Historical battles

[Dragoncrusader]

Does anyone know how to produce historical battles in either MTW or RTW and what sort of editing programme I would need?
thanks

[AmbrosiusAurelianus]

I can give you some help with MTW historical battles: I haven't tried RTW ones yet. It all depends on what you want to do.
If you want to modify existing battles you must edit the BDF and ADF files that are in the individual battle folders. You should be able to find them here.
C:\Program Files\Total War\Medieval - Total War\Battle\batinit\Historical Battles

Get a text editor. There are many, but I use Notetab light, cos it is free.
http://www.notetab.ch/ntl.htm

If you load up the files you should be able to edit things such as unit numbers and types. If you are unhappy with unit stats you need Gnome editor, which you should find at the download section of the org. You can load the following files with this editor if you have VI.
CRUSADER_BUILD_PROD13
CRUSADERS_UNIT_PROD11
PROJECTILESTATS

The other text files relating to the add on can be edited as well.
I can do some other things, but I'm still figuring out how to do some stuff myself so I hope this helps - you can search the org if it doesn't, there are a few guides knocking around. What exactly are you trying to do?

[Dragoncrusader]

I have been reading Steven Runciman's excellent 3 volume history of the Crusades and in there are dozens of battles that I have never heard of and would like to recreate and play. For instance the Battle of Dorylaeum in the 1st Crusade - an army of French crusader knights on foot in the middle of the plain being pounded by two armies of Turkish horse archers - only to be rescued at the last minute by an army of 'Italian' crusaders coming down from the mountain pass. And the Bishop de Puy and a small company of knights appear behind the Turkish army and cause them to panic. How cool is that. Difficult to do as a custom battle though because you cannot one French army on the middle of the map and another Italian army on the edge. But you should be able to do this with the historical battles. I shall give the text editor a go and see how I get on.
Thanks

[AmbrosiusAurelianus]

And the Bishop de Puy and a small company of knights appear behind the Turkish army and cause them to panic. How cool is that. Difficult to do as a custom battle though because you cannot one French army on the middle of the map and another Italian army on the edge. But you should be able to do this with the historical battles.

You can. There are start position co-ordinates in the ADF file, along with a direction figure. So far I haven't tackled these because I don't know how to relate the numbers to the actual map, but it is possible - somebody made a Battle of Bosworth historical battle, with a very similar scenario. You might have to look into how army is programmed to behave though, or just experiment with the co-ordinates and see what happens.

[Dragoncrusader]

I already have a good idea of which co-ordinates to use from the existing historical battles and a bit of trial and error (depends on map size?) Also there is a 'read me' file in the historical battles folder which gives details of how to program the AI to react in certain ways. So I will give that a try as well. I forsee some long nights in front of the computer. I shall post how I get on.
thanks

[AmbrosiusAurelianus]

I already have a good idea of which co-ordinates to use from the existing historical battles and a bit of trial and error (depends on map size?) Also there is a 'read me' file in the historical battles folder which gives details of how to program the AI to react in certain ways. So I will give that a try as well. I forsee some long nights in front of the computer. I shall post how I get on.

Be sure to do so; I would love to hear the results. I too am mostly interested in Historic battles. If you need help on changing battle flags let me know- that is one thing that I did manage to figure out myself, although I still can't seem to change the colour scheme or faction affiliation in historic battles.

[Dragoncrusader]

Well I burnt the midnight oil and have now managed to build two historical battles from scratch. I kept a note of what files did what and wrote this up into a guide which I have posted in the MTW forum. I managed to change the factions for both MTW and Viking TW, faction affliation, allies, text files, position on the map. I am now experimenting on getting the ai to behave differently - first try, an ambush situation in a mountain pass. I want the ambush unit to wait until the decoy unit is attacked. I will let you know how I get on.