The MTW challenge thread.
A challenge is always good to have with any game, as that can make a monotonous moment, become a great experience, even if the challenge is self made.
That brings me to the point of this thread, which I hope will have a decent run, as I'm sure it was either done before, there's gonna be little interest in it, or not a lot of ideas going about, but that's enough about crying about things that may not happen. I wanted to have a thread, that not only had us telling tales of things we did to make the game more fun, but to put challenges forward for other players to try, and then tell us how they did.
The best way I can put this is, let's say "You" are playing as the Turks, well you might make it more of a challenge by never using "unit x" whatever it maybe, it could be peasants, or JHI. Or let's say you haven't tried the "challenge" yourself, but you have the idea of going as the Hun's and never making your king/princes fight unless they are attacked.
Well I hope I was clear, and if not just tell me and I try to be clearer. Oh and as something I've done to add a new level hardness, I did a game as the HRE, and limited what I could make from sea trade to no more 1500 florins.
Well that's my idea, hopefully it'll have a half decent run before it gets forgotten.
Re: The MTW challenge thread.
Good idea for a thread, but why not extend it to simple mods to the game in order to make it more challenging??
For example you can mod peasants out altogether to prevent the AI from creating spam armies full of them or you can resrict them to being only trainable via the VI muster field.
Another way you can make the game more difficult is to mod out anything that you can do that the AI can't. These include Inns and Mercenaries and Dismounts.
There are also things that you can exploit all too readily that the AI can't. Provincial valour bonuses to Assassins or Grand/Inquisitors for example. These can be removed easily.
You can also reduce the trade income of trade goods to get rid of the huge trade bloat problem and remove the inland trade goods from the map altogether as they're of no real benefit in MTW where there is only sea trade anyway (the "local trade" you see is simply the value of one trading transaction per year that the province generates within itself, it is not trade with neighbouring provinces over land). Trade income should be balanced so that it covers small scale ship support but gives a small profit.
In terms of restricting yourself without modding I've found that you can often use common sense rules:
1) Instead of taking a huge overkill force into a battle against a weaker foe, just take enough to do the job. Regard such battles as "training".
2) Don't attack unless attacked
3) Don't assassinate your own generals/heirs, only try them for treason with spies if their loyalty is pitifully low.
4) Don't send generals/heirs on suicide missions to get rid of them.
5) If you must use inquisitors limit yourself to one GI and two Inquisitors only and no more.
6) In battles don't blatently try to shoot out the AI general.
7) In battles, no edge camping.
8) Try to put together realistic and balanced combined arms forces. No large armies full of uber units such as 10 units of Viking Huscarles. Try to defeat the enemy through smart maneouvering ambushes height advantage and morale destruction rather than brute force bumrush.
9) Absolutely no executing of prisoners on the field - the AI doesn't do this to you! Take your chances and you may find that the outcome is better overall, with the enemy having lost the battle and having to pay the ransom for a huge mob of disloyal men. Next turn it could be a civil war for him.
10) No breaking of alliances. Try to remain true to your allies and grin and bear it even if you know they're building up a force on your borders and are preparing to stab you in the back next year.
That's it for now, I may think of more.
:bow:
Re: The MTW challenge thread.
Thanks Caravel, I completely forgot about the idea of self modding, which can be somewhat easy if you know what your doing, and if you can follow direction well.
Oh and I got one that tho I haven't done, sounds fun, if you're playing a faction with camel units, make them your only cav unit you train, except for royal family members that need re-training. OR maybe try a game where you use no cav whatsoever, relying only on infantry and archers/x-bows etc...
Re: The MTW challenge thread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nara shikamaru
Thanks Caravel, I completely forgot about the idea of self modding, which can be somewhat easy if you know what your doing, and if you can follow direction well.
Most of those are easy to do and require only a few minutes with notepad or the gnome editor.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nara shikamaru
Oh and I got one that tho I haven't done, sounds fun, if you're playing a faction with camel units, make them your only cav unit you train, except for royal family members that need re-training. OR maybe try a game where you use no cav whatsoever, relying only on infantry and archers/x-bows etc...
Well you don't have to be that extreme but if you were say playing as the English you could field "realistic" armies mostly made up of spearmen (Sergeants), UM, FMAA and archers with only small numbers of cavalry and very few knights units. Historically the Knights would not have been in such huge numbers and most of the army would have been made up of infantry.
