Side effects of changing time scale

[Philippe]

I hate multi-year turns. There was a great board game about Charlemagne once and I couldn't play it because I couldn't wrap my mind around the concept while looking at a map that cried out for less than grand strategic thinking. And I had a similar problem with a Peloponesian War game, which was really a shame because it was designed to play solitaire and the dynamics were conceptually brilliant.

But I digress.

There's a line in one of the text files somewhere that reads the equivalent of something like one turn = 2 years. I gather if that gets changed to one turn = 0.5 years time will seem to flow at a vanilla RTW pace.

Leaving aside the issue of exactly where that line is that needs changing, and not worrying about any other files that might need to be modified to accommodate that particular change, I have a few concerns about vanilla RTW time ported to M2TW.

Will it interfere with any basic game mechanics, and will it throw timed historical events badly out of sync with actual chronology?

What effect will it have on the rate of successful schtupping? I've already been amused several times to see Princesses give birth on the same turn that they married. Does this mean they had one in the oven when they stood at the altar, or does it mean that they got married towards the beginning of a vanilla two year period, which left them with more than enough time to mess around in the marriage bed and get in the family way (legitimately). If you speed time up to one turn = six months, will they still spawn the morning after their weddings, or will they have the decency to wait a turn or two?

[Historical note: although people haven't really changed much over the last ten thousand years, the chastity of Princesses was a closely guarded commodity in the Middle Ages -- at least until they were married. Having said that, of the dozens of weddings that I've been to my favorite was a few years ago when the bride was attended by two of her offspring by the groom, one of them old enough to stand. But she was only a modern princess].

Another concern that I have is with what may be described as timed events. If you make one turn = one year, will the Mongols invade when they should, will the Black Death strike in the mid-fourteenth century, will Columbus discover the Philippines (or whatever it was he thought he reached) at the end of the fifteenth? To have this kind of event occurring four times earlier than it should would be a bit disconcerting.

And finally, won't the rate of building construction and economic activity be four times as fast as in the vanilla game? I have enough trouble with sixteenth century fortifications and ahistorical plate armor on generals as it is, but the idea of putting the twelfth century renaissance on steroids is a bit frightening.

Any informed thoughts on this would be appreciated before I start worrying about messing with the internal mechanics of the game.

[Quillan]

It will have one intended effect and one unintentional effect. The intended effect is that it will do nothing for the aging of characters. It's hardcoded in the game that the various family members only age 1 year for every 2 turns (regardless of the timescale). This was so that at the default scale you didn't have family members dropping like flies; a diplomat would die before he could walk halfway across the world. They age properly at the 2 turns per year scale, but incorrectly at any other setting. The unintentional effect has to do with the endgame. All events are based on the number of years since the campaign start, so those will happen correctly. However, if you change from the default scale, you tend to win so early you won't experience anything late. In 3 long campaigns, I've won every one of them between 1300 and 1350 AD, and have never experienced the Black Death, never seen the Timurids, never made it to the New World, etc. That's what will happen.

[Bob the Insane]

I may be corrected but I believe you do not need to worry about such things... Historical events are tied to a date I believe and as such do not occur early.

The are some niggles though with population growth as it grows but a percentage every turn thus your city of 10,000 will grow to the a certain size in 100 turns whether 200 years have passed or 50...

The build speed is suddenly much higher which matters more for the more advanced buildings such as a cathedral which takes say 12 turns... In default that is a reasonable 24 years, but in the 0.5 timescale a mere 6...

But simply increasing build times by 4x has effects, now a simple church take 4 turns and the Pope only gives you 5 turns in his build a church mission... And I noted a distinct lack of priests in the AI factions when I had made that change is a test game of the 0.5 timescale mod I was playing around with...

In the test games I also found that CA had showed good judgement in balancing the game for 225 turns as it still takes around that time to win even if not being too aggressive... Which in the 0.5 timescale only get you to just shy of 1200...

The good point where the slow tech development gave you much more time to play with the different variety of troop before better ones came along...

Another unforseen issue, the HRE's early troop are inferior to various Italian ones and the HRE normal getting beaten into submission every time if the AI is controlling it...

I often thought a good idea would be to combine the 0.5 timescale with a era's style game, say starting in 1203 for a High medieval game...

