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.

[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.

[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.

[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?