Anno Domini

[PseRamesses]

@ReB I,
May I suggest you open up at least Lubeck, Stettin and Gdansk as valid crusade targets to represent the German and Danish crusades against the slavs there during the 11th and 12th century.

Now I haven´t played any game longer than 1150ad so I don´t know if this is already in the game: Are there game events to represent the crusades against the Cathars in France, the French and the Pope against Aragonia and all the crusades in Italy and the ones the Pope issued against the HRE?

Also, shouldn´t all settlements of an excommed faction be valid crusade targets?

[Re Berengario I]

Crusades are half hardcoded so for example, for what I know, no crusades will have as target a rebel controlled province unless it's asked by the player himself. Instead I saw more that one time crusades against catholic provinces provided that the faction which owns them is excommunicated and the province is a crusade target (like Toulose). The latter makes sense as an excommunicated faction is considered the same way as an islamic one by the MTW2 Pope.

[Re Berengario I]

Some other previews of the new tech/cultural advances building trees:

[Re Berengario I]

Another example of the different cultural advances some cultures can get.

[Desert_Fox]

Hi Re Berengario I, i'd just like to say what a fantastic mod you've created, can't wait for whats more to come.

I just have a quick question, i know that when the army is out of the settlements they take a whallop on your wallet, but if we construct forts and they remain there rather than in the field, does this give you the discounts?

Once again, the mod the vanilla version!

[Re Berengario I]

Forts are considered as settlements... for the moment :P

[Herkus]

wonderful work, enjoying your mod

[Hross af Guttenburg]

Pardon my ignorance, and probably irritating critique about such a little thing, but what is the motivation behind a tax bonus for the Asharite school? I don't see how these things are linked.

[Re Berengario I]

Pardon my ignorance, and probably irritating critique about such a little thing, but what is the motivation behind a tax bonus for the Asharite school? I don't see how these things are linked.

Beside the fact that bonuses are still to be finalized (most of them are placeholders) cultural advances will give also economic benefits because the more your settlement is "civilized" the more will have a productive "middle class", not to talk about the revenues that could derive from scholars, sages, professors and all the linked activities which couldn't be displayed directly in the game.

[PseRamesses]

@ReB I,

*The ability of different religions to increase global reputation needs to be tweeked a bit IMHO. Out of the 6 parameters, in the readme file, that can increase your rep 6 applies to the catholics, 5 to the muslims and only 4 to the orthodox factions.
I can play a cath faction as a real badass and just lauch a crusade every 10 turns to regain reputation. I can do pretty mych the same with a muslim faction but with the orthodox ones it´s really hard to raise rep. This is an inbalance that need to be adressed.
Maybee it could be done through some kind of scripted glorious achivements? Like the Byzantines regaining control of Anatolia? Instead of just dropping your rep one step when you take a settlement there you could also gain one to balance it out?

*Shouldn´t land units always have one movementpoint left to be able to unload when their transport is on a coast? It´s a bit silly that they are stuck in a boat and can´t land if their ship is near the coast, isn´t it?

*The "wounded" and "ill" traits needs tweking too. I´ve never got the wounded-trait when fighting battles myself but when doing it through auto-calc I seem to get it in 1 out of 3 or 4 battles. Also the 100% movement restriction should be lowered to maybee 90%. I don´t know how many times I´ve had generals stuck in ships seriously wounded or ill. Shouldn´t they atlest be able to move a tile or two thus representing them being carried on a guerney(sp?)?

[Hross af Guttenburg]

I've got to say that Im looking forward to the next update, but this constant problem with save games makes me want to cry, finally when I get some where in the game everything goes to hell. There seems to be no logic to when or where it can save, I have tried reinstalling, I have tried saving only when there are no scripts running etc- the fact of the matter is the mod is just not stable. The other issue with long turn times is acceptable if a pain, but without saved games, how is it ever possible to advance unless I play non stop for ten days...which would get me through about 20 years of gametime I suppose.

[Re Berengario I]

The save problem seems solved in the new version I'm working upon with an automatic quicksave at the end of the player end turn. I still have to encounter a corrupt savegame.

[Hross af Guttenburg]

mucho fantastico. when can we expect the next update?

[Ackwell]

Thanks a lot man, the mod itself is great! But I think you should make a "light" version of it too. Maybe with only half of the regions and half sized map. Just can't play when AI is taking over 15 mins to complete its turns. I just donät have time to play your mod and the vanilla game is too simple and too small map. Would love your mod with a slightly smaller map so it wouldnt take so damn long. :)

[Re Berengario I]

Light version means double development time and I barely have the time to make one version.

