Byzantine Musketeers

[Musashi]

PPS: Those masochists amongst you who have been asking for a step by step tutorial may now rejoice.

Behold!

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=75706

Don't say I didn't warn you though. The model DB file shall consume your soul as it did mine!

[Varangian Berserker]

I hope the mod is going well, but can you develop a version that leaves the development of gunpowder within the original timeframe? Just add the new units so the Byzantines can expand their tech tree of buildings/units is all.

[Quillan]

Personally, Musashi, I prefer to, rather than ask "What if gunpowder had been developed when the eastern Roman empire was still at the height of their power?" (they still called themselves the Roman empire, I believe), ask "What if the aftermath of the battle of Manzikert and the sack of Constantinople had never happened?" If the empire hadn't been reeling from the loss of their major recruiting grounds in Anatolia and then split by the loss of the capitol to catholic crusaders, I suspect they would have made strong use of gunpowder in their military.

[Musashi]

I'm sure they would have... I just have this idea I feel the need to play with :)

I'll see about putting together a version that just provides Byzantium with my gunpowder units and doesn't change anything else, but they may be just a tad uber for the unmodded game.

Basically I'm providing Byzantium with a Musket Militia (Which, historically would not see it's appearance for a long time yet), their professional Musketeers, a Dragoon unit (Basically Reiter equivalents) and a light cavalry mounted rifle force... basically a logical extension of the Byzantine horse archer tradition.

Those four units would give them a not-insignificant boost in late game power... Possibly making them the strongest faction in the late game. But it's certainly within the realm of what they might have developed had they not been crippled by the events you mention Quillan.

[Whacker]

I'm sure they would have... I just have this idea I feel the need to play with :)

I'll see about putting together a version that just provides Byzantium with my gunpowder units and doesn't change anything else, but they may be just a tad uber for the unmodded game.

Basically I'm providing Byzantium with a Musket Militia (Which, historically would not see it's appearance for a long time yet), their professional Musketeers, a Dragoon unit (Basically Reiter equivalents) and a light cavalry mounted rifle force... basically a logical extension of the Byzantine horse archer tradition.

Those four units would give them a not-insignificant boost in late game power... Possibly making them the strongest faction in the late game. But it's certainly within the realm of what they might have developed had they not been crippled by the events you mention Quillan.

I'd be interested to see those other units that you're coming up with... I'd assume you'd make something like the handgunners and the musketeers respectively? Methinks two mounted gunpowder units may be a bit much with the current state of the game... Though in general, it's a great idea. I just feel that the overall MTW unit rosters had a bit more diversity and selection than M2TW's. It'd be really nice to see CA do a rather large overhaul with the next patch and potentionally "pad the rosters" a bit with some new stuff.

[dopp]

Pikes. Give them pikemen too. Or halberdiers. You can also still simulate their "conservativism" by only allowing them to build musketeers from the royal barracks and nothing else. No handgunners, no arquebusiers. This way they won't get cheap and plentiful low-level gunpowder units, but the ones they do get will be very good. Make the musketeers a "royal guard" unit like those elite guard archers, something like the Greek equivalent of the janissary corps.

It's too bad you can't edit the meshes. Giving the elite guard archers muskets would make for some really cool Byzantine musketeers. All that lamellar gives them a truly unique appearance, compared to the ribbed tunics of the existing musketeers.

[Daykeras]

Give them an elite group of "Roman" Legionaires to use from the beginning as well, but only in constantinople. I want to see the Legion against these pathetic useless excuse for Knights

[Musashi]

Dopp: Their elite musketeers are actually a castle troop. You have to have the highest level castle barracks to produce them. So they're not easy to get your hands on. You get militia muskets from the city barracks, but they're no better than any other faction's musketeers.

I don't think you can really say the Byzantines were conservative. Their armies were actually ahead of their time. Employing a professional military is something the rest of the western world wouldn't be doing for a long time... The western style feudal armies were more of a throwback than a new development... They're basically just a more developed form of the warband, a style of warfare that Rome's professional armies decimated in the ancient period.

[TheSeated]

A TW modder is a lonely person indeed.

[antisocialmunky]

@Musashi, didn't the Byzantines move to more of a feudal way of troop recruitment dring this era with local lords providing X amount of troops to the Emperor?

- Sorry, please be more clear next time -

[TheSeated]

A TW modder is a lonely person indeed.

meaning there is not many of them.

[Musashi]

I just finished implementing my Light Dragoons, they look like crap though, since I used the Camel Gunners model with purple textures. They don't look even slightly Byzantine, but the Reiters model would have looked far too armored for what I was going for. Oh well... These are basically all just placeholders until CA or someone gives us modelling tools and I can swindl... err... convince some kind soul to make me a quartet of quick kitbashes.

Until then all I can do is lay the groundwork.

By the way, I'm trying to think of a more Byzantine sounding name for my Dragoons... Obviously the term Dragoon came from the fact that they used short carbine muskets which were referred to as Dragons due to the amount of muzzle flash they produced... Dragon is from a greek root, drakon, if I'm not mistaken... So would the Byzantine version of Dragoon be something like Drakonarioi?

That's just my stab at it... it's probably painfully incorrect... Anyone know?

[Quillan]

http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/dicti...arch&va=dragon

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French dragun, from Latin dracon-, draco serpent, dragon, from Greek drakOn serpent; akin to Old English torht bright, Greek derkesthai to see, look at

Draco in Latin and drakon in Greek is correct. I don't speak Greek, so I'm not certain of the correct term, but just by association with other terms drakonarioi sounds right. They used Greek instead of Latin mostly at that point in time anyway.

[Musashi]

Yeah, I'm just making a totally wild guess with it though, based on the names of other units hehe.

