Discussion and Announcements

[Zarax]

The land briges are a temporary measure made to compensate for the AI problems with naval invasions arose in 1.3, I think they will go out as soon as the problem will be fixed.

About Syracuse, I think the change has been done because it was a quite independent city-state, with little or no support from hellas...

[WhiteProphecy]

ok about the naval thing but Syracuse, that is awsome that it is independent, that why it is so fun to control that terictory so far away, becuase you can take all of Scily, and than march into Italy.

[Zarax]

Well, now you can control greece and then march into Italy and Sicily too...

[DimeBagHo]

WhiteProphecy:

(1) If you don't want the land bridges you can revert to the vanilla map quite easily. Run the XGM installer again, and then before you start a campaign, delete the following files:

xgm\Data\world\maps\base\map_heights.hgt
xgm\Data\world\maps\base\map_regions.tga

But, personally I find it a lot more fun to have to defend my cities rather than rely on the naval incompetence of the AI. You don't have to use the bridges yourself, and really the AI can't function without them.

(2) Carthage still has Iberian infantry (and Scutarii now) but only in Iberia (spain).

(3) Defending Syracuse was fun, but historically Syracuse was never a member of any of the alliances of the Greek Cities in this period. Besides, it just made things too easy for the GCS to be able to dominate Sicily and Greece so early in the game. Now you have to fight your way through two or three factions just to start expanding, rather than being able to shut down two Roman factions before they even get going.

[Zarax]

BTW, I noticed a strange thng DimebagHo, in my current Carthage campaign the AI seemed to be using the navy a bit better than before... While I haven't got any real naval invasion (I think the AI just wanted to use the land bridges) my ports were under constant blockade by the romans, at least until they were still able to field a navy...

[Zarax]

Dude, you made it!
This mod really rocks!
I'm having one of the most epic campaigns ever with the carthaginians, with some truly extensive battles against the greeks now that the romans are gone... The combination of armoured phalangites and hypaspists can be a truly hard nut to crack, even against a mix of sacred band, carthage levy phalangites and mercenary hoplites (modded to be like a lower quality hypaspists) they does serious damage, especially the Corinthians that are more than a match to my best units... I don't know why, but now i really dread facing a stack with some spartans that is approaching against my elite army... When I brought on my war elephants they answered with ballistaes, giving me some real pains as my cavalry couldn't cross the enemy phalangites...

[Zarax]

DimeBagHo, are you working on some update?

EDIT: I'm experimenting in a version that uses the BI exe to get the additional features... Let me know if you're interested in that...

[DimeBagHo]

At the moment I'm working on some minor changes. Egypt is going to get Levy Phalangite and Phalangite equivalent units, rather than just the current Nile Phalangites (which are just a little better than levies).

I have played around a bit with using the BI exe (mostly to see whether the shield wall formation would make a good replacement for the phalanx formation). Let me know how things go for you.

[Zarax]

Well, please try to not make the eggies a macedonian clone like RTR did, their phalanxes were of lower quality historically anyways... In an historically correct game the egyptian player should use the strenght of numbers rather than army quality...
If you want to boost the nile pikes a bit you might give them a combat bonus in desert instead and make them hardier...

About BI, how did you made xgm work with the exe? I've been able to import some stuff but not make the whole thing working...

[Zarax]

Well, if I can find a way to merge your mod with this one I think we'll get practically on perfection: http://www.twcenter.net/downloads/db/index.php?mod=722

[DimeBagHo]

Borsook's mod is what got me interested in playing around with the BI exe. I couldn't figure out how to get it to work correctly with the -mod switch - so I had to overwrite stuff in the main data directory to get XGM going with it. Another obvious downside is that I would either have to maintain two versions of XGM or drop support for RTW 1.3.

[Zarax]

Well, your latest version got pretty much anything a player would want for such a MOD, a good compromise would to keep maintaining the RTW version only for bugfixes while doing the bulk of development on the BI one... The other nice thing in Borsook's work is that it developed most of the "hidden units" left by CA, giving some quite interesting bonuses...

[Zarax]

I did some tests with mixing XGM and RTWEP... The BI exe is definitely better working than the 1.3 RTW one, naval invasions aren't broken and the AI seems smarter than the vanilla one.

