AEGEAN_SEA
Deleted Sea of Marmara "SetNeighbours" line.
Deleted Sea of Marmara "SetBorder" line.
Deleted Sea of Marmara "SetOrigin"
Changed Constantinople's port graphic as follows:
SetPort:: ID_CONSTANTINOPLE 22450 16700 6
Changed the following for "Parallel Marmara". Had to be careful about tab counts and order, took me two tries to get it to work.
SetNeighbours:: ID_CONSTANTINOPLE ID_BULGARIA ID_GREECE ID_NICAEA ID_TREBIZOND ID_AEGEAN_SEA ID_SEA_MARMARA ID_BLACK_SEA
SetNeighbours:: ID_AEGEAN_SEA ID_CONSTANTINOPLE ID_NICAEA ID_GREECE ID_BLACK_SEA ID_SEA_MARMARA ID_DODECANESE_SEA ID_SEA_CRETE ID_MIRTOON_SEA
SetNeighbours:: ID_SEA_MARMARA ID_CONSTANTINOPLE ID_BLACK_SEA ID_AEGEAN_SEA
SetNeighbours:: ID_BLACK_SEA ID_CRIMEA ID_KHAZAR ID_GEORGIA ID_TREBIZOND ID_CONSTANTINOPLE ID_BULGARIA ID_MOLDAVIA ID_KIEV ID_AEGEAN_SEA ID_SEA_MARMARA
Changed Constantinople's port graphic as follows:
SetPort:: ID_CONSTANTINOPLE 22450 16700 6
Thanks for posting in with your ideas, Galestrum and Jo Beare. This was one thing I hoped would happen with the Medmod threads- that other modders would start following them and offering their own ideas and suggestions. I know the entire Dungeon forum is dedicated to modding, but you notice that most all the threads are either about very basic stuff from beginners, or dedicated to very, for me, advanced graphics problems dealing with making new maps and so-forth.
There are not many threads which deal with making the current game more enjoyable *and* which continue to follow up on the actual results of the things proposed in them. Red Harvest and Galestrum both have chimed in with excellent ideas that I may have never thought of, and I assume that they were following the thread because they had gained some insight from my work. This is what you have to have in order to make real progress with the game, unless you want to spend years working in isolation (and there are people who do just that. I occasionally get emails from them. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif) There is nothing wrong with this, if it is primarily a mental exercise for you, but everyone else is going to move on to the next new thing before long.
Red, I want to second the request to post your work on the Sea of Marmara and the *demolition* of the medieval causeway over the Bosporus. (Is that the right name for the strait? I knew more of this stuff 10 yrs ago.) If you would make a similar bypass of the Adriatic for us it might save one of us from messing up if we attempt to make our own bypass.
Earlier tonight I thought about setting the map border from Nicaea and Trebizond to Constan to Waterway, which would have the Byzants defending a bridge crossing. This wouldn't keep them from retreating to the castle, but it might help some.
Btw, I think that the reason the Byzants don't keep a ship in Marmara, like the Italians in the Adriatic, and why ships cluster around Sicily and in the North Sea, is because their trade settings only give emphasis to the trade potential of foreign ports, and place none on their own.
The settings place a large value on defending one's shores, so maybe the programmers didn't think it was necessary, but as we can see, in protected seas this leads to a breakdown in the chain.
The settings also seem to place a significant default value on seas which normally have no land contact, so maybe the AIs will continue to place ships in the Ionian Sea even if provinces connect to it.
Thanks Jo Beare, for taking the time to post with your results. I know how long it takes to make these things. The idea of including knights in the peasant_revolt list is a good one. I went through last night and drastically lowered the setting for peasants, and increased it for some of the militia troops to try and get the same result. I didn't know that a value of -5 would produce so many knights. I will be sure and include this in my mod, too.
Your mods to produce income seem to work well for you, but those and the other building changes would seem to fundamentally alter the way the game is played, and I am trying to stay away from that. You might want to try out the Medmod's system, which I believe has largely succeeded in fixing the AI money shortage in a way which in effect takes the shackles off the AI that had been placed on it by CA's play-testers.
In my recent games, I don't remember once receiving messages that belong to the poverty-stricken behavioral type when negotiating alliances, and I have also begun seeing AI kings with the Builder virtue. These let me know that 1) the AIs aren't in poverty any more, and 2) they are using the new wealth to improve their provinces. There is the added bonus that this new wealth is primarily brought in by the larger AI navies, which bring that element of the game up to where it should be.
I would like to hear from everyone else regarding the alliance messages, which you sometimes receive even if the alliance offer is declined.
Ok, I just checked, and apparently I did not include the Changes.txt in the mod, which contains the personality responses. I remember making them weeks ago, apparently with the intention of seeing if they worked before putting them in the mod, and then of course I forgot about that part and assumed that I had put them in the mod immediately.
Anyway, here are some of the messages for some of the personality types. For the Poverty ones, each message is divided by a comma, and I think I left one half of each message practically untouched, so you should be able to recognise them. This file is the Changes.txt, located in the Loc/Eng folder.
