V1.21 Rebuild-ProblemFixer BETA testing thread

[Carl]

Not, units are getting far less experience. Bigger battles, more units, fewer battles. The experience is spread around. When I quit for the night (well, morning) I think I had a couple with 2 chevrons. And the new garrisons are a disincentive to horse archers (which you may like), at least for the Egyptians. They will come into their own later. But that means there's no rush to upgrade that stable at Gaza. Have to try the Turks later. They are more dependent on horse archers in the early going. And they get cheaper ones.

Hmm, fair enough about the experience, not what I'd prefer but unavoidable. The HA situation is a bit sad, (they are Egypt's unique unit after all), but a bit unavoidable, it's worth noting however this may be getting thrown a bit as I disabled rebel and pirate spawning in my testing to see if it speeded up the AI (it didn't really), and have forgotten to re-enable it. S their won't be many rebel Field armies ATM. Sorry about that, i only realized when I came to try and edit some starting provinces around just before I went out.

I think the Red Sea port are either very poor, or flat broken. Dongola is on the other side of the Nile, and not sure it has a connection to its port. The Cairo port never had any sea trade going in my last game (and I got to where I had Jedda and Dongola with ports too). Not saying the port has zero effect, but that it doesn't have its normal ROI. It's not worth paying for if money is tight.

Of course, I was just saying that if you have spare income it is worth it as it does give a bonus to your land trade, just as markets boost your sea trade.

Acre garrison was virgin. No idea what I had now. Probably mostly starting units and all of them. With a turn or two of cav builds from Gaza thrown in. Had one general. Other one was on governor duty.

So it was a tough Garrison on it's own, but not utterly silly as i feared, (I was worried it was a major force of extremely high quality stuff that got beat up badly).

The reason I am going so heavy on footsloggers is cost. Cav is not as efficient. Mobility means little in seiges and it costs relatively a lot. And replacements are more expensive too. And with the high unit count for defenders, it takes a lot of units. Which means paying maintenance on them longer. So I really look at the maint versus "firepower" ratio. The up front cost is a small part of the total when multi-turns are ensured.

Looking at the rosters, the only reason to use cav in a seige is to get it done fast, not cheaply. They get there faster, and if the defenses are light, they can get the job done. But they take far more losses in the tight spaces of a city than in the field. They aren't suited to the task. Though with very thin defenses they do well because they force the city square defense (instead of gate or walls) and there they have SOME room to at least attack flanks (sort of). But I autoresolve most seiges. I hate that pathing stuff. It's annoying. Very hard to even reform a unit into a different formation in a city.

But as things progress I expect to use more cav as the mobile (and destructive) arm. For things like crusade attrition and depleting defenders in the field, it's superior. And for strategic defense, denying easy access to my cities. Being able to throw cav at walls is a bit unrealistic anyway. So don't see the current thing as bad. The player does have the choice. It just makes sense, due to other factors, to choose infantry for this stage. For Egypt.

The numbers may work differently for the Turks, in which case I would force sallies and defent them in the field HA style. With infantry storming is viable. With pure cav you flat can't (though you can hire a few infantry merc units on the spot, cav is still not cost effective in the streets on the whole, at least if there are more than a couple defending units).

Thanks for that explanation, and I agree about pathing. It is improved and I've had uphill formed charges in castles before, but it takes a lot of careful rearranging of unit widths to get things just right.

I tend to auto-resolve because of the pathing too TBH.

Architect is not too common. You get it for building. If your "general" is sitting in a city playing governor, you deserve to get that one. It's the seige engineer that I don't know about. That one should come from building the seige line, I'd think. Or beseiging cities. Not sitting in cities.

True, I just see Goveners pick it, (Architect), up every single time within a few turns, i've even had feild generals who've stoopped for 5 turns to secure PO get it. hats a pretty bad state of affairs.

No. Both are strategic dead ends. If I leave the Holy Land open, I will not get it, the Turks will. Those two are "safe" for Egypt for a while. And neither is important (though Dongola is nice for the trade). Both are poorly positioned for building units or other purposes of that nature, but both are economy boosters. I go for them once my forward borders are settled. I'd go earlier except Egypt doesn't have the generals to spare. I keep one on governor duty, and push the other (now two) forward to fight and get the trait boosts from that. And I use the 4th to put up towers everywhere (and it's a lot of towers!) So those two don't need large garrisons. They have a built in delay in that wasting resources on taking them early will hurt the player on the real front. Forces sent there are out of play for 10 turns each. And they are both far enough away that rebellions in general-less armies are very likely. I saw that happen with a half-stack I sent to Jedda in the last game. Made me more conservative where long trips are involved. Total waste of time and forces to have them rebel 5-6 turns move away.

Hmm, actually, Jedda almost justifies a port at Cairo. Just for the saved time getting there and back. The 800 for the port is probably recouped in just unit upkeep for the saved 4 turns or so. Don't think that would apply to Dongola though. It's a long way from the Red Sea.

