To Kraellin

[Kraellin]

hi cugel,

the whole money thing is indeed a potential game killer. it might be interesting to make a minimalist type campaign where that really comes into play. this could be done and might make for a better, more realistic and accurate representation of feudal times. it's an interesting idea, and if you do go this way, i'd be curious to see what comes up.

as for the danes, hmmm, how do i put this...it works in my campaign, is pretty much the answer. the danes in the game have always been a problem. if you give them a ton of cash so they can expand it tends to warp the balance. if you leave them in denmark they have a hard time doing anything and, they are in constant threat from the HRE. i made them barbarian raiders for the simple reason i wanted to test out that ai behavior and the danes were the most logical choice for this, given everything else. now, being barbarian raiders, it also made sense to isolate them a bit from the continent, since i particularly wanted them as sea-raiding barbarians. i also found that they had a lot of trouble starting on the continent. they'd take something and never hold onto it. so, it just made sense, once i made them raiders, to take them off the continent.

my foolings around with mods are rarely done for historical considerations. i just dont know that much about history, so i dont make any pretense about trying to make things historical. what i do is try and figure out how things work and make them work better from a purely game playing perspective and then let the history buffs take that info and do with it as they see fit. it's like the difference between me and a history buff when he watches something like Braveheart. i see a rousing good tale of a fight for freedom and he sees a historical boondoggle full of speculation, alteration, and historical fabrication. frankly, before that movie, i'd never heard of william wallace :) so, it's just a matter of interest and background and purpose as to why i do the oddball things i do. i mean, horses dont really fly, but i did make a flying horse map for stw in which they did :)

what's most likely happening with your danes is that they are hitting either the poverty_stricken or close_to_support_limit behavior and clamping down on spending. that's what i found too. you have to get them over this hump and bringing in trade money and then they'll start producing pretty well. i also recently found it's why my egyptians never built shipyards in that one game i mentioned. i've now fixed that and they're building again.

the burgundian problem is multiple. they will build ships. the problem seems to be with the italians. for some odd reason, and i believe it's related to the GA goals, the italian port/shipyard is in venice in my game (cause that's where i put them), but they want to sail around to the ligurian sea (outside of genoa) and think that genoa is their home port, so they always start a fight with burgundians by sea, since that's the burgundian starting port sea also. now, if somehow the burgundians get out of the ligurian sea, they tend to go west into aragonese waters and boom, another sea battle.

ok, so why not leave burgundy as a minor faction. well, it is. the thrust of this mod, though, is to get so bloody many ships out on the sea as to make it more difficult on the player and his trade route advantage. that's been one of the biggest problems with the entire campaign; the player knows to build trade routes, the AI doesnt. so, i'm not so much interested in anything but creating ships for the ai at the moment. balancing things out will come later. i dont really have a problem with having minor factions. it's nice to be able to play as a major or a minor, but the the current project is simply to increase shipping, figure out the ai behaviors better and then tweak things a bit for balance. this is also why i gave prussia to the poles, so that they'd have access to the sea to start with. oh, and btw, i now have hungarian navies :)

yeah, i did a similar thing with the swiss; the whole rebellion factor thing. my swiss start with switzerl and tyrolia. tyrolia has a rebellion factor of 3 and switzerland is 2, i think. this is a very nice way of limiting a faction expansion-wise. so i agree with you there and i may try it with the burgundians if nothing else works. i'm also toying with changing what they own and thus moving their starting port location.

yes, i used to chuckle over the nov's and their rebellious popular revolts and their re-emerging and always coming back stronger. i did finally 'fix' them, but yes, it might be interesting to leave them that way, just for the added differences it brings to the game.

the one thing that is currently beginning to make me wonder about the way i'm going is, what happens when someone wants to play as the byzantines in my mod, or the english. is it going to be too much of a walk in the part. i always play as the sicilians, and play as a pretty much neutral observer, so what's going to happen with a very aggressive player when he starts just walking all over all these ship building factions? not sure, but for now, it's enough just to get the ai building ships.

K.

