Side effects of changing time scale

[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.

[Foz]

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.

You could always take to renaming the places yourself and release it as a mod. IIRC it requires less work than you'd think just to change the names around for things, and it would probably be well received in the community.

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.

Me too. I don't even think I know how to find out what year it is in the game. The seasons come and go, the characters age along with the season cycles, which seems natural enough. The only way it would really bother me is if I sat here and constantly reminded myself that 2 years were going by every time I hit the turn button... which I simply see no reason to do. Outside of doing that, I have no way to know that anything is odd.

[Quickening]

You could always take to renaming the places yourself and release it as a mod. IIRC it requires less work than you'd think just to change the names around for things, and it would probably be well received in the community.


Me too. I don't even think I know how to find out what year it is in the game. The seasons come and go, the characters age along with the season cycles, which seems natural enough. The only way it would really bother me is if I sat here and constantly reminded myself that 2 years were going by every time I hit the turn button... which I simply see no reason to do. Outside of doing that, I have no way to know that anything is odd.

The faction summary sheet gives you the year.

[Agent Smith]

Just so everyone knows, I have uploaded a mod that attempts to make a 0.5 turns/year game as parallel to a vanilla game as possible while creating a new military/agent usage dynamic. I'll let everyone know when it gets posted and is available for download.

[Foz]

The faction summary sheet gives you the year.

Well that explains it then, I find little use for that particular sheet. I sometimes look at my regions or city/castle numbers, and turns left, but I guess I adjusted so fast to where they are on the sheet that I don't usually note the year. I guess it also helps that I don't really care what year it is, too. Even the things I do look at on there, I don't check frequently - I know well enough usually what situation I'm in, at least as it concerns those things. I probably pass through it on the way to diplomacy and pope tabs far more often than I actually look at the faction tab. The overall financial details is a more usual hangout of mine, but even that I go turns at a time without checking. I can certainly understand the compulsion to check those various items frequently though: it's easy to establish a habit of checking all the info available, even if you don't necessarily need it at any given time. I've certainly gotten that way with other games before, but for some reason it just didn't seem necessary in M2TW.

[TevashSzat]

Agent smith, if you are truly intent on having a realistic game, then you must mod the unit speeds by making them about 5-6 times longer than the ones in the game. Even at .5 year turns, it would take you at least a couple of years to sail from Spain to Jerusalem which in reality would just take a few months. You would further have to alter the size of the New World since currently, the south eastern part of the US is about as big as Ireland and England which is not geographically correct. To tell you the truth, 2 year turns were used so that the game will actually be playable. Lets say you have 0.5 years, who would want to wait 400 turns just so they could get gunpowder and around 600 turns just so they can see America. You have to put everything within game perspective. If CA only put maybe 100 year worth of history in M2TW, you would be sure that people would start complaining about the lack of gunpowder and the New World and then start saying CA is just too lazy to write those things into the game..

[Agent Smith]

Agent smith, if you are truly intent on having a realistic game, then you must mod the unit speeds by making them about 5-6 times longer than the ones in the game. Even at .5 year turns, it would take you at least a couple of years to sail from Spain to Jerusalem which in reality would just take a few months. You would further have to alter the size of the New World since currently, the south eastern part of the US is about as big as Ireland and England which is not geographically correct. To tell you the truth, 2 year turns were used so that the game will actually be playable. Lets say you have 0.5 years, who would want to wait 400 turns just so they could get gunpowder and around 600 turns just so they can see America. You have to put everything within game perspective. If CA only put maybe 100 year worth of history in M2TW, you would be sure that people would start complaining about the lack of gunpowder and the New World and then start saying CA is just too lazy to write those things into the game..

I'm trying to make a 0.5 game as PARALLEL to vanilla as possible with a few tweaks. I never wanted to imply I was going to make an uber-realistic game. My only intent was to rectify the disparity in technology based upon the year in a 0.5 game.

For Pete's sake, if you don't want to play it that way then don't. There seems to be plenty of people here that want to play on a 0.5 timescale, but don't want it to be so unrealistic that you wind up with Gothic Knights by the mid 1100's. I just made this mod for myself and to maybe make a few people happy.

I understand why CA made it 2 years/turn. I just want to slow the pace down. I made the mod for myself, but I'm sharing it with others if they want to use it. Why is that so wrong?

If anyone can play four consecutive long campaigns, I'm sure they could play one extra long one. If you don't like it, don't use it.

[Philippe]

You could always take to renaming the places yourself and release it as a mod. IIRC it requires less work than you'd think just to change the names around for things

I had sworn to myself that I wouldn't do any modding unless I seriously like the game. I got badly burned on Combat Mission by working on mods and mod related projects for several years and not actually playing the game.

In any case, I think it might be wiser to wait until after the next patch on the off chance that they decide to fix this.

Having said that, I unpacked the game (because I was wondering how to go about shrinking the flags) and took a look at some of the description files.

Modding something like this seems fairly easy at first glance, but first glances can be deceptive.

There are a lot of game functions, victory conditions, and scripts that seem to key off of region names. So I'm initially reluctant to start making name changes to the description file until I'm sure what other files will need to be modified to correspond to it. [It looked like three or four at first blush]. Apart from that that particular aspect of modding this game doesn't look any more difficult than modding Europa Universalis II.

By the way, does anyone know what it is you need to open and modify a CAS file? And if I were to start messing around with the text files, I'm assuming that I could make stable changes in Notepad, without having to worry about them crashing the program or coming undone once the game is fired up.