[Gray Beard]

After playing version .93 for a while may I offer what is meant to be some constructive criticisms.

As you can see from my post on this board I generally play the Byzantines and I think that the Byzantines, Turks and Egyptians get short changed by AD.

The reason for this is very simply that the provinces in the Near East are to big to march from a city, attack another city, conquer it and then garrison your army in that city in ONE turn. When Other factions especially the HRE or the various Italians want to take a city they can do so in one turn if they have siege engines of some sort. What this means is that the Byzantines and Turks tend to sit there with a full stack in each city that they can't afford to move.

In many of the games I 've played against the computer the HRE ends up winning because it is very easy for them to reach the 35 province limit. What to do? These are perhaps not the best suggestions but they are things that have occurred to me

For the HRE make them have to duplicate the empire of Charels V. They have to take out the Hungarians AND the Spanish.

Byzantines and Turks maybe start with roads built between Turkish (Old Byzantine cities) to give troops ability to move between them in one move while dragging a siege engine, OR since many siege engines were built on location allow them to be purchased as mercenaries.

Alternately adjust boundaries and make one or two more provinces from Smyrna, Niceae, Sinope, Iconium, Ankra, Cesaria, Trebozond Adana, and that other one down on the coast but keep the total income the same for the combination. This would make the towns closer together.

For the French to win they should have to subdue the HRE

The Milanese, Venetians and Sicilians should have to control the whole of Italy and reduce the pope to a vassal.

Create a faction called "The Prussians" to help counter balance the HRE and give the Danes someone to worry about. It is a little early at the beginning of the game for them but not by the end.

Just some thoughts

[Diogenes_of_Sinope]

Dude, you got me with your new 'tech/cultural advances tech trees'... i now really want your mod... it looks awesome. Any word about 1.0 release date? Anyway, thanks for sharing your great work with us all.
A TW-fan.

[Desert_Fox]

Hey ReB I

I'v got a small question. Don't know what the matter with my treasury, but i seem to be losing 10000 everytime i end my turn. This didn't happen before and only started happening around turn 40 onwards. This is very wierd, all my units are garrisoning forts or settlements and i'v never had this much money deducted from my treasury after i ended my turn before.

Dunno what the matter is, anyone have any suggestions?

[Re Berengario I]

Do you have spies or assasins in foreign lands?

[Desert_Fox]

nope, don't have any created at the moment.

[Jobst_vonGrünungen]

A mod that solely altered the game to have two turns a year would be very good, in my opinion, I really dislike the system MTW2 uses where your faction leader inexplicably lives for 80 years, then dies at age 57, and children age sporadically and arbitrarily. It's not a game-ruining aspect, but having two turns per year would still be fantastic.

[zenisar]

Hi Berengar,

I recently downloaded your mod version 0.93 and started to play. With House of Salis, I reached 1120 AD on VH/VH. I would like to share with you some of my experience with your mod.

General. First of all, this is a great mod. I like the idea of houses instead of nations, the map, historical naming, events and many other things.

Rebels. From the beginning, when conquring all the surrounding regions belonging to lesser factions, I really had troubles with the rebels spawning all around my territory every turn. It was really embarrasing, so I was going to stop playing when sick and tired of fighting the rebels each turn. However, when I won the first crusade, my reputation went from dubious to trustworthy and eventually to immaculate after winning the papal office for my cardinal. To my surprise, the rebel spawn frequency dropped, as everybody was suddenly happy with my rule. Very good feature, the reputation pays!

Names. I play as House of Salis-Hohenstaufen which is a pretty long name. In some screens, for example main faction screen with victory conditions etc., the names like “Heinrich von Salis von Hohenstaufen the Immacolate” simply don’t fit in, making the other texts on the screen unreadable. Would that be possible to shorten the faction name, for example to House of Salis only? Sure, not historically accurate, but better playable.

Titles. In the course of the game, I acquired following titles:
Sacrum Romanum Imperator
Rex Teutonicorum
Rex Bohemia
Rex Burgundie
Rex Croatiae
Rex Sardiniae
Sereniximo Doge Venexia
There are so many titles on my emperor that together with other ancillaries they simply don’t fit in those 8 slots so my emperor feels hurt in his pride as his achievements are not visible. Would there be any way to sort ancillaries in such a way that royal titles are shown first (on the top) according to their importance while the normal ancillaries are suppressed to the bottom?

