Broken Crescent

[Ramses II CP]

As the Rajputs I found that they were able to cross rivers pretty easily against my Tier 1 units, naturally, but that they were always reluctant to attack a crossing if I had reinforcements behind it. My strategy was pretty much just to throw expendable militia/tier 1 troops at them, hold the river crossings, and whittle them away gradually. They took Samarqand from the Ghorids, they wanted to take Termez, but retreated when I blocked the road, and they exterminated Bukhara. Eventually I trapped them north of Balkh and finished them off.

Of course the Raj have elephants, which do take some of the sting out of those heavy lancers, but my weak infantry was almost completely unable to hold walls or bridges against them. My great advantage was economic, as I had bought a bunch of cities from the Ghorids, then made them my vassals, recovering a huge quantity of florins in addition to the incredible merchantry in India. Good luck.

[Galain_Ironhide]

Finally I have downloaded BC!

Unfortunately it is already almost 12am and I have to go to work in 5 1/2 hours so I am not going to able to play it tonight. Friday night and Saturday night are out of the question too - OH the Pain!! I have started it up though just to have a sneak peak and all I can say is..... wow. I don't think I have been so excited to play m2tw for quite some time.

I am thinking on playing as the Kingdom of Jerusalem first and it looks like quite a challenging faction to play as. I am also thinking on starting my very first AAR (which could most likely be a thread that will show me getting my pants thrashed off me by all of the muslim nations)

A quick question though....
Before I start I will download 1.05 (naturally). But there are also some other files that the BC team have added that you extract into your M2TW folders. I've never done this before, is this easy to extract? (I think there is a file for missile AI, also one for a UI issue that arose from the new 1.05 patch). Please, if some one can explain to me in simple terms of how I can extract files that would be huge! (sorry, now I am showing how much I understand about computers )

All the Best!

[Jason X]

@Galain

windows should have a zip extracting utility, if not download 7zip and use that

when you double click on the zip file provided by the BC team, you will have some option to extract the files contained therein and you will be able to specify which folder (usually your broken_crescent installation folder) to extract to. this is the crucial step.

for example, for the missile tweak, he asks you to "Unzip into ..\broken_crescent\data and overwrite"
this means, when you extract the zip, you will need to navigate to your broken_crescent folder (which is where the installer stuck the mod), select the data folder underneath and extract there. the extracting program will ask if you are sure you want to overwrite files, say yes.

enjoy

[Captain Pugwash]

Went out and got M2tw gold. Now installed. BC working fine. If you are thinking of getting this then do, its better then kingdoms.

[Shahed]

From Ayyubid Campaign:
The Final Moments of a Marshall of Jerusalem.


From Ayyubid Campaign:
Final Phase of the Last Battle vs The Kingdom of Jerusalem.


This was kind of... curious, from Khwarezm Campaign:
Dog Trader in Afghanistan.

[PBI]

I downloaded this mod a few days ago and have been playing a campaign as the Solanki Rajputs. It is a very beautiful and well made mod and it is very refreshing to campaign in a region and culture not found in any of the other TW games. I'm finding it particularly interesting having to adapt my tactics to using elephants as just another wing of my army, rather than the rarely-seen superweapons they are in vanilla. I got a very nasty surprise last night when I rashly assumed I would be able to take on a full stack of Ghorid heavy cavalry using only elephants and scrub militia

I do have one concern however, which is over siege warfare. As far as I can tell there are no siege weapons, and rams seem to take an eternity just to break through even the most basic gates, making every siege assault a very costly enterprise. This worries me a little, as the reason I usually get bored of vanilla campaigns is the constant repetitive siege warfare, which stops me being able to use many of my best units properly and leaves little room for tactics. Am I missing something here? Surely an assault against a well-defended citadel is going to be almost impossible, if I have to spend half an hour bashing through each gate.

[Shahed]

Solankis are really fun, I played like an hour or so just to get a feel. Like with all the factions in BC, you can only recruit artillery at certain settlements. I think Kabul is one for example. Usually it's one the larger settlements in the region. Don't quote me on that though because I'm not really sure what determines if a settlement can recruit artillery. Although some say that artillery is weaker in BC, but I lost about 500 men (infantry army) in a battle vs Kingdom of Jerusalem. The AI had 4 sets of artillery. The artillery was absolutely devastating. They've removed bouncing boulders which makes it harder to hit targets such as gates but they are accurate and they KILL!.

[PBI]

Ah, didn't realise that, thanks. So I guess artillery are much more valuable in BC: The only way to cost-effectively take a settlement, but much harder to get. I won't miss the infamous all-artillery AI stacks mind.

[Ramses II CP]

The Rajputs are definitely a fun faction. One of the most striking things I noticed was that Rajput nobles really aren't nearly as durable as you might expect. The AI targets them heavily and they tend to die a lot. Without over using the MoH noble recruitment I ended up with 17 nobles when I reached the 60 province victory condition. The Mongols were especially deadly against my nobles.

Regarding the siege battles, I found them to be much more enjoyable and realistic than in vanilla. It is definitely possible to capture a citadel, mostly because the AI is still rather foolish about garrisons. I took the one that accidentally had cannon towers left in (The BC guys know about it and it'll be fixed in 1.1 or whatever) from the Kwarezmshah without too much trouble, you just have to have a plan and accept some significant losses.

