Medieval 2: Kingdoms - Expansion Discussion

[Ignoramus]

I have to agree with repman a bit. While battles are nice, what I appreciate most is immersion. I want to believe that when I am playing a medieval game, that I really am in the Middle Ages. Medieval: Total War did this quite nicely for me. The sequel, however, I find slightly lacking. But it is still an amazing game despite that.

[MilesGregarius]

No Inca, the largest empire in america?

or Mapuche, who reisted over 300 years to the spaniard invasion and defeated them in the end?

My pet peeve remains that the Apaches were chosen to spice up the Americas campaign, instead of the more historically accurate first-contact factions the early European colonizers actually had to face (Apalachee and Calusa in Florida, the real Carib Indians, etc.). Choosing the Apaches is the Holywood version of history.

From the looks of it, the Americas campaign will be based around the Valley of Mexico and environs. That would place the Inca, the Mapuche, the Florida tribes, and the Carib well off map. More appropriate than any of those, and far more accurate than the Apaches, would be the Zapotecs or the Mixtecs. The Zapotecs in particular were a significant player in the region.

[anders]

The idea of four smaller campaigns seems pretty cool, just hope this also includes the end to all those infuriating bugs in the original grand campaign, and maybe somewhat less stupid AI diplomacy, at least the spaniards are gonna need that if the americas campaign is going to be remotely realistic.

also, I really hope this expands the grand campaign somewhat too, some new units for all factions, inclusion of the MP units that were omitted from the grand campaign, and a couple of new factions and new provinces.

[PseRamesses]

IMHO the ability to control multiple armies including reinforcements was the feat that surprised me the most. The way the sentence is written I got the impression that you will be able to control even your allies armies beside your own reinforcements. This will really spice up my playstyle since I usually deploy two armies together in an campaign, one offensive and one defensive.
More epic battles, yahooooo!

[sapi]

I presume that that feature was included in order to make the 'alliance' campaigns more realistic and immersive; now we've just got to hope it's carried over into the main campaign.

[pike master]

maybe they will work on the americas map some more before release.

and you cannot have byzantine flamethroweres without the da vinci steam tank and steam cannon and his infamous rotating blade assault chariot.

[Whacker]

That last bit looks like it'd cause more damage to the horses driving it than anyone else.

Personally, I think madchat is on to something with his laser armed terminator cohorts. I'd also like to see the inclusion of several lances of various clan and star league era mechs as elephant replacements.

[Lusted]

Info posted by Caliban at TWC:

Kingdoms Expansion isn't finished yet, but its well on its way. The testers here are already playing through the campaigns and giving us some really positive feedback.
The patch is due out very soon and will be out well before the expansion.

These are definitely abilities and not 'special powers'. We wanted to expand on the general’s influence to give different characters abilities that compliment their personalities. You should see more detailed information about the different abilities soon.

The Control multiple armies feature is extremely cool. This lets you send orders to the generals of the reinforcement armies to carry out commands. You can select the armies via the 'army tabs'. I was watching Palamedes control 6 reinforcement armies in a siege battle last week! Very cool stuff.

[Ituralde]

I finally got my hands on the copy of GameStar to dig through the facts collected there. Man I love living in Germany!

First, I would like to point everyone reading this thread to the following link where you can find some more screenshots from the AddOn:
http://www.gamestar.de/aktuell/scree..._kingdoms.html

Second, I would like to add some of the things I gathered from reading the GameStar article that have not been mentioned yet.
The major drawback that the Preview mentions concerning the AddOn is that many features contained in the four scenarios will not be available in the original M2:TW. For example the forts with moats can only be built in certain scenarios and you won't be able to control AI reinforcements in the original campaign.
Let's come to the new additions though for each scenario:

Eastern Europe:

Faith will play a huge role in this campaign as the Teutonic Knights will only be able to train their best units in catholic settlements. This means they will have to put a lot of effort into converting.
On the other hand pagan or orthodox factions like Novgorod or Lithuania can convert to Catholicism. This can lead to riots but gives them access to more advanced weapons. It also has the drawback that the Teutonic Order can immediately pump out it's best units should they conquer one of your towns.
The Danes have other goals, they are bent on uniting Scandinavia which will give them access to special norwegian warriors.
While the HRE will have to try to secure vital trading posts to boost the Hanse in the Baltic Sea.

Crusade:

Important towns and cities like Jerusalem will offer unique bonuses to the faction that controls it and enable you to recruit elite units. You will also receive steady reinforcements from the settlement.
There will be Holy Relics that you can find in victorious battles or in conquered cities. You can assign those Relics to one of your generals. After his death it will be given to his successors. Relics can be lost to the enemy if you loose a battle.

New World:

If you start as the Spaniards, you can gain Presitge points that will let you raise in rank from mere Noble to Marquis. Every rank will give you more money and give you access to more advanced troops. You can also be demoted if you loose too many battles.
The Spaniards will not only have to subdue the Indians but later in the game they also have to defend their possesions against French and English colonists.
The Indian tribes can ally with the Spaniards and gain Musketeers and other advanced units through it. They also have the option to sacrifice prisoners to their Gods to make their populace happier.

Britain:
In this scenario you will see a large and strong Britain that has to fight against the Welsh, Irish and Scots on all fronts, while having to fight inner squabble as well.
The Norwegians will be raiding against all parties present on the British Isles.


I hope you found the above information helpful. I'm only passing it on from what I read in the GameStar magazine so don't hold me responsible for any of it. Have fun!

Cheers!

Ituralde

[Lusted]

And a TW blog with info no the general abilities:

First off – hello. I’m Mark Sutherns, I work at CA UK in the Studio Marketing department and hopefully, you’ll be seeing a lot more of me on this very blog and on the forum in the months ahead. Enough of the introduction though, let’s get down to business.

I wanted to make a post to follow up on some of the comments and threads I’ve read on the Medieval II forum since the announcement of Kingdoms. In particular, I wanted to post some more info on the heroes and special abilities feature to give you some more detail and perhaps put some people’s minds at rest. I would have posted on this before now, but I wanted to get some additional info from the dev team in Oz and with the time difference...well you know. Anyway, enough of the rambling excuses, here's the beef on heroes and abilities.

Firstly heroes have been added to Kingdoms in order to reflect the role that certain significant leaders played in battle. Up until now in Total War, you've developed your own Generals, their traits and command abilities but with Kingdoms we wanted to take that a step further by giving the player unique General characters that came equipped with improved abilities in battle. These special abilities reflect the influence that these great leaders of men had on their troops and their potential to turn the battle in the favour of their armies.

By giving these heroes increased abilities, it makes these particular Generals even more precious, therefore introducing new strategies concerning how these heroes are used in terms of where they are deployed on the campaign map and which battles they are thrown into.

The special abilities included in Kingdoms (we’ll reveal more detail on these in the weeks and months ahead) will be limited to one per hero and will be carefully balanced so, while they have an influence on the battle, they are not so powerful as to unbalance things dramatically. Typically these powers will be limited to morale effects on your own troops and in some cases, the morale of enemy troops. As you'll see when you get to play Kingdoms, these abilities make these heroes significant to the campaign game so that the player you’re driven to keep them alive and to use them strategically at the right time and in the right battles within the campaign.

To give you even more detail, Dan Lehtonen, a designer on Kingdoms from our studio in Brisbane, sent me this overnight:

“The one ability that seems to have spooked a lot of people is the Byzantine politics ability. This unfortunately prompted by an inaccurate translation from the Gamestar magazine preview in which it was thought that enemy units would be made to fight against other enemy units, when in fact they cause a ruckus throughout their own unit, causing a distraction and holding that unit up. This can provide many tactical opportunities on the battlefield with possible flanks being opened or vital units being held up by infighting.

Manuel’s ability represents the skill and cunning use of Byzantine agents’ provocateur. These men slip into an enemy army before battle and bribe greedy members of enemy units to start a ruckus when given a signal from the Byzantines. They do not kill anyone in their own unit! Because if they did and the battle is won by their army they would be strung up as murderers! Of course Manuel has promised through his agents that they will be spared if they lose… There is no magic at work here, just capitalizing on pure human greed.”

So there you go. I hope this sheds some more light on this particular feature. More will become clear when we reveal each of the heroes and their particular abilities in a month or so. In the meantime, keep the feedback coming and I’ll endeavour to keep you updated with extra snippets of information and detail up until release.

http://www.totalwarblog.com/

[TinCow]

The major drawback that the Preview mentions concerning the AddOn is that many features contained in the four scenarios will not be available in the original M2:TW. For example the forts with moats can only be built in certain scenarios and you won't be able to control AI reinforcements in the original campaign.

[Whacker]

Times 80 hojillion... C'mon, that's just crap CA. We've been chomping at the bit for this feature since STW, and now we finally get it but we can ONLY play it in a few small campaigns? This must be what it's like to buy a sports car and find out you can only drive it at 35 mph in stop and go traffic.

[Lusted]

My guess is so that those who don't get the expansion can still get update 3 patch without it being several gb in size and featuring things others have to pay for. I mean BI didn't add anything to RTW, apart from a few things that could be modded in.

[Ignoramus]

[alpaca]

Aye, it shouldn't be a big deal to mod most of that stuff into the grand campaign.

[fabiano]

Aye, it shouldn't be a big deal to mod most of that stuff into the grand campaign.

But, if it is not a big deal for the modders, it is a lot easier for CA. :)

That´s a feature the player are looking for, CA knows that and are going to use on the new exp. Why not use in the main campaign?

Sometimes I think we are being too kind if the companies, as if they are doing us a favor just making the game. Why spend money to play it and its not a big deal to wait for the best CA could do, not the best the modderes could do.

Just my toughts.

Fabiano

[pike master]

That last bit looks like it'd cause more damage to the horses driving it than anyone else.

Personally, I think madchat is on to something with his laser armed terminator cohorts. I'd also like to see the inclusion of several lances of various clan and star league era mechs as elephant replacements.

well mech commander 2 did somewhat of a decent job of what you are talking about. but still it would be awesome to see battle mechs going through a wormhole and appearing on the medieval battlefield although im sure it would be one sided unless they had to take on timurid cannon elephants.

we would have to take the terminators guns away from them since when they travel through time displacement they cant take mechanical devices with them. so they would have to go catch some knights and soldiers and relieve them of their attire and duke it out with pole arms and swords.

also a zombie army would be neat as well but they would have to show arms and legs getting hacked off for that.

it would be neat instead of wardogs you had to fight a bunch of war wolves or in other words and interpretation ware wolves.

and of course the zombies would have morale so you can watch a bunch of zombies trying to run while their legs come lose and their rotten bodies disintegrate.

skeleton armies like out of sinbad. with sword and shield.

these ideas should definetly make mtw2 more historically i think

[Monarch]

Does this seem like 4 alexanders bundled into 1 xpac to anyone else?

[King of Kings]

to me it seems like 4 great campaigns and one great expansion.

[Quickening]

to me it seems like 4 great campaigns and one great expansion.

Sounds like a tagline; "Four Thrilling Campaigns in One Epic Expansion Pack!!!"

[TinCow]

The aspect of this that I'm really encouraged by is the size of the campaign maps. We're now getting 4 completely new maps of regions that have far more detail than most modders have been able to achieve. Even though it looks like there are only a few factions in each campaign, there's no reason why modders can't easily alter that and make each individual campaign into a massive game of its own. For instance, the British Isles map appears to only have 4 factions, but is easily large enough to support 15. That alone makes it a gold mine for the modding groups.

[alpaca]

The aspect of this that I'm really encouraged by is the size of the campaign maps. We're now getting 4 completely new maps of regions that have far more detail than most modders have been able to achieve. Even though it looks like there are only a few factions in each campaign, there's no reason why modders can't easily alter that and make each individual campaign into a massive game of its own. For instance, the British Isles map appears to only have 4 factions, but is easily large enough to support 15. That alone makes it a gold mine for the modding groups.

Just you wait until some mods are actually released. Most of what we have right now is rebalancing vanilla, really (although that in itself is often a very good achievement).

Anyways, maybe CA will put those features into the grand campaign with a patch for the original game, or they simply didn't work on it until the version Gamestar got. If I'd make an expansion I'd try to get the expansion content right before adding stuff to the original game, too...

[IrishArmenian]

Does this seem like 4 alexanders bundled into 1 xpac to anyone else?

(Gasp of Anticipation)...No.
I never played Alexander because it just looked like they were not making it to enhance gameplay experience, as it looked uninspired.

These, hower, look inspired, imaginative and made for the sole purpose of a more enjoyable gaming experience.

[Xtiaan72]

Does anybody know?

This reinforcing army feature they are talking about. What is the best info on how they are implementing this. Are we really finally going to be able to toggle between two full stack armies in one battle?

[Lusted]

This info posted by Caliban at TWC is the best we've got to work on:

The Control multiple armies feature is extremely cool. This lets you send orders to the generals of the reinforcement armies to carry out commands. You can select the armies via the 'army tabs'. I was watching Palamedes control 6 reinforcement armies in a siege battle last week! Very cool stuff.

[Xtiaan72]

It sounds really promising. So there is no info on troop limitations yet.

[TinCow]

Threads merged. Please keep all expansion discussion in this thread.

[Pindar]

Of the scenarios: three made sense, but the British Isles one surprised me a little. I would have thought an Iberian Peninsula scenario or a British Isle plus France scenario would have been a better go.

[Hoplite7]

So... most of the new content is only accessible in the 4 minicampaigns?

Honestly, doesn't sound like much of an expansion. Would be better suited as downloadable content.

[Skott]

If I were to buy this expansion, and I'm not terribly thrilled by it so far, it wouldnt be so much because of what CA did but more like what the modders can do with it. I'm of the opinion nowadays that CA makes a okay game but the modders can make it a good game.