*** BREAKTHROUGH *** Making battles more climatic!

[Duke John]

The modding community can only prosper if we share our discoveries, so here goes:

*building up the tension*
I've got a personal project called the Wars of the Roses. During a period of 30 years there were a series of battles. Over the past few hours I was breaking my head trying to come up with a way to lessen the amount of battles and actually have battles that can bring doom or glory to an empire.

So after some tinkering I came to the conclusion to that solution lies in prohibiting non-named characters from moving around on the strategic map. So I tried looking for:

A. Nullifying movement points of captains. After a bit of searching I came to realize that this was not possible.

B. Delete walking animations of strategic captain pieces. Didn't work and if it did it would be a bad fix.

C. Zeroing starting action points in descr_character.txt:

starting_action_points	0

But "Stop!" you scream, now nobody can move. And then my twisted mind starts working; you can create traits that add action points to named characters/familiy members, agents and admirals upon creation. So now we have only eliminated movement of captains.

The consequence is that battles can only be initiated by family members, and since you only have a few of those you will carefully decide which battle to fight. Since the AI also only fights with family members each battle will become significant as each loss with probably mean a loss of a named character which brings the faction closer to defeat.

Now as return of sharing this find (for whatever it is worth, alot to me) with the community, I would ask modders to find out how the AI reacts to this, and wether there is any chance of avoiding the AI to throw away all its family members on the first turn.

I'm curious to your finds and opinions, so please let it hear!

Cheers,
Duke John

[Silver Rusher]

*building up the tension*
I've got a personal project called the Wars of the Roses. During a period of 30 years there were a series of battles. Over the past few hours I was breaking my head trying to come up with a way to lessen the amount of battles and actually have battles that can bring doom or glory to an empire.

You are making a Wars of the Roses mod? We at CTW are having the Wars of the Roses. I know you are making Sengoku Jidai, but well...

Anyway, the thing I don't think you have realised is that in defensive battles you can still use captains. Just march a general army into the middle of nowhere, get rid of the general, and you got yourself a piece of solitary bait. Another thing is that often the game makes it so that only really winning big battles with your captains makes them generalworthy. Another thing you haven't thought about (yes, another thing) is also how players are going to want to bring in troops from nearby settlements to reinforce their armies. It was a good idea, but IMO it does leave a few massive holes and accuracy.

[Duke John]

The WotR mod is a very slow moving personal project and is what I do to keep the things diverse.

But yes, there are indeed large holes in the idea.

It could be easier to merge with normal units by upping the movementpoints.

Also I am aware that this idea might not be suitable for all projects. For the WotR mod it is perfect as when you look at how the armies moved during the campaigns they were all led by important nobles/heirs/kings who crossed the country to pick up soldiers. Then there are a couple of battles and the campaign (not ingame, but historical) is over.

Placing armies on the map and leaving them alone might not be an option for the AI. If so it can be seen an exploit done by the player. If a player wants an easy game, play easy and use exploits, if you want it hard, play by the rules.

Perhaps a trigger could be made that whenever an army is present on the battlefield and there is no named character then the general will be adopted... I have no idea wether that is possible...

Hmm, perhaps I was a bit overenthusiastic

[Mouzafphaerre]

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The modding community can only prosper if we share our discoveries, so here goes:
{snip}
Duke John

Wholeheartedly agreed!

My sincerest congratulations.


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[Oaty]

So what are the steps to implement this mod? Will it work on an ongoing game? I would'nt mind testing it out and telling you the results.

[dhague]

Sneaky idea, however: I tried adding a "movement points trait" to various characters at one time. The result that I got was the character could move farther than normal. If the character then joined a regular stack, the "joined unit" lost all or at least most of the character's extra movement points. Also, I have noted the AI using Captains for settlement seiges (don't know if an AI family member had to start the seige).

[dclare4]

Hi Duke John,

For what it's worth, I'm thinking go ahead. The new minor captains are next to useless - they don't even have permanent names (I tested moving a single unit in and out of a single vacant town and everytime it came out under a different leader!) so they're useless for most anything but moving armies. Sure go for the 'Great Captain theory of Warfare' it's entirely appropriate to these ages :) - I actually have been wanting to find a way to make immobile 'fortress' stacks for certain areas in my own pet project (like your WOTR mod I found a pet proj to work on) where there were historical fortifications but since the game is limited to 200 provinces and the port cities are not rendered on the battlemap the only real alternative is to use the buildable 'forts' to represent other minor/major but non-capital fortress cities/castles. But I'd need a unit to stay stock still there and I'm thinking your idea is one to test out!

Cheers,
Clare