//POVERTY_STRICKEN
["aa2t_0_0_xzy"]
{"They say even though they are monetarily poor, with your support they will crush their enemies. "}
["aa2t_0_1_xzy"]
{"They suggest that you immediately take action to crush our mutual enemies, as they are too poor to field a large army. "}
["aa2t_0_2_xzy"]
{"They strongly suggest that you attack our mutual enemies forthwith, as their small economy is struggling. "}
//DESPERATE_DEFENCE
["aa2t_1_0_xzy"]
{"They say that the survival of their realm depends upon your support against our mutual enemies. "}
["aa2t_1_1_xzy"]
{"They suggest that together we can survive the current threat and defeat our mutual enemies. "}
["aa2t_1_2_xzy"]
{"They strongly suggest that you attack our mutual enemies forthwith. Their people will be forever in your debt."}
//CATHOLIC_EXPANSIONIST
["aa2t_2_0_xzy"]
{"They advise that with God on our side both our nations can crush all before us and achieve great glory. "}
["aa2t_2_1_xzy"]
{"They strongly advise that you keep to the terms of the alliance. "}
["aa2t_2_2_xzy"]
{"They warn that breaking the alliance will result in swift and determined retribution. "}
//CATHOLIC_NAVAL_EXPANSIONIST
["aa2t_3_0_xzy"]
{"They hope that together we can steadily and relentlessly grind down our enemies into eventual defeat. "}
["aa2t_3_1_xzy"]
{"They suggest that we marshal our forces and steadily advance against our common foes. "}
["aa2t_3_2_xzy"]
{"They ask that you not take unnecessary risks and give our mutual enemies any opportunity to resist our unrelenting assault. "}
//CATHOLIC_TRADER
["aa2t_4_0_xzy"]
{"They suggest that the maintenance of large garrisons is wasteful, and we should work to build and develop our trade links. "}
["aa2t_4_1_xzy"]
{"They hope that the alliance will mean an expansion of trading links, and they encourages you to build more ports. Wealth begets might. "}
["aa2t_4_2_xzy"]
{"They suggest that to strengthen the alliance we build up mutual trading links and develop more ports. That will strengthen the incentive for peace. "}
//CATHOLIC_CRUSADER_TRADER
["aa2t_5_0_xzy"]
{"They suggest we should work to build and develop our trade links. Increased wealth will allow us to go forth and do God's work. "}
["aa2t_5_1_xzy"]
{"They hope that the alliance will mean an expansion of trading links, and they encourage you to build more ports. The income will make our armies unbeatable. "}
["aa2t_5_2_xzy"]
{"They suggest that we build up mutual trading links and develop more ports. That will strengthen the alliance and allow us to crush our enemies. "}
I would also like you guys to check out the AI leaders in a game that is 30 or 40 turns old, and see if they have the Builder virtue. I don't remember seeing this in unmodded games, but I am seeing it now with the Medmod.
For those of you who aren't registered, just send me a short email. Any info is helpful.
Also anything about how naval combat seems to you guys. I play on expert, so maybe that has something to do with the outcomes, I don't know.
Back to the other posts: I don't think it is a good idea to try and strengthen Crusades through higher zeal. Remember that deserting troops simply disappear, and don't go back to their original owners or anything. Increasing zeal will indeed strengthen crusades, but it will also cause more desertions, which weaken all the provinces they pass through. This is one reason, though correct me if I am wrong, that I don't think Jihads necessarily need to be strengthened in response. More and stronger crusades are also accompanyied by more desertion, which weaken the Catholic factions. As long as you don't make crusades really cheap compared to the troops they produce, I think the trade-off is about equal.
I went ahead last night and lowered the cost of the crusading units from 25 to 20 percent of their normal production cost, but this is as far as I plan to go, without increasing the cost of the crusades as well. When coupled with moving them out of the capital province, this should make them worth building even for the human.
I finally got finished with altering the units text last night. (don't even ask how many hours that took) I will do some play-testing after I finish this post.
One thing I wanted to mention is that it dawned on me while looking through the buildings text that a lot of the most elite units would be getting one or more valour bonuses because they required level 4 buildings to produce. This may have been why their offensive stats didn't go up like it seemed to me they should.
So, I went through and made a list of the other things that could be bonuses besides valour, and came up with several from other structures- armour, morale, weapons, and discipline. Therefore I substituted one of these for the valour bonus, with aims towards areas certain unit types were deficient in. I gave a 2 pt morale bonus to level 4 town watches, bowyers and gunsmiths, a 1 pt weapon bonus to spearmakers and swordsmiths, and 1 level to discipline for horse breeders.
I had already gone ahead and lowered the building requirements for some of the latest units so that only Hashishin require a level 4 swordsmith, and only they and the late era knights require even a fortress among regular troops. (So, you can see that your posts can sometimes have an influence on my thinking even if I disagree with you at first.)
Then, I did something that I think everyone will agree with- I added a valour bonus to Military Academies for Christian factions, and a 1pt weapon bonus to the Muslim factions. (They both keep the discipline bonus.) This should make another irrelevant building mean something.
All of this has turned into another major update to the mod, as I made some smaller changes that I have not mentioned yet. When I implement the sea changes Red has been working on and tidied things up, I will post it in the test section.