[Goofball]

Like you Philippe, I found myself almost, well, offended by the idea that I should just turn a blind eye to my characters ageing in such a whacked-out manner. I switched to the 0.50 timescale some time ago and haven't looked back. I have found no problems with balance. The only drawback (as already mentioned by Quillan) is that you will usually win the game before experiencing the Timurids, the black death, the New World, or even the Mongols. To remedy this, I downloaded a handy little tool called the MedManager, which allows you to modify the date (and other things) of saved games. Now I am able to go in whenever I want, and "time warp" my campaign ahead in time in order to hit specific historic events.

1. Go to the D/L section, Files button on the top bar.
2. D/L MedManager.
3. Read the instructions.
4. Install it.
5. Launch the program.
6. Open you save game using MedManager.
7. Modify the date etc... to your liking.
8. Launch M2:TW and continue your campaign.

[Agent Smith]

The events in the game, oddly enough, are coded to occur in regards to the year and not the turn number. So, changing the years per turn will actually not effect the year in which events occur, only how long it takes to get there.

That being said, a 0.5 years per turn scale would lead to a 900 turn campaign, taking 200 turns to move ahead a century. So, it may take about 280 turns for the Mongols to even invade if I remember correctly, which is about the length of a normal vanilla campaign!

For me, I don't mind, because I like taking things in a slow, realistic fashion, but that could bother others. You can always change the year when events are coded to occur to make them happen sooner if you'd like.

As for the princess/birth thing, there is nothing to worry about when you think about it. Each turn is a six month period, so any event in that turn could technically happen at any point during the turn. So, for the summer turn, perhapps the princess got married in the first month of the turn, and if she gives birth the next turn, she could technically give birth at the very end of winter. That is actually a year difference, and not just six months, so it works out in a very pious fashion

[Philippe]

If events are keyed to year dates rather than turns, then the main obstacle to using six-month turns is that it puts the 12th century renaissance on steroids.

I've only started playing the game, but I'm assuming that if you play the game at the nomal pace, by the time you get to the fifteenth century you'll have a little light artillery, a few handgunners, a heavy cavalry contingent decked out in heavy plate armor, a few infantry units decked out in similar fashion, and a variety of things that just wouldn't have appeared on a battlefield during the time of the Crusades. You would also have a bunch of social and architectural structures that you wouldn't find in an earlier period, like big post-gothic cathedrals and a network of guildhalls.

If you put the 12th century renaissance on steroids by playing at one quarter speed, you'll probably get all that and the infrastructure that goes with it well before the mongol invasion.

Now I realize that most people's idea of what the Middle Ages looked like is the cavalcade room of armor in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. But it just ain't so. What you're looking at in that room is really the start of the sixteenth century, and the reason the non-jousting armor is so thick is that they needed something that, among other things, could protect them from primitive firearms. This gets back to my complaint about generals running around in early 16th century armor commanding troops dressed in 12th century-compatible equipment -- fine in the 16th but downright weird looking in the 12th.

[I'm not going to discuss architecture because there's not much that can be done about it. Except at the very end of the time-frame covered by the game, MTW and RTW had more correct walls -- though I haven't seen Byzantine or Middle Eastern fortifications yet].

To avoid fielding ahistorical armies in the 12th century (which is what I'm really talking about) without doing a major overhaul of game mechanics (consider that though the EB team is doing a truly epic and admirable job, they're only up to 0.81 and are probably years away from 2.0 -- tinkering with the guts of a game causes CTD's and other problems) I think what you have to do is slow down the rate that spare cash accumulates. One way to do that is to simply make the cost of everything except upkeep four times as expensive, though even that formula is probably too generous. And a side effect would be that the game would probably get weird on you because the AI would go bankrupt faster than you would. This could lead to a situation where you were the only faction with money, armored troops, and stone buildings, and everyone else would be living in dirt hovels (hey wait a minute, that's what the Middle Ages was actually like...).

I don't know how or where to do a global price increase, or even if it is advisable. But I'm reminded a bit of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, where the most perfect sociological evolution model gets out of whack and stops reflecting reality after a few years. M2TW is just a game, but it is also a model, but a model that doesn't try to mimic history too closely. It's a pity that there is only one Grand Campaign, rather than three (or perhaps four) for different time periods the way it was done in MTW. I also miss the MTW alternate victory conditions. Conquest of Europe in the Middle Ages by anyone but the Mongols was unthinkable, if for no other reason than the factions didn't even have the resources to control what we would think of as their own countries, let alone anyone else's.