[Kraellin]

alright, i'm about ready to release this thing. the major goal of increasing shipping has more or less been accomplished. it aint purty, but i have increased it.

there's a couple things i dont quite understand, and may never understand, like why, if i set burgundians and italians to muslim_peaceful as their default, are they still attacking each other at sea. that one seems odd. and, oh, yes, you can set a catholic faction to muslim behavior and vice versa. these things are just tags like i figured.

still havent heard from edratman on what he found out in trying to set the odd behaviors to start behaviors, but that wont delay my mod.

one other thing i tried to do with this mod that i wasnt disclosing before, is, i altered one faction, the swiss, who i set to catholic_isolasionist, to create tons of agents. i wanted one faction that would more or less just sit there and spy and assassinate and create havoc through spies and so on, but not be a major military power. now, i cant really tell if it worked or not because i dont know a cheat that reveals hidden units, but i will say that i had more of my emissaries killed off than in any game i recall before, so maybe it is and maybe it isnt working. nothing like blind modding to leave big questions.

i also set the papacy to create more bishops and religious units, but didnt notice any change there. i suspect they just dont make enough income to do much. one side effect of this though, was that in setting some of the buildings and so on for this, i increased the ability of catholic factions to build crusades and 20 or 30 moves into the game this seems to take effect. again, not sure though. might just be a normal amount.

i've now got the byz, the italians, the danes, the almo's, and the english as the major sea powers, with the byz and italians clearly leading this race, and the danes and english a good second. the almo's and the spanish are third, and the aragonese and burgundians are 4th. other factions will show up on the seas as well. i've seen the papacy, the turks, the polish, the hungarians, the swiss, the novs, the french and the HRE all show up at times, but quite a bit later than the others and in smaller numbers. this is close enough for my purposes at this time.

i may do more with this mod, keep tweaking this and that, but i'm figuring to move on to another project soon, so this may be the last ai mod for a while.

there's tons of things that could be done with all this. you can move province ownership around to suit, make historical models of province ownership, buildings and units, tweak single ai behaviors to make tailored factions, like my attempt at making an agent only faction, or a cavalry faction. one could make a land-based barbarian raider. one could make an inquisition faction, say the spanish or something. by being able to tweak the behaviors and give them to different factions, there's all sorts of things available.

one of the things i didnt try that may be possible, is to give any religion jihads or crusades or both, or, to turn them one or both completely off.

one could set up a head to head game with a single ai player. you could divide up the entire campaign map between two factions only, half to the ai and half to the human and let them go at it.

one could set up a minimalist game, like i talked about before, or just max everything out and make everything easy to build and easy to support.

there also seems to be the possibility to give other buildings income. i was quite tempted to give inns, taverns and brothels some income in this last mod. and as tosa suggested to me, maybe it's possible to give buildings a support cost by simply making the income column a negative number, like say on castles, for instance.

bear in mind that with this mod i was only trying to increase the early shipping, the early ships. no attempt was made to tweak the better ships that can be built later on, so your shipping by the ai may dry up as the game progresses.

this mod is also just an extension of the russia q mod. that was the base mod i used and simply took that and carried on with it, so there's still 19 playable factions, no land bridges and so forth and so on. the biggest difference now is that some of the ai factions actually do a decent job of ship building.

it shld also be noted that i can do almost nothing to affect HOW the ai distributes and uses his ships. i could do more testing with the various behaviors to see if it that is the determinant on distribution, or if it's like doc says about the choke points ont he map and simple geography that is mostly determining things.

i had thought i was being very clever in giving the burgundians and italians both the muslim_peaceful behavior so that they wouldnt always fight when they met in the ligurian sea, but the code outsmarted me by either breaking the rule against muslim_peaceful never attacking or by simply changing its behavior to something else, or in some other way completely that i dont understand currently. ah well.

i prolly wont release this today, but it shld be up within the next few days. i may yet do a touch more tweaking, so no promises.

K.

