MTW Pocket Mod: Units, Buildings and Unit Stats

[caravel]

Hi all! I've been lurking in this thread from the beginning, following the discussions with interest. The work you've done sounds fascinating. One question: when you feel these changes are complete enough, is it going to be downloadable somewhere as a mod? I'd love to play with it when the day comes.

Once the changes are complete, and my webhosting is back up and running their will be a zip file available for download. This will be the testing version, and only those interested in taking part in testing should install. I'm hoping at that stage that we will get alot of feedback on any changes or tweaks that need to be made. The more people on board the better, as to the name, I hadn't thought about that as yet. Naming such a mod may seem a bit self indulgent and over the top when you consider that this is no where near the scale of mods such as BKB, NTW, HTW or XL. This is more of a patch than anything. I would like to get as much historical accuracy in as possible but I'm no historian. And any history I do read up on tends not to be military based, so though I understand somewhat about e.g. the Byzantine economic and social history, I'm not aware of what shape of helmet was worn by their infantry between 1090 and 1100, for example. My other focus is gameplay. Achieving a better balance and strengthening the AI's position is a priority. The more people involved the better. If people don't understand modding it's not a problem, ideas and information are more important.

As you've made Pikemen Town Watch(3) dependant, have you left Halberdiers Town Watch(3) dependant?

I have. Though Pikeman are only available in Late, so Halberdiers will appear first. I could still make the Pikeman available in Late if I was to lower the build requirement for the Town Watch(4) to a Citadel. At present the depencies are as follows:

TOWN_WATCH - CASTLE
TOWN_WATCH2 - CASTLE4,TOWN_WATCH
TOWN_WATCH3 - CASTLE10, TOWN_WATCH2
TOWN_WATCH4 - CASTLE13, TOWN_WATCH3

They could be restructured like this:

TOWN_WATCH - CASTLE
TOWN_WATCH2 - CASTLE4,TOWN_WATCH
TOWN_WATCH3 - CASTLE7, TOWN_WATCH2
TOWN_WATCH4 - CASTLE10, TOWN_WATCH3

CASTLE7 is the Castle, which was previously not a dependency for the TOWN_WATCH buildings. The previous dependencies were Fort, Keep, Citadel, Fortress. Using this method, the dependency for Pikemen can be changed back to the TOWN_WATCH4.

It seems to me that alot of effort was made to stop the factions from obtaining pikemen and halberdiers too early and in large numbers. This is rather silly because neither are elite troops, and neither are that good, and both are era restricted anyway. I preferred chivalric foot knights (train 20 man units of Royal Knights and dismount before battle) to halberdiers and Chivalric Sergeants to Pikemen. They just don't seem worth the effort with the old dependencies, now with the revised ones I feel I might use them more. (and hopefully the AI will also)

The summary should be updated later with the homelands so far. That is going to be a big job because I'll need to add all of the rest of the units in the game to the list.