Side effects of changing time scale

**Philippe** · 03-03-2007, 01:33

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** · 03-03-2007, 02:11

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** · 03-03-2007, 03:37

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** · 03-03-2007, 03:51

Originally Posted by 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.

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.

**Rhedd** · 03-04-2007, 05:53

Originally Posted by Agent Smith

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.

**Foz** · 03-03-2007, 04:08

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.