[cugel]

"i had thought i was being very clever in giving the burgundians and italians both the muslim_peaceful behavior so that they wouldnt always fight when they met in the ligurian sea, but the code outsmarted me by either breaking the rule against muslim_peaceful never attacking or by simply changing its behavior to something else, or in some other way completely that i dont understand currently. ah well."

OMG Set the Italians to Muslim_peaceful???
And I thought your other ideas about the Danes were radical

Ah, well I think I'll have a look at this. Don't know that I'm going to install it though Seriously though, didn't that cause some conflicts with the Game engine? Or is that just if you attempt to build some building/unit belonging to another faction's religion? You can give Catholic factions muslim behavior sets? I wouldn't have thought of that, but: "why not?" if the AI is going to shift to that behavior set anyway (my guess is that it doesn't - that muslim and christian factions don't use each other's behavior sets). I suppose that's no worse that Giskard setting the French to eastern orthodox Heresy Heresy [covers ears]

I wonder if each game isn't rather ideosyncratic. If you only play 40 turns or so (I did this a lot too), you might miss some things. I was concerned about play balance, but the other day I played about 120 years as the Sicilians (just remained neutral and built ships) and I noticed that just about every faction (except the Aragonese) were still in it by 1240. Everybody who was eliminated made at least one comeback and some made two. The Egyptians built about 40-50 ships and took over most of the map. Then their assault on Scotland and Ireland failed and within 10 turns they were cut down to size (despite being helped out by an "Egyptian loyalist" rebellion in Tyrolia) (had to laugh about those Tyrolian Egyptian loyalists).

My only point about Burgundy and minor factions is that they can be made to be very independent and difficult to hold on to (which is historically true) and it also makes for better play balance. They don't have to build ships to do this - especially if it causes other problems for the AI. The player or AI that wants to hold them will then have to garrison large armies there or there'll be big loyalist rebellions there.

I've given up hoping to balance trade with the AI. It just doesn't get it. Rather like attempting to teach your poodle to read. If you can do it. Well, that's more than I can say. I'd say that the remaining issues for me are:

1. Crusades. The AI stinks at crusades, so next I'm going to up the build requirement for Chapter House to have fewer of them. I've made crusader knights buildable for all catholic factions so they should have a high build requirement or there will be too many such knights built in the early period.

2. It's still too easy to win as Byzantium. Nothing to do about this. If I cut down the Byzantines, the AI will do even worse with them than it does, which isn't too good. If I play as them, it's a cakewalk.

3. I might break down and stifle trade as a last resort. I'd hate to do it though because that's how I like to play and I can't really imagine any other style of play. If I did, I imagine that the AI might easily beat me, given the other advantages it has playing on expert. I'll have to see.

4. I don't think that anyone can really fix the problems that the AI has with trade so #3 might be the bet. Just make the build requirement for merchant castle9 or something. That should take the starch out of trade (and cripple the Italians into the balance). I you or I did that, it might be a good idea to make the Italian city states independent (as Paladin did in his mod), rather than "Italian" (which is historically accurate since Italy wasn't unified between the 5th and 19th centuries), and remove the Italians from playability - either that or start the Venetians out with a trade guild. and fleet?

I'd really like to see what those boys making the Lord of the Rings mod come up with. If it was good I'd play that next.

"Ringwraiths and Goblins and Trolls Oh, MY"

[Kraellin]

cugel,

this is what i was saying before, the behavior tags/labels/names are just that, they are names only and have no other significance than that, well, other than turning on that behavior. they could have been named anything. just because it says 'muslim_peaceful' doesnt mean that only the muslim can use it. this is what i was trying to convery to doc in our earlier conversations where i was talking about the ai changing behaviors from time to time based on the circumstances within the game.

now, i dont know that the ai does change to all the different behaviors, but it does seem to alter its tactics at times, so i'm fairly sure that any of the given behaviors, except maybe 'rebels' is available for any faction to use. this may also be why the italians i had set to 'peaceful' and the burgundians i had set to 'peaceful' went ahead and attacked each other anyways. they simply changed to something else.

