MTW Pocket Mod: Units, Buildings and Unit Stats

[caravel]

They sound a little like Highland Clansmen, except with spears. It should be....interesting to try them out.

Well if Tegns can be modded so that they're more likely to have good acumen, that would definitely help. I still think the Huscarles should stay in, though.

They can be modded to appear as overall good governor material, with better stats. That is what usually occurs. There is no single attribute that boosts the accumen of generals belonging to a certain unit. It's still random. Also elite units, in general, seem to produce some good generals. Alot of the time having a good faction leader will determine the quality of the generals that appear.

Interesting; I didn't realize that was why trade goods in landlocked provinces are so hampered. If raising the tax percentage on imports will help the AI, then I would definitely say go for it!

Trade goods in landlocked provinces are largely pointless because there's no one to trade with. In my experience trade needs a port as well as a trader. Even if you've got neighbours that are allied to you, trade with them doesn't occur. Trade is only worthwhile if you're trading by sea and that one province is sending, e.g. saltfish to 10 provinces. Local trade is trade within that province only. Local trade is exactly the same size income as foreign trade with a single foreign port. It is an income based upon a set percentage of the trade goods in the province, which is obviously further affected by upgrades to the Trader. It never seems to match the trade value in the startpos files. I forgot this earlier when I described the income from trading with other provinces. You never get the full trade goods value, but the cost per good always appears to be the same whether trading with your own province or others via a port. To reiterate:

1) Land locked provinces cannot trade with each other in any way. If you build the trader in e.g. Syria you will get one complete export trade income from the all of the goods there. This is internal Trade within the Province itself (Syria Trading with Syria not with any neighours whether allied neutral or your own provinces)

2) When a province with trade goods builds a trader that province gets a default standard trade income called "local trade" that is the same value as if you'd traded all of those same goods to another allied or neutral province, that accepts all of those goods, by sea.

3) The import percentage is so low that the importers get a pittance for any goods they import. Raising this from 20% to 50% makes a small difference though it may need to go higher. This will need to be tested for game balancing.

Starting up a Russian/High campaign I built the Trader in Muscovy for 800 florins, the only trade good, furs, is worth 20 florins. The startpos file sets this as 40. Upgrading to the Merchant cost me 1000 forins and I'm now making 24 florins. The Merchants guild costs me 1200 and now I'm making 30 florins. The final upgrade, the Master Merchant, costing 1400 florins has raised the income from furs to 34 florins, but not the 40 in the startpos text file. So is this some kind of seed number or a percentage? Is it 40 percent of something + whatever the traders and their upgrades give, or something else? I'm not sure. In total the outlay was 4400 for the trading buildings, so the Russians just need to wait 220 years for it to pay for itself then they sit back and enjoy the 34 florins per year.

So really most of those landlocked trade goods need to go, in case the AI goes and blows a few thousand on traders... The other alternative would be to increase the number of Landlocked trade goods and encourage the AI to build the traders more. With more goods the incomes do get quite sizable. Syria for example is, sort of worthwhile, once it aquires those extra goods.

The build prod file contains not info pertaining to the nature of the trader structures. They are labelled as "TRADING_POST" type structures and nohing more. There is nothing in the file to relate to the extra income produced by the upgrades. This must be hardcoded. The game engine possibly recognises that the buildings are in a province and adjust the incomes. There is also nothing in the dependencies info about building conditions, so this must also be hardcoded...

Some good ideas there. Timber mills (for Forestry) could help benefit the HRE, as well as some of the northern and eastern provinces on the map. Would you limit iron mines to the provinces that currently have iron (a majority of which are in Iberia), or do you think you'd expand them?

...Mines have the resources column, which they depend upon in order to be built, then the building itself generates a set income stored in the build prod file. Based on that I can have various types of new mines up and going very quickly, just need good historically based ideas and locations!.

The Iron mines would be added to provinces that already have Iron, or the whole thing could be done differently...

At the moment the Metalsmith depends directly on Iron. This could be restructured as follows:

Metalsmith (and upgrades)
Dependency: Iron Mine

Iron Mine (and it's upgrade "Iron Mine Complex")
Dependency: Iron (Ore) Resource

This way we have slotted in a new structure that also gives an income. Then, as I've said in the previous post, Iron resources could be made more plentiful to inlcude about half the provinces (As I've said I need some assistance as to where they should be located as I want them as historical as possible, as well as balanced). Iron was a necessary component of steel, which was used extensively throughout the medieval world for arms and armour of all kinds, so just having it in a few provinces is daft. I think the representation in the game is of "famous steel" (e.g. Toledo steel in particular), abstracting other deposits out. The Toledo Steel thing can still be preserved by only allowing the Spanish (Castilian Leonese) to produce the last Metalsmith upgrade.

I think the build requirements you propose are pretty reasonable, except I wonder if needing an Armourers Guild is maybe a little high. Given that you need a Citadel to build it, it seems likely that by the time a Danish player had constructed all the necessary buildings to train Huscarles, the Early period would be nearly over. (Unless my math is way off, upgrading your castle to a Citadel, along with building the other structures, would take around 60 years. And that's if you didn't build anything else!)

So unless you were planning on making Huscarles trainable in both Early and High--which I wouldn't recommend, and I don't think that's what you had in mind anyway--I would ask if perhaps the requirement ought to be lowered from an Armourers Guild to an Armourers Workshop. I doubt anyone would have a major problem with having to tech up a good bit before training Huscarles, but they should still be trainable for a reasonable period of time before the Early period expires.

I agree. The requirement for a castle is sufficient. That's done.

Sorry if I sound like I'm trying to boss you around and tell you what to do, btw. I just do my best to give input, but I know I come across the wrong way sometimes.

That's not a problem. I really appreciate all of the input from all of the members in this thread! The rest of the traitors have obviously sneaked off to play M2TW!!

Now, for the latest. The Yeoman Cavalry are in. I haven't tested them yet but they do work (I hate adding units, it's very tedious and I always forget something or make a typo somewhere).

The next thing to do is change the shipping costs. I've done the ports and shipyards already, but the ships themselves I've overlooked! So I need to do those next.

After that, down the mines!

Then it's the trade and farm balancing act.

We should have a testing version ready by next week. The whole thing is mainly text files but a few unit icons (renamed replicas not originals) need to be added also. Because of this I can't Really just post up the text files and allow people to just generate their own txt files from that, so it will have to be contained in a zip file. I should be able to host it early next month, once my internet connection is working again. I can't FTP into my ISP webspace from this connection, it won't allow it.