A few questions

[Garnier]

What dates do gunpowder and the compass become available? And are there any other events that can be used in "27 Invention requirements for building Label" in the build_prod?

And also, is it possible in some way to make buildings not get sacked and destroyed when you take a province? This severely hurts the AI's teching ability since whenever they lose their provinces they go back 20 some years of buildings..


And another question, after I start a campaign, is there any way to tell which difficulty I chose? I intended to choose expert but have forgotten.. I'm not sure anymore..

[caravel]

What dates do gunpowder and the compass become available? And are there any other events that can be used in "27 Invention requirements for building Label" in the build_prod?

Compass is something like 1170 and Gunpowder is the mid to late 1200s sometime (sorry can't remember the exact date).

Unfortunately Gunpowder and Compass are the only two hardcoded events. The compass event is actually pointless as all of the ships requiring shipyards that depend upon it are high era (1205) anyway. If you want to give the compass event some meaning, then set those ships to all periods availability you should be able to build those ships in 1170.

And also, is it possible in some way to make buildings not get sacked and destroyed when you take a province? This severely hurts the AI's teching ability since whenever they lose their provinces they go back 20 some years of buildings..

Unfortunately that can't be done (how I wish it could). The only non destructible building is the land clearance from VI (in fact I think there is one other from VI but I can't remember it offhand). That one is hardcoded to be indestructible. So if you want a building that cannot be destroyed, use that one.

And another question, after I start a campaign, is there any way to tell which difficulty I chose? I intended to choose expert but have forgotten.. I'm not sure anymore..

Well there's no way to tell as far as I know. In general with Expert the AI will be very difficult to rout due to the moral bonus they get, so start fighting a few battles and you'll know soon enough.

As this thread discusses mainly modding issues: Moved to the Engineers Guild.

[Axalon]

It is impossible to remember everything, especially if “you” kind of operate under circumstances like Naga and myself who most of the time are working on special and deviating versions of MTW apart from the original. You tend to get a bit rusty on the standard trivia after a while. I’ll fill in some of the blanks here as I’m sure Naga would return the favor if the roles were reversed.


The date for gunpowder is set to 1260. However, these dates (compass and gunpowder) do deviate slightly from time to time, about 1-3 years/turns. Anything above that and something is seriously wrong in the game.

As for the level-thing, just as already pointed out. However, if you do have save from your first turn. Load it up and check your florins: 4000 expert/6000 hard/8000 normal/10000 easy (the standard values for MTW). That is the only way of knowing for sure.


- Cheers
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Naga, I didn’t know about the non destructible aspect of “land clearing”. Perhaps you could find out which one was the other and post it up in a separate thread here or something. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would find that little piece of info interesting, apart from Garnier here, as it strikes me as relatively unknown.

[gollum]

Originally posted by Garnier
And also, is it possible in some way to make buildings not get sacked and destroyed when you take a province? This severely hurts the AI's teching ability since whenever they lose their provinces they go back 20 some years of buildings..

Actually its not that bad - before the v2.0/v2.1 the AI factions would autopillage lands that they d conquered from each other. In VI indeed the AI factions do not autopillage when they fight among themselves. The only time the autopillaging happens is between the player and AI factions and vice versa.

If you want to modify this aspect - you might wanna make the higher level fortifications cheaper and quicker to be built - there is less autopillaging from the Ring Walled castle and onwards.

This however might require balancing in order to restore some of the tech tree depth and/or not mess up the Glorious Achievements goals that are associated with Citadels (like say the Krak de Chevaliers and the Alhambra).

In general if you want the AI to respond better to human player early attacks (that are devastating since they catch him unprepared) make sure to slowshift the pace at which troops become available in early/newly conquered provinces. Typically troops produced from forts plague the AI performance because they give the chance to the player to rush him cheaply and comfortably while they leave the AI with stacks of units that are underperforming like the Slav Javs, Slav Warriors, Jobbagy. In my view provincial troops should be slightly better than decent, available only to local factions and vailable to from 1-3 provinces (otheriwse they overrride core units). Units like Steppe Heavies and Armenian Heavies are almost cheats since they are too cheap to recruit and maintain, and too easily available for their stats, while junk units like Woodsmen, plague the AI factions that prefer them due to low recruit and meintenance costs making their early stacks, that are critical for later progression, a pushover.

The other aspect that needs calibrating is mercenaries - in my view they are too much of an advantage for the player and need either removing or have only junk units available or very few elite units from few provinces (like the Almughavars and Alans) so the player cannot exploit them for easy early rushes that win him the game essentially in 30 turns.

In light of this - making sure that the tech tree yields a decent amount of units available to the human and AI factions that are proportional to the time/money that that particular tech tree bracnh requires is critical to improving AI performance overall througout the game and most particularly in the early stages that the *butterfly effect* (sensitivity to initial conditions) can take place. This is why early garissons and early units need to be carefully thought out - to ensure that AI faction fights are not predictable.

[Garnier]

I've done a lot to make the game harder, using INNs as the AI's free 200% farming income building that I simply don't use. (this means no mercenaries of course as well).

That and making trade worse and giving 100% import income.. and other stuff.

Now I wonder, would it be possible to use the land clearance building as the Castle building in the main campaign, or would that only be available in the Viking campaign?

If it were possible to make castles not get sacked, this would be really nice.

[caravel]

You can use the land clearance in the main campaign yes. I've never tried making it upgradeable though so I cannot testify if that works but you can use it for any other single buildings.