Well the farming issue can be improved by adding an adittional 100% upgrade and by making the upgrades cheaper. The trade issue only needs the trade goods items values to be increased in proportion so the wealthy provinces remain so.
This is one of the great benefits. Crusades are harder to pull off. In vanilla the player can create a link of fleets to the province, add lots of units to the crusade and then drop it into the target province in a single turn. The AI simply cannot do this.
That's easy enough. In the past I've removed all bonuses from the map, because they cause the AI to go berserk trying to tech up to train a particular unit at the expense of everything else.
The best way to improve the Sicilian position is to a) give them Naples in the early Era, which they should have anyway and b) reduce the tech level of Sicily to prevent them expanding too soon. The Siciliy to Tunisia connection is risky. You could do a Siciliy -> Malta -> Tunisia connection but it holds the same risks. The Sicilians ten to explode all over North Africa and wipe out the Almohad in a few years.
Firstly any changes will only affect Early anyway. To change High and Late you have to edit the files again - though that's possible. The Greece -> Naples connection is one I had forgotten. That one is quite important.
It's true also that these regions were isolated. They did not have this kind of reliable shipping connecting them, nor supplies and troops ready to ship in at a year's notice.
I've just realised that with the mod I play, I use a different map... Though I don't mind working on a version for the Vanilla map at some point. The map I use has an improved Iberia, Greece, Asia Minor, Near East and North Africa. It also has most of those suggested land bridges already in place. The province layout in those regions is different and Cyrenacia, Sinai, Finland, Switzerland, Rhodes and Malta have been removed altogether. Many new provinces have been added in the above regions however.
Now all I need to do is get a new graphics card and get the game running...
![]()
Bookmarks