Could these changes be made?

[Lord Liendecker]

Id like to know if changes like these could be made.
If you have ideas for making functional changes in MTW, or if you want to make TW fit your favorite time in History more realistically, your responses are welcome.

Reading about the history of the Crusades was thinking how much more interesting it would be to add a deeper aspect of religious tension and Trade Rivalry, into Total War. I thought i could create a more agent based game where conversion of enemies, and maybe relics, or stuff like agent based trade routes could insight politics more dramatically. With the RGB maping system in TW and the trouble involved in learning a new skill, ive given up the idea of enhancing the frequency of battles by adding new provinces. Im also tired that the Muslims can hardly do as much damage as your fellow Christians can. Id rather they bring the war deeper into my boders, and give me something to fight for.

Would these changes credible?

1)Creating orthidox or heretical patriarchs
2)Making muslims more agressive with jihads
3)creating a trade route agent ("caravan") that advances provincial income like a ship does with trade
4)creating a religious agent that in some way could "insight rebelion"
5)How high can i make the rebeliousness of a province in the mod txt: 7? 14? is there a limit?
6)Finally is it at all possible to make new cultures

1)could i possibly clone the Papacy and make it into a Muslim or Orthidox patriarc? giving out money, demanding crusades, and threatening excomunication?
for instance add an orthidox Patriarch that dictates what orthidox country's do and cracks down on herisy, or add a Musilim Theocrat that calls upon the Musilims for jihads.
or heretical patriarchs that build heretic bishops and convert provinces and so insight rebelion and resist the orthidox and papal decrees.

2)If possible, How might i inspire it so that Muslims send jihads into christian territories, so i could have advancing Muslim assaults on France as in the Battle of tours or the invasion of Venice.
Could i create a Pagan type of Jihad?

3)If possible, How might i make a trade caravan agent, that would be placed in a line from one major trading place to another so that it would advance the trade along the "trade route" (I supose this would be much like ships, but it would be over land and the "major trading places" would have an exagerated amount of trading resources.) Could i make an agent that is like a ship only goes on land. (even if it transported men, that would be very handy)

I know this is probably a little far fetched but... Technically this agent would have to be available in proportion somehow to the ampount of provinces. Could i have these agents appear like titles on provinces to keep the suply and demand down? This way the trading income would not just be anywhere (if Bysantium wanted to trade over the Silk Route, it might have to cut down on its trade through Arabia and Egypt. Therefore Egypt and Arabia would loose money if Bysantium decided to trade with someone else.)

4)Would it be possible to make a religious agent that converts or insights rebelions? This would be sort of like an inquisitor i supose except it would be like an emisary too that could bribe. Could i take the inquisitor's assasination ability (based on piety and %chance of sucess) and give it the effect of an emisary successfully bribing an enemy army (based on loyalty)

5)Im aware that probably if i raise the rebeliousness of the province and then make a bishop that raises the religion a ton in a different religion, i could probably make the province rebel. Correct? If so how rebelious can i make the province? the highest i see is 4 but that only requires about 500 men to supress.

6)it would be handy and realistic to have cultures such as eastern Christian Heritics that set up their own patriarcs in Alexandria and Syria. This way i could have a faction thats constantly up to mischief agaist the Christians to cause rebelions with their Heretic Bishops and Anti-Popes.

Ive never heard about anyone modding agents and the Papacy, is it possible? Exactly how far can you go with TW?
These are my deepest and darkest Total War dreams, if you have any imput at all, please, give me a reply. Thanks

If anyone else has ideas of how to manipulate MTW and stretch it to its limits, please add your thoughts to this thread.

[Lord Liendecker]

Considering the pope's influence which has always been widespread, it is very effective for him to declare things to the world in the interests of Christianity, and to single out leaders and suggest to them points of action, in the interests of welfare and soforth.

I was wondering if we could enhance the pope's and the Emperors' influence by creating an agent type unit, that is based off of a Title. We could call them Papal decrees and Royal decrees. These Agents would be the same as buildable title's that added to people's character traits, acumen, piety, and dread, depending on the different type of papal decrees we can come up with. They would be dropped on people just as the pope or emperor, might single out someone to inspire in a holy or patronistic obligation. These obligations would then directly effect the people of the lands that the person is governor of, or directly effect his valor and morale in battle.

of course there would be a few problems to solve:
1)it would be ideal if the pope could use these documents with generals from different countries.
2)it would be necessary to have these documents added along side someone's governorship, so that we could add agricultural benefits, as well as make it possible to give them to royalty.
3)it would also be necessary to find a link between traits and tittles, that we could not only raise someone's dread, acumen, and piety, but also someone's vices and virtues: such as steward, builder, and charasmatic.
4)Perhaps it would be good to create more vices and virtues that are aplicable to these titles, would this be possible?
5)Finally we'd have to find a link between the agent as a unit, and find a link for the tittle as a type of agent. I wonder if they are similar enough to create this new entity.
and if this were possible why not reverse the process to create more province-based agents.