[Agent Smith]

Another option is to increase the time it takes to build buildings. You could techincally just, for instance, double the building times to compensate for the slower campaign rate. Which, actually, would make it more historical. It often times took a decade or more to build a castle historically anyway. I'm pretty sure the largest buildings take 6 turns to build, so this would make the highest level buildings take 12 turns, or 6 years, to build.

You could take it to the extreme and base the building time on years instead of turns. A six turn building would actually take 12 game years in vanilla time. So, you could always make it 24 turns to build at a 0.5 year per turn level to make it exactly equivalent to the vanilla time frame.

This would make high and late units become available at a more decent time. However, there are two main problems I see with that:

1.) AI would be even more inclined to just build massive militia armies and drain their income; and
2.) Your treasurey would be bursting at the seams from having income coming in and nothing to spend it on.

EDIT:

However, I bet it would make playing factions like Russia very difficult in the early going. They have poor militia troops, and you'd be forced to fight with them early on for quite some time. Might hurt a player's ability to just march in and take territory.

[Rhedd]

There is one small thing that won't scale correctly. The appearance and availability of special ancillaries, like Hildegarde von Bingen, Roger Bacon, Joan of Arc, etc., are keyed to a certain range of TURNS, not years. If you care (which I do), changing the time scale will throw these out of whack.

Who knows why they didn't just key these to years, like everything else.

[Agent Smith]

There is one small thing that won't scale correctly. The appearance and availability of special ancillaries, like Hildegarde von Bingen, Roger Bacon, Joan of Arc, etc., are keyed to a certain range of TURNS, not years. If you care (which I do), changing the time scale will throw these out of whack.

Who knows why they didn't just key these to years, like everything else.

I did not know that. Thanks for the input!

I wonder if those can be modded as well.

Anywho, if anyone tries the increase build times in a game let me know how it turns out.

[Foz]

Yeah Philippe, you're largely correct about infrastructure and tech level going far ahead of the actual date if you're playing with 6 month turns. There's one BIG noteworthy exception though: you'll still be unable to access any gunpowder units for a LONG time, as all such units require the gunpowder historical event which will still be tied to the year. Where you normally have to work a bit to get the highest barracks level in a city so it will be ready to recruit gunpowder foot troops once it's invented, now you'll be sitting around for ages with the right buildings, but not the invention as the catalyst. Gunpowder and the various invasion events are things that I very much cherish in the game, so I suggest if you intend to play at a different time scale, that you compress the event timeline to be consistent with the slower passage of time so that you continue to experience events. The date the game displays will become entirely meaningless, but at least events will happen at their normal rate. You could of course further modify the build times and such to be consistently longer... but at that point, what is the reason for modifying the time scale at all?

My honest suggestion, though, is just to play the game at default time scale. Don't worry about what year it is - it hardly shows up in the game at all, and in fact I regularly have no idea what the year is in-game. I just watch the turn number go up. I don't even find myself thinking "hey that church takes 4 years to build" -- my brain just knows it's 2 turns, b/c nowhere I look says anything about the years, just turns. It's a turn-based strategy game - as long as you can wrap your brain around the idea of a turn, nothing else matters. The game info will even tell you how many turns you have left, so that's not even troubling.

[pike master]

some events are triggered on turn numbers and some on year numbers.

[Budwise]

I have also have been using the .5 timescale. So far, no bad effects have been noted. I have not reach Gunpower yet, nor have I seen the new world nor have I see an elephant army of the Timerods. But, I have another 800 or so turns left.

If you play this way, for fun, play for a deplomatic type of game. Don't attack unless attacked first, send diplomats out and ally with EVERYONE. Do random acts of kindness and work on your small empire until later before becoming a "Hitler" and develope Blitzcrik type of offensive.

[jbguev]

Increasing build times may cause population control problems at larger city levels. In addition to changing build times, you can also slow down the rate of growth of populations by modifying the descr_regions.txt file. Check out the SloMod somewhere in the forum.

BTW, MedManager ROCKS!

