MTW Pocket Mod: General

[Martok]

(Briefly off-topic: So Caravel = Manco Capac now? What inspired the name change?)

I hate the province layout in the region, and I do feel it needs an extra province. The Sahara is there and usable. I have reverted back to vanilla MTW/VI 2.01 now. If anything does come of our efforts here, then this mini-mod or at least this information will be available to the wider vanilla userbase and not just XL users.

I'd agree, though I don't want to get into messing with provinces. I'd have to combine the lookup map from XL with the one from vanilla in order to remove those provinces then mess about trawling through the code undoing stuff. That's not really my objective as such. New provinces IMHO don't add that much to gameplay, new units and new factions definitely do. Strangely enough the only new province I really appreciate in XL is Mesopotamia. It does make things interesting. Personally I would have joined the County of Edessa to Syria and used the ID_EDESSA province as Mesopotamia.

Personally, I think most of the additional provinces make a fair bit of sense. My two personal favorites are Skania in southern Sweden and Algarve in southwest Iberia--I think they definitely alter the strategies of the factions nearby. Mesopotamia actually annoys me, but that might have more to do with the fact that it makes it harder for my Fatamids to take out the Seljuk Turks. ~;P

Kidding aside, I would recommend keeping Edessa and Syria separate from each other. Both cities played fairly significant roles during the existence of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (although Damascus was never actually taken by the Crusaders). I realize you don't want to monkey with the provinces more than you have to, but Estonia or Savoy still probably the two best choices. Just my two cents; take it with as many grains of salt as you're comfortable with.

Possibly. I'm just not so sure about provinces with that many trade goods being landlocked. On a similar note it would be interesting if local trade good be boosted in value, to make it actually worthwhile, while lessening the value of sea trade at the same time. I haven't really thought about this before...

I don't know about lessening the value of sea trade (unless it's by only a very small amount). VH already nerfed income from sea trade pretty heavily--IMHO, gutting it much further might threaten to make it not worth the time and effort necessary to set up trade routes. I definitely agree, however, that inland trade could (and probably should) be increased. I don't think it should equal what a faction can get from sea trade, of course; but it could still be significantly increased.

I know what you mean, and I do think that the XL mod does have some very good improvements, many of them contributing to greater historical accuracy. Some of the new units are rather questionable, and the unit balancing is a bit off though. Another problem is that naptha throwers have been removed in favour of the naptha catapult which replaces them. While some may dislike naptha throwers for whatever reason, others may see their absence as a problem. The changes I prefer are those subtle ones, that on the surface don't make much of a difference, but which improve gameplay. Homelands, trade/farm balance, new valour bonus regions, better historical faction/unit naming, landbridge changes, different dismount types for some units, reassignment of certain units to other factions and restriction of others to specific factions, stat changes to some units, are the sort of changes that make a difference in my opinion.

Well you probably know better than I--as I've said before, I have only a passing familiarity with medieval history. I'll leave such decisions & changes to you.

Another major problem that has had me puzzling for a while is bodyguard units. As they are, they're pretty poor. I am at a loss as to why the Byzantines qualify for a full size unit of Kataphraktoi whereas the Muslim factions have to make do with a non scalable 20 man units of Ghulam Bodyguards. The 20 man units have their pros and cons. Firstly they're small so their support costs are low. This means that having 6 heirs mature one after the other won't break the bank, as it would if each of those units were four times the size. In a campaign as the Volga Bulgars (XL Mod) I had to send alot of my heirs out to fight in the hope they're be killed, and I'd be able to disband their units which were costing me 210 florins in support costs apiece and preventing my economy from getting off the ground. The cons of a 20 man unit is that they're easy victims for missiles, and are quickly beaten and routing, which gives the units leaders alot of the coward type vices. How many times have you simply gunned down the muslim faction leader and his heirs and watched the rest rout off the field??

The solution in my opinion is to make the 20 man units scalable and reduce the 80 man units (Kataphraktoi, Boyars and Mongol Heavy Cavalry, off the top of my head) down to 20 - also scalable. That way the units scale with whatever unit size the player prefers. That solves the problem for the Muslims, Pagans and Orthodox, but not the catholics. Early Royal Knights are the same as Feudal Knights, the only difference is the unit size. The same goes for High Royal Knights and Chivalric Knights, and Late Royal Knights and Lancers. As I've said earlier in the thread, it would be a good idea to make Lancers available to all factions, as they're simply a Late Medieval Knight type of unit (The Spanish type of Lancers are fantasy). In this way, Royal Knights could be removed altogether and catholic factions could use Feudal/Chivalric/'Lancer' Knights as their bodyguards in a scalable 20 man unit. The tech tree would be adjusted so that Feudal Knights would depend on the first type of Royal Court and not the second, Chivalric would depend on the second and Lancers (who currently don't have a royal court dependency) would depend on the third. The easiest way to do this would be to actually remove the Chivalric Knights, Lancers and Feudal Knights and rename the Royal Knights as Feudal/Chivalric/Lancer and adjust their unit sizes and dependencies accordingly. This sounds a strange way of doing it, but it will preserve the upgradeability of the old type to the new type, which is how the Royal Knight units currently work. The problem with this is that the new Feudal Knights would be unavailable after 1204, and new Chivalric Knights after 1320.

It's your last sentence (which I underlined) that somewhat bothers me. I'd hate not being able to retrain my Feudal/Chivalric Knights--we deal with enough of that nonsense as it is (Viking units, Varangians, etc.).

I admittedly can't think of another solution, however; and I do agree that bodyguard units should really be scalable. (Never quite understood why they weren't. ) [sigh] I don't know.

Just something I noticed that's all. I wondered if there was a historical significance. Maybe camels feared the reputation of the Mesopotamians and were reluctant to cross the border?

The only thing I can think of is that perhaps VH associated Mesopotamia more with the Baghdad Caliphate....and I'm not sure how much the people there used camels. (?) That's more of a random guess, though.