Side effects of changing time scale

[chickenhawk]

Carl, I am eagerly awaiting your 1.14, how is it coming?

Also will you redo it for the patch or not?

[Carl]

It'll get re-donne for the patch, mostly i'm doing some trait tweaking ATM, then i'll update some stuff for the patch and take it from their. About 2 weeks if they hold off till the end of the wek on the patch and I should be ready to send it for testing. I just need some damm testers. Will have to advertise in the modding section...

[gardibolt]

I wonder what the intersection is between people who complain that the game is too easy, and people who are playing at .5 and thus never get the Mongols, Timurids or Aztecs? I think I need a Venn Diagram....

[Foz]

I don't know, perhaps we should just agree to disagree

Probably.

So some of us can't comment on gameplay if we use a mod?

That depends of course on what your mod does - how it changes the gameplay. In so far as it changes the game, then no, you should not discuss those aspects of the game in general discussion threads where people are assumed to be playing vanilla, or at least close enough to vanilla not to affect whatever discussion is at hand. You can of course discuss other unchanged things, but even that is gray area since some people have not played vanilla sufficiently to even KNOW how it is different from the mod(s) they are using (note Carl, who played only about an hour of the game before changing to 6 month turns. I'm sure he's not alone). This lack of knowing the difference leads to people posting things without adequately prefacing them as mod-related b/c they don't realize it's due to their mod(s), and also to quite jumbled up threads due to talking about 2 or more versions of the game at the same time, which are both things you can already see cropping up with the shield fix, pike/polearm fix, and various other mods that have gained some popularity. I fairly regularly see people having to go back and explain that their comments were based on "mod x" that they are using. Prefacing comments with what personal modifications you're using is one possibility, but surely anyone can see that if that becomes widespread enough, soon it will be impossible to tell whether anything anyone says actually applies to the version of the game that you are playing. It actually already is difficult to tell to a large extent: I get the feeling that nearly everyone on here uses mods of some sort, and if that is the case then FAR too few comments are being prefaced as mod-related, and we're already on a sinking ship where we're likely hearing advice that may not necessarily hold true to the base game.

I don't see why there has to be such a purist attitude about generally discussing the game.

Because, as I said, you must be discussing the same game as someone else in order for your comments to be relevant to that person. If you personalize your game enough, then nothing you say is relevant to anyone because their game operates differently in every respect.

No hard feelings. I don't want to start a fight or anything.

Likewise. I may seem harsh sometimes, but don't confuse it as personal: I intend only to attack ideas, not people.

1. A poll a while back showed a very large percentage of the responders did not use the defualt time scale, that implies a fairly big part of the online community in fact is giving results at somthing other than the defualt timescale.

Such self-motivated response polls are not scientific and should be assumed to be inaccurate. People who see such polls typically are far more motivated to vote if they feel strongly on the matter. It seems unlikely that many people would feel strongly that the default time scale was best, where obviously many feel strongly that non-standard ones are best, so we can reasonably assume that the poll in question is skewed in favor of the non-standard time setting, and presents an inflated estimate of people using non-standard time scales.

Not everyone changes the timescale to get an advantage, they often change it because of other in game changes or because they want a diffrent style of gamplay, or as in my case just to make the game make sense.

Honestly it doesn't much matter why anyone has done this, only that it has been done. Even if we assume the people using this change are not trying to get an advantage, the fact remains that they do get one, and it changes the gameplay in some way, intended or not. Having a longer campaign affects the strategies you use on the campaign map because you know you have all the time in the world. Having 4 times as many turns pass before the mongols turn up likewise changes the campaign substantially for many factions that would otherwise have to divert significant resources to relatively early army build-up to combat that threat. I freely admit that the game mechanics remain largely unchanged, but the strategy decidedly does not. Thus far everyone has tried to trivialize the difference that a 6-month-per-turn game has from the standard 2-year-per-turn sort, but the differences simply are not trivial. That everyone keeps trying to say they're trivial just lends more credence to the idea that people are not sufficiently paying attention to how their mods are affecting their game, and thus are likely making some potentially misleading comments in general discussion threads as a result.

[Quickening]

Honestly it doesn't much matter why anyone has done this, only that it has been done. Even if we assume the people using this change are not trying to get an advantage, the fact remains that they do get one, and it changes the gameplay in some way, intended or not. Having a longer campaign affects the strategies you use on the campaign map because you know you have all the time in the world. Having 4 times as many turns pass before the mongols turn up likewise changes the campaign substantially for many factions that would otherwise have to divert significant resources to relatively early army build-up to combat that threat. I freely admit that the game mechanics remain largely unchanged, but the strategy decidedly does not. Thus far everyone has tried to trivialize the difference that a 6-month-per-turn game has from the standard 2-year-per-turn sort, but the differences simply are not trivial. That everyone keeps trying to say they're trivial just lends more credence to the idea that people are not sufficiently paying attention to how their mods are affecting their game, and thus are likely making some potentially misleading comments in general discussion threads as a result.

