A 6 month mod - anyone?
Just some ideas, venting about issues I'd like to see changed about this game. Excuse the typos this is sort of off the top of my head.
Is there a comprehensive mod that changes the game speed to 6 months but that in some way deals with the problems this creates? The closest that I've seen is some of things done in Anno Domini 0.8 but those guys were trying to fry a different fish than I am interested in. However, some of what they did would slide right into this idea.
I've never really understood the turn modes of this game. Why two years?
Yet the complaints about simply changing the turn to 6 months that match the aging and to give two seasons to the year are also valid. There are it appears to me three areas where slowing the game speed messes things up and some other nit-picky areas that should be changed because they are irritating.
Problem 1 Building and population speeds
If you leave the building speeds alone you end up with huge Cathedrals and armor smiths that have to wait 150 years or 300 turns before they can build anything. You win long before you see the Mongols or can sail to the Americas. Simply changing the dates that Mongols or Timirids appear is, at least to me, a little disingenuous. You also end up with cities that have a maxed out population by 1250 or so because a growth rate of 4% on a 2 year turn is 12% on a 6 month turn. This means that if you build a lot of cities you can collect huge piles of taxes and that further increases the extra cash available to you. Indeed, you run out of things to build if purposely don't win which can be fun in a perverse count you 30,000,000 gold pieces kind of way.
Problem 2
If you lengthen the building time by a factor of 4 on every building then it take forever to be able to build anything and your leaders tend to rack up negative traits because it take 64 turns to build a cathedral.It also means that the first one to get to an advanced troop type can have an almost unsurmountable advantage for 30 or 40 turns until rival factions can compete. This is also problematic for factions that have units like Latinkons that are hard to reach when others have equivalent units at a lower level.
Problem 3
If you simply shorten the turn but do not adjust the income of the provinces and the upkeep cost of units then you are able to pile up a lot of cash very easily. This can give factions with wealthy provinces a huge advantage. Although I'm not sure that isn't realistic in some ways it does significantly change the game balance.
Problem 4
Is a group small issues that are not directly related changing the time scale but could or should be changed. These are all related to movement combat and diplomacy
Problem 1 & 2. Building & Population Speeds and cost
Leave thee cost for all buildings alone. Changing the turn mode simply spreads the cost of the build over a longer horizon. Assuming the cost involved reflects what the building would actually cost to build it doesn't need to be changed which an exception below.
However it might be possible to mod a function into the game that would allow construction to be sped up by a certain percentage by paying more but this should be a negative benefit in that doubling the cost gets only a 25% increase in speed
City walls: Quadruple the build times
Roads: Quadruple the Build Times
Land clearance and farms: Triple build times
Population growth rate: reduce by 3/4's
Level ONE buildings:
Should be left alone. I can't see that it would take longer than 6 months to a year to build a tavern, militia drill square, small church or small docks. Yes this greatly speeds up the construction in the early game but is OK because otherwise you end up with provinces that cannot produce anything, defend themselves or add any value to your empire.
Level TWO buildings:
Should have their build time increased by 2.25 % their building cost should be raised by 25%. This means that a 4 turn build time should become 9 turns. This is still a bit faster than the vanilla game but is partially balanced out by the additional cost
Level THREE buildings.
Most should have their build times tripled and again have their cost raised by 25%. However, Churches as the primary building that generate should remain
Level FOUR buildings and up.
Quadruple the times to build
Cathedrals should possibly be broken into sections The Asp, The Choir, The Transept and the bonus of the whole building divided among the parts. (I'm not either Catholic or Eastern Orthodox so I don't know what the parts of a Cathedral are, I just know they have names for those parts) That way a leader could get a partial benefit from building the cathedral. This way the total time for building a Cathedral could go from the Vanilla games 32 years to a more realistic 50 or 75 years (I know many of them took longer than this even)
Problems with units
Some troops should be available at a much lower levels but have more armor upgrades; Kataphraxtoi for example. However, reduce the amour, morale, or unit size with a lower level so that as you improve your facilities you can improve the unit. For example if you give a unit to a faction at a 2nd level drill drill square rather than a 4th level drill square then reduce the armor by two and add two additional armor upgrades. That way as your facilities improve the unit can improve. I don't actually know that a unit with an armor rating of 6 and no upgrades is equivalent to a unit with an initial armor rating of 2 + 4 up grades but I'd bet it is close.
Another way to handle this is build speeds. In the vanilla game all units, as far as I know take one turn to build. That wasn't the case in MTW or Shogun. There many units took longer than a turn to build. It seems to me that good place to start would be to say militia units may be raised in 6 months, standard soldiers and perhaps some light cavalry units in a year and elite or heavy cavalry units in 18 months. That would add a great deal of straegy to the game and make you decide whether it is better to build three units of militia spearmen or one unit of Mailed Knights. However, if factions are getting units at lower levels then perhaps a higher level smith or an armor factory allows you to create high level units faster.
Problem THREE Cash
If you cut the cost of recruitment and upkeep and the cost of buildings all by 4 and the amount of money generated by provinces by 4 you kind of solve this problem. However, I've tried this and it doesn't seem to work as well in the game as you'd think. I think that if you cut the unit upkeep cost by 3/4 and leave the unit construction and building construction cost alone and then cut the revenue generated by provinces in half you get a very workable system. Everybody gets a bit more cash but not so much that it becomes silly.
Problem Four Other stuff
Movement of armies.
Neither you or the AI should be able to walk an army into another factions territory without a declaration of war or their permission. Period. The only exