05-22-2003, 19:15
Wanted to say hi to everyone. I have been playing the MTW for a long time and have checkout the various mods available. I also go VMT as soon as it was released. I have also done some mods myself but have not given them to the community as of yet.
I am going to give a brain dump of what I have learned I would like to hear comments and feed back ect. This is more then likly going to be long.:D
Rebellions:
I never seem to have any problems pre-patch or post-patch with rebellions. I leave the tax rate at very low till I have towers and border forts and several militia upgrades around 5-7 years or so. I also leave what I term an occupation army. My occupation armies are made up of 3 spearmen type and 3 archers. This keeps the cost low but gives me a nice speed bump if I get attacked.
Special units:
I use spies defensively at first till I have all the neutrals that are with in striking distants. Then I might use them against other catholics. I use the spies to remove disloyal generals and sometimes unwanted heirs. I noticed that you get valor for each revolt your spies set off. So if you have ten of them in one province then all of them get a valor promotion. I discovered a cheesy way of training up assassians as well. They can kill each other. So if you have one try and kill another one ect... Cheesy but now with the new tavern upgrades needless imho. I use priest as my principle spies in other territories. This helps to jump start the conversion to which ever religion I am and gives me much needed intel on the various factions. Plus it is no big loss if an assassin kills a priest. I also read where someone else in the forums said they used like 10+ of them togeather. I tried this and it works pretty good. Each priest seems to give you about 2% per turn. Cardinals are better at 5%. I use princesses exclusively for my own generals to raise thier loyalty. Each married general gets 2 shields for the marriage. And when your king dies thier loyalty doesn't change. Now with the new generals dieing of old age thing this kinda sucks. As you lose the marriage. I have found a that generals only seem to die if they are in charge of the army btw so if you place them in the stack with a better general you only seem to lose the guy in charge. Need to test this some more to be certain. Inquistors are kinda fun. You can even use them on your own people to strenghten their piety Just make sure the percentage is very low. I also use them in high loyalty territories to get the zeal down so crusades that march through get very few of my men. Crusades you either love them or hate them or both. If your zeal is low and the peity of your generals are low then they take less of your forces. So one of my favorite things to do is to make a merc army that I have follow the crusade if it is moving through my territory. I then move my other armies out of the way. So this way the territory is protected by the crusade and the mercs but my own armies are safe from the crusade. This assumes my money is good. If it is an internal territory then I will just move the occupation army out till the crusade is gone. If you use crusades to suck out the armies of your victims..err allies then send in some inquisitors first. I found that if you move the inquisitor every turn it is less likely to start an inquistion and just bring the zeal up.
Armies:
I tend to make a pretty standard army set up regardless of which faction I play. 4 spear types 4 archers 4 med cav or nobles 4 heavy cav or royals. This gives me just under the 960 men limit ( does anyone else think the limit should be 16 units not the number of men? ) but give you a very flexiable and powerful army. The med cav can be changed out to various faction specific units when you need or want. I stay away from crossbowmen just a personal thing but I find that they shoot way to slow. I can decimate any crossbow men with just regular archers in no time. I pretty much use my spearmen to grab the enemy by the nose and then use the cavalry to kick them in the butt. Pretty standard tactics historically. I find most swordsmen types to be useless when it comes to cavalry. Altho in the viking scenario this is reversed. Axemen and vikings themselves are very useful in the early games and with armor and weapon upgrades can still be useful in the high game as well. With the new siege results/attrition I have added a siege army to the mix this is made up of units that are outdated and then 4 catapults. I use these to assualt the forts.
Modding:
I have found this to be the easiest game to mod that I have ever run across. The new names folder you get with VTW is great for changing kings and such. Path to the file is campmap\names\DEFAULT_HEROS.TXT
The listing looks like so:
//name no.c d p a portrait vnv
The comments tell you how to change the name. no is the roman number after the name c is command d is dread p peity a is accumen portrait refers to the a portrait number or -1 for a random one. vnv is vice or virtue.
If you try and add a name in this file or change one you have to change it in loc\eng\changes.txt as well. Just a little thing that is not mentioned. So you can change kings around if you don't aggree with TW's evaluation of that king. I have tried to add more then one vice or virtue but so far no luck. I have tried () , and just a tab put it doesn't take more then one. Also if you have to make sure the second field no. matches for the names such as henry I - henry V or it messes up on you.
As for mods to play I like Wes'es mod. Or I use one I have come up with myself. I take and set every faction to one province and balance out the starting forces for each faction. Makes for a fun and intresting game. Don't know if any of you would be intrested in it but if you are I can post the file I use in the downloads here on totalwar.org.