:bow:
Re: The MTW challenge thread.
When I played my first Irish campaign in XL, I was shocked to discover that they could train archers (unlike the Irish faction in VI, which is what I was expecting...) So I did the campaign without training any archers other than "specials" I could pick up from foreign provinces (eg Welsh longbows). I will one day edit my XL so that the Irish simply can't train vanilla archers :2thumbsup:
Re: The MTW challenge thread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Caravel
You can also reduce the trade income of trade goods to get rid of the huge trade bloat problem and remove the inland trade goods from the map altogether as they're of no real benefit in MTW where there is only sea trade anyway (the "local trade" you see is simply the value of one trading transaction per year that the province generates within itself, it is not trade with neighbouring provinces over land). Trade income should be balanced so that it covers small scale ship support but gives a small profit.
If you prefer having a large trade income, you can mod the import percentage to a higher value (like 100%). That way, the comp will gain as much as you on your own trade network. Easier modding as well (needs only to change one value).
Re: The MTW challenge thread.
Play as Almohads, no AUM...
Re: The MTW challenge thread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bregil the Bowman
Play as Almohads, no AUM...
Ooh, that'd be interesting. Pretty much would have to rely on muwahid's for 'heavy infantry'(not that they're even heavy) at that point, and just use pure mobility to try and win battles. LOTS of Gulam cavalry/Saharan cavalry, Faris, and muwahids... Dang, I might just have to try this sometime!:beam: Winning battles with lots and lots of mobile but weak units. Those are some of the funnest battles of all.:yes:
Re: The MTW challenge thread.
Having played the MTW for a while I have a couple of rules that keep the game interesting for me.
1. Don't use inquisitors to burn enemy generals. They quickly become immortal killing machines, capable of bringing down an empire with no real effort. The only exception is when the A.I. burns one of my generals, then
I burn one of theirs in exchange.
2. If an area has a unit bonus then build only that unit in that territory. It forces me to use units like urban militia or woodsmen that I might not otherwise use.
3. Only build units from historically correct areas. If I'm playing the Turks I don't build turkomen horse archers in Wales. I try to build 'local' units where possible. I do cheat a little as I can't build all of the local units though. It's much more fun to field a mixed army with a mixture of strengths and weaknesses.
One thing I have been considering is only personally fighting battles where my King is the commander...
Re: The MTW challenge thread.
How about rising the cash demands of "uberunits", specially "fief holding" uberunits, such as knights, to make overproliferation be unprofittable?
Re: The MTW challenge thread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unknown Guy
How about rising the cash demands of "uberunits", specially "fief holding" uberunits, such as knights, to make overproliferation be unprofittable?
The issue there is that on a whole those types of units are not part of a paid standing army and as such wouldn't have actually cost the ruling monarch anything.
Re: The MTW challenge thread.
Quote:
those types of units are not part of a paid standing army and as such wouldn't have actually cost the ruling monarch anything.
they would have costed land (althrough in some cases they were hired as mercs and paid in cash, eg: the "free companies" in Italy, or the Spanish tercios later during Renaisse). In any event, since land-granting doesn´t get represented inside the game, imho, to "symbolize" those units they should be made them prohibitive (as in: the feudal lord loses the revenues of a significant part of a province, which now go to his knights instead)
Re: The MTW challenge thread.
There are some units that are unbalancingly good. Longbows for example have the first equal longest range, are armour piercing and fire almost 4 times as fast as Xbows as well as being able to shoot over other troops. A few of these units make short work of anything except for charging cavalry. There's really no reason to use any other archers but these.
Viking Huscarles are available super fast and carve through almost every other unit in Early - High without even having to draw breath. Try limiting yourself to no more than 1-2 units per army of any super troops you might have access to, just to give the other guys a chance.
Likewise, the Danes can simply spam vanilla vikings all day long. I'm in the late period now and these guys still kick some serious arse. The remain one of my staple troops. Granted I'm only playing on normal difficulty at the moment, but so far noone seems to be able to stand up to the viking flood.
I'm considering just auto queueing them in every sea side province with a port and dumping about 16 vikings into a new province every turn. some places might take a couple of these raids to fall, but fall they will.
I think I'll impose a restriction on how many I make of these guys in the future, or maybe only build them in scandanavia.