I suppose another way to do this is to create a ton of different office buildings, and then just assign these people with offices, but i thought the idea of a papal decree would be more useful. Also they could be subject to assassinations, if someone wanted to cut off the pope's or emperor's influence over other nations.

[EatYerGreens]

Would these changes credible?

1)Creating orthidox or heretical patriarchs
2)Making muslims more agressive with jihads
3)creating a trade route agent ("caravan") that advances provincial income like a ship does with trade
4)creating a religious agent that in some way could "insight rebelion"
5)How high can i make the rebeliousness of a province in the mod txt: 7? 14? is there a limit?
6)Finally is it at all possible to make new cultures

1) I suspect the Pope's actions in the game are hard-coded. Those wishing to remove him from Medieval completely were advised to use the Viking era Startpos file, transplant all the faction data except him and substitute all the UK maps with Europe ones.

I suppose you could mod the medieval startpos, have the Pope begin the game in a different location, change his culture and religion to something else, set his bishops to propagate heresy, Jewish faith, etc, then create a whole new faction (cloned catholic units, say) to simply hold Rome and Papal States until they get conquered in the conventional manner. However, the hard coded Papal functions will still be handing out money and calling for crusades. If the relocated Pope gets wiped out, it would be interesting to see if he's hard-coded to re-emerge in Rome, or back where you initially placed him.

2) Jihahds are hard coded too and they are only permitted to launch them against territory which has been lost.

3) This sounds very interesting and I'm equally disappointed that the landlocked trading posts can't sell goods across the province border, not even when it's a nuetral or allied faction on the other side.

The difficult part is that trade routes require two things - ports at both ends, as well as the ships in between. Ships have a certain level of agent capability (you can see into provinces but not get full detail on army composition) and the only change to their behaviour that would be required is swapping sea-only movement to land-only.

Next, you'd need a 'surrogate port' type building. This would have to be completely unique, so that it doesn't screw up port provinces when two lots of trade route link to it. You'd also need to work out how to make sure the AI factions bother to build them for itself (build preferences data is beyond my understanding at the moment).

A big drawback is that the AI is already pants at setting up sea trade so land trade would go equally badly for them and the player gets a huge advantage from knowing what to do.

Basically though, I don't see these changes as achievable just from tinkering around with text files. It would require some kind of code hack, so it's not really viable, IMHO.

4) Try adding a faith conversion parameter onto a conventional Spy agent. Rebellion incitement (it's 'incite', not 'insight, btw) is hard coded into spies but the faith conversion factor is editable in the UnitProd file.

5)How high can i make the rebeliousness of a province in the mod txt: 7? 14? is there a limit?

I don't know the answer but I've created my own mod in order to do whacky experiments and may give this a try.

6)Finally is it at all possible to make new cultures

I thought Cultures only refers to the various different styles of common building types? The happen to have re-used the religion names for these cultures, for want of anything else to call them. The user isn't told a Town Guard building is an 'orthodox town guard', all they see is the relevant graphic, so the culture side is transparent to the user. By that I mean you could rename it to anything and maybe not see a difference in any text strings in the game.

What would be interesting to find out is whether things like a tooltip text which says "Orthodox Priest" is triggered from the SetReligion:: label or the SetCulture:: label.

By way of experiment, one could change SetCulture to "Footballer" for one faction and see if the tooltip changes or creates an error because the labels mismatch in NAMES.TXT. (In other words you need to add/amend all culture references in all the files in which they appear).

There is just enough room on the Province parchment for 6 religion percentages (Pagan, Jewish, Catholic, Othodox, Mulim, Heteric) and I think the most I ever saw was 5 at once. The spacing does squash up a bit so maybe there is a little room for one more. The question is whether the percentage figures use hard-coded program variables which can't be increased in number or if declaring an extra SetReligion: will grant extra space in the array which keeps track of the proportions.

Obviously, adding a whole new faith will require an extra graphic file to make it appear on the parchment plus a tooltip text entry for when the user hovers their cursor on it.

I have vague recollections of seeing a thread where somebody actually managed to do this but it was a long while ago. If I find it again, I'll put in a link.

[EatYerGreens]

Link to thread about creating or altering culture/religion

About halfway down page one is a nice pic of an English king, with piety set to Heretic! Plus the code change which enabled this.