[Werner]

Well dont the two different types of game play (Normal and Long) have an effect on the number of years per turn?? Normal is 2 yrs and long is 1 yr/turn right? So take a long game and mod it to being 1/2 time scale and events wont be so out of whack as opposed to going from 2yrs/turn to 6months/turn. Just a thought.

If you mod it to 6months per turn will you still see summer/winter everyother turn on the map like? That would be one disadvantage I could think of...

Why the hell didnt they just make it an option in the game to choose the amount of months/years per turn?

[Foz]

Why the hell didnt they just make it an option in the game to choose the amount of months/years per turn?

Because obviously they do not intend it to be modified, and I suggest that it does not need to be, so this is a good design decision. The vast majority of game functions are turn-based, not year-based. The only things accomplished by changing the time-per-turn ratio are:

1. You change the number of turns in the campaign.
2. You compress or expand the historical event timeline.
3. You change the temporal meaning of a game turn.

Everything else I can think of is based on the turns, not the years: character ages, build times, movement, missions, AI scripts, income (all economics really), and probably a whole slew of others I'm not even remembering.

#1 seems to be the usual goal of everyone who decides to use a non-standard ratio. Could just be me, but I don't see the need to make the campaign longer. It doesn't take much effort to get rolling with multi-front expansion in this game, and once you do so it's amazing how quickly you pick up extra provinces. We've got what, 225 turns in a long campaign? And need to capture ~45 provinces, plus some special target province, usually. That amounts to a province every 5 turns, which is a totally easy thing to achieve in this game. If you can't tow that line then I imagine the devs would suggest that you should not win: you're not sufficiently trying to expand your empire/take over the world which is of course the point of total war. You can have plenty of fun playing without trying to win (I've screwed around plenty already myself without ever intending to win), but that doesn't mean you should bend the rules to make yourself win when you're not really making a concerted effort to accomplish the goal of the game.

#2 and #3 then are the primary focal points of this thread: i.e., the weird/bad things that will happen to your game when you do this. The timeline problems are more annoying probably: it's just not cool to play an entire campaign and never have the big events happen. I would suggest at the very least that players who complete campaigns without ever seeing the mongol invasion or various other early key events have unnecessarily switched to a slower time mod than they ought to be using. If you often win before 450 turns are over, you should try doubling the amount of time each turn accounts for (try 1:1 turn to year), since you'll still have enough to win but will experience events more reasonably. If you can win before even a quarter of the turns are up at 6-month-per-turn speed, then you more rightly belong at the default 2-year-per-turn setting, since you've shown you can win in the default 225 turns.

So while I'm all for players who need more time stretching the campaign out the necessary amount, I have a strong suspicion that most players doing so are simply being lazy or unnecessarily jumping onto the bandwagon, neither of which are things I intend to applaud or encourage.

[Rhedd]

I did not know that. Thanks for the input!

I wonder if those can be modded as well.

The times that special ancillaries CAN be modded, but it's not fun to do. I know, I did it. ^_^

You just go through the last half of the export_descr_ancillaries.txt file and multiply all of the "I_TurnNumber" < or > values by the appropriate amount for you campaign. (x2 for a 1 year/turn campaign, for instance.)

It's not hard, but there are a bunch of numbers to edit.

[Irishman3]

So while I'm all for players who need more time stretching the campaign out the necessary amount, I have a strong suspicion that most players doing so are simply being lazy or unnecessarily jumping onto the bandwagon, neither of which are things I intend to applaud or encourage.

I'd bet your wrong there. My hunch is it is more likely because they had 2 turns per year in their RTW games, and since family members age at that rate it seems more natural to play at it. Kind of a high-horse response actually Foz. I mean most people also seem to complain about how easy the game is, so why would most want to stretch the turns out to make it even easier?

Personally I believe it should be an option and that choosing so would alter build times, income and the like to adjust for a 1 year per or .5 year per turn ratio. Its really nothing to use variables for stuff like this, unless you program with total spaggeti code.

[Werner]

So while I'm all for players who need more time stretching the campaign out the necessary amount, I have a strong suspicion that most players doing so are simply being lazy or unnecessarily jumping onto the bandwagon, neither of which are things I intend to applaud or encourage.

The fact of the matter is the game is BUGGED. I've been playing MTW2 since release date and the mongols still cant get past the stupid province they started with, the black plague has never happend, and who are the Timurids? Who cares about the events if they dont even work right? The dev's were obviously lazy and just didn't want to include an option they didnt care about. And since everything is either turn or year based it should've been that much easier for them to include the option of how the individual wants to play. So no, I disagree with you, this has nothing to do with a "band-wagon" or people wanting the game to be easier because its already easy.

