Mod Concept
In a way you can think of The Caravel Mod as MTW's version of Jack Lusted's "Lands to Conquer" series of mods for RTW and M2TW. It is based on essentially the same concept ie maintain the vanilla feel and flavor and improve on it.
So the mod is not:
-a mod providing more factions, units or provinces than the vanilla game
-a mod featuring new graphics, icons, models, portraits, unit cards etc in other words it does not have any new aesthetic touches.
-a mod geared for impossible difficulty, although it is by far more challenging than the vanilla game
-a mod that is geared to make the game strictly historically accurate, although it improves on the historical plausibility of teh vanilla game in a number of ways
The mod is a comprehensive and complete (but by no means exhaustive) take in bringing out the potential of the vanilla game and make it shine. All gameplay concepts, art, features and attributes of the vanilla game have been maintained; the existing core game has been improved/optimised for SP (single player).
What the mod achieves in the campaign and the battlefield
Improvement and optimisation consisted of small but numerous (too many to meaningfully list) alterations and in the (heavily playtested and proven) combination thereof.
The results are more meaningful faction choices and so behaviour without losing in diversity, flavor or complexity. By improving stack composition, AI unit choices and choice priorities and helping the AI factions to regenerate more easily and quickly decent stacks (through meaningful building choices and dependencies), the battlefield experience is also (considerably at times) improved over vanilla.
Overpowered or underpowered vanilla units/weapons were tweaked (mildly to retain familiarity) accordingly in order for them to become units/weapons with clear battlefield roles ie having clear plusses and minuses, which the AI can recognise and use as such, and so put them to good use on the battlefield.
Battlefield gameplay was then enhanced on the basis of combined arms.
Combined arms basically means that you need to coordinate your units and your unit types (missiles/heavy-light-missile-cavs/melee infantry/light infantry/artillery) in order to win on the field of battle, rather than having units that can do everything themselves (can fulfil multiple roles too well) and singlehandendly (ie so strong that they make other units redundant, hence overpowered) carry the day. I drew on this account from my own TW singleplayer and multiplayer experiences as well as of other players'.
In order to make navigation of units and buildings that have been tweaked easy for players and the game intuitive to play, the text descriptions of units and buildings were changed to reflect their attributes and intended uses. hence what you read in the description is what you get.
AI battlefield use of certain units was also tweaked (through the available parameters in the files), like for example BG units, xbows/arbalesters and guns, to improve their performance at the hands of teh AI, with good results.
Basically, if you enjoy the vanilla game, but are tired of slaughtering armies of peasants and ballistas (or other low end units) with your lancers, or of the AI wasting good florins in buildings that cost much, take forever and train no units or have no other benefit for that faction or in that region (say master merchant in a landlocked province), or of Lithuanian cavalry having building requirements that rival those of Gothic Knights, or sick of winning the early game with mercenary dismounted Druzhinas then this is a mod you might want to try.
NOTE: all levels of difficulty start with 2000 flrs treasury. This is because 2000 flrs is the default treasury, and all AI factions, that is the factions that the player does not choose, revert back to it. This is pretty easy to assert, just start a campaign in vanilla and after the first turn switch to another faction (note: by use of -ian every faction is represented by a number in your keyboard - press the numbers to change factions; also use switch+number). What you'll see is that (any of) the AI faction is down to 2000 flrns as starting treasury. Hence, its only fair for the player to start at the same money level - if the AI can do it, we can(?) too ;)
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