For anyone who is interested I did a more complete AAR on my battles against the Mongols in the AAR Challenge thread. You can read it here:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=99641

[PBI]

Yes, the elephants are definitely tricky to use well. They are much less of an unstoppable force than in vanilla, and javelins will kill them off in short order, and they aren't nearly as devastating against cavalry as they used to be.

I'm finding it an interesting challenge trying to build an effective army based around them. So far I've found a mix of about 1/3 foot archers, 1/3 elephants and 1/3 javelin cavalry seems to work quite well: The archers to soften the enemy up first, the elephants to break their infantry and the cavalry for the chase. I haven't found the Hindu infantry to be much good for anything.

But I would definitely say the Rajputs are my favourite faction so far in terms of looks, with their beautifully ornate elephants. Far nicer than the ugly, utilitarian European infantry. I'll never train another unit of spear militia!

As for sieges, I'm actually finding them to be refreshingly rare; the AI seems to be much more inclined to fight field battles, I guess because of the larger map. Also, it seems much more inclined to defend bridges, which is a nice change. I can't remember ever having to attack across a bridge in vanilla.

[Monsieur Alphonse]

The Rajputs are definitely a fun faction. One of the most striking things I noticed was that Rajput nobles really aren't nearly as durable as you might expect. The AI targets them heavily and they tend to die a lot. Without over using the MoH noble recruitment I ended up with 17 nobles when I reached the 60 province victory condition. The Mongols were especially deadly against my nobles.

That is because your noble has only one hit point. I have seen this to. After a charge the only casualty was my general.

[ezoons]

Dog Trader in Afghanistan.

Come to think of it, the Afghan hound is quite a famous breed. Nice resource.

[Shahed]

Good point, taken. Would be ncie to see some other new resources as well.

[Monsieur Alphonse]

@ Sinan

How did your war against the Mongols go? Mine didn't go well. They broke through my line at their first attempt. They found an army with few archers and shot it to pieces. I was impressed by their strategy. No stupid charge across the bridge but a careful planned attack. The sad thing is that I can't continue because my save game got corrupted. I was planning to fight them in the Samarkand island as you planned, but alas my computer wouldn't let me.

[Shahed]

Hey Alphonse,

I chose to leave that campaign as is, until I figure out what to do, and started another as Ayyubid , and another as Seljuk. I've been wanting to go back to that one, I'm afraid it's unwinnable without extremely heavy losses. I have only 1.5 or 2 +6 -> +9 exp all cav armies. They will be wiped out. I have about 10 stacks of spears and archers all +2 -> +5 exp, they'd probably take out 7-8 Mongol stacks. The 2 elite all cavalry armies would probably take out 2 Mongol armies each. So that would leave about 2-3 Mongol stacks alive, without reinforcements. It would be easy to disperse these, but the cost would be the entire Khwarezmian Army. So here is the point where I will refuse to order the death of MY MEN ! It's good it's just a game, so what I'm going to do is abandon the Silk Road, the home of the Khwarezmians. We'll pull back to Yazd & Shiraz. The 2 all cavalry armies will stay in field, and the chances are very high they will most likely will die in field. The rest will disband around Samarkand. New all cavalry armies will form around Yazd. We'll find them in the open, we'll isolate them and then we'll wither them down as the waves wither the rocks... that is, IF I can still steal time to play!

[Shahed]

I was just looking through the Citadel, and it's hard to believe that people are still playing vanilla. I could NEVER EVER play vanilla after BC. I just hope they release the Kingdoms version soon. It creams vanilla so bad, it's not even funny. I can actually play every single faction in this mod, each one is different and each is interesting and fairly challenging to play, you do actually have to think about stuff. This mod still needs work but it is a fantastic first release. I've now tried Abbasids and Eastern Roman Empire (AWESOME roster) as well, do wish ERE had better archers though.

[Vladimir]

Agreed. "What is Vanilla" is now a valid question to me. People need to discover the mods.

[Galain_Ironhide]

For the first time in about a week since downloading BC I have finally got to play it.

I have started a GC as Kingdom of Jerusalem and man how cool is it!?
KoJ start out in a pretty tough situation, they have the Abuyyids surrounding them in the south and the North east, they are financially strapped and their forces, apart from the one commanded by Balian de Ibelin, is very thinly spread out and I have noticed what I would almost say is a clever trap for the unexperienced. (Now I'm not gonna say exactly what it is, but put it this way, dont march in on the Abuyyids unguarded territories or you will get kicked out of the holy lands quicker than you can say, 'what was that?' )

I have played a few battles, particularly seiges and they are awesome. Definately not your normal M2TW cakewalk and as I seen mentioned before, I like the change they have made with the battering rams taking longer to break through. Historically speaking, as the enemy were trying to bust through, the dead would have been piling up against the gate.

Loving the colours too during battles. It is great that you can differentiate between two factions just purely on that.

Hmmm not going to get much sleep tonight I'm afraid.

[Redz " Preatorian Knights"]

wait a minute people!!!!all of you are talking about it but hell im no-computer-know-it-all kid, were can i find that broken cresent?

tnx to all..

[Zim]

Here are the forums for the mod.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=346

You can also get the mod in their forums here at the ORG, under "Broken Crescent" in the mod sections under MTW2, but the twcenter forums are far busier if you want to read up a bit on the mod first.

wait a minute people!!!!all of you are talking about it but hell im no-computer-know-it-all kid, were can i find that broken cresent?

tnx to all..