[sbroadbent]

I was contemplating posting to this thread, but I just have to say that there are as many ways to play this game, as there are people who play the game. It seems there are some who just want to blitz through the game in the shortest amount of time possible, only to get "Victory" and then move on to the next game. There are others who want to take their time, to have more opportunity to manipulate events in the game, and just enjoy a slower pace of expansion.

I got probably halfway through my English campaign (probably 125 turns), and began to look at the "victory" conditions, and realized that at the rate I was going that I'd run out of turns. I didn't like being rushed artificially to meet some goal that was decided by someone else. The game might be "total war", but even in war there are times of peace and growth. When an ally of 260 years (ie 130 turns) attacks you, well, rally the troops and have no mercy!

During my English campaign I got to the gun powder event and was like "what, already? I haven't even had much time to play around with swords and bows", so I ignored gunpowder. Due to the catholic AI factions wanting to be aggressive with me, I had to put off some more extensive plans to crusade to the holy land. So much to do, so little time to do it all in. The next biggest problem is travel time. It can take forever to send troops or agents to another location.

I've been contemplating doing a marathon campaign of 1800 turns (4 turns per year), more to have the time to enjoy the campaign, draw out some wars that I might otherwise try to end quickly because I need to rush to get the Victory conditions in time. I am pretty sure that presuming that I stay interested in the above mentioned marathon campaign, that I will experience not only gun powder, but the Mongols, Timurids and the New World long before I "win" the game.

Werner, in my English campaign, the Mongols had not only taken out the egyptians, but had developed into a super power by pushing into Anatolia and pushing the Byzantines into Greece. They also forced the Turks into becoming their Vassal. The Timurids emerged and had they had more time they probably would've caused the decline of the Mongols as they started eating up Mongol territory. Since I was playing a completly vanilla unpatched game, it clearly must be the 1.1 patch that keeps the Mongols from doing anything in your game

jbguev, in my English campaign, London hit about 50K population before it's growth levelled out and then started on a decline. In addition, squalor doesn't have as huge an effect as in RTW, so I had no particular problems with population. The problem you would get into is that unrest can certainly effect a city during it's middle stages if it takes too much time to build happy buildings, but once a city has hit it's growth limit you should have had enough time to build enough happy buildings to keep the population in line.

I've only started playing the game, but I'm assuming that if you play the game at the nomal pace, by the time you get to the fifteenth century you'll have a little light artillery, a few handgunners, a heavy cavalry contingent decked out in heavy plate armor, a few infantry units decked out in similar fashion, and a variety of things that just wouldn't have appeared on a battlefield during the time of the Crusades. You would also have a bunch of social and architectural structures that you wouldn't find in an earlier period, like big post-gothic cathedrals and a network of guildhalls.

I found this definately amusing, more to the fact that one of my offline interests is in the Harn Fantasy Roleplay setting. Here's a setting which is based (I believe) on 10th-12th century Britain, has a republic coming from Ceasar's Rome, Renaissance level tech in some parts, Vikings from the early 9th century, and ships hitting somewhere around 15-16th century. Throw in some magic, and nope, there's no gunpowder either (gunpowder rarely exists in fantasy RPG settings). With that all said, I suppose I am completly unphased by the fact that there might be technology from one era appearing much earlier than it should. It's a game, enjoy it.

My point being is that Total War games are not meant to be historical recreations of the time and place it takes place in. They are more "what if's" and alternate histories where anything can potentially happen.

To wrap this up, no I am not lazy if I want my campaign to go 900 turns (or even 1800 turns). No, having the "extra" time won't make the campaign "easier". In MTW I never started in an era other than Early because I wanted to have the most amount of time playing my faction as I could, and starting in High or Late would cut down on the amount of time I could play before I'd have to start all over again with a new (or the same faction). I want a game that will give me many hours of game play, not one that I can rush through and then get bored waiting for the next great game to come along. After all, M2's expansion won't be out for what, 7-8 months?

