ZX MiniMod Beta Released!

[Pericles]

Zarax:

My suggestion would be to edit your first post on a continuing basis to keep us up-to-date on the changes you make to your mod:

Add the date (in BOLD) plus the version number (in bold).

For example:

DATE: ####

Mod Version ####

Changes to date:

1
2
3

After a while this thread is going to get long, and it will be hard to read through to find what changes you have made to your mod.

Thanks :)

[Zarax]

Will do, thank you :-)

[Pericles]

Thanks for your work on this mod.

I am currently knee-deep in playing two campaigns so far, so I haven't had a chance to play your mod.

I would suggest you continue to tweak it on your own, and when I get a chance I'll download and play it. The changes you have made so far sound quite interesting.

What I also like is the fact that your mod is a very small download.

One suggestion that I find works:

In the default VI Campaign the first farm improvement (land clearing) takes 16 years and 1200 florins to complete. I think 16 years is just too long to tie up the AI.

I changed this myself to: 2 years and 1000 florins. The other farm improvements progress 4, 6, and 8 years.

As a general rule to help the AI, I think buildings should NOT take longer to build than 10 years (maybe even 8 years) in all the default campaigns.

Cheers!

[Zarax]

Well, i'm experimenting with the building times to help the AI to tech up a bit, and i'm leaning towards a small speed boost for non farming upgrades.

What i still haven't managed to ackieve is to improve the AI economic management...
Despite all my attempts instead of investing money into creating an infrastructure the AI tends to squander almost every florin in units, and crappy ones more often than not, only to go into deep red once they cannot sustain the army anymore...

That said, there are some improvements so far, thanks to the improved roster focus you actually see the AI trying to build good units when it gets the chance, one of the happiest moments of modding development i ever had was when i happened to fight against gothic units in late... There weren't many but still it's much better than fighting vanilla spears in 1350...

[Pericles]

Personally, I wouldn't waste a lot of time trying to improve the AI's economic situation. That may be a road to frustration.

I have found a very simple way to make the AI a formidable opponent both militarily and economically:

Have the player choose a faction, and then instruct the player on how to give ALL other factions more florins (from 10,000 to 2,000,000) for the difficulty setting they have selected.

So whether the player is playing a default campaign, your mod, or any other mod, doing the above will give the player a great game.

With lots of florins the AI can squander money on units AND have lots of money left over to build improvements. This also means that the AI doesn't have to worry about building a trading system; only the player has to worry about it.

I would concentrate on:

* getting rid of crappy units (like peasants) and have better units available for the AI

* make ALL factions playable

* include some unique units

I have also found by switching Faction Behaviours around, I can get some factions to be more aggressive.

They are found here:

C:\Program Files\Total War\Medieval - Total War\campmap\startpos:

For VI Campaign:

For example, in the default VI Campaign, the Northumbrians are set as CATHOLIC_DEFENSIVE. I often change this to CATHOLIC_NAVAL_EXPANSIONIST. With this behaviour, the Northumbrians will attack me and build ships. As the Scots, I am having quite a war against them and the Saxons in my current VI Campaign (I also gave all other factions 200,000 florins).

//Faction Behaviour
//This is the default behaviour of each
//faction, various in game factor will
//alter it. Rebel are always set to REBEL
//these are the available options
//also note that these are related to the
//product spreadsheet
//CATHOLIC_EXPANSIONIST_CRUSADER
//CATHOLIC_EXPANSIONIST
//CATHOLIC_NAVAL_EXPANSIONIST
//CATHOLIC_ISOLATIONIST
//CATHOLIC_TRADER
//CATHOLIC_CRUSADER_TRADER
//CATHOLIC_DEFENSIVE_CRUSADER
//CATHOLIC_DEFENSIVE
//ORTHODOX_EXPANSIONIST
//ORTHODOX_STAGNANT
//ORTHODOX_DEFENSIVE
//MUSLIM_EXPANSIONIST
//MUSLIM_PEACEFUL
//MUSLIM_DEVOUT
//POVERTY_STRICKEN
//DESPERATE_DEFENCE
//CLOSE_TO_SUPPORT_LIMIT
//POPE
//BARBARIAN_RAIDER
//REBELS
//========================================