the only reason that these names are the way they are is for easy reference purposes. if you simply drop the 'catholic, orthordox and muslim' part of the name off then it makes a lot more sense. just think of it without those religious parts of the tag on there and use them accordingly.

the one that i think you cant use, is 'rebels', at least not for a playable faction. you might be able to assign it to a non-playable faction, but that is something i wanted edratman to verify.

yeah, i almost changed the burgundians to a single province with no sea access. would have made things a lot simpler.

one of the nice things about this game is that you can make a lopsided game with the factions. you dont have to have a perfect balance. it's perfectly fine and even desirable that they arent all perfectly balanced. if the player wants to play a tough game, then pick a tiny faction and if he wants an easy game, then pick a big faction. this leaves it up to the player, which i like. my only concern when balancing is that the ai isnt walking away with things too awfully much faction to faction. i dont want one faction always dominating every campaign, at least the ai factions.

yeah, i'm afraid the trade thing is going to be difficult no matter what we do. the ai just doesnt 'think' trade routes that much. it's geared mostly to causing wars and taking provinces. it needs work. i'm sure CA is aware of this and will improve it as we go along. the whole ship thing is new to mtw and they packed so much new stuff into the game that i'm guessing that someone finally said, 'um, hey guys, this stuff is great, but at some point pretty quick, we've got to actually sell something', so threads had to be tied off somewhere and the shipping/trade route thing seems to be one of those.

this current mod is simply one attempt to try and work around the shortcomings of the ai ship stuff. i think it improves it a bit, but is far from being everything we might want in the whole sea/shipping arena. still, it's fun playing around with this stuff.

i've still got a few ideas i may try, so dunno when i'm going to release this mod now. if you really want to see it, i could bundle up whatever the current version is and post it in the test upload area, i suppose.

K.

[+DOC+]

A minimalist mod with little or no trade.... now that might be very interesting indeed and may even make the game harder in itself since trade is the main way we humans can whoop the AI.

Hi all.

Been busy with Civ3 and PTW... Got bored of MTW after i finished my mod. lol. When it gets to the stage of fighting 1 hour long 4000 v 4000 man battles multiple times every turn i get bored of MTW. Especially when you're dealing with hundreds of horse archers, man those guys are annoying to fight.

So, the talk of a minimalistic mod might keep the battles down to a more interesting and less repetitive level.

Any ideas? Remove trade from the sea, or even altogether? Then ships would be useful solely for naval assaults and wouldn't necessarily be so important

Might make it very interesting and the game progression more frought with danger....however, one may have to seriously chop building prices and time to produce them though? Anyway, if any of you are interested, start up another thread and we'll get the ball rolling. Otherwise, see ya in a month or two when i may be interested in another late game hour-long turn lol.

The only trouble i envisage with this is trying to balance the factions when trade is no longer an issue...particularly since the Italians, Sicilians, English and Danes rely so heavily on it.

Doc

[Kraellin]

i hate windows.

my harddrive crashed finally. that's meant setting up a new one and windows and all the drivers and all the oddities and tweaks and peculiarities that windows has/does/is. pain in the arse. i'm still working on it, but i've got it so that i can at least get online again. what a pain.

at any rate, doc, yeah, one of my original ideas was to do a minimalist and maximum type money thing. do one with tons of money and one with very little and compare. i think CA took a low end approach, not quite minimalist, but low. and i think they did this because of the ai trade stuff. i think they just ran out of time to tweak it right, or at least better.

hehe, i just auto-calc, doc. saves me chasing all those horses :)

well, i wouldnt want to remove trade completely, but you could cut it down and minimalize it. you'd still have provinces with tradable goods, just not all of them and to compensate for the land-locked provinces not getting as much money, there are things you can do to change that, particularly by upping the trade goods and resources of those internal provinces. this balances the land-locked with the sea provinces and changes the importance of trade. it's just a balance thing if you want to lower the trade stuff. it might also be interesting to only give a few key provinces tradable goods so that their strategic importance is exaggerated, like constantinople, for instance. but then drop all the rest to almost nothing. just scatter a few around, particularly on the mainland so that the islands arent quite so key. lots of ways to tweak it around.

civIII eh? yeah, i sometimes go back to that one for a few days, but i always get pissed off by the way they do a few things and by the lack of what could have been done. i'm afraid good ole sid has fallen behind. what is PTW?