Injuries. When I saw my general wounded for the first time after autoresolving battle, I liked that because it looked realistic. However, when I have to fight every other turn with cloned rebel armies, some of my generals get wounded pretty frequently on autoresolve. My emperor got “Near Death” trait in 48 years of age and could not move till his death at 61. His successor got a trait “Seriously ill” at 32 and his movement is pretty limited since. When his heir got a similar trait, this situation becomes pretty annoying. How can I get rid of these traits? Even if he stays in beautiful Venice all the time, the trait does not dissapear in the course of time (no recovery on body and soul?). The only way to avoid this situation is fight every clone rebel army manually, which is pretty boring from second battle on.

Political situation. When playing vanilla MTW, I set a personal goal to keep peace as much as possible (and got war on all fronts simultaneously instead). In Anno Domini mod it is 1120 AD: almost all factions are curiously at peace, they have several full stack armies in their territories, just sitting there and doing nothing. On top of that, around 1115 AD, most factions in the game lost more than half their territories to rebels. The house of Salis is the only one keeping their lands under control (with some difficulties). Unfortunately, there is no reason to play further as there is no real competition any more when all the other factions broke off.

Anyway, I really like your mod and thank you for further tweaking it and for all the effort so far.

[isellj0epnuts]

Titles. In the course of the game, I acquired following titles:
Sacrum Romanum Imperator
Rex Teutonicorum
Rex Bohemia
Rex Burgundie
Rex Croatiae
Rex Sardiniae
Sereniximo Doge Venexia
There are so many titles on my emperor that together with other ancillaries they simply don’t fit in those 8 slots so my emperor feels hurt in his pride as his achievements are not visible. Would there be any way to sort ancillaries in such a way that royal titles are shown first (on the top) according to their importance while the normal ancillaries are suppressed to the bottom?

This will be so in AD 1.0. Faction leaders will no longer acquire normal ancillaries, thus opening up more spots for their titles. In addition, the triggers for royal ancillaries will fire before those of the normal ancillaries.

Injuries. When I saw my general wounded for the first time after autoresolving battle, I liked that because it looked realistic. However, when I have to fight every other turn with cloned rebel armies, some of my generals get wounded pretty frequently on autoresolve. My emperor got “Near Death” trait in 48 years of age and could not move till his death at 61. His successor got a trait “Seriously ill” at 32 and his movement is pretty limited since. When his heir got a similar trait, this situation becomes pretty annoying. How can I get rid of these traits? Even if he stays in beautiful Venice all the time, the trait does not dissapear in the course of time (no recovery on body and soul?). The only way to avoid this situation is fight every clone rebel army manually, which is pretty boring from second battle on.

Having played A.D .93 extensively, and implemented a 'battle wounded' trait in my own mini-mod, I must unfortunately admit that there is little room around this issue.

If you suffered for long in a vanilla M2TW campaign, you may have noticed that auto-resolved battles tended to give your generals the 'battle scarred' trait. Apparently when given control of your forces, the computer calculates that your generals will act like Alexandros Reborn and charge into the thick of the action. Generals who excessively lose hitpoints in battle will gain traits like 'battle scarred' in vanilla, and the 'injuries' in AD.

My suggestion is to leave rebel battles in the hands of your captains...

[Re Berengario I]

If you suffered for long in a vanilla M2TW campaign, you may have noticed that auto-resolved battles tended to give your generals the 'battle scarred' trait. Apparently when given control of your forces, the computer calculates that your generals will act like Alexandros Reborn and charge into the thick of the action. Generals who excessively lose hitpoints in battle will gain traits like 'battle scarred' in vanilla, and the 'injuries' in AD.

My suggestion is to leave rebel battles in the hands of your captains...

And in the next versions rebel armies won't be so much cloned so to make the autoresolve option a less desirable opportunity.

[Jobst_vonGrünungen]

My suggestion is to leave rebel battles in the hands of your captains...

In RTW I would have the issue, like you said where the computer thinks your general is Alexander the great, only not lucky, but instead of making them battle scarred it would make them die miserably. So I started only auto-resolving battles where the odds where 5-1 in my favour, or if there was only a captain there. That sounds like the best solution in this case.

[Re Berengario I]

Ok people, my battleplan is the following:

- Next version status

new buildings and tech trees: completed for the 90% (together with card images, descriptions and new icons).

revision of income/resources/trade values, techs and buildings in a region will give huge differences and not just 2-5% bonuses like in vanilla. This way we could simulate highly developed regions like Constantinople, Venice, Bruges, etc. Textiles would not be a resource anymore, replaced by Alum. There will be a textile manifacturing buildings tree which will give different incomes depending if you'll have a merchant on the commodities needed to produce textiles (wool or cotton, dyes and alum). Some other manifacturing buildings will be added (like a brewery with bonus if you're trading grain or have grain in the region). I also reduced the resource points together with an increased number of recruitable merchants if you have the right trade tech. Some trade wars are to be expected.