I may be about to install M2TW for a couple of weeks until the patch comes out, but before I do I may re-write the names of some of the towns from within the game to see if that changes the region names. A very useful function carried over from BI, where many of the place-names were in ungrammatical latin.

[Agent Smith]

Update:

I'm about 30 turns into playtesting my mod, and so far it has been the MOST INTENSE first 30 turns I have played.

In all instances playing vanilla, using my standard blitz strategy for the Russians, I can have close to all of the Steppes by 30 turns and usually only fend off one small Polish invasion force.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE.

I have fended off almsot three full stacks of Polish troops within the first 30 turns. One of them was a huge siege assault by the Polish on my troops in Kiev, and the only reason I won was because I got as many mercenaries earlier as I could. I have found it hard to resupply my troops, because the extra length in build time means that, as of now, Novgorod and Smolensk are my only provinces that can train troops (a standard Town Guard in my mod, because of the x4 build time in my mod, take 8 turns to build, not to mention time turning castles into towns and building wooden palisades before that).

The result on the AI is seemingly profound. With the increase in build time, the AI has seemingly invested a ton of its starting money into making early, low tech armies of militias, peasants, and early castle cavalry. I honestly would have lost if I didn't get those mercs early.

Now that turn 30 has rolled around and I have am investing in infrastructure, my starting total florins has nearly run out. I'm assuming the AI will slow down, too. But still, I have never had an opening 30 turns like that before.

[Kobal2fr]

Don't know if it's been mentionned already (didn't read the whole post, once it started drifting into a "people who change the scale shouldn't" VS "people do what they dang well please" debate, I got bored quick ) but there's an elegant way to solve both building "times" and pop growth in one swoop : divide all provinces' agricultural values by the same factor you've divided the turns by.

Now, I can't remember which file to edit and which of the (uncommented) values it was you had to tweak but I could find it back, I know I've made a couple posts about this back in December when I was still active here... (haven't reinstalled/patched/unpacked M2TW yet, I'm still waiting for more feedback on 1.2, especially on the traits front which was my major beef with 1.1...)

Anyway, the point of it is :
- it makes a lot of provinces have a negative pop growth value early on (meaning you *have* to build farms and then wait if you intend to move past "dirt heap" tech level),
- Even when fully teched up, towns and castles grow very slowly, though good governors can help with this - slower gameplay
- you have a *lot* less cash flowing around meaning you can't build everything everywhere and have to make choices. That cathedral might still only take 6 years to build, but if you have to put it off for 20 years, the time it takes you to painfully scrape enough cash to do so, then it has a "realistic" time frame.

The only problem with that solution is that trade rates and mines are not affected (hard-coded on the 2yr/t values), which makes sea commerce somewhat overpowered (and merchants too, to a point). I'm sure one could play by house rules to mitigate this, as I did back then.

[Foz]

The only problem with that solution is that trade rates and mines are not affected (hard-coded on the 2yr/t values), which makes sea commerce somewhat overpowered (and merchants too, to a point). I'm sure one could play by house rules to mitigate this, as I did back then.

These are taken from descr_settlement_mechanics.xml:

      <factor name="SIF_FARMS">
         <pip_modifier value="0.75"/>
      </factor>
      <factor name="SIF_TAXES">
         <pip_modifier value="0.9"/>
         <castle_modifier value="0.9"/>
      </factor>
      <factor name="SIF_MINING">
         <pip_modifier value="1.0"/>
      </factor>
      <factor name="SIF_TRADE">
         <pip_modifier value="1.0"/>
         <castle_modifier value="0.5"/>
      </factor>
      <factor name="SIF_BUILDINGS">
         <pip_modifier value="1.0"/>
      </factor>
      <factor name="SIF_ADMIN">
         <pip_modifier value="1.0"/>
      </factor>
      <factor name="SIF_WAGES">
         <pip_modifier value="1.0"/>
      </factor>
      <factor name="SIF_UPKEEP">
         <pip_modifier value="1.0"/>
      </factor>
      <factor name="SIF_CORRUPTION">
         <pip_modifier value="1.0"/>
      </factor>
      <factor name="SIF_ENTERTAINMENT">
         <pip_modifier value="1.0"/>
      </factor>
      <factor name="SIF_DEVASTATION">
         <pip_modifier value="1.0"/>
      </factor>

SIF is for Settlement Income Factor from what I've puzzled out. Everything you could possibly want to control is in there. If you divide turns by 4, dividing every factor in here by 4 should make the game's economy operate at 1/4 the rate as well. In fact the rest of the file deals with Settlement Population Factors, Settlement Order Factors, and populations levels required for upgrading, so it does just about everything you could ever want w/ regard to settlement mechanics. A simpler way to modify growth is to just divide the growth modifiers in this file by the same amount as the turns, and you (just like with economy) will immediately bring growth factors into line with your timeframe - and not just farming growth, you can affect every single growth factor using this file. You should also lengthen build times accordingly though, if you're trying to keep time passing as before.

This is not without potential pitfalls, however. The game's system appears to have a certain set graininess in its calculations: it only displays growth in half percentages, for instance. This could mean 2 farm levels are required to get any benefit at all out of having them, since the first 1 would make 1/4th growth, not enough for a full half point to show up. I haven't confirmed that the unshown points are wasted, but they well may be since they do not show up in the pseudo-calculations the details scroll presents.

What to do about that if it's the case? I don't know. As I've said before there seems to be no way to make the game actually run correctly in all respects with any timeframe slower than the one it shipped with, and as a result I simply recommend against modifying it - you are decidedly screwing some game mechanic(s) up when you do. I simply can't see sense in making a cosmetic change and sacrificing gameplay to do so.