And let's try and get some feedback from some of you that normally don't post. It's something that you can do in a few minutes during a lunch break or whatever. We keep getting closer to perfecting the game, that which is within our limits anyway. If you notice, the topics have been changing from fixing things to optimizing them, so hopefully we can get them done by 1.9 anyway.;)
Hamburglar
03-04-2003, 00:56
Another weird request by Hamburglar....
Would it be possible to have the Swiss or Burgundians as playable factions in the late era?
I know the Burgundians played a pretty big role in the 100 years war, so they'd be kind of cool to see.
Quote[/b] ]Another weird request by Hamburglar....
Would it be possible to have the Swiss or Burgundians as playable factions in the late era?
I know the Burgundians played a pretty big role in the 100 years war, so they'd be kind of cool to see.
If someone would post links or a summary of the history of Burgundy in the medieval period, I would like to read it. I just run across bits and pieces about them.
In the maps, it seems that a very large portion of eastern France was known as Burgundy, but it was split between the French, HRE and maybe the Italians. The maps also don't list any of it as being independent, but as HB said, they played a big role in the 100 yrs. war.
In the made-for-TV special on Joan of Arc a couple years ago, it talked about the leader of Burgundy, I believe, as the third player in that war. I think they were allied with the English at one point. When I watched the movie, I thought they were referring to Bordeaux and the Eleanor of Aquitaine connection, but I guess I was wrong. (My historical knowledge of this era is better than most people's, but obviously not as good as many of the guys who frequent here, especially the Englishmen.)
Btw, I just finished reviewing the posts made by Action and HB in the 1.8 thread, and they are just amazing. I have never been so excited about the mod as I am now. Be sure and get Action's sceeen captures, as they give you an awesome view of the ebb and flow of the game. Factions that never do anything normally rise to major powers at various points, and traditional powerhouses never get out of the gate.
And HB's game had a totally different outcome than Action's, with the HRE and Byzants standing dominant at the end When was the last time you read about that
There are still a few things to be worked out, and I have not heard from anyone on unit balance yet, which was the main reason I posted it as a beta, but the first news is just awesome to me.
Wes,
Just wanted to say that I have really been enjoying the medmod. my main concern with the game has been with the lack of ai agression. While not addressed exactly, your fix of the ai wealth has helped out quite a bit.
On a side note, i finally built my first medmod 1.71 crusade, and was excited to do some holy ass kicking on the almohads, and then the stinking italians killed the pope so sad.
Hamburglar
03-05-2003, 19:36
Here's a map of Burgundy's territory. Apparently they owned Friesland or something.
http://www.ucalgary.ca/HIST/tutor/imagemid/france1429large.jpg
Some history
http://www.visitbelgium.com/bxhis03.htm
http://www.dragonbear.com/burgundy.html
I plan on posting the 1.81 public release version of the mod sometime tomorrow.
I will be perhaps a bigger update than the 1.7 version, but several of the changes actually bring the mod back to the original CA settings, like reverting the cavalry speeds back to normal. I have also largely deleted the changes to unit stats I made in the 1.80 beta, when it became clear that I had taken the wrong approach.
There a some other small changes I made that had a side-effect of reverting other mod changes back to the original, as in my shuffling of Muslim medium cavalry which resulted in Armenian Heavy Cavalry once again becoming a relatively heavy Turkish-only unit.
I think we have solved a few more major game-play issues regarding AI trade, the performance of the Golden Horde and the strategic decisions of the Byzantines. I have also made a number of changes in the startpos files that should help Aragon and the Papacy, and a couple of surprises that I mentioned in the beta thread.
Thanks to Simon I discovered the original spreadsheets CA created to develop the units text (better late than never, I suppose), and I have spent the last day or two analyzing it and comparing it to my system. Overall I think the two compared very well, being exactly the same in some instances, and similar in techniques most everywhere else. I will include a modified version of this file which explains my modifications in terms of CA's original values, with additional notes on things I developed that are not in CA's formulas. All of this is contained in comments I made in the Tables page. I have also made changes to the Unit def page to show individual changes I made to units. If some of my changes seemed to come out of left field in the past, perhaps seeing them expressed this way will help you understand my reasoning better.
The entire original document was too large to include in the mod, but I will post it soon at my webpage, since you need to have the original to compare to mine.
Bear in mind that my comments were meant to give an *idea* of my thoughts, so the calcuated results in the Summary page don't match exactly to the Medmod stats' sheet. I did them to show what I *would* have done if I had used CA's file as the starting point for my modifications.
Also note that I did not examine every unit in the Unit def page to match to the changes in the Medmod. Again I was mostly seeing how my thoughts translated using CA's formulas, and giving me another way of illustrating my intentions to you.
As far as the update, I think the only real points of potential controversy lie in some of the changes I made to the projectile stats and to unit ammo. I will try and go into detail when I post the update thread.
In the meantime, if you would read the 1.8 beta thread, I listed in detail many of the changes included in the public release version and the reasoning behind them.
vBulletin® v3.7.1, Copyright ©2000-2025, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.