which faction and mods?

[caravel]

Hmmm... interesting. How does one go about modding out all the landbridges? I've considered doing this myself, as the landbridges tend to make the game less realistic in my opinion.

The landbridges are a personal thing. I prefer the game without them, some people think they're necessary to game balance, except the Sweden/Denmark one. There is also a landbridge that should exist, and that is the Sweden/Finland one. These are joined together off the map, so they should be linked.

The downside of this is that reckless AI crusades headed for norh african provinces will now go via eastern europe, asia minor and the holy land (the long route) instead of hopping across via the cordoba/morocco or granada/morocco landbridges at gibraltar. If this is a problem you may want to leave gibraltar connected, and only disconnect, i.e, wessex/flanders, sicily/naples and sardinia/corsica.

I will post a guide about landbridge removal later today. It's really very simple.

On Topic: Another good faction to play as is the Novgorod. They have to be modded as playable from the early startpos file. They have horse archers, boyars, druzhina cavalry, vikings (+1 valour in norway), rus spearmen (early only), +1 valour woodsmen in lithuania and easy access to steppe cavalry and steppe heavy cavalry. What more could you want? I'm currently on a novgorod campaign myself, and it's so long since I'd played them I'd forgotten just how good they were. It's difficult to get started but if you persist in invading and holding provinces every time an heir matures (boyar's upkeep is expensive and saps your already poor economy) you can pull yourself out of the red and end up as the strong baltic trading faction with a strong economy. So far I've taken all of russia, scandinavia (including denmark) and given the poles a serious kicking and taken poland and moldavia. The Byzantine also broke alliance and invaded khazar but lost badly, but I'm leaving them alone for now, even though I have some particularly legendary generals (ex princes) and enough of a military to take them on and wipe them out. The vikings, boyars, druzhina and steppe cavalry have ensured that I haven't lost a single battle so far. Now I'm going to wait for the GH to arrive, only a about 20 years to go.

[Sensei Warrior]

I just started a Campaign in XL as the Scottish. Its my first time playing a mod. So far its a lot of fun. Its nice to Campaign against a faction the uses more than Peasants, Archers and Spearmen.

I would cast my vote for the removal of land bridges. It took me awhile to realize that my huge army sitting in Wessex was not protecting me from the French in Flanders. Although the one minor downside is it is incredibly hard to get your island faction off of your island.

With all the boats hanging out in my section of the world I might have to contentrate on being an island trading faction for a bit.

I always wondered if when you edited out the land bridge if you had to erase the lines that indicate the landbridge from the map or if it just disapears on its own?

Eagerly waits for Caravel's instructions.

[caravel]

As always back up any changed files before proceeding. If you mess up a file with a syntax error it can be hard to trace the fault.

Ok in the location where you installed MTW/VI go to this path:

\Medieval - Total War\campmap\startpos

You'll see files of this sort:

early.txt
high.txt
late.txt

Personally I only play the early period anyway so I haven't modded the others but it works exactly the same way.

1) Open the early.txt file with the notepad text editor
2) Find the "SetNeighbours" for the region you want to disconnect. Next to this you'll find a list of other provinces e.g.

SetNeighbours:: ID_WESSEX	     ID_FLANDERS        ID_MERCIA	ID_WALES	ID_ENGLISH_CHANNEL	ID_IRISH_SEA

from this line, if you wanted to stop stacks and agents crossing directly to flanders without a port and fleet you would have to change as follows:

SetNeighbours:: ID_WESSEX     ID_MERCIA	ID_WALES	ID_ENGLISH_CHANNEL	ID_IRISH_SEA

After this you would need to find the line:

SetNeighbours:: ID_FLANDERS	ID_WESSEX       ID_NORMANDY	ID_ILE_DE_FRANCE	ID_CHAMPAGNE	ID_LORRAINE	ID_FREISLAND	ID_ENGLISH_CHANNEL

And change it as follows:

SetNeighbours:: ID_FLANDERS       ID_NORMANDY	ID_ILE_DE_FRANCE	ID_CHAMPAGNE	ID_LORRAINE	ID_FREISLAND	ID_ENGLISH_CHANNEL

This stops stacks and agents crossing back in the other direction.

The next thing is to remove the little descriptions you see when you open the info parchment for, in our example, flanders when you have that parchment open and mouse over wessex. You see the "armies meeting here..." terrain type info.

Find:

SetBorderInfo::	ID_FLANDERS	ID_WESSEX	8600	8184	0	LUSH	AT_WESTERN_EUROPEAN	COAST	FLAT	NO_RIVER

Replace with:

//SetBorderInfo::	ID_FLANDERS	ID_WESSEX	8600	8184	0	LUSH	AT_WESTERN_EUROPEAN	COAST	FLAT	NO_RIVER

The two "//" comment out the line so that it is not parsed (read by the compiler) so that border info line won't have effect.

Next you need to do the same for wessex:

SetBorderInfo::	ID_WESSEX	ID_FLANDERS	9208	8568	0	LUSH	AT_WESTERN_EUROPEAN	COAST	PLAINS	NO_RIVER

Change as follows:

//SetBorderInfo::	ID_WESSEX	ID_FLANDERS	9208	8568	0	LUSH	AT_WESTERN_EUROPEAN	COAST	PLAINS	NO_RIVER

Britain is now a four province island.

Other provinces you may wish to disconnect using this method are sardinia/corsica, cordoba/morocco, granada/morocco and sicily/napes. don't forget to comment out the borderinfo for both directions and remove the neighbours for each direction.

-Edit, oh and I almost forgot, the little 'cosmetic' links on the campaign map graphic won't disappear as the whole thing is just one big .tga image. I had photoshopped these out myself a few years back (and did a pretty good job of it if I do say so myself!), and I use this all the time now. The only visual landbridge not erased is the denmark/sweden one, because I don't actually remove that anyway. I would host it but the "MapTex2.tga" file, as it's called, is near 37MB so that's not an option for me.

[Sensei Warrior]

Caravel, I take back all the bad things I ever thought about you. Your a true Prince. I always like to see the info so I don't have to rip my hair out trying to figure out what I forgot.

I knew about the first part, but totally forgot the part about commenting out the battlefield setup. Thanks for clearing up the strategy map question, I always wondered about that.