I've been trying to mod my game to make it more fun. I'd download someone else's mod but at the moment I'm happy to tailor the game to my own tastes.

Battle speed has been a big concern of mine at the mo, so I added extra morale to all units. That was a nice improvement. Then there were two more things: speed of the units (apparently editable in the descr_battle_map_movement_modifiers.txt file) and killing speed.

So I edit the txt file that is supposed to alter the speed of units depending on the terrain. I made some reductions and tested it out. I thought the changes had worked. Things seemed slower I thought and I was really pleased. However, after some more tinkering, I realised there was no difference in speeds whatsoever.

Using the flat grassland map, I placed one unit of Auxilia, and one enemy unit of Legionaries. I was going to test changes to kill speeds when I noticed something else instead. When I placed my Auxilia at the edge of the deployment zone and started the battle, if I double clicked on the enemy legionaries and timed how long it took for my brave Auxilia to reach 'charging' distance, it would take the same time no matter what changes I made to the text file. Always about 40 seconds. I tried it in snow, no difference.

I then used horses, one light/fast cavalry unit and one heavy/slower cavalry unit. No matter what changes I made to the movement modifiers file they always got across from the edge of the deployment zone to the end of the red line at the other side of the map in one minute 10 seconds. Actually there is a bug of sorts: Group together the fast and slow cavalry unit and both units travel at the speed of the fast unit. Don't group them and the slower cavalry unit takes another 20 seconds to do the journey.

I then edited the grassy flatlands map and added strips with different terrains. Rather than just have grass to test, I added sand, swamp and rock. I then got several units, lined them up on each of the surfaces and had them race to the other side. Each unit reached the end at roughly the same time, despite some supposed to have big movement penalties.

After about 2-3 hours of testing units on different surfaces and maps and finding modding the file did nothing, I gave up defeated. I wondered if the file was supposed to affect not the speed, but the amount of fatigue suffered, but at the end of the sprint, every unit was typically at the same 'warmed up' stage.

Perhaps the file doesn't affect custom games and only campaigns (I haven't tested the campaign battles yet) but as far as I can see, the file does nothing despite many people saying otherwise.

I'm running version 1.2 of RTW. Anyone shed any light on the file and it's effects?