MTW Pocket Mod: Units, Buildings and Unit Stats

[Martok]

The problem with this is that the AI will struggle to tech up to the decent units. As I said exotic units could require a smith building, but mainstream elite units such as e.g. High era Knights probably should not as this would hamper the AI from teching up to them as quickly as the player would.

Fair enough. My main thought/hope was that adding a smith as a dependency for Knights might help the AI financially without seriously impeding its ability to tech up to them. Ah well.

Again the problem with having larger incomes on the smiths buildings means that the player can exploit this easily. I prefer the idea of a gradual smaller income build up. For example there are 8 lines of "smith" building:

Spearmaker
Bowyer
Swordsmith
Armourer
Blacksmith
Horse Farmer
Siege Engineer
Gunsmith

If each building was bringing in roughly 100 florins at the base level, that's quite a sum. I have structured it as very low, a couple of florins each at the base levels. Though this could be altered so that as ugprades are applied income increases to reflect volume and better quality of goods produced. I also have cheaper upgrades to the smith buildings only costing 100 each and taking 2 years. So this should balance out when tweaked.

Gah! Well I wasn't thinking *that* much (100 florins) -- rather something more like 25-30 florins for the base level smiths, and then working up from there.

I digress, however. If you've made the smith upgrades that cheap, then it hopefully shouldn't matter, especially if you tweak them so they bestow a (somewhat) larger income at higher levels.

Renaming is an idea, perhaps something in the name or description that indicates that these are solely income generating buildings?

We'd definitely want to edit the descriptions, yes. As for renaming, perhaps something as simple as adding "Shoppe" (Armourer's Shoppe, Bowyer's Shoppe, etc.)?

If I were to do this though, I would need to work on some replacement training facilities. Butts are fine for archers but there would need to be upgrades to butts (not the bowyer line).

Hmm. I confess I'm currently stuck as to what else would be proper names for subsequent structures. Presumably upgraded butts (whatever they'd be called) would be primarily devoted to recruiting crossbowmen and arbalesters?

Also I'm thinking that the muster field should be separate from the barracks line. This would be the generic structure for cultural, levied or similar low level units "native" to a province. In view of this the muster field might also need an upgrade or two... Perhaps the Inn could be utilised for this? As technically if a King "trains" a unit of Highland Clansmen, he has not really trained them, but "hired" them, either with promise of a florin or two for their purse, lands, titles or position.

That could work. Otherwise, perhaps upgrades could go: Muster Field --> Levy Field --> Shire Grounds?

The Horse Farmer line would have to be renamed and used as stables. I don't think leaving these as a smith building producing an income would be wise.

Certain units such as Handguns would probably need to rely on their smith building being in the province as well as the barracks as would siege units depending on the siege engineer. Again these would be training facilities and not really income producing.

Agreed.

So to finish with we would end up with something like this:

Income (perhaps tied to resources in particular provinces to avoid spamming, this way income could be increased per structure):
Spearmaker (Pole Turner?)
Bowyer
Swordsmith
Armourer
Blacksmith

Looks good to me, although again we should probably rename them to avoid confusing players.

Training:
Horse Farmer (Stables, Stables ???, Stables ???, Stables ???)
Siege Engineer
Gunsmith
Muster field, Inn
Town Watch (Militia Barracks, Barracks, Barracks ???, Barracks ???)
Royal Court
Butts, ???, ???, ???
Military Academy (Possibly depending on the fourth barracks level? Seljuks/Ottomans only?)

Yeah, I like that. Here's my crack at the building names:

Stables, Knight's Stables, Ducal Stables, Royal Stables
Militia Barracks, Infantry Barracks, Guard Barracks, Palace Barracks
Butts, Yeomenry Range, Guard Range, Master Range

(Sorry, I know that last series isn't very original. )

Yes I'd say that advanced troops would be limited geographically, though we have homelands to deal with that. It may be an idea to use special resources to restrict some buildings to specific provinces and thus restrict training of certain units, but I'm not 100% sure of this yet. It may complicate matters and imbalance the game even more than it is. Inevitably this approach would great very strong areas and very weak ones. Also it's debatable if the AI would build the needed building in that particular province and meet the rest of the requirements in order to train the unit. It also means that if certain factions don't hold certain provinces then some units will be unobtainable altogether. Homelands do this to a certain extent already.

It's the sentence I highlighted in bold that concerns me most. I could all too easily see the AI being critically -- if not fatally -- hampered with the system proposed. So long as elite/royal units can be restricted to homelands, I'd just as soon not mess with the setup (at least for now). We can always tinker and tweak later if it seems desirable and/or necessary.