K.

[cugel]

You have my sympathy K: My hard drive crashed last year and melted my processor into the balance. I had to buy a new computer and then the NEW hard drive crashed after 1 month.

Not fun. It took me a week each time to get things set up right again. Kudos all around to Microsoft for making it so easy

BTW, did you ever get your Byzantines to trade effectively? You said they produced a lot of ships, but I bet they didn't leave any in the Marmara for any length of time

[Kraellin]

hehe, aint windoze fun :) lol.

the byzantines kicked butt. yes, they do skip a sea zone from time to time, but remember, that trade routes are optimized by having ships in the zones with the most ports and that any zone you have a ship in is the start of a new trade route, so i suspect that the ai moves its ships around to start NEW trade routes from different places to optimize the income. still, it does seem a bit screwy at times when you cut off the black sea trade from the rest of the world by moving ships out of marmara. overall, though, it was much improved in a number of the faction's shipping and trade. the italians were the ones that did this the most. they'd move out of the zone around venice and go around the italian peninsula to the genoa zone and work from there a lot.

it's far from perfect and i had to tweak a lot of stuff to get it to work as well as i got it, but as least there are a lot more ships on the board, which is essentially all i was trying to do. a routine for training the ai on how to construct good trade routes would have been a nice file to have in order to tweak faction by faction; that would have been really nice. so, without that, the best i can do is to just make the ai REALLY prolific on ship building use large numbers to make up for poor routing. oh, and find out how each faction behavior works and then pick the behaviors that seem to promote good trade routes.

K.

[+DOC+]

As mentioned in another thread, you might want to swap the province characteristics of Genoa and Venice around for that very reason K. The Italians are crap at trading from Venice and good with Genoa.

[Kraellin]

doc,

yeah, i think it may have something to do with the GA game and yeah, i read your other post in the new thread about that. if i ever get this computer back up right i'll take a look at it.

K.

[cugel]

Another idea K might be to reduce support costs for ships, either by 1/2 or to zero. Then producing a lot of them won't cause the faction to have to change to close_to_support_limit (which sometimes seems like a dead-end for the AI - example: the Danes, who once they get stuck in a rut never seem to get un-stuck).

[Turbo]

Quote[/b] (Kraellin @ Jan. 03 2003,14:17)]hehe, i've got ships coming out my arse i think i'm close to figuring out how to get this shipping stuff really cranking. the byzantines are now super powers because of their shipping and trade routes...quite scary.

the almo's also build a lot of ships, but get VERY protective of their home port in morocco. they'll spread out if no one is around, but if one ship moves into their home port, they'll bring almost their entire fleet back to home base to protect it. talk about paranoia.

the english and the danes are now fighting for control of the north sea and english channel, but somehow in the 2nd version of this, the danes arent building hardly any ships, so something got screwed up there.

the germans and french still seem to be shy in building ships for some reason. they do build some now, but gotta look at the stats again.

the swiss and the turks are building ships. lol. not many, but it's a start

my spanish give varying results. they build ok, but their deployment is quite erratic. sometimes they sit and protect the home port and sometimes they use the home port to raid from and sometimes they spread out. not quite sure what's going on there yet, but at least they build.

the aragonese are the real surprise. they are now capturing provinces by having more money from their limited trade route, but they do seem to use trade routes fairly effectively.

the italians are building again, but seem bent on holding the sea zone around genoa, which always starts a war with the burgundians, so hard to tell how effective they might be otherwise.

i turned the egyptians way back at first but now have them back and building ships. they almost always end up fighting the byzantine through ship battles in the egypt sea zone. the egyptians are set to muslim devout this time, instead of muslim expansionist and it seems to make no difference in their aggressive sea action. they ALWAYS try to drive everyone out of that one sea zone.

