Playing multiplayer campaigns via hotseat method

Hi,

I just wanted to share a method that my friend an I used to play medieval 2 TW multiplayer campaigns using the well known hotseat technique.

So the only problem with this kind of mp was the human vs. human battles which we solved by reconstructing them in custom battles.

We would play the campaign normally and when our armies clashed we would write down our numbers, troops region and other information and would later copy paste that information in a custom battle we would then play...write down losses ect. and submit changes in the campaign map...hand over regions and disband the units that were "killed" in the battle or siege...

Hopefully, we will do the same thing once EB2 comes out.

I hope someone finds this useful.

Best regards,

Mario

And what do you do with the remaining troops?

For example 45 of the 90 survived, what do you do with that unit?

It is interesting approach but would take very long in any HS with more than 2 players. I could see doing it for major battles but every single battle?

afaik the EB team know of the possibility and are acceptive towards it - thus It will probably be included.

and I'm sure a lot of people would like to play this way, I've heard this desire quite some time now.

Its not a big issue if you understand the tactical difference in playing hotseat versus regular campaign. In regular campaign you can play any battle normally, but in hotseat you can only control battles you initiate, this drastically changes the manner in which you play the campaign, and in general favours an aggressive player.

If anything I'd play the custom battle as you two do, but instead of simply disbanding lost units and such I'd just have whoever won the custom battle be made to automatically win via auto-resolve by giving the winner the "automatic auto-resolve win" console code. This way a realistic amount of attrition would still be applied to each of the individual units, experience could still be accrued for the surviving soldiers, and generals would still gain any battle won traits. Of course the custom battles themselves would be entirely unable to represent the respective generals all that accurately. Since any ancillaries, traits, and/or attributes would be entirely unaccounted for, that would make using battle hardened veteran generals in player vs player conflict a complete waste when you could simply send any random family member regardless of their ability to lead men into battle.

Moral bonus would still work battles though?

I saw some custom battles done in HS where the player bringing either FL, Heir, or a 10 star command general would get extra points to spend to represent those things. Anything other than those 3 got nothing special. So if you work to build up a 10 star general or commit your Heir and FL to battles you get a slight bonus since not only do FL and Heir have larger BG but they also tend to get nice traits at least with how most people play. I've just never heard of a HS that played out every single battle. The ones that use custom battles that I have seen are usually only battles between nearly full stack armies.

Well he is my next door neighbor and when we played it we were usually in the same room, also after a couple of such battles we got very skilled and fast at it so we did not really lose that much time.
As for the details, we do everything we can to represent losses as accurate as possible in the campaign.
As for general stars and traits, we represent it by adding experience or equipment.

At the peak of our gaming there were four of us and we played the best game of our lives...but that was a long time ago so I really can't wait to try this with EB2.
EB is much much better than M2TW so I cannot even imagine what it would be like to have human vs human wars over the boot of Italy again, fighting for river crosses, mountain passes and bridges or trying to save an allied fort near my trade capital from an combined attack by two human players...but this time in EB2!