Incidentally, anyone have any idea if/how you can set what unit type generals/family members use? I'd like to have Byzantium's late period Bodyguard units be Heavy Drakonarioi ;)

[katank]

That would be cool. Won't it be very OP though? BG abuse will become even better if you can use them to shoot up the enemy first.

[Quillan]

I'm posting from work, but I think down in the export_descr_unit.txt file there are unit listing for the various bodyguard units. It should be greek_generals_bodyguard or something similar.

[Quillan]

Katank, did you ever play the Barbarian Invasion expansion for Rome? Sassanid bodyguards were Clibarnarii archers. They had cataphract level armor, 2 hp each, armor piercing maces as a secondary weapon, and composite bows as primary that shot as far as foot archers with the Long Range missiles tag. That was serious abuse.

[Musashi]

Hehe, I loved those guys :D

But remember, I'm going to be tweaking every other faction too... So while things may seem overpowered, there's going to be foils.

Quillan: The bodyguard units are in the EDU file, but I can't figure out how the game knows which units are the bodyguards for which periods... Like there are NE_Bodyguard and NE_Late_Bodyguard entries... But how does the game know which unit, out of all the units in the EDU file to use for bodyguards? Byzantium only has one unit, Greek_Bodyguard, and I don't want their bodyguard unit to be the Heavy Drakonarioi at the beginning, only in the later periods.

[katank]

@ Quillan, I never really got into BI so I can't say I've tried that before. Does sound pretty crazy though.

I have a feeling that heavy dargoons are going to be even more OP considering that with camel gunner missiles (range 180), they outrange long range archers (range 160) and the missile is high attack and armour piercing not to mention inducing a gunpowder morale penalty on the enemy.

[Quillan]

I'm not certain what triggers the late_bodyguard switch in any event. In RTW, it was the Marian reforms, caused by building the first Imperial Palace on the Italian peninsula aside from Rome. If you can find that switch, it might be possible to add in a greek_late_bodyguard unit that uses the dragoons, but only if the trigger is post-gunpowder.

Personally, I wouldn't give dragoons a long range. Camel gunners are supposed to represent those Bedouin tribesmen who used long muskets/rifles from the back of camels, so long range there is fine. Dragoons used carbines or pistols; their ranges should be much shorter, perhaps slightly shorter than arquebusiers even.

[Musashi]

Arquebusiers have 120 range, same as any non-long range foot archer. My Heavy Drakonarioi have 100 range... Which is actually fairly short. Longer than Reiters, but that's because they're using a Carbine Musket, and not a wheellock pistol. Still shorter than any archer in the game.

My light dragoons have a range equivalent to long ranged horse archers, but they have basically no armor at all. They're a skirmisher/flanking enfilade fire unit, and won't hold up under fire from foot archers (Who outrange them) and certainly can't handle melee.

Again though, I'm going to be giving the other factions tricks of their own to compensate. However, I'm probably going to be treating it like RTW... With Byzantium playing the role of Rome, the all around solid faction, and other factions are more challenging to win with.

[katank]

I see, so it wouldn't be that unbalanced. I was expecting heavy dragoons to get camel gunner's range and reiters missile attack, thus mowing down all opposition before charging in to finish off the ragtag survivors.

[Musashi]

Yeah, I was gonna go that way originnaly, but then I decided to make two separate units, where the Light Drakonarioi serve as the long range skirmishers, and the Heavy Drakonarioi are basically Kataphractoi with a little added punch due to the ability to shower the target unit with heavy musket balls during the charge.

[Kraxis]

Wouldn't Drakonikon would a more fitting name? Or is that related to a specific place or people? But as far as I have understood Drakonikon would imply that it is 'the unit of Dragons' (a more similar name to the Dragoon version), while Drakonarioi would be 'Dragonriders' or some such, which to me sounds like some people riding on dragons.

But technically it is a small issue. But perhaps you could mix the two. Have one of each... A dragonrider seems a little more powerful than a dragon itself, so perhaps Drakonikon as the light version and Drakonarioi as the heavy?

[Musashi]

See that's why I asked the question... I was just making a wild guess based on unit names in the game ;)

Thanks for the advice :D

[dopp]

Whoa, the castle armoury? That will make them way cheaper to get than any other musketeers in the game. Byz will go from having no gunpowder to being the best faction for early gunpowder spam.

No other faction gets firearms from castles, forcing you to have to switch to cities if you want to spam them. Only 6-7 factions can even build musketeers at all (Spain, Portugal, Milan, Venice, Turks, Russia, Moors). To get muskets, you have to spend 15 turns and 27k to build the royal barracks, 2 levels above the castle armoury. An armored, elite musketeer unit that can be produced from a castle is the Medieval equivalent of the A-bomb. Erm, militia muskets that are equal to other factions' musketeers? Those fellows aren't militia, they're actually professionals.

Excellent work on your part, but I fear than when update 2 comes out and we discover that muskets now have the range of javelins and the accuracy of drunken peasant archers (to better reflect their *historical* effectiveness), we will all scratch our heads, wonder why we gave musketeers to Byz, and go back to building trebizond archers again. Maybe the Byz had the right idea to begin with, ignoring all that nasty gunpowder stuff. REAL MEN use longbows (and composite bows).

[Quillan]

Well, Dopp's correct about that, but the solution is just to mod in two additional barracks for the castle: Army Armoury and Royal Armoury, and have the musketeers recruited from that. Perhaps do it with stables instead for the drakonioi, since they are cavalry. That should be a moderately simple change.

[Musashi]

Well... My other alterations to the game make building up to the top tier for a castle very, very slow.

My Drakonikon or Drakonarioi or whatever they should be called are already coming out of the stables :D

[Rheinhart]

This is a very old thread, but I would like to know if anyone has any of the files still with them.