Well that is more then I thought I was going to say. Hopefully some folks find it useful. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif
I am going to give a brain dump of what I have learned I would like to hear comments and feed back ect. This is more then likly going to be long.:D
Rebellions:
I never seem to have any problems pre-patch or post-patch with rebellions. I leave the tax rate at very low till I have towers and border forts and several militia upgrades around 5-7 years or so. I also leave what I term an occupation army. My occupation armies are made up of 3 spearmen type and 3 archers. This keeps the cost low but gives me a nice speed bump if I get attacked.
Special units:
I use spies defensively at first till I have all the neutrals that are with in striking distants. Then I might use them against other catholics. I use the spies to remove disloyal generals and sometimes unwanted heirs. I noticed that you get valor for each revolt your spies set off. So if you have ten of them in one province then all of them get a valor promotion. I discovered a cheesy way of training up assassians as well. They can kill each other. So if you have one try and kill another one ect... Cheesy but now with the new tavern upgrades needless imho. I use priest as my principle spies in other territories. This helps to jump start the conversion to which ever religion I am and gives me much needed intel on the various factions. Plus it is no big loss if an assassin kills a priest. I also read where someone else in the forums said they used like 10+ of them togeather. I tried this and it works pretty good. Each priest seems to give you about 2% per turn. Cardinals are better at 5%. I use princesses exclusively for my own generals to raise thier loyalty. Each married general gets 2 shields for the marriage. And when your king dies thier loyalty doesn't change. Now with the new generals dieing of old age thing this kinda sucks. As you lose the marriage. I have found a that generals only seem to die if they are in charge of the army btw so if you place them in the stack with a better general you only seem to lose the guy in charge. Need to test this some more to be certain. Inquistors are kinda fun. You can even use them on your own people to strenghten their piety Just make sure the percentage is very low. I also use them in high loyalty territories to get the zeal down so crusades that march through get very few of my men. Crusades you either love them or hate them or both. If your zeal is low and the peity of your generals are low then they take less of your forces. So one of my favorite things to do is to make a merc army that I have follow the crusade if it is moving through my territory. I then move my other armies out of the way. So this way the territory is protected by the crusade and the mercs but my own armies are safe from the crusade. This assumes my money is good. If it is an internal territory then I will just move the occupation army out till the crusade is gone. If you use crusades to suck out the armies of your victims..err allies then send in some inquisitors first. I found that if you move the inquisitor every turn it is less likely to start an inquistion and just bring the zeal up.
Armies:
I tend to make a pretty standard army set up regardless of which faction I play. 4 spear types 4 archers 4 med cav or nobles 4 heavy cav or royals. This gives me just under the 960 men limit ( does anyone else think the limit should be 16 units not the number of men? ) but give you a very flexiable and powerful army. The med cav can be changed out to various faction specific units when you need or want. I stay away from crossbowmen just a personal thing but I find that they shoot way to slow. I can decimate any crossbow men with just regular archers in no time. I pretty much use my spearmen to grab the enemy by the nose and then use the cavalry to kick them in the butt. Pretty standard tactics historically. I find most swordsmen types to be useless when it comes to cavalry. Altho in the viking scenario this is reversed. Axemen and vikings themselves are very useful in the early games and with armor and weapon upgrades can still be useful in the high game as well. With the new siege results/attrition I have added a siege army to the mix this is made up of units that are outdated and then 4 catapults. I use these to assualt the forts.
Modding:
I have found this to be the easiest game to mod that I have ever run across. The new names folder you get with VTW is great for changing kings and such. Path to the file is campmap\names\DEFAULT_HEROS.TXT
The listing looks like so:
//name no.c d p a portrait vnv
The comments tell you how to change the name. no is the roman number after the name c is command d is dread p peity a is accumen portrait refers to the a portrait number or -1 for a random one. vnv is vice or virtue.
If you try and add a name in this file or change one you have to change it in loc\eng\changes.txt as well. Just a little thing that is not mentioned. So you can change kings around if you don't aggree with TW's evaluation of that king. I have tried to add more then one vice or virtue but so far no luck. I have tried () , and just a tab put it doesn't take more then one. Also if you have to make sure the second field no. matches for the names such as henry I - henry V or it messes up on you.
As for mods to play I like Wes'es mod. Or I use one I have come up with myself. I take and set every faction to one province and balance out the starting forces for each faction. Makes for a fun and intresting game. Don't know if any of you would be intrested in it but if you are I can post the file I use in the downloads here on totalwar.org.
Well that is more then I thought I was going to say. Hopefully some folks find it useful. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif