CA propositions thread

[madalchemist]

Yeah and that comment will really help improve things for us...

Maybe you could just send the request without comments, but you know way better than me that modders can solve problems (like the sucking Diplomacy/Alliances, Antitraits) more quickly than developers...

[Lusted]

Maybe you could just send the request without comments, but you know way better than me that modders can solve problems (like the sucking Diplomacy/Alliances, Antitraits) more quickly than developers...

No we can't, as far as im aware no modder is always a fully qualified programmer in C++ who knows how to edit the hardcode of the game.

A real, fully moddable game, and official support for it. Client side source code and an SDK. Open source tools that the community can contribute to.

This is for stuff to go in the 3rd update, not for the next game, so keep it realistic.

[Whacker]

This is for stuff to go in the 3rd update, not for the next game, so keep it realistic.

Fine, fair enough. I will not withdraw that comment though, seeing how CA has hyped this game as "modder's heaven" and in my view they've utterly failed to deliver on that.

Things I'd like to see in update 3:

- Dismounting units. I honestly don't care if they don't implement it in the main campaign, so long as we have the actual GAME MECHANIC and ABILITY to configure units to do so.

- Ability to change things like individual unit movement speeds, turn rates, etc. All the stuff that we lost in the engine upgrade from MTW to RTW.

- City/castle wall mechanics. Non-interlocking concentric walls. I can't say that enough. The ability to configure walls to behave like in RTW, aka capturable towers, and towers that fire automatically without unit proximity.

- User-definable religions and cultures, and a good limit please. More than just 5 or so, 10+ should work. By cultures I mean like "roman", "carthaginian", etc. Ignore this if the ability already exists.

- More console commands and BETTER DOCUMENTATION. The docudemon files floating around aren't accurate and don't cover a number of commands available at the console. The better documentation also applies universally, the comments in the config files are helpful for the most part, but quite often are woefully incomplete and/or do not give enough data to help determine what is valid input or settings.

- A list of hardcoded limits for files like export_descr_units. The ol' trial and error gets really old and annoying real fast, esp. when the developer should be able to and should have already told us what these are.

Thanks.

[Lusted]

There not going to put the first 3 in the patch, those are major engine rewrites and game changes. Please be realistic.

We can already add new cultures i think, i know we could in RTW:BI.

Your last 2 are the kind of thing me and alpaca are looknig for, reasonable requests that could be done.

[Whacker]

Again my apologies. I wasn't aware that you were actually a CA dev and know exactly how long/much effort it would take into doing these things. I could see dismounting as a bit of a stretch, but not the wall mechanics at all. At least not giving us back the ability to make walls behave like in RTW, unless they happened to completely lose their old code.

[Lusted]

I've been modding the TW series for over 2 years now, and i've been in a fair bit of contact with the devs. A dismounting feature ain't sometihng they're going to add in a patch. Me and alpaca need people to suggest reasonable things to open up to modders. Like for instance help in making walls moddable not make it possible to change the entire way walls work. They probably still have the old code, but WE don't have access to the hardcode, so what use would it be to us?

[madalchemist]

Asking for CA to remove hardcode wasn't supposed to be a bashing, but if you think it's a request with poor chances of success the fact it won't be brought to CA won't be considered a personal offence for me :)

Edit: Anyway, to speak frankly, which monetary damage would be for CA to add moddable features? Maybe I don't know what I'm speaking of, but i.e. the export_ancillaries made the modders able to add/change/fix the ancillaries of the game; before, it was not possible, right?

The money CA made with MTWII were made within the first two monthes -give or take 2 weeks- of its release. If they'd give the whole world the ability to send the factions cap at 123 instead of 31, in which way would they lose customers? Mods increase the playability of a game, as you know better than me.

Of course, this would not prevent them to keep the expansion hardcoded to sell it when it goes gold.

And regarding to the difficult of reading and programming in C++, I know at least two people in my neighbourhood able to do it, dozens of modders could do it.

I sincerely do not see reasons to keep hardcoded feature, files, etc. as long as it does not help the bug fixing or gives money to CA; please explain me where I'm wrong

[LorDBulA]

The ability to configure walls to behave like in RTW, aka capturable towers, and towers that fire automatically without unit proximity.

Lol. I give 10 priority to NOT SENT this change request to CA.
Automatically firing towers was afoul and cause of a lot of griff in RTW fans.
Now CA got it right and wa ask to change it back to the way we didnt like it?
That just insane. Please dont send this request to CA.

[adembroski]

One tool... a "Campaign Editor"... I'm not asking for a map drawing utility here, rather, the ability to load up a map and rename provinces and cities, generals, place armies, assign buildings to cities, etc.... basically set the starting conditions of the campaign without having to edit 50 million individual files... this program would generate a desc_strat, desc_regions, names.txt, all that wonderful stuff... ability to change the names
Priority- 8


Outside of that...

* I'd like to be able to adjust growth rates within a specific campaign without heavily effecting everything else from economy to unrest (Priority- 5)

*Ability to use up to 4 turns per year with the appropriate number of winters showing up (Priority- 6)

* It should snow on sub-arctic climates (Priority 10... blah!)

* Artic (permanent snow) climate (Priority 1)

* Seconding the disband unit scripting capability with an addition--- destroy building as well (ie ruler reaches too high "dread", a highly chivalric order may deny him use of their forces)... last part might already be in, I'm just starting to get into scripting... Priority 10 Twice!!!!!

[alpaca]

About the SDK/hardcode issue: Guys, some of this might be interesting for CA for their next game (although only if they already implemented it, because they're probably quite far into the development process), not for a patch or an add-on.
The main problem here is probably that their management doesn't or didn't see supporting modders as a large priority - I guess because of the small fraction of people they constitute.
I know that this view is wrong, but some people in the industry still seem to have it. I hope that SEGA will change their opinion about that seeing the long shelf live of a game like Civ4 which is moddable to a far larger extent than Medieval 2.

What we need are suggestions like "raise this limit", "make this small code change" that seriously won't take more than a few minutes developer time.
I can also say that they are often simply not aware what we as modders need, which is due to the somewhat strange politics of an almost complete lack of cooperation with the modding community.
Again, I hope this will change in the future.


As for the kill_unit command: How do you imagine should a unit be chosen to kill? Units don't have qualified names, they only have an index number that we can't find out.
I can propose it but I'm pretty sure it won't go.

[Whacker]

Lol. I give 10 priority to NOT SENT this change request to CA.
Automatically firing towers was afoul and cause of a lot of griff in RTW fans.
Now CA got it right and wa ask to change it back to the way we didnt like it?
That just insane. Please dont send this request to CA.

Just because you don't want it doesn't mean that there's a good deal of us who don't. Having the ability to do this won't hurt anything and wouldn't mean that one couldn't keep the current tower mechanics. Spare us that snide attitude in the future.

@ Alpaca - I understand what you are saying. It ceases to annoy me though that some of the items I've outlined above you guys keep saying are "major code rewrites" or "needs a whole new engine". That's bull, if CA knows anything about writing good modular code half of those are not, repeat not major undertakings. So please stop saying they aren't realistic because they certainly should be. If you want a list of "piddly" stuff, then so be it:

1. List of max/min ranges of values. Like for export_descr_units, descr_character, etc.

2. In-depth details on savegame structure for single player. A savegame editor is probably too much to ask for, but it'd be nice.

3. The ability to destroy already created watchtowers in game, both normally by generals and through console commands.

4. Process_rq working. I realize this is somewhat redundant with create_unit but it'd still be nice to have this available.

5. (may be irrelevant) A fix for the obnoxious bugged province/can't build watchtower/reduced movement deal that happens after a disaster. I do not know if this has been fixed, my understanding is that as of M2TW v1.1 it has not.

6. Ability to make *every* building in a settlement destructable, including walls. If not through normal game means then at least through console commands.

Those are in order that I would like to see them from most priority to least.

Thank you.

Edit - added item 6.

[Lusted]

extra cultures

faction/culture specific descr_campaign_db.xml settings

We can already do this, for instance the UAI mod added in new profiles for all cultures, so you could add in new ones for each faction.

[wilddog]

OK the votes from Wilddog. I haven't done that much on scripting yet so some of these may be able to be handled anyway

10) Be able to have turn based event trigger (not just date).
9) Be able to remove ancillaries
8) Be able to amend ages or increment ages based on true years.
7) Be able to have additional Jihad (or culture)* type missions - for other faction groups.
6) Be able to create an event with a yes or no decision.
5) Use of OR and not just AND.
4) An ability to vary the seasons in multiple turns per year games - ie to have maybe consecutive winters or possibly an Autumn/Spring season (I know there were longwinded scripts to change the season per turn but a simplification of that would be better and I can't recall if the end of winter triggered other things).


ie at the moment Jihad is restricted to Muslims (at least in v 1.1 as far as I could tell) but it would be interesting if a similar trigger could be used by orthodox or by different groupings of culture and ideally the call to war could be triggered by the Faction leader.
Same thing applies to the Pope & crusades (ie having multiple Popes connected via culture).

[Re Berengario I]

10) Be able to have turn based event trigger (not just date).
9) Be able to remove ancillaries

You could set events with <date> <season>, the example in docudemon contains that parametr and it worked in my tests.

remove_ancillary should work as console command but I agree to have something which works within triggers (or at least for character inside settlements where all the console commands fail).

[madalchemist]

-5- Could we ask to raise the number of agents (like units, factions, regions)?

You know I'm the one who wanted to add the Inquisitors to the playable factions

-4- Some traits are almost never used: the Hates_the_(facion) and the Fears_the_(faction); since they was created, it would be nice to see them more often, and use them (same request of who asked a way to remove ancillaries in some conditions).

[nikolai1962]

if i'm wrong about how the pathfinding works then this is ignorable but otherwise it would be good if, when the map.rwn is generated, you could have a config switch for modders that would output the x,y centre point calculated for each region by the game.

Just knowing how it was calculated would help.

Worth a 10 to me but maybe not for anyone else :)

[alpaca]

Maybe you could just send the request without comments, but you know way better than me that modders can solve problems (like the sucking Diplomacy/Alliances, Antitraits) more quickly than developers...

No, because it's a request that has a chance of succeeding similar to that of a mayfly trying to lift an elephant.
And I stated quite clearly that we will make a preselection of the propositions - most of them won't be implemented anyways, and such completely unrealistic requests can be taken wrongly and sound close to CA bashing, even if that might not be your intent.