I just can't face playing the game with the default timescale which 1. Makes the characters aging look stupid and 2. doesnt make sense when you still have the Summer/Winter cycle as in RTW.
Those things are important to me and no matter how hard I try I can't get the fact out of my mind that when Im playing the vanilla game, my characters are living Biblical lifetimes. It's stupid. And that annoys me.
On the other hand I agree with you about people using mods making comments when they don't know otherwise. It annoys me no-end to read what I think is useful information only to find that they are using some mod. I never use mods, I hate them and Im only modding the game's timescale sometimes because I think the way CA designed the game is stupid for the reasons above. I know it's just a game but talk about immersion shattering.
However, I think it may have been you who said that the default timescale forced you to become a more efficient strategist and that kinda inspired me so sometimes I do revert back to the normal timescale.

For me this is one of those thing that really bugs me. I hate playing games with mods or in any way which was not intended by the developers. Even to the extent that I will not use mods that fix really annoying bugs like the shield one. And yet on the other hand CA made what I think is a ludicrous timescale desicion which gets to me so much that Im forced to mod the game to feel "right" playing it. Yet I don't because I know it wasn't intended to be played that way


EDITED TO ADD: Want to emphasise that I have nothing against mods or their makers, it's just that I personally feel uncomfortable playing the game in any other way but vanilla. Of course the real point of any game is to have fun so each to their own.

[Skyline Pete]

Smith, I actually didn't edit that particular file to slow growth but rather the SPF Farm factor in the settlements mechanics file to slow down how quickly settlements grow.

I'm still testing it but as Sicily I took Durazzo as a village and took about 4 or 5 turns before it reached my new min pop level limit to upgrade to a town. Seems right to me.

Unit and buildling cost/upkeep/movement is all default in my game as I prefer it that way. To me an army should be able to march half way across France in 6 months time. As for building time, well I'm still testing that out, but by not altering income it just means that generally you can't afford the building in the first place rather than it taking forever to build.

This makes building choices much more important as you can't afford to build everything in a settlement and must make settlements specialised (ie an archer producing place vs a swordsman producing place).

If you've got anymore questions feel free to grab me on MSN or send me a PM.

[_Tristan_]

I just can't face playing the game with the default timescale which 1. Makes the characters aging look stupid and 2. doesnt make sense when you still have the Summer/Winter cycle as in RTW.

Exactly the point I was trying to make earlier...

CA should have stayed on a 0.5 time scale, which never got any complaint in the preceding games (Am I wrong ?)

I'm generally opposed to modding a game in that it modifies what the developers intended as a game experience. Nevertheless, modding is sometimes the only solution to bugs or totally inept ideas that developers get sometimes

I pay a vanilla game but finding more and more bugs and not agreeing with the way my characters and agents are aging I think I will be modding shortly...

To add on the subject of modding, I understand both point of view expressed here. True, a modded game is the the REAL game but most times you can't see a true difference in the gameplay. So I don't see why a modded-game player shouldn't give his opinion about some game mechanics even to non-modded-game players... To each his own...

As a last note : Don't you think it strange to see a winter or a summer only every two years ? What got into them CA Dev' ?

[gardibolt]

It has a feeling of being designed by committee, doesn't it? My utterly uninformed guess is that there were two factions in CA: one wanted to have a long game that covered from 1066 to the conquest of the New World; while one wanted to have people get quickly from the start to the end so they could experience lots of different units. But the only way to do that with characters that didn't die in a few turns was what they did.

It's kind of strange, and I thought I would hate it, but I'm pretty used to just counting in turns now and not paying any attention to what "year" it is.

[Philippe]

I suspect that they changed the timescale to avoid having a 900+ turns campaign game. And (more importantly) to avoid having to do the research and testing to create two (possibly three) more smaller campaigns as they had done in MTW.

I really wish they hadn't opted for the hopelessly unimmersive region naming convention. Now that they have a little time to work on a patch, maybe they'll pull out an historical atlas and act accordingly. I hope this wasn't a nod to their focus group's comments that most of their audience's geographical knowledge is so poor nobody would notice. 'sFeet, I want to invade Lombardy and Flanders.

[_Tristan_]

@carl : Would really like to try your 1.14 patch, need a tester ?

I'm on it...if you're OK

[Carl]

Sure, your about the 4th person to voulunteer. I'll start a thread advertising now, and you can drop your name in their for me if you will. I'll keep a list of voulnteers their then.