[Rilder]

Werner, in my English campaign, the Mongols had not only taken out the egyptians, but had developed into a super power by pushing into Anatolia and pushing the Byzantines into Greece. They also forced the Turks into becoming their Vassal. The Timurids emerged and had they had more time they probably would've caused the decline of the Mongols as they started eating up Mongol territory. Since I was playing a completly vanilla unpatched game, it clearly must be the 1.1 patch that keeps the Mongols from doing anything in your game

and were well on there way to heading into Italia, they had even defeated the turmids according

Nope it wasn't the patch, at the end of my Portugle campaign (1.1) Mongols had taken greece to toggle_fow.

[Agent Smith]

Does anyone think quadrupling the build times for a 2 turns/year game would drastically effect the AI? I want to try it, but it make takes 100's of turns to see the effects, if any. I just wanted to see if someone else has already tried it.

[Foz]

I'd bet your wrong there. My hunch is it is more likely because they had 2 turns per year in their RTW games

Yeah you're probably right on that. Sad that people would get locked into an idea just because it was that way in the previous game, though.

Kind of a high-horse response actually Foz. I mean most people also seem to complain about how easy the game is, so why would most want to stretch the turns out to make it even easier?

It sure was. I must've been having a bad day.

Personally I believe it should be an option and that choosing so would alter build times, income and the like to adjust for a 1 year per or .5 year per turn ratio. Its really nothing to use variables for stuff like this, unless you program with total spaggeti code.

Sure it could be done, but why should it be a feature? I don't hear people complain that football games should be able to have extra quarters, or baseball should be 15 innings instead of 9. Games have rules people, and those rules are not meant to be changed. They are what give meaning to the game, define the game. If you mess with those rules very much, soon a win becomes meaningless, because you've changed things enough that your win isn't the same as anyone else's win.

Changing the amount of time a turn takes does change how the game plays, and so I agree with the developers on this one: it belongs in the world of modding, and decidedly not as a potentially confusing feature of the vanilla game.

[Whacker]

I'd bet your wrong there. My hunch is it is more likely because they had 2 turns per year in their RTW games, and since family members age at that rate it seems more natural to play at it. Kind of a high-horse response actually Foz. I mean most people also seem to complain about how easy the game is, so why would most want to stretch the turns out to make it even easier?

Personally I believe it should be an option and that choosing so would alter build times, income and the like to adjust for a 1 year per or .5 year per turn ratio. Its really nothing to use variables for stuff like this, unless you program with total spaggeti code.

Or perhaps some of us just prefer to take our sweet time.

[Whacker]

Sure it could be done, but why should it be a feature? I don't hear people complain that football games should be able to have extra quarters, or baseball should be 15 innings instead of 9. Games have rules people, and those rules are not meant to be changed. They are what give meaning to the game, define the game. If you mess with those rules very much, soon a win becomes meaningless, because you've changed things enough that your win isn't the same as anyone else's win.

Changing the amount of time a turn takes does change how the game plays, and so I agree with the developers on this one: it belongs in the world of modding, and decidedly not as a potentially confusing feature of the vanilla game.

I'm not so sure about the whole "rules" thing, but I'm inclined to agree with the intent there Foz. CA makes a game and designs it a certain way, "balances" it a certain way. Throwing more options into the mix means more balancing, which they may not have time to look seriously at, and it's more work they have to do afterwards if/when people complain. Relegating this to the modding world makes it easier on CA as they have less to fart around with, and people can change that aspect of the game as they personally choose.

[Agent Smith]

Just so everyone knows, once I either finish or get bored with my current campaign, I'll make a modified building file with all of the build times for buildings quadrupled to make a 0.5 game sync with the standard vanilla time. That should help make sure you don't make citadels by the mid 1100's...

[sbroadbent]

Sure it could be done, but why should it be a feature? I don't hear people complain that football games should be able to have extra quarters, or baseball should be 15 innings instead of 9. Games have rules people, and those rules are not meant to be changed.

That's a flawed analogy because in real baseball there are 9 innings so it's expected that there will be... 9 innings. Most people who would play a baseball game would not be looking to change the number of innings. If you play a baseball game, you do expect the same number of innings as in the real sport. Same as in Hockey, football, etc. Medieval 2 doesn't necessarily have those same comparisons. CA could've made the time flow at 1 turn per year, or used the RTW time flow. Essentially there is nothing other than the developers decision that the default time flow was 2 years per turn.