ok, so here's my reasoning on trade and the aggressive AI. we know that the ai tends to attack when it has the advantage, at least with some of the ai behaviors. so, let's take advantage of that. we cant change it, so let's use it to our advantage. that means, get the ai building a TON of ships and let's go ahead and fight for the seas. this will keep the human on his toes and cut down the human trade routes somewhat. and that's exactly what we need. the human can all too easily run away with the game thru trade routes and money, so let's get the ai VERY aggressive in this regard.

before, i was going for trying to get the ai to be less aggressive on the seas and expanding his trade by keeping the peace and simply spreading out. well, to do that, you almost have to set all the ai factions to a very few ai behavior types, like muslim_peaceful. and that just isnt very good. oddly, so far, orthodox_stagnant is producing the best trade route routines. the byzantine in my game are now out-producing me in ships and trade. it's quite impressive. if i can just get the others to do this, i'll have a great mod, one that folks have been wanting for a while when they noticed that the ai sucks in trading.

i've modded quite a few things, including some ships costs, ship building time, ai preferences, starting locations for factions and a number of other things i'm not going to yap about quite yet (specially since they arent working right yet:).

i've totally abandoned my 10 year rule for this. if they fight on the opening move, so be it. and, i've gotten some interesting conflicts. the aragonese sending a crusade to cordoba was a shocker. the byzantines invading tunisia by sea was interesting. the danes taking over england was cool. the german naval fleet mixing it up with the danish longboats was funny. the papacy invading switzerland was quite unexpected. lol. gotta watch that old pope

there are some observable patterns emerging in the ai behaviors. most behaviors that have 'defensive' in their name seem to do the protect-the-home-base-first routine. the spanish are catholic_defensive_crusader in my mod. other 'defensive' ai's seem to operate similarly. the muslim_devout also seems to act like a defensive behavior. the muslim_peaceful will build and spread but then come home if threatened. in the last game, there were 16 stacks of ships in the straits of gibraltar with a total of 22 ships of different factions, the almo's having spread out to begin with but then brought damn near everything back when 1 or 2 other factions stuck ships in there.

ok, and here is one of the keys to this stuff. we werent really certain how those numbers after each behavior were affecting everything. the way it seems to work is that it's a ratio of any given number to ALL the other numbers of all other things. for instance, if you raise the muslim_peaceful(20) on the ship stuff to muslim_peaceful(400), the code says ok, take ALL the other units of muslim peacful, including the land units and compare these numbers, then build based on the highest values most of the time, but not always.

we also know that the ai alters its behavior based on what's going on in the game. it even states this in the early.txt file. what we dont know is, which of these ai behaviors are switchable. can a muslim_peaceful become catholic_crusader_trader, for instance, or, does the ai simply use the poverty_stricken, desparate_defense, close_to_support_limit, and rebels behaviors as the one's that can be switched to? my recent thinking is that ALL of the behaviors may be being used to switched to. remember, just because it says 'catholic' in the file, doesnt mean the code reads this as catholic only. this is just a variable name, just a tag for reference or for starting out a faction behavior. it doesnt necessarily mean that a catholic faction cant use a muslim behavior. it's just a tag. it doesnt mean anything particularly. you could have named them behavior_a, behavior_b, behavior_c and so forth. you get what i mean here?

now, to test this, i decided to change some of the starting behaviors to include those 4 oddball behaviors, poverty, close_to, rebels, and desparate. the game wouldnt show in the campaign list. so, one or more of those 4 is different in nature than the muslim, catholic, orthodox ones. i suspect it's the rebels, since if that one is set, it wont EVER change. that is also stated in the early.txt file. more testing is needed on all that yet.

now, going back to the numbers at the end of the muslim_peaceful type references. you MUST look at the land based unit numbers. some of those numbers are quite high, 600 and over, so, even if you went from muslim_peaceful(20) to muslim_peaceful(400), you may still not be giving ship building a very high priority relative to peasants(600). you MUST look at ALL the unit values. and then, it's just a matter of balance, getting more ships, but not so much that the ai becomes terribly vulnerable to land attacks.

