Pics & History of your Empire

ZXMOD, started as Danish GA in Early after a lot of turtling i watched many empires rise and fall...

Byzantines, Spanish and English all became superpowers and fell, with finally the Italians ready to challenge me for the last race to grab the decisive points (I lead with a 3 point margin, so it's very close) with the Huns as unsuspected third power acting as artificial chockepoint for my smaller army.

In this screenshot you can find a typical late AI Italian army featuring a good quality mix of their militia units

https://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a1...x/27906f53.jpg

Same scenario, danish side.
The Danish roster, like the Italian, is infantry heavy and so the player must rely on the eastern lands to get a good cavalry supply, even though their heavy inf is capable of taking care of almost anything alone...

https://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a1...x/be92d486.jpg

heres how my english campaign's going,
on here you can see I am allied with the french now, and we were both fighting the huge Russian empire and caused it to go into civil war, I also took denmark and Sweden from the russians :)
https://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y2...IFT/round1.jpg




on this screenshot u can see I took over Portugal and Leon, they were both being controlled by Rebels so I said what the heck, I can use the money :)

https://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y2...IFT/round2.jpg


this mod pwns

Some of these modded games look awesome.. Though I can't download anything because I have a cr***y 56 k which disconnects randomly. I started a new game, early again, Aragonese, unmodded.

Sancho and his princes led a war against the English and the Germans, (taking provence, then cease firing with french), before finally surrounding France and blitzing in with mercenary heavy cavalry and valour 2 elite urban militia. Sancho I died and Sancho II was crowned, so I had to lower tax ands sent my mercenaries south to expend themselves on the Spanish and Almohads. I kicked the Almohads out of Valencia first, but then the Spanish invaded and by pure military genius (luck) I killed the command lvl 8 spanish king and 800 of his men and my counter attack scared him into Leon where his son would dwell for a decade before finally being extinguished.

A slowy drawn on campaign to push the Almohads into Granada and take Morroco and Portugal followed, all the while my entire conquest of France funded a 100% funded military construction scheme as I did in my last campaign, to mass produce armoured and metalsmithed elite troops.

I also donated a provionce to produce assassins and spies and another to make inquisitors and cardinals, though I intend to demolish the cathedral there and build a new one in Palestine, when I have conquerred it and built a citadel there..

The Almohads were obliterated by a Crusade I sent from my religious province, I had sent it to Sinai to seal off North Africa.

At the moment I am recoverring from an annoying invasion by the deceitful Italians and a subsequent excommunication for bribing some Italians cowerring in a keep in Tyrolia. I killed off the popists and have withdrew from the Italian peninsula and I intend to churn out some of my well armed units and conqwuer europe up to Poland and Hungaria, before taking the middle east up to Turkey...

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...Aragon1158.bmp

The image thing won't work, so i hope this turns out ok...

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Originally Posted by Patron

Some of these modded games look awesome.. Though I can't download anything because I have a cr***y 56 k which disconnects randomly.

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If you're looking for something quick to download try the mod in my sig...

oops..

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...Aragon1158.jpg

The page cannot be displayed
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http://microsoftusernetwork.com/hosted/ZxMod.exe ^
:(

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Patron

The page cannot be displayed
The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings.

http://microsoftusernetwork.com/hosted/ZxMod.exe ^
:(

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the link doesnt work for me either

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Patron

The page cannot be displayed
The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings.

http://microsoftusernetwork.com/hosted/ZxMod.exe ^
:(

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Sorry, DNS issues... Try this: http://microsoftuse.temp.powweb.com/hosted/ZxMod.exe

omg I was having such a great battle, and my general dies and I loose, arhghh I'll never send my general in to fight again >_<

https://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y2...IFT/damnit.jpg

Arrgh, stupid computer..... [post deleted]

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Originally Posted by PittBull260

omg I was having such a great battle, and my general dies and I loose, arhghh I'll never send my general in to fight again >_<

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What the..... How on earth did you lose that battle? It looks like you were mopping up already. Did you run out of time?

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Originally Posted by Martok

What the..... How on earth did you lose that battle? It looks like you were mopping up already. Did you run out of time?

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i was demolishing them, my general got killed lol, he was in the frontlines :)
it was a historical battle, so if my general dies i loose

Ah yes, that would explain it. Unfortunate; you were really cleaning up there!

how you play as a unplayable faction?

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Originally Posted by Martok

Ah yes, that would explain it. Unfortunate; you were really cleaning up there!

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That is right. Another thing is the fact that the battles in PMTW are really massive ~D and historical battles have several additional victory conditions e.g. do not lose too many men, do let the enemy to flee ( Karachev 1615) - or survive ( Obertyn 1531) ~D ~;)


BTW - Pittbull I have noticed you are using westerneuropean panel/menu - do you like it ? ~:)

And a piece of advise - when using Husaria set their formation to melee - keeping them in formation doesn't help at all ~;)

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Originally Posted by cegorach1

BTW - Pittbull I have noticed you are using westerneuropean panel/menu - do you like it ? ~:)

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yes sir i do

well the year is 1800, and I'm done, I had a lot of fun with this campaign
As you can see me and the french ganged up on the portugese :)

I had 10 fortresses, the french had 12 >_<


Links are down but were replaced by other images (photos) that were irrelevant to the post.

come on ppl, lets see some more campaigns!