Interestingly enough, in most sports games that I know of where there is a timer involved players can change the rate time flows. In the 2K hockey you can have 5 minute periods! Talk about "changing" the "rules" of the "game". Of course, who would spend an hour playing out a game of hockey on their PS2 or Xbox?

My opinion is that M2TW has a total of 450 years. You start at 1080 and go until 1530. Whether you mod the game to 4 years per turn, or all the way to 4 turns per year, you still play 450 years of history. I'm not playing 225 turns, I'm playing 450 years of history. If I want to change the speed that the game flows from 225 turns to 1800 turns, that's basically the same as a gamer playing NHL 2K7 at 5 minute periods. It just happens that they will get quickly through their game, while I'll spend much more time playing my game.

They are what give meaning to the game, define the game. If you mess with those rules very much, soon a win becomes meaningless, because you've changed things enough that your win isn't the same as anyone else's win.

If the rules were not meant to be changed, the number of turns would be hard coded. Clearly it was not, and was intended to be changed, and fairly easy as it were. CA makes the game easy to be modded compared to many other games out there, so that each player can play according to their own "rules", rather than the rules that the devs decided before hand.

[Foz]

That's a flawed analogy because in real baseball there are 9 innings so it's expected that there will be... 9 innings. Most people who would play a baseball game would not be looking to change the number of innings. If you play a baseball game, you do expect the same number of innings as in the real sport. Same as in Hockey, football, etc. Medieval 2 doesn't necessarily have those same comparisons. CA could've made the time flow at 1 turn per year, or used the RTW time flow. Essentially there is nothing other than the developers decision that the default time flow was 2 years per turn.

Ahh, but it does have those same comparisons, which you just proved for me. Did you read what you wrote? What you described about M2TW is exactly what was done by the person who laid out the rules for the first baseball game: he picked an otherwise arbitrary length for the game, which was then the rule for the game. There's no sublime reason for a baseball game to be 9 innings - it simply is, which should be good enough for M2TW as well.

As for the rest of your comments, they all stem from this perceived difference between baseball and M2TW, which is really naught but shadow. They are both games, with rules - rules that you play by, rules that determine whether you win or lose, rules made by men. Your comments do not account for that most basic truth, and therefore are largely irrelevant to what I said.

If the rules were not meant to be changed, the number of turns would be hard coded. Clearly it was not, and was intended to be changed, and fairly easy as it were. CA makes the game easy to be modded compared to many other games out there, so that each player can play according to their own "rules", rather than the rules that the devs decided before hand.

Hah! That's laughable. If the number of turns were MEANT to be changed, it would be an option in the game, and not require editing of a file that the game reads to get its settings. CA makes the game easy to modify so that MODS can be released: you know, those vastly different games that just happen to run off the base M2TW engine? Not so players like you and I can change 2 settings. Don't suggest that ease of modding indicates CA intended each player to have control over a given setting: it doesn't. It only indicates that they know modders may need to control that setting for the purposes of their mods. Settings intended to be controlled by players are, of course, in the options menus provided with the game, and require no such editing of any game files.

[Suraknar]

Because obviously they do not intend it to be modified, and I suggest that it does not need to be, so this is a good design decision. The vast majority of game functions are turn-based, not year-based. The only things accomplished by changing the time-per-turn ratio are:

1. You change the number of turns in the campaign.
2. You compress or expand the historical event timeline.
3. You change the temporal meaning of a game turn.

Everything else I can think of is based on the turns, not the years: character ages, build times, movement, missions, AI scripts, income (all economics really), and probably a whole slew of others I'm not even remembering.

#1 seems to be the usual goal of everyone who decides to use a non-standard ratio. Could just be me, but I don't see the need to make the campaign longer. It doesn't take much effort to get rolling with multi-front expansion in this game, and once you do so it's amazing how quickly you pick up extra provinces. We've got what, 225 turns in a long campaign? And need to capture ~45 provinces, plus some special target province, usually. That amounts to a province every 5 turns, which is a totally easy thing to achieve in this game. If you can't tow that line then I imagine the devs would suggest that you should not win: you're not sufficiently trying to expand your empire/take over the world which is of course the point of total war. You can have plenty of fun playing without trying to win (I've screwed around plenty already myself without ever intending to win), but that doesn't mean you should bend the rules to make yourself win when you're not really making a concerted effort to accomplish the goal of the game.

