Let's do the time warp again!

[ForgotMyOldNick]

Ok, personally, I really enjoy the campaign pre 1300's. I don't really care about gunpowder nor the Black Death. I just want to run around assaulting castles the good old fashion way.

So, How do I make the turns not advance two years per turn?

Is there a way to make it a year or even 6 months in line with the seasons?

I know it would be twice/quadruple as long a campaign but that's absolutely fine with me, that's what I want.

Thank you very much for any help with this.


And is there a really newbie friendly tutorial to do with the unpacker tool that Sapi pointed out to me in another thread?
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=88914

Thanks again.

[Askthepizzaguy]

If I am not mistaken, all you have to do is change one text file. There should be a turn/year stat somewhere in there. Unfortunately, the only thing I know how to find is the key to unlock all factions.

Someone else will probably know the technical details.

[ForgotMyOldNick]

Looks promising then

[4th Dimension]

Swing over to FAQ:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=72109

It's explained in Chapter 5

[ForgotMyOldNick]

Thank you 4th Dimension. Swear I saw it somewhere :S

Anyone got a link or planning on making a thread about the other issue then?

[SadCat]

The unpacker thinks every one knows how to make a .bat file. Which in XP I would have to think about. Other than that it is user friendly. SadCat


Use notepad, open a new document. Each the command should be followed by enter. Then save the document as "filename.bat"

[sapi]

Sorry; I assumed you knew about .bat files; my mistake.

What you need to do is open a new file in notepad, enter a line of text using the commands outlined (badly) in the readme, and save it not as a text document but as a file with the .bat extention.

Example command (unpacks general modding files):

unpacker.exe --source=..\..\packs\*.pack --destination=..\..\ --verbosity=1 --filter *descr*.txt

The key line is filter, with * being used as a wildcard. Here I'm unpacking all .txt files with descr in their title (eg export_descr_units fits into that command through use of the wildcard).

If you want to get a certain file, run the provided 'list contents.bat' file, open the text file it creates, locate the file that you want and add its name to the filter command (in pace of *descr*.txt above

Relevant readme section (substitute 'command line' for '.bat file')

-  The Unpacker can be used manually from a commmand prompt. The 
   Unpacker is called by typing:
   
	unpacker [options]
		
   Where [options] is one or more of the command line options
   described in the next section.
   
-  The following command line options are required:

	--source=[pack file(s)]
		
   Where [pack file(s)] is the path to one or more pack files.

	--destination=[file/folder]
		
   Where [file/folder] is the path to the folder to extract the pack
   contents or the file to write the list of pack file contents to.
   
-  The following command line options are optional:

	--filter=[filter]
		
   Where [filter] describes which files to extract from the packs.
   The default is *.* which will extract all files;
   
   NOTE: The & character cannot be used in the filter. If you use
   a ? instead it will extract the file. Alternatively wrap the
   filename in quotation marks.
   
	--verbosity=[verbosity]
   
   Where [verbosity] is either 0 (low) or 1 (high) for the amount
   of information that will be displayed on screen during unpacking.
   
	--mode=[mode]
   
   Where [mode] configures the Unpacker to either extract files. Set
   this to 0 to extract files from the packs, or set to 1 to list the
   contents of the packs.
   
-  Example command lines:

   This will extract all .txt files from the packs to the c:\packs folder
	unpacker --source=..\packs\*.pack --destination=c:\packs\ --filter=*.txt
		
   This will extract a list of all files in the packs to list.txt
	unpacker --source=..\packs\*.pack --destination=list.txt --mode=1

[ForgotMyOldNick]

Wow, thankyouverymuch Sapi. And Sadcat, thanks matey.

I will try it out soon. Unfortunately I am a bit paranoid with modifying MTWII files as RTW just had them right there in the folders... not hard coded, it was very easy back then.

Thanks a lot guys!

[sapi]

Well, I think you'll find that when you get into things (and understand, I'm not speaking from experience ) the M2TW system is a bit more versatile, as if you do make a horrible mistake with one of the files, you can always replace it with a working copy through use of the filter command on the unpacker.

Good luck, and let me know if you need any more help with the syntax

[ForgotMyOldNick]

Champion. Ta

[Bob the Insane]

The biggest issue I found if just altering the timescale to 0.5 (1 year every turns) is that it take the same overall number of turns for your cities to grow, some 200 turns in (near the end of the game in default mode) you will have loads of Huge Cities with loads of improvements, but for you it will only be 1180...

I have not decided if this is a good or bad thing yet...

One one hand it throws the economy out of whack as by the 1200's you will have huge cities pumping out the taxes and not much left to build. So you will have loads of money.

One the other hand you will have loads of money and will be able to field the troops of your choice in huge numbers...

One thing I tried that brought the city growth issue into focus was to slow the city development by multiplying the build time for everything by 4. You can normalize the economy by multiplying the build cost by 4 to because you have had longer to save up now. Don't forget to update any "build this" missions for the new build times.

However without slowing the growth rate some how your cities grow really fast and you find that half the time your are expanding the settlement size rather than building other improvements which can quickly lead to public order issues. One way to deal with this is to limit agiricultural output which slows grow rates and has the interesting effect on greating increasing the impact of the tax rate and quality of the governor on a settlements grow rate.

I started modding this stuff ages ago, but gave up because of the other quality mods around, the large bugs in the 1.0 version and the horror of repeated play through tests of a 900 turn campaign...