I finished the Spanish campaign. The Turks were a useless buffer. The Horde attacked me twice in Syria, but my army of arbalests, feudal and chivalric sergeants, and knights took care of them easily. I finally had numerical parity and I sent huge stacks to take them out of the game. That done, I took out the last few Egyptian provinces and sealed the 60% win by invading three Polish provinces on the same turn. I'm now working on a game as the Italians. I'm around 1115 and I've taken out a good chunk of the HRE (I've taken Provence, Tyrolia, Burgundy (I believe), Austria, and maybe some others that I forgot). I'm rebuilding my military (I'm spread pretty thin right now, and those Hungarians have tons of horse archers and milita sergeants) and teching up to get some cavalry. I don't have a good trading fleet yet, and I'm really missing the early cavalry I had as the Spanish and English. Also, I require a defensive army in the large majority of my provinces.

Plans: Once I get some mounted sergeants I'm going to go after the French and English and I'll finish off the HRE so I can get a nice, 2 province border at the Pyrenees and no northern border (unless I stop at Flanders and/or leave the Danes alone).

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Originally Posted by littlebktruck

By the way, how can you tell which prince will become the King? Is there any way to affect the selection? It seems to usually go to a young one, I guess so he has time to have heirs, as it doesn't seem that princes have children. I could be wrong about that, though, as I have seen it where I had heirs after someone just took over the throne.

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Originally Posted by Martok

Go to your family parchment. Whoever is listed at the top of the sheet (he should be in red lettering instead of black) is the guy next in line for the throne.

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Yup.

If you check the list often and recheck just after a succession, you'll notice the difference. His younger brothers will have vanished from the list but then conveniently become 'eternal', in the form of generals, for the rest of the campaign.

I actually think this partially spoils the game, in that empires really should wax and wane according to the varying quality of their army leaders, with the passage of the decades. Good quality generals, in real life, come with an inbuilt expiry date. You simply have to make use of them while you can.

Whilst it is feasible for a great general to pass on his skills (by means of tuition, not genetics, I hasten to add) to his offspring, you can't guarantee that some descendent won't turn their back on their family heritage and take up something less martial as a career. In the game this could hit as hard as a general being assassinated and weaken a border province if an adequate second in command hasn't been stationed close by.

Meanwhile, the son inheriting command of a unit could be implemented in the game by having his individual valour level revert back to that of a fresh trainee (dragging down the unit average until he wins some fights). Also, whilst the father may well have gained star ratings from successful battles, eventually they retire and perhaps the son should have a reduced star rating, maybe no more than 85% of his father, to reflect that he's been schooled in the techiques but lacks actual experience. If the son fails to gain stars in his lifetime, perhaps due to a period of extended peace, the grandson's rating will be further dented as the knowledge becomes third-hand and anachronistic. So an 8-star early-era Byz prince would become a 3-star general after six generations unless skills are kept fresh by frequent victories in each generation. (And, if I understand correctly, the star ratings are 1 = 1 win; 2 = 2 wins; 3 = 4 wins; 4 = 8 wins; 5 = 16 wins; 6 = 32 wins ; 7 = 64 wins; 8 = 128 wins, as unfeasible as that last one sounds)

In this sense, we're probably lucky that the game doesn't make troop units grow old, gradually lose the odd man to disease, or decline in physical fitness (reduced default level of energy bars, in battle mode), or suffer from lack of real battle experience whilst on prolonged garrison duty (valour bonus gradually decays) and so on.

Seeing these screenshots with piles of unspent money in the bank, I wonder if the extra costs of continually having to disband aged units and train fresh ones - not to mention the logistics of getting them to the right places at the right time, across a large, sprawling empire with awkward naval blockades in the way and so on, would add to the overall challenge?


As seen on one of these screenshots, in the game, you can crusade to Palestine and hold it for decades, remote from your homelands. In reality, all their opponents had to do, rather than fight at great cost into strong fortifications, was to wait for the occupiers to grow old and die (20-40 years), or for them to simply give up and head back home (5-10 yrs). They didn't bring their families with them and properly colonise the place, did they? (I need to check up on the history at this point).

I don't have a knowledge of modding but it obviously entails unit parameters being tweaked, provided the game designers decided to include it. However, adding a whole extra variable, which has to be incremented on each turn and individually kept track of for every single unit on the map, is an entirely different matter. I doubt the game-save file structure would allow for it and, if it did, it would increase its size quite substantially.

