Campaign questions

[Diehard_TH]

Hi all,

I've recently purchased MTW/VI after playing STW for some years and i very glad i have, awesome game.

A few questions though.

My second game (French/Early/Hard) has me having heir problems. To start with i got loads of sons but once the old king died i've had nothing but princess after princess, then he had a gap of 10 years or so and then 4 sons in a row. The eldest is now 13 but the king is 62, and his only surviving brother just died of old age! Fingers crossed he holds on a few more years....

Question 1: At what stage does the AI work out the heirs stats? Is it when they come of age or when they're born? Makes quite a difference as my kings Influence etc is usually much higher the older they are.

Question 2: Does the kings influence actually affect whether you get alliances or not, or are there modifiers for each faction? My king usually has between 7 and 9 influence yet no-one seems to want to know I noticed on my first campaign (England/Early/Hard - quit due to the GH!) that the French never seem to be allies with many factions, which makes me think there must be some sort of -ve modifier for their diplomatic relations.

Question 3: Is there some sort of savegame bug, as quite often (usually after i've not saved for a few turns) the game crashes to Windows when i hit the Esc button to save it?

That's it i think for now, most queries are answered on the excellent guide forum, well done for that, v.useful.....

[Satyr]

Try using the Ctrl-S to quick save the game. Ctrl-L will do a quick reload. If you are crashing chances are you need to upgrade some driver somewhere. I have been playing MTW since it came out and since loading version 1.1 I have never had it crash.

Often kings will have children even when they are quite old. In my current game the king had 3 children in the last 3 years of his life. If it really looks like you might not have an heir by the time your king gets to 65 or so you can always take preemtive steps and use the cheat code that will cause a male heir to be born the next year. The only time this doesn't work is if your king has 6 brothers all waiting to be king then you can not have another heir as 6 is the max. The cheat code is keyed in while on the strategic map and is .unfreeze. and make sure to include the periods on either end.

Heir stats are worked out when the heir is born but it isn't until he is of age that he is capable of becoming the ruler and then gets placed at the top of the list (obviously).

Your king's influence affects your ability to make treaties and also I think has some effect on the size or cost of crusades and most importantly, controls happiness levels at home. However, once you gain a certain size the AI no longer sees you as a viable strategic partner because you probably got big by warring on your neighbors. Why would they want to ally with a wormonger? You will be hated, envied and attacked at every sign of weakness. Enjoy it, it is Total War after all.

Enjoy, MTW is one of the best games ever created!

[ShadowMagnet]

Intersting thing you can do is marry your princesses to the best generals you have. Better yet - choose absolutely the best one there and marry him to the youngest princess in royal family. When your king dies (provided you haven't been exporting your princesses abroad to marry into any foreign faction and there are no royal heirs available) the general in question has a major chance of controlling more valuable lands and better units in the oncoming civil war. Gives the campaign wicked flavour and makes it more real-life.

One thing that really gets me is reappearance of eliminated factions. On the whole I don't mind but several times the English and HRE reappeared with their king being 58 and the youngest heir about 50!! Not one of them a married man. I let them die out slowly, and yet, even after ALL the heirs have passed away aged over 60, some twenty years later they have enough cheek to respawn again!

Heir stats only come into play when your sons are mature. The moment they turn 16 they are given their first v&vs. Any vices or virtues are only given to the generals visible on the map.

Influence does help forging alliances but there are some other things that affect your chances.

a) faction profile (expansionist, defensive, merchant etc.)
b) emissary valour - the higher the better
c) your current position on the map.

All these statements come from personal experience and have no scientific background so feel free to correct me. Certain mechanisms seem to be fairly constant and after a good year and a half of playing the game (I will never stop having fun with it) I repeatedly get similar results.

Never encounterd any bugs in the since installing VI. No crashes, nothing.
It might be your system, mate. Try and free up as much memory as you can spare, close down any applications you don't need and see how it runs.
Good luck.

[Yoyoma1910]

Yes, a problem with a king that has too many sons is that the next heir may not be able to fit his into the line of succession. Only 6 male heirs to the throne at once. This Includes the brothers. So how do you fix it? well, thin the herd of course. If your king has a large amount of brothers, rid yourself of the less attractive ones so that some new blood can be on the table.
It will also keep the unkingly royals from being king...

[mfberg]

Check out the Apothecary for CTD problems, some of the newer NVidia Drivers may make things worse, I use an older one, when I updated I got constant CTD's. Save your games at the beginning of the turn, and have at least two saves in case one gets corrupted.

mfberg

[Diehard_TH]

Thanks guys.

Now i think on it i have had problems with some display settings so it's probably the driver. I'll try using Ctrl+s in future.

As for the heirs, i think i did have 6 at one point but 'accidently' got the dross killed off and still didn't get any more for many years.

Impressed some of you get kings up to over 80 years old, all mine (admittedly not many) have died before 70.