My Final Mod - bringing it altogether

Well met...I have been reading and following the forums since STW but never got too involved or posted until RTW 1.1. RTW had so much potential for me that I decided to start learning how to adjust the game to the way I wanted it. I have now got it to 99% of perfect for me and wanted to share this. Keep in mind that I am no modder, I just learned from the forums and tested. Here is my list. I will offer details as people show interest. I will list my modded changes, then at the end I will share my personal rules that make the game much more challenging. Note: Not everyone will be happy with my way, it will depend on play style, but I wanted to try and show how I brought it altogether.

1. RTW 1.2
2. More Cities Mod by UCMJ (look for it in the mods section here at the guild)
(I cant praise this mod enough, it changes the whole game to a much greater challenge, AI builds up faster, there are less rebels as there is less open space between cities (too many rebels is a hassle in my opinion), and more AI Navies. It works well with dearmad’s building file. The map is surprising and interesting. Yet it doesn’t alter the game in any other significant way, it was just designed to give you more. Just be aware that when you use this, you have to go back to opening up the historical battle screen before starting a new campaign for time limit to be disabled (some bug with provincial campaign). TILN no longer works with 1.2 files.
3. Dearmad’s Building File with modifications. I took out all wardog recruitable lines from all buildings. Took out screeching women recruitable. Decided to leave druids in. (For those not familiar with Dearmad’s fine work, it only allows building of units at the level of building you have. In other words, if you build a city barracks, you can’t recruit peasants or hoplite militia any more. This greatly helps the AI use their better units. Especially in the end game.
4. Modded my units file by adding:
1 to all Armor ratings for all infantry and foot archer units that already had Armor under 10. This did tweak archer power some and I can notice it in game.

I added 8 to the moral of all units (except siege engines) that had under 10. 10 or over I added 5. 15 or over I added 3. This slowed down routing and chain routing to the degree that I wanted it. I have tried many other things, hps, weapon speed, etc. but this was all I needed in the end and I seem to have struck a fine balance for the length of the battle (BTW, messing with hps is a tricky business, it is very easy to unbalance the units in my opinion). Adding 2 to the armor ratings is not extreme, but the AI uses so few archer units already that I did not want to nerf them too much.

I reduced the cost and upkeep of all foot archer units and naval units. I am not going to list the exact prices, but if you lower the archer prices so that they are 10 or 20 cheaper than an infantry unit of same level, it seems to encourage the AI to make more of them. Naval units, well this took some experimentation, for example, my basic bireme is 75 upkeep. The AI in my current game pumps out navies but not like in 1.1. In addition, the more cities mod gives a lot more starting naval power to the AI.

There are other things you could do here, I further customized by making falxmen buildable by greek_cities, and adding that to the blacksmith series of buildings in my export building file (I know this is not historic, but it gave a little more variety to my game, and showed me that I could do it). A good rule of thumb is to keep your changes simple and small. Test it, and change again to fit your likes. Enough on units.

5.Traits. I simply reversed the greater than sign on the scarred trait and changed the hps ratio to 0.7. There is a great thread on the mechanics of this, but this is all it took for me, I have yet to get a scarface and that is good enough for me. All bad farmer and bad trader traits (and negative tax man) have been reduced for me again by either switching signs or lowering the random chance to 1 or 5. I still get negative traits, but they are showing up few and far between. I can now leave my governors in cities without being paranoid about them. (That was for you frogbeastegg…). I would be glad to email you a copy of my text files, but please don’t ask me to spell out every line exactly or get in a technical discussion as I will not do it. It just takes some testing and messing around after reading everything you can on the forums.

Other misc. things. I discovered how to change names of cities in the regions and settlements text file (the one associated with the campaign. Again, not very specific, but it can be done. You can even roleplay and name certain cities that you know you want to take after yourself! I do not recommend changing region names, as there are numerous things that seem to be attached to them).

Things I tried to do that did not work: I tried to change the names of named characters in the desc stat text. This crashed the game no matter how I tried to back it up in other files. Realizing that this is supposed to be a somewhat historical game, I still would have liked to see the in-game ability to change city names and character names/portraits. This did happen in history and would have added more of a roleplaying and personal element to the game.