If there does happen to be a mod which has somehow managed to implement this, I'd be extremely interested in trying it. ~D

Well, you can get something like that. In the last patch for VI CA programmers included a little extra. The -greengenerals command line. With this active your generals lose some of their stats when they die of old age. So it makes building up das uber general a little harder rather then farming battle and titles for one. I never really liked playing with it though. Because its not random, theres no chance of keeping stuff its just a set decrease it seems. But it sounds like you might like it better that way. Since i'm not sure if -greengenerals is the exact command line search around for it, there should be a few threads on it.

Thanks ChaosLord. I'll probably give that a try, sometime.

I'm not too sure about what you mean by 'farming' generals but I can certainly see how it's possible to 'work the game' rather than do things which would be done in reality. For example winning a territory then repeatedly pulling out on the following turn, allowing the sieged force to retake it then attacking again the year after and every other year in a similar pattern, to clock up multiple victories and increase the general's command rating.

If I'm right about the exponential increase in numbers of victories per star then at least there's an issue of diminishing returns on this practice though you might pick up some usevul V&V's like 'skilled attacker', which gives the equivalent of an extra star when on the offensive.


One of the things I don't like about the game is the emphasis on outright victory. When faced by multiple huge stacks and you can only afford to keep a single stack but of better quality troops, logic dictates that the way to go would be to make repeated raids, inflict as many casualties as possible but without making the outright win and then withdrawing (not routing) to prepare for more the following year, or however long it takes to bring in your replacements for your own losses.

The side benefit is that as long as you keep initiating attacks, the enemy force has to sit and defend, thus stopping the multiple stacks from breaking into your lands.

There is potential for generating income out of repeated ransoming of prisoners but in many ways this is counter productive as you only have to fight them all again in the next round. Oh hang on.... come to think of it, if you don't score the win, you automatically lose your prisoners and the right to ransom them, so you'll just have to keep hitting the button to slaughter them all. The general may get 'butcher' through this but there's another one ('scant mercy'???) which says something about discontent in the ranks due to lack of opportunity for a share of the ransom.

Anyway, attempts at nuisance raiding or the full-blown attrition style penalise you heavily by making generals lose star-rating if they fail often enough and also pick up vices like 'coward' , 'good runner', 'retreats often' which hit their unit morale and valour rating hard.

There are times when you want to send a raiding party to a territory next door to the one where your real attack is to take place, to pin down the AI units there and discourage it from moving them in to bolster the defence against your main attack. You know full well that the odds for this feint will be hopelessly against you and that it will be called off but, for your troubles, that general picks up 'hesitant' and so on.

I could understand if you got those vice as a result of at least three occurences but you only need to do it the once - and that can easily happen purely because you decide the weather was unfavourable for an attack (you brought gunners with you and it tips down for several days in a row).

It's a real pain.

I liked the look of those battle results screens earlier on in this thread but I started another one about what I thought was odd about them...

Ludicrous prisoner numbers!! thread

New campaing here
eary-expert-Welsh-bkb super mod

the start was really hard, i had like 200 men and 1 small province sourrounded by the huge british armies, but here's how it is right now :)

the pope's definently the biggest and strongest and richest empire, I'm just waiting till is collapses into civil war...

Links are down but were replaced by other images (photos) that were irrelevant to the post.

THE POPE'S EASTERN ARMIES

Links are down but were replaced by other images (photos) that were irrelevant to the post.

Jesus that's one weird map - and look at the size of some of those eastern armies! ~:eek: I've never seen the Papacy do that well!

That and the Danes... Even after massive work I never managed to have them become a world class power in ZXMod...
I think it's more a matter of inefficent resource management (and weird low loyalty generals) because once they reach a decent level of development fares well even against significant numerical odds on AI vs AI... The overall balance is quite good though, no power manages to own more than 40% of the map.
That's enough digressing, I'm going to upload some screenshots of my own...

Has anyone ever managed to get a massive Danish empire in Vanilla VI/Expert/Late?

I kidna want to try except +3 Armour Boyars and Gothic Knights frighten me dearly.

https://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a1...x/fc3e2075.jpg

Here's my latest testing...

I played an ultra defensive game as the Italians, believe it or not I have to fight a battle in this game yet, all the conquered territories are the results of bribed rebels.

The actual scenario is just after the Spanish (who owned the western half of the map) suffered a civil war due to a failed crusade against a surprisingly resilient Byzantine Empire, who unlike in most games survived the golden horde.

Despite the major setback the Spanish managed to launch another crusade, that grew quite big (I've seen up to 4000 men per crusade) thanks to their clever use of the inquisitors (who are burning up my generals like paper despite my attempts to kill them).
They have a scary 8 stars guy that might be able to kill my royal line, is pretty much invulnerable to assassination and caused me much grief when he killed my favoured general (8 stars and 9 acumen)...

The current crusade is wreacking havoc through the Byzantine empire (that had to massively cut the size of the army after having lost the seas) thanks to the top quality troops they "recruited" in Venice (100% zeal, raised by the AI) and the use of my neutral navy as a trojan horse... Really clever move, there are instances where the AI almost reaches human player levels of strategical thinking it's really a pleasure to see...