I was thinking f them more as Cav production centerers as the Cav can eat the distance fast, and also in the case of Dongola, it could feed all sorts of troops to Alexandria to by shipped to the holy lands, the Turks tends to concentrate on Tbilisi and Trebizond first, and then spends a fair few turns weakening garrisons up so you'd probably have had chance to do that and if you struck quickly at the territory near the turks cut them off from the holy land and have the whole lot.

But i'm not an Egypt player so you'd probably have a better idea than me.

It's actually bad strategy to be tall poppy early. I'm pushing it. The only thing keeping me out that early is I'm spending all my money. As soon as the economy is cranking, I will have trouble with getting alliances, I suspect.

It was harder before because their where triggers that automatically lowed your rep and faction standing with everyone if you where in the top 5 or so. Since the player is almost always going to be at least 5th no mater what I do I decided to just remove those triggers, so being 1st shouldn't make it any harder to get alliances.

Need to move fast. The bigger buildup in army mass is also a factor. I usually build more economy and less army this early. But those garrisons are forcing me to build up a lot faster. I do have the choice of taking those conquests slower if I want to get into a war with the Turks later (well, sooner, in a sense). I'm less apt to be able to force them to attack me, and more apt to put muself where I have to take the rep hit by attacking them, if I delay my expansion.

I actually took Adana first for the council 2500. Could have taken Aleppo instead. I know Adana will mean earlier war with the Turks. But Edessa might also prove that trigger. Assuming I get it before the Turks. They are trying. They have backed away from Adana (for now) since I took it.

The question will be whether the Byz attack them to keep them off me or not. Suspect they will go for Treb and get into it with the Turks.

The Byzantines tend to go for turkey pretty fast so probably. And thanks for the extra info, it sounds inane to most people but it paints a really clear picture which lets me plot opening moves in my head and figure out how well your doing.

Heh, what's a field army? All I have so far is armies aimed at cities. Antioch is crammed full, and there's a fort just outside Aleppo that's almost full. Both will hit Aleppo shortly. Using almost two full stacks to overpower the garrisons, which keeps my losses down.

The "ally helping: bit was tongue in cheek. They were after the city, I just beat them. Since they were adjacent to it, they got pulled in as an ally force. They took zero losses, but then so did my second stack. The main stack did all the work in the autoresolve, it appears.

LOL, I hoped it might be something like this, but I DO want to see Egypt's HA used early on as thats when they excel, and I wanted to check it wasn't a case of them being too weak.

I got the irony with the Allies comment, I've just never sen tis happen before so...

I don't really know about the merchant takeover chances yet. I don't have any in the heavy competition areas. My comments there were based on past experience. Someone needs to play Milan or Venice to test that. Lots of merchants fast and in the really hot zone.

Or Byzantium. Will have to ask somebody to do that as I want your English blitz at some point too.

Heh, shifting them off resources is no problem. A little force works (a military unit will shove them aside).

LOL, that only works near home, not so useful when the nearest army is half the world away, which was more what i meant.

The number of missile troops in those motte and baileys makes assault almost prohibitive by the way. The M & B also slows me down considerably because I don't need castles in these locations, I need cities. I can't afford the troops I could make from Caen and Nottingham, so having to convert them is a definite brake.

I did it more for the AI's benefit as they are normally desprally short of castles, but i've begun to suspect that both York and Dublin should be pallissade walls, same in a few other areas. But in most areas the AI is often in desperate need of castles.

I like the agent speeds, but it lets them get more done, opinions may vary.

Ship speeds are unchanged. This may matter less since agents can get where they are going. I am not sure the AI could deal with long range amphibious assaults from the player.

Will give a more complete report in a little while on the rest of the campaign.

Thanks for that, I was actually trying to encourage naval attacks and defenses by the AI TBH, one issue right now is that the AI often has it's fleets badly out of position if the player tries navel invasions and can never get them into position to defend.

Caernoven is a castle-type in vanilla. So that's no change. Dublin is a town. A town without a stockade, as I recall. Just give it a wall, Carl. It's always had a pretty decent garrison.

I was thinking the same, when I added things in a I just changed every settlement without a wall to a Motte and Bailey castle TBH without thinking about it as in most places thats what the AI needs the most.

How do I disable it?

Go into your Medevil 2 prefrance.cfg file and look for the following entries and delete them:

[multiplayer]
playable = 1
hotseat_turns = 1
hotseat_scroll = 0
hotseat_update_ai_camera = 0
hotseat_disable_papal_elections = 0
hotseat_autoresolve_battles = 0
hotseat_save_prefs = 1
hotseat_disable_console = 0
hotseat_validate_diplomacy = 1

Does that Help?


Any idea how it got enabled as my mod shouldn't enable it...

But I have hopes! (if Carl lets me play England again... )

I just want a quick check that Egypt/Turks are Okay power wise now, thats all. After that if you still feel up to it I'd love an attempted English blitz to find out how you do, thats going to be EXTREMELY valuable info, I just ant to check the old versions faults have been put to rest.