Side effects of changing time scale

[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.

[FrauGloer]

When I got the game (on the day of its first release, like all TW games ), the first thing I did was to go into descr_strat to unlock Scotland (Call me a cheater for doing it, but it's my game and if I don't want to play another faction just to be able to play them - screw the developers' intentions!).
Right underneath, I saw the show_date_as_turns line and was like 'WTF?!?' In a (semi-)historic game about the middle ages, I want to see which year I'm in, I don't care about 'turns'! Out with it!

Now. My first campaign, as Scotland, I played on default (2 turns/year). It went ok, but I like playing in a slow-paced way. I don't care about winning as soon as possible. I was appalled to see gunpowder discovered when I didn't even have high-tier conventional units (noble swordsmen, for example) yet.

This is what bugs me most about the standard turn ratio. Time just flies by and by the time you can field significant numbers of high-tier archers to actually use them, they are already outdated and ready to be replaced by gunpowder units. By the time I was ready to build trebuchets, bombards and cannons weren't far-off. Plus: once you can afford a nice crusade (incorporating actual soldiers) the Age of Crusades is almost over - blargh!

Another thing is that you are practically forced to play extremely expansively to be able to aquire the necessary number of held provinces (45-50). There is no time to let the AI become a challenge. As the HRE, for example, you'd never get to see high-tier danish units because they are usually wiped out way before they are developed enough to field them. Same goes for Scotland and England. The constant struggle between the two never happens because one (the player-controlled one) wipes out the other long before other units than militia and the like become available. On 2 turns/year, there is more time for the AI to develop and field more challenging armies than vanillas repetitive town-/spear-/crossbow-militia hordes.

Personally, I settled on a ratio of 1 turn/year. While this slows down the gameplay a lot when compared to vanilla, it doesn't take as long for historic events to happen as with 0.5. I halved population growth and increased upgrade tresholds to deal with too rapidly growing settlements. About 150 turns into my English campaign, I own only ~20 provinces, and I'm happy with it. No faction has been destroyed yet and all are fielding nice armies, not just vanilla's low-tier rabble.

To counter high-tier units becoming avalable too early, I added several triggers to space availability. E.g. Gothic Knights and the like cannot be built before a specific date; Arquebuisers, Musketeers, and high-tech artillery don't become available as soon as gunpowder appears, but require another event about a hundred years later. This way, you actually get to use the low-tier gunpowder units (handgunners, bombards) instead of just skipping ahead to arquebuisers and cannons/culverins.

All this may not reflect the developers' intentions on how to play the game, but so what? I couldn't care less about what purists like foz think about this. It's my game since it crossed the counter in exchange for my money, not the developers', and I can change it in any way I see fit.

To sum it up:
I believe that a ratio of 1 turn/year is the best compromise between vanilla and 'realistic' 2 turns/year. 450 turns is enough to win by playing a slow paced game, while not drawing it out too much (900 turns... )
IMO, M2 vanilla is taking a step in the wrong direction. Epic medieval warfare doesn't mix with fast-paced blitzkrieg - thats what RTS games are for! I would not be playing this game anymore if it weren't for its moddability. Thank you for that CA!