SetBehaviour:: FN_01 CATHOLIC_NAVAL_EXPANSIONIST // Irish
SetBehaviour:: FN_02 CATHOLIC_EXPANSIONIST // Mercians
SetBehaviour:: FN_03 CATHOLIC_DEFENSIVE // Northumbrians
SetBehaviour:: FN_04 CATHOLIC_DEFENSIVE_CRUSADER // Picts
SetBehaviour:: FN_05 CATHOLIC_EXPANSIONIST // Saxons
SetBehaviour:: FN_06 CATHOLIC_CRUSADER_TRADER // Scots
SetBehaviour:: FN_07 BARBARIAN_RAIDER // Vikings
SetBehaviour:: FN_08 CATHOLIC_TRADER // Welsh

[Zarax]

Personally, I wouldn't waste a lot of time trying to improve the AI's economic situation. That may be a road to frustration.

I have found a very simple way to make the AI a formidable opponent both militarily and economically:

Have the player choose a faction, and then instruct the player on how to give ALL other factions more florins (from 10,000 to 2,000,000) for the difficulty setting they have selected.

I would concentrate on:

* getting rid of crappy units (like peasants) and have better units available for the AI

* make ALL factions playable

* include some unique units

I have also found by switching Faction Behaviours around, I can get some factions to be more aggressive.

Thanks for your feedback, i'll try to reply all your points:

1) Economic Management:

Frustrating or not i still think there are better ways than having the player changing his available money and give the AI a gazillion florins...
I also think this is not a really effective way, as i already tested it with poor results (gave 1.000.000 flourins to the Danes, they managed to create an enormous army and expanded to the east, the problem is that after i killed 20.000 or so Thralls they were so deep in red that it wasn't even funny).

On that side i might choose to follow the XL way for the weaker factions (Danes, Novgorod, Aragon, Sicily) as the other ones manages to expand quite nicely after some behaviour tweaks, so i'd rather give some free improvements to their starting lands than money... This way they manages their economy in a more rational way and build more.

2) I've got rid of peasants since the first release (it should be in the first post), they now just appears in crusades and rebellions, where they belong (Early only)... Other less useful units, such as the vanilla ones gradually disappears with time, forcing the AI to upgrade and keep building.

3) Novgorod is now playable (it should be in the first page too) and it's a viking-like faction, kind of orthodox Danes with better cavalry.
The Papacy was playable but it's a bit cheesy as player faction plus it gets some weird bugs sometimes... I don't think more factions are needed however, as now the available ones are more focused on certain units so their playing style tends to be different in a AOE-like way.

4) Having new units is beyond the scope of this minimod...
Besides that MTW covers pretty much anything can be done with the available variables so most of the new stuff would be almost a clone of the existing units.

What i did is to give extra usefulness to some underdogs and use part of the VI roster in an intelligent way...
Light cavalry especially is now a flexible tactical unit mix, making it unvaluable for factions like the Polish or the Hungarians which lack many heavy units, making the steppes an important recruiting pool.

Finally, some factions gets nice crusading bonuses in terms of units, so i wouldn't miss the opportunity to kill some pagans when possible ;-)

5) Many factions have their behaviour changed, in some cases this is very effective (the Italians are lovely sea riders now, while Byz and Novgorod make a nice hold on the steppes), but others still lack enough aggressivity (this might be due to economical reasons).

[Pericles]

Zarax:

Sounds good.

It is true that some factions can be frustrating to let the AI handle - it just can't seem to get them going properly.

From my understanding of some of the other mods, tweaking the build system; giving the AI some improvements; and changing the build order; all have yielded positive results.

I think you are definitely on the right road...

All the best.

[Zarax]

Yes, i just discovered that the Danes benefits immensely if they find some extra ports nearby to get trade with, i think in a few days of work i'll get them tweaked enough...

Next challenge: having the Turkish survive long enough to build the Janissaries.

[Eternal Champion]

Your mod is sounding quite interesting, keep up the good work.

[Zarax]

Thanks, i'm currently working on improving the Bulgarian Brigands and next release is due on a few days...

[Zarax]

Ok, a new release with tweaked Bulgarian Brigands and improvements for the smaller factions is ready, though it won't be available yet as i'm moving my website to another server and the DNS haven't changed it yet...

Did anyone actually play it?