[Zarax]

Ok, here's a quick tutorial on how to use XGM with the BI exe:

advantages:

- BI AI is smarter than RTW one and naval invasions works

- You can easily mod the EDU file to add BI formations

disadvantages:

- overwrites the vanilla campaign, so if you got other mods installed it's likely they will be broken

- untested and unoptimized so it's likely that there will be some bugs and uses redundant data for now

instructions:

- go to your rtw folder and double click on the xgm subfolder

- copy (don't cut, it won't work!) all the content using ctrl+c

- go back into the rtw main folder and paste everything, overwriting when it asks to

- in your desktop (or programs menu) right click in the xgm link, select properties and change the target to: "C:\Program Files\Activision\Rome - Total War\RomeTW-BI.exe" -mod: -show_err -nm

note that if you didn't install RTW in "C:\program files" you will have to change the path to the one of choice, actually it might be safer just to copy "-mod: -show_err -nm" (without the "") over -mod: xgm and replacing RomeTW.exe with RomeTW-BI.exe.

If someone is interested i'll make an optimized unit file and publish it provided DimeBagHo gives me the permission to do it...

NOTE: Remember to back-up your RTW folder before doing it!

[Zarax]

Two quick suggestions for the next version:

1) Make balearic slingers recruitable in Palma

2) You might want to include files to make the MOD compatible with the MM 1.3 patch and/or Warmap...

[DimeBagHo]

Zarax: Feel free to release that optimised unit file. The next version might take a while - maybe a week or so. I'm back to playing BF2 so it's hard to find time for modding :).

[Zarax]

That's good, I'm currently reinstalling MTW+BI as I managed to mess up the game beyond repair trying to merge MM 1.3 and XGM...

That said, I'm thinking to tune down the eggys a bit at the start as they still will kill the seleucid a bit too often and eventually turn on carthage after that... Needless to say, numidian cav + elephants are an excellent counter to eggys with a bit of cav support (even toned down the general's cav are still capable to turn the tide of the battle, they will only show some extra problems on prolonged battles) but their numbers make them quite a painful thing to manage, especially with the BI exe that fixes naval invasions.

[Lentonius]

is there any screenshots?



happy holidays

[Zarax]

Readme got some screenshots, all units are quite fitting to vanilla RTW visuals but the good stuff is not on the eyecandy here...

[Zarax]

BI optimization for XGM is now available!

http://microsoftuse.temp.powweb.com/hosted/xgmbizx.exe

Features:

- includes instructions to activate xgm using BI exe

- optimized files for BI allows swimming and BI formations for various units

- toned down general bodyguards

- added a new recruitable mercenary for Carthage, made Phoeni Infantry slightly harder to recruit to compensate

not included in the mod but suggested:

remove the land bridges as the BI exe has working naval invasions so no need for them.

DimeBagHo, I hope you'll like my little additions to your great work, let me know if something needs to be changed :)

[Kaldhore]

Seeing how im involved in another game for a week - should I download this mod now or should I wait for 1.5 Patch compatibility?

It looks fantastic BTW I always prefered the Greeks to the romans :P

[DimeBagHo]

Lentonius: Zarax is right. Some of the new units look nice (you can see most of them in the readme) but my aim has always been to improve gameplay, and to improve the tactical and strategic options available to the Greeks, rather than to improve the way the game looks.

Kaldhore: According to CA the new patch will not break saved game compatibility, so you are probably safe to download XGM and start a campaign now.

Zarax: According to CA naval invasions will be fixed in the 1.5 patch, so I will probably remove the land bridges once the patch comes out (I might make them an optional extra).

I think I will hold off on releasing the next version until after the patch comes out. I also think that I will stick with the RTW exe for future versions of XGM, but include your BI files as an option.

[Zarax]

I will take care of the BI optimization, the files I made should be 100% compatible with 1.3 too, the only difference is that the extra stuff won't show...

BTW, if you can add an hidden resource for palma and one for the "hellenistic lands" (greece, southern italy and eastern mediterranean) you would help me a lot as i'm thinking about implementing some very light and hidden AOR to fine tune some game balance aspects and give some more character to a few factions...

[DimeBagHo]

BTW, if you can add an hidden resource for palma and one for the "hellenistic lands" (greece, southern italy and eastern mediterranean) you would help me a lot as i'm thinking about implementing some very light and hidden AOR to fine tune some game balance aspects and give some more character to a few factions...

I will. In fact I was thinking about implementing several new AORs so that I could give each region its own native levies, and limit the recruitment of some elite units.