#2 and #3 then are the primary focal points of this thread: i.e., the weird/bad things that will happen to your game when you do this. The timeline problems are more annoying probably: it's just not cool to play an entire campaign and never have the big events happen. I would suggest at the very least that players who complete campaigns without ever seeing the mongol invasion or various other early key events have unnecessarily switched to a slower time mod than they ought to be using. If you often win before 450 turns are over, you should try doubling the amount of time each turn accounts for (try 1:1 turn to year), since you'll still have enough to win but will experience events more reasonably. If you can win before even a quarter of the turns are up at 6-month-per-turn speed, then you more rightly belong at the default 2-year-per-turn setting, since you've shown you can win in the default 225 turns.

So while I'm all for players who need more time stretching the campaign out the necessary amount, I have a strong suspicion that most players doing so are simply being lazy or unnecessarily jumping onto the bandwagon, neither of which are things I intend to applaud or encourage.

Well..225 turns maybe enough if your sole goal is to win...

Now, i understand different people play for different reasons and with different ways.

yet on my part I like very long campaigns, where one can take their time fully devellop settlements units armies, try different things explore the world, experiemnt with possible scenarios..

At times I will run many diplomatic years of peace its time where I devellop my own settlements and I dont need to expand, when I expand I want to do it one at a time, not multifront expansive...which is all about winning but nothing about enjoying.

When I first saw 2 years per turn...simply unnaceptable...I emediatelly ran in these forums to see what has been said about it. Now, I am an oldy here, started with 4 turns per year with Shogun TW...these were the days :P

I know, as years pass audiences are also changing for the most part, I have a hunch that player feedback in general, may have commented that RTW was slow paced and people wanted a faster paced game, and I think CA decided to give the people that which they were asking for. I am fine with that :P

As long as, some of us can also make the necessary changes to shape the gameplay to our cup of tea. And thank CA we can, this has become a longstanding tradition with this series, the modding capabilities of it, stands side by side with the gameplay aspect this series offers in terms of my decision to buy this game. If it were not moddable...I am not sure I would buy em all as I have done since Shogun.

Beating the game is not the only interest here, the journey is more important than the destination for me. And when the jurney gets packed up in a nicelly wraped box of 2 years per turn for a total of 225 years to beat the game, it a box I am not interested ackuiring...usually these boxes end up in the garbage after use :)

Not with this series, its replayablity value due to its modability is a treasure in itself.

And so I play at the 0.50 scale, I have to admit however that the events will take long before they come...I think there is a file however that lists all teh events and one can modify the years it takes to trigger them, in my case a .5 turn ratio with a 1.0 event rate would fit just fine, so maybe I can simply half the number of years that these events take to happen. I am not sure it is possible, and besides a question for the Modding form not this one.

As for the fact that it may affect the actuall date, a someone else said, it not that important, there is not reason to obsess about Historical correctness when we play agame that actually is dealing with alternate reality all together. For insatnce, I play Byzantium, I have to get both Jerusalem and Rome, both of which did not happen in real History..so I really dont care if a certain event happens several years erlyer than the real dat of our known history, because as soon as I embark on that "Alternate" history which is the events of the Campaign, it does not matter any longer if an event such as the mongols invading is true to the real history, yet, it is true for that alternate history and that is what really counts. :)

We are rewritting History as we go when we play a campaign, why not rewrite dates of events too then?

[_Tristan_]

The main discrepancy I see in the 2-year turn is the character aging.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but at the start of my french campaign, my two sons were one or two year olds and reached their useful age only thirty years later (15 turns).

Seems strange...

Is there any way to make sure they age correctly ?

[Skyline Pete]

From my understanding family members/agents age at the end of every winter turn. So running at .5 will be fine but running at 1 might cause problems.

I have modded my game enough to run at .5 and am currently (when I get free time *sigh*) testing it. I've not adjusted building times or cash income at all, purely altered population growth levels and the caps required to upgrade cities/castles in the hope that it will stop citadels/very large cities from appearing too early. Unit speed has also been left untouched as I feel it is reasonable that an army can only march so far in 6 months.

I'm still testing it out so we'll so how I go.

The whole reason for my modding the game was that I wanted to run at a 6 month set, plus it just looked weird only having winter every 4 years.