The History of MTW

[Servius]

While reading some posts, I've noticed several posters who probably started with RTW and never played the first MTW. So, what I was thinking was that it might help the community in general, but folks who've only played RTW (or never played a TW game at all) in particular, to review some of the game mechanics from MTW. If this turns out to be a popular and useful thread, maybe we can get it stickied.

So, for some structure, perhaps MTW veterans could elaborate on some area of the game. In general, try to provide a brief description of how a particular game mechanic worked in the game. For example...

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PROVINCES

Provinces in MTW differed from those in RTW in several ways. First, you either owned a province or you didn't, and if you did, you controlled the whole thing, border to border. You could have as many army stacks as you wanted there, but no other faction (ally or not) could leave a stack in your province. Other factions could invade your province, but one way or another, only one army would control the province at the end of the turn. The one semi-exception to this is that, if the defender of a province had a castle, and they lost the battle, a certain number of their forces could retreat to the castle (the rest had to retreat to a friendly neighboring province). In that situation, the retreating defender would be in the province's castle, but the attacker would 'hold' the province until the defenders were killed through siege or assault. The attacker could not earn any taxes or build any units in such a province until the defenders in the castle were utterly wiped out.

In MTW, the province was all their was. There was no differentiation between province and city. Gameplay-wise, there never really were any cities. Battles used a castle map only when someone had retreated to a castle. There were never any city fights like there are in RTW.

Each province had it's own stats: Farm value, trade goods, tax rate, loyalty, zeal, and sometimes Iron.

Each province had a base farm income. Farm upgrades would increase this base value by a given percentage. Therefore, the first farm upgrade would generate more money in a province that had a large base value (like in Flanders) than in Scotland (which had a low base value).

Trade goods were only useful if your province was on the coast and you had a port, a merchant building, and shiping lines to connect your port to the ports of other nations. The start-up cost for building a good trading network was very high. Ships cost a lot of money to build and weren't cheap to maintain either. However, once established, trade networks could rake in the dough. Also, the same ships that acted as your trading fleet also doubled as your troop transport network. Units were never loaded onto a ship. Ships occupied sea zones. If your army started in one province with a port, and you had an unopposed chain of ships between your home province and the one you wanted to invade, the entire army could invade in one year.

Each province had a sliding scale tax rate (Very Low, Low, Moderate, High, and Very High). The higher your tax rate, the more money you made (off of farms and trade goods), but the lower the loyalty of the province.

Loyalty could be modified by the variable tax rate, loyalty-improving buildings, the size of the garrison, the Dread rating and vices/virtues of the governing unit, how far away the king was, the presence of agents (spies and inquisitors), the Influence rating and vices/virtues of the king, whether your faction was at war or peace with its neighbors, and the success or failure of active crusades. I know that sounds like a lot, but in reality, it was much easier to control the loyalty of the people in MTW than it is in RTW. The two tower improvments, a friendly spy, and a garrison of 100 men was enough to gaurantee the loyalty of almost any province.

Zeal wasn't very important. It only came into play if you built a crusade. For instance, if I own Wessex, and Wessex has high Zeal, the crusade was more likely to have crusader knights and order spearmen and less likely to have Fanatics (uber peasants). Also, if you moved your crusade through provinces with high Zeal, the crusade would suck up more troops from whatever armies were in that region. But outside of crusading, Zeal was unimportant.

That leaves Iron. Iron was like a trade good, but you couldn't trade it. Instead, if the province had it, it allowed you to build an Armory which could add +1 to every unit's attack value produced there. Each armory upgrade added another +1 to subsequent units produced there.

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I hope this is useful. If you think so too, adopt a game feature and tell the uninitiated how it used to be.