[Zarax]

I was thinking about something lighter than that, mostly to emphasize the role of mercenaries...

If you want to send me some betas i can test them and give you some early feedback too...

[Kaldhore]

Kaldhore: According to CA the new patch will not break saved game compatibility, so you are probably safe to download XGM and start a campaign now.

Cheers dude

[DimeBagHo]

The next version is pretty much done. I am still playing around with some of the unit descriptions and waiting for the patch. The changes are mostly just to tidy up the transition to the new phalangite units started in the previous version.

GCS - The unit line-up is now much closer to the other Greek factions.

Militia Phalangites - similar to other levy phalangite units.
Phalangites - similar to other phalangite units.
Armoured Phalangites - similar to Foot Companions (etc), except that they have significantly heavier armour, but lower attack.
Spartan Phalangites - no longer an uber unit, but still very good, they are similar to Foot Companions (etc) except that they have an excellent sword attack, and higher morale.

Egypt - Added a levy phalangite unit, and made Nile Phalangites similar to other Greek phalangite units.

Carthage - Added Balearic Slingers recruitable in Palma.

I have also fixed up some unit voices, and corrected some unit descriptions. Land bridges will become an optional extra.

Zarax - I have added a hidden_resource "hellenic" and added it to all of the provinces that had significant Greek populations, including some outliers like Bosphoros, Cyrenaica, and Transalpine Gaul. Send me an e-mail at dimebagwhore@yahoo.com and I will send back a beta of the new version.

[Zarax]

Hmm, I'm not too enthusiast into uniforming factions too much, making the hellenistic factions too similar to each other the RTR way would hurt both the fun and realism factor...

How about:

Macedonians - they stay more or less the same as now

Greeks - better equipped phalangites but suffers from high upkeep and lower morale as they lacked a real standing army except for the spartans and few other elites

Seleucid - good unit roster but can recruit good troops only in hellenistic areas and have to rely on low morale light infantry and levy pikes everywhere else.

Egypt - Lots of low quality infantry, levy quality pikes and usually low morale except for the elites.
Bonus in desert but very low armour for most troops.

Historically egypt had very low quality troops except for the macedonian elite and relied more on numbers and a few mercs than anything else...
They won at Raphia over the seleucids mostly thanks to sheer numerical superiority and due to the fact that Seleukos was very poor at maintaning army cohesion despite being able to break the enemy left.

In detail:

Nubian spears - theuphoroi level infantry, maybe slightly better against cav. Good stamina, bonus in desert

Nile inf - levy quality phalangites with low armour but good stamina and bonus in desert

Desert axemen - decent quality flankers, low armour but good morale and very hardy. Bonus in desert

Pharaoh guards - those were the macedonians, capable hypaspist-like infantry with excellent morale and great stamina.

[DimeBagHo]

I have e-mailed the beta for XGM 3.4.1 to you.

Here is what I have done with Greek infantry units:

Elite units including Foot Companions, Silver Shield Phalangites and Legionaries, Bronze Shield Phalangites, Armoured Phalangites, Pharaoh's Guard, and Hypaspists, are only recruitable in hellenic provinces.

Levy phalangite units are all pretty similar, except for Carthaginian levies which have somewhat better armour. The regular phalangite units are all pretty similar except for the Egyptians which have lighter armour.

There are some significant differences between the elite phalangite units. Some of the GCS units are significantly more expensive.

The GCS cavalry line-up has changed a little as well. Thessalians are gone, replaced by a heavy cavalry unit equiped with shields.

The line-up is now: Greek Militia Cavalry (much the same), Greek Light Cavalry (formerly Greek cavalry), Greek Cavalry (similar to Macedonian Cavalry, 2 turns to recruit), Greek Armoured Cavalry (similar to Praetorian Cavalry, three turns to recruit, but now recruitable anywhere).

[DimeBagHo]

XGM version 3.4.1 is available for download.

You can get it here.

-Updated to work with 1.5/1.6 patches
-Removed Thessalian Cavalry
-Added Greek Armoured Cavalry
-Added Levy Phalangites to Egypt
-Added Militia Phalangites to GCS
-Increased size of GCS phalanx units
-Added AOR for elite phalanx units
-Removed land bridges from default install
-Tweaked various unit costs and stats

Most of the changes are either updates for the 1.5/1.6 patch, or tidying up the transition to phalangite units.