I tried to adjust the music files so that I could mix up the mp3 files a little, I realy like the roman music set. But there was only one text file I could find that allowed me to do that (desc sound music) and it just didn’t take. But this is minor.

I think that is enough for the modding part. Perhaps more later, but there are many others who have much more detailed descriptions of what they have done. I am very happy with my game now, and it is enough.

Personal preferences: (there are plenty of other threads where this topic is discussed in depth, I will be brief)

I play VH/VH. It is harder. See other threads for in depth discussion.
I don’t reload. Ever (unless the game or computer crashes).
I only use archers for city defense (the exception being the early game, where in my mod you have to use what you can to survive.) I do use peltasts. Any massing of archers ruins the game for me, as I can easily take over the world with a pack of those arrow guys. Please, no tears, this is just the way it is for me (btw, this is historical, the mass use of the longbow and crossbow, in a general sense, was the demise of the armored knight and feudal warfare).
I let routers go. Hitting end game instead of continue to kill everyone who surrenders allows the AI to do what you do, retrain. See other threads for in depth discussion.
I don’t bribe anyone except rebels, spies or assassins.
I don’t exploit the corner of the battle map. I do exploit woods and ambushing.
I try every faction two ways. First I play them as historical as I can. The second time, I go crazy and go total alternative history, for example, try transplanting the greeks to Britain or Iberia.
Fog of war on. I self restrict my camera and never peak into a city’s defense during a siege unless I had a spy in that city.

This is just a partial list, these methods have made the game very challenging/interesting.

Conclusion. Many posters have been a great help to me, just a few: frogbeastegg, redharvest, bob the insane, pode, dearmad, and many others. Especially the froggy lady, who has put numerous hours of her life into the forums and her excellent guides.

My intent was for a general narrative of my version. Perhaps others can link to various threads that discuss some of the changes I made. As I stated before, I will not be able to get very technical, but I know others will. That’s it.

Moderators: Please place this where you feel it needs to go, I placed it here because I see so many searching for answers in this part of the forum. Keep up the good work!

May your lines be straight and your victories decisive!

-MorgTzu :bow: ~;)

I tend to mod my version of the game to suit my gaming preference too. I've been keen on getting some kind of 3rd party mod that gives more settlements.

With the More Cities mod, does it perchance add some settlements between Tripolitania and Libya? I believe the massive gap between Lepcis Magna and Siwa gives the AI a bit of a headache. The AI is loathe to move across the borders. And even if one faction has Lepcis Magna and Cyrene, they probably won't move units back and forth because it means crossing over another faction's boundaries. After studying the game with fog of war off, I believe another couple of settlements at the bottom of the map so there is less open space will improve the AI's chances of expansion and conflict. In fact the AI is suspect in all regions where there is masses of open space.

:book: At proffessor, I do remember more cities in libya in the more cities mod...not sure of details as I dont play down there much. I spent hours looking at the more cities map on fow off...very interesting.

I wanted to add that for those who have not yet figured out how to modify your text files and for those who want to know more, there is an excellent work entitled Documentation of files BY Duke John. It is in RTW Modifications / Guides, Tutorials, and Tools.

-MorgTzu :bow:

I hope you'll be able to enjoy the game after all the trouble you went through.
I hate to sound pessimistic, but I also did numerous changes where I felt the game was finally getting the right feeling. However, after playing a bit like that, I realised that the "drop siege upon reload" bug essentialy ended up ruining all my effort. I even tried to leave the game on for a couple of days, but then it's too much like torture - it feels like I just *have* to play it then, which sucks. Despite all the hours spent on fixes and tweaks, there's nothing I can do to make the game at least dynamic if nothing else. The "kings die at 56" bug was a picnic compared to this.
So, all in all, I wish you luck, but I think that the game cannot be saved in its present (sad) state.

Cheers,

Messing with HP weakens phalanx because they need the first blow vs cavalry. i also modded the game my mod is SRTW but. i'll wait for EB and RTR so i can add some xtra skins. most things you did i also did, but the restricting buildings to the new availeble unit is stupid cause you'll end up building URBAN COHORTS only and that will make you the absolute power on the battlefield.