now, what i dont know here is if the code is taking units AND building preferences into account as one thing. do the building preferences and the unit preferences get taken together or are they separately considered when the ai is spending its money? that one i dont know yet. my earlier guess was that they were taken separately.

ed,
there are a number of things that need to be tested. if yuuki was doing all this he'd very carefully test each individual stat and setting and isolate all this stuff out systematically. i'm terrible about doing this. i tend to do 50 tweaks at once to get an overall change and then end up wondering which tweak did what, but, i get bigger changes and more diverse effects this way. i find the tweak the one stat, test ad nauseum, tweak, test, tweak, test style a bit too mundane for my tastes. i'm too impatient. if you were so inclined, testing some of this stuff one by one would be helpful, like the poverty, rebels, desparate, close_to stuff. which one of those is the one that prevents the game from showing in the campaign list when it's given to a faction as the starting behavior...stuff like that. in other words, answer some of the questions i've listed above. i'm currently bent on getting all the factions positioned on the map better and getting them all to do more shipping.

oh, and that's another thing; because we know that some ai behaviors are quite aggressive, locating and positining your starting ports for the factions is quite critical now. i'm having to re-arrange some of the province ownerships to spread out the starting ports better so that the ai can at least start to produce some ships. this is helping. the last change i did was to remove the danish from denmark. lol. sounds goofy, and is terrbily non-historic, perhaps, but i go first for game play, so, if the english end up starting in georgia, so be it

cugel,
i think i answered all your points in the stuff above, so nothing really specific to direct at you personally here, other than keep the faith and keep on truckin

K.

I think we need to face facts that without another patch (fat chance) that fixes the AI naval trade, this facet of MTW is hopeless. If the AI would at least make a modest attempt to try to trade, building more ships might make things better. Unfortunately, the AI treats the ships as combat units. Ports and shipyards when they are built, are built in provinces without consideration of trade resources. Finding a dozen ships in one sea area and none in others is common AI "tactics".

I bought this game looking for a challenge, not looking for a walkover or blowout. Based on this, I went "heretic" and modded this part of the game.

My solution was to eliminate naval trade altogether but retain the naval combat/transport features of the ships. This was easy to do. Income now comes exclusively from farmland or base province income. This had some interesting consequences in the game as it forces serious limitations on the size and quality of the player forces. Holding provinces and keeping them happy becomes a critical part of revenue along with decent govenors. Rebellions or civil wars are budget breakers. Size of empire equates with revenue, allowing for the 'Hojo' like enemies I liked so much from STW.

[Turbo]

Quote[/b] (Edratman @ Dec. 31 2002,06:52)]I think I've got it An example of turning a finely tuned Engineering mind (sic) to solving a problem.

How about delaying the merchant1 build? Make the prerequisite Castle9, or what ever you choose.

Think about it. We can't get the AI to trade, so limit our trade. This would level the field. The implications are enormous. Probably can't afford a world wide network of agents, or ships, so you'll play blind. No more bribing of rebel provinces whenever you want. Spend every florin like it was real money.

I'll wager the AI is good enough under that condition. I know my playing style would go down the toilet.

Got to run.

I came to the same conclusion however, I eliminated naval trade. Income comes from province income and farmland just like STW. This puts the human on the same playing field as the AI and changes the nature of the game. I find myself struggling with income, and constantly checking govenors and happiness levels. I never paid any attention with this before because with the one-sided naval trade I was swimming in florins. Rebellions and civil wars are budget busters now, it is easy to go into the red. And, playing Poland is close to hopeless....

[Kraellin]

turbo,

cool beans.

fraid i'm somewhat temporarily out of the modding business for a while. since my harddrive crashed i havent put mtw back on yet. still ironing out a few bugs and i may have some hardware going bad; i keep getting little oddities that shldnt be there and some interesting clicks and pops now and again, so it may be a while.

at any rate, yeah, the minimal thing is fine for a harder game...almost always is, but i'll still be trying to work out something with the ship stuff. i hate just cutting off parts of a game to make it better, though, sometimes this does seem to be the only way.

K.