Larger starting treasury = TOTAL WAR

[edyzmedieval]

Woah, started a campaign with the English on Expert, after modding the game to include more trading goods and such, but also larger starting treasuries. It's a huge mess now Europe! The French have been completely anihilated by HRE, and the Germans are expanding rapidly in all corners. However they over-expanded in some areas and I foresee a civil war soon which I hope it happens so I can expand as well...

Otherwise, the Turks have been waging some serious battles with the Byzantines, Egyptians stayed on their positions but have some strong armies, which makes for some amazing Crusades later on; Spanish against the Almohads, Danes expanded by one province and Novgorod conquering the surrounding regions.

And it's really challenging.
I'll post some pics so you can see what's going on.

[bondovic]

Interesting! I always enjoy when things get shaken up a little. Please post pics, and, by all means, elaborate on what changes you've made to the files.

B

[Raz]

Sounds utterly crazy! I sure hope you'll incorporate this into your mini-mod, edyz!! Bahahaha!

[edyzmedieval]

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A tad later on, I admit, I had to use the money cheat to survive but I refrained myself from being a conqueror. And plus I would get my backside whooped by the Germans if I attacked only with spearmen and Hobilars.

Take a look, something different than usual...

[Axalon]

Hmmmm, I don’t know Edyz…

That stuff swings two-ways you know. More money means also making it easier for you too – that is not good for the opposition (AI-factions) you know. And, pumping up trade and adding wares usually ends up making the game less demanding as well since that will just generate more florins for you too. If that is what you really want, then you are on the right track I guess.

- Cheers

[Raz]

There's several things you can do to solve that problem, Axalon, but they're rather drastic to any sort of mod.
The first thing that you could do is create a campaign for each faction, with only one faction being playable in each start_pos you could modify the campaign to make it more difficult for the player. In this particular case, you'd have an increased amount of florins available for the enemy with the playable faction having far less (you could do a lot of other things to, but this is just to solve that particular problem).

The other thing you could do is do something similar to what the Pocket Mod did (I'm pretty sure it was the Pocket Mod). And that is remove all sea provinces from the game. This would eliminate the lucrative amount of florins available to the player through sea trade and reduce it to local trade only, meaning that trade would just be another form of fixed income to each province (such as farming and resource mining, obviously changing with the level of the building but otherwise fixed).

Unfortunately, both options have drawbacks and limitations. You could only take advantage of the first option if there were relatively few factions that the modder would want playable (such as your Redux, Axalon - I remember being disappointed when I couldn't play as the Egyptians in Redux [so I made them playable myself haha! :D ])
The second is difficult to balance out, ships are always fun to mess about with alas, without water what can you do? It would render a strong strategic element redundant. No longer would it be possible to launch those massive amphibious blitzkriegs on your enemies.

Anyway, sorry, I got a bit off-topic there.

[edyzmedieval]

Hmmmm, I don’t know Edyz…

That stuff swings two-ways you know. More money means also making it easier for you too – that is not good for the opposition (AI-factions) you know. And, pumping up trade and adding wares usually ends up making the game less demanding as well since that will just generate more florins for you too. If that is what you really want, then you are on the right track I guess.

- Cheers

The thing is, you want the game to be more challenging for you. I for one really want to get my backside whooped in Medieval without having to make drastic changes. The vanilla is still very very good in MTW, and some small fixed will make it even better. So naturally I took the starting treasury and changed the values, and this greatly affected the game, and I'm surprised empires are expanding. Smaller factions are indeed wiped out, such as Aragon and Hungary, and even big ones like France.

It will be very interesting to see what happens when the Mongols come.

[caravel]

The other thing you could do is do something similar to what the Pocket Mod did (I'm pretty sure it was the Pocket Mod). And that is remove all sea provinces from the game. This would eliminate the lucrative amount of florins available to the player through sea trade and reduce it to local trade only, meaning that trade would just be another form of fixed income to each province (such as farming and resource mining, obviously changing with the level of the building but otherwise fixed).

...

The second is difficult to balance out, ships are always fun to mess about with alas, without water what can you do? It would render a strong strategic element redundant. No longer would it be possible to launch those massive amphibious blitzkriegs on your enemies.

I did not actually remove sea regions, but ships themselves and the ability to build ships. Physically removing sea regions from the lukupmap is not really worthwhile, disabling them and/or removing ships is enough as it achieves the same end result. In my experience removing ships improves the game, but of course it's not to everyone's tastes. That's what modding is about after all: changing the game to more suit the individual preferences of the modder.

I did not get around to fully implimenting it before I gave up on MTW, but my plans at the time were to use ports and traders as a fixed/variable income, in combo with existing trade goods (making use of the otherwise useless "local trade" income). To achieve this the goods values would have to be raised sigificantly to make the local trade worthwhile. All islands had to be land-bridged also (which is a good idea anyway, regardless of what you do with Ships).

The pros of ship removal far outweigh the cons in my humble opinion:

1) More solid and reliable trade income, that still has some variation and is not subject to the random and often inexpicable movements of AI fleets.

2) A trading system the AI can use effectively.

3) No more huge trade exploit for the player.

4) Removes 'crusade teleportation' (i.e. the player pushing tons of units into a crusade and then moving it from Wessex to palestine in one turn.), so they now have to take (the correct) land route.

5) Ends the idiotic AI invasions of the vanilla game and most mods, where the Almohads land a huge stack, led of course by the Khalifa, in Ireland. This gives better territorial stability to the AI factions.

[edyzmedieval]

The huge trade exploit happens if you can actually manage it, with the higher starting treasury the Byzantines have been spamming ships and my fleet is suffering serious losses in the Italian seas.

And I was thinking of already providing a second or third tier trading post to the big merchant cities such as Constantinople and Flanders.