Trade Question

[caravel]

Well it's going ok so far. I'm running an English/Early/Hard campaign to see how things go. This is my third after Italian and Byz campaigns. It works, but for some reason in this campaign ports aren't appearing. I don't remember modding ports in the crusader text file but it's possible I made an error. Anyway I can fix that.

Anyway, the most obvious problem, looking at the screenshot, is the Sicilian powerhouse that is only going to get stronger as time goes on. Giving the Sicilians such easy access to Almohad territory was perhaps not such a good idea after all. At present they're at peace with the Byzantines, they usually go for naples, which hasn't occured because the Byz have been able to reinforce via the naples/greece landbridge. But for this they'd no doubt be up there giving the pope hassle. Their alliance with the Spaniards has also lasted so far, but if it fails I've no doubt they could power on up through Spain, and beyond.

My crusade from Ile de France to Cyprus went well, following the route through eastern europe, to constantinople and so on, but it was filled up with my own trained units. The AI will probably fair worse because it is unable to top up it's crusades and may take a worse route.

After this I'd conclude that, in my opinion:

1) Shipping does need to stay. It's badly implimented but it's necessary for realistic movements of troops, especially on and off of strategically defensive islands.

2) The following Landbridges need to go from vanilla MTW/VI. This comes from over a year playing the game modded in this fashion:

i) wessex/flanders
ii) granada/morocco
iii) cordoba/morocco
iv) sardinia/corsica
v) sicily/naples

When breaking landbridges it is necessary to rethink the shipping and ports allocated to the factions from the startpos file. You have to give them some ships and ports where necessary but can't over do it either.

3) The following Landbridge needs to be added:

i) sweden/finland

4) The Sahara province needs to be enabled. This breaks up the unrealistic north african single province line, and allows those provinces to be backdoored. Sahara should also contain Marrakech, and not Morocco, as depicted in the game. The Saharan province would have a low farm income and maybe two trade goods including ivory. Possible resource would be Gold. Due to it's size and difficulty to govern it should perhaps be a rebellious province (a factor of about 2, like scotland, not 4 like portugal or livonia). Starting buildings would be just a fort. Units should be mostly berber camels and a few peasants/urban militia. Perhaps just enough to hold off any very early invasions by the Almohads.

5) Trade income cut as per other mods.