new units roster: I'm writing a new EDU (export_descr_unit.txt) from scratch using as guidelines rosters used in popular medieval wargames (DBA and DBM), linked to an era system, together with a complete (and I mean complete) revision of stats and costs. Basically, following PointBlank great ideas, I lowered the attack values of the units resulting in longer battles. I expanded his concepts also to mental and defense stats so they are coherently applied to the various types of units (elite, professional, militia, peasants). So for example a peasant archer will have shorter range and slower rate of fire than a "professional" longbowmen, not just a different attack value (which is more linked to the weapon he's using). Once in melee the latter would also have a better defense and morale than the former. For the moment I will use old skins and models, they'll be modified in the next versions (read on).

Rebels won't spawn the same army over and over. They will spawn with core units to whom randomly some others units could be added in the following turns. So you can "easily" take care of rebels soon but if you let them grow you'd probably be toasted in that region (code 100% done, units to be changed accordingly to the new rosters).

Expanded family trees right from start with all the most notorius noble families linked to the "royal" dinasties. So you'll have Hohenstaufen, Palaiologos, etc as family members (this also immensely helps the AI and avoid AI factions to collapse because lacking of heirs). Family members will also have improved fertility (yeah they like sex :P). 100% done, just missing factions that will be replaced in the future (Milan for the matter).

- 1.0 version todo in order of release

New victory conditions linked to "prestige points". Basically it'll win the faction that will have more prestige points at the end date of the campaign. Prestige points will be gained using your prestige status (global reputation, already changed the name in the diplomacy screen) at the end of each turn plus other important achievements.

Revision of what influence your prestige status splitting the less important thing into turn status and the most important thing directly in prestige points (like a victorius crusade, a pope election, etc).

Revision of the campaign AI using the new 1.2 patch commands.

New factions. They'll be mostly playable and at the start they'll mostly use already existing models with just new skins for the elite and professional units (militia and peasant units will share skins depending on culture, geography, etc, peasants didn't use heraldry or uniforms).

New skins, banners and some new models for all the factions (as this will be very time consuming I'll release them as singular faction packages one at the time).
new units roster: I'm writing a new EDU (export_descr_unit.txt) from scratch using as guidelines rosters used in popular medieval wargames (DBA and DBM), linked to an era system, together with a complete (and I mean complete) revision of stats and costs. Basically, following PointBlank great ideas, I lowered the attack values of the units resulting in longer battles. I expanded his concepts also to mental and defense stats so they are coherently applied to the various types of units (elite, professional, militia, peasants). So for example a peasant archer will have shorter range and slower rate of fire than a "professional" longbowmen, not just a different attack value (which is more linked to the weapon he's using). Once in melee he would also have a better defense and morale than the former. For the moment I will use old skins and models, they'll be modified in the next versions (read on).

Rebels wouldn't spawn the same army over and over. They will spawn with core units to whom randomly some others could be randomly added in the following turns. So you can "easily" take care of rebels soon but if you let them grow you'd probably be toasted in that region (code 100% done, units to be changed accordingly to the new rosters).

Expanded family trees right from start with all the most notorius noble families linked to the "royal" dinasties. So you'll have Hohenstaufen, Palaiologos, etc as family members (this also immensely helps the AI and avoid AI faction to collapse because lacking of heirs). Family members will also have improved fertility (yeah they like sex ). 100% done, just missing factions that will be replaced in the future (Milan for the matter).

- 1.0 version todo in order of release

New victory conditions linked to "prestige points". Basically it'll win the faction that will have more prestige points at the end date of the campaign. Prestige points will be gained using your prestige status (global reputation, already changed the name in the diplomacy screen) at the end of each turn plus other important achievements.

Revision of what influence your prestige status splitting the less important thing into turn status and the most important thing directly in prestige points (like a victorius crusade, a pope election, etc).

Revision of the campaign AI using the new 1.2 patch commands.

New factions. They'll be mostly playable and at the start they'll mostly use already existing models with just new skins for the elite and professional units (militia and peasant units will share skins depending on culture, geography, etc, peasants didn't use heraldry or uniforms).

New skins, banners and some new models for all the factions (as this will be very time consuming I'll release them as singular faction packages one at the time).

[Gray Beard]

Do you have a time frame for this? (i. e. a release date)

[Re Berengario I]

Do you have a time frame for this? (i. e. a release date)

Nullum nosco rerum futurorum.

[PseRamesses]

Nullum nosco rerum futurorum.

[Gray Beard]

Nei meih ya'uh houh Go' mafan Ng'oh seung ya'uh

I can read your Latin can you read my Cantonese?