The Caravel Mod

[Durango]

OK, some ideas and feedback.

1. Region bonuses - Yes, +1 valour bonus provinces are clearly detrimental to the AI. However, like Stazi says, they are a very
nice way of having certain regions be of extra strategic value. I sure enjoy "something to shoot for". The solution to the AI not teching
up the provinces beyond the requirements for the bonus unit is a tricky one to find, and I have been contemplating how to do so for
some time now.

One way to do would be to clone units into certain region specific versions of themselves, if there are extra unit slots to spare. With
this system, you would edit the new units to have better stats equal to 1 valour, and rename them according to their origin. Urban
militia trained in Tuscany would become Tuscan Urban Militia, i.e. a "Region-Name" format. They could also be set to have a higher
AI preference in the unitprod. All, in all, it would be a matter of using about two dozen extra unit slots to achieve the effect.

Perhaps the campaign map could show the changes as well, similar to the way that bonuses and trade goods are marked on the STW
campaign map.

2. AI costs and preferences - Are you sure, Gollum, that the computer makes decisions on what to build based on cost and
upkeep? Personally, I have been a bit reluctant to changes the vanilla ratio/balance too much for fear that the AI would bankrupt itself
training units it wants despite them being prohibitively expensive.

3. Royal BG costs - What I have done in my home mod is to make BGs non-trainable and have them cost zero in upkeep. Not only
is this greatly helping the small factions manage their economy, but also level the playing field between the player and AI, since the
computer does not retrain his BGs anyway. Is this also the approach taken in the Caravel mod?

4. Unit sizes - I believe that MTW is balanced for Default unit sizes in the battle mode. For one, you can only raise the camera so
much above the ground, and having larger units gives you less overview due to seeing less of your forces at the same time. Furthermore,
the maximum frontage of men is limited to about 60 men IIRC, and I remember being annoyed that my missile troops and swordsmen
could not spread out sufficiently thin playing on Huge. Thirdly, only some of the battle maps are large and spacious, while quite a few are
fairly small. The terrain, I think, is also optimized for Default.

However, I do concur with the advantages gained on the campaign map by playing on Huge, as I have raised the cost, upkeep and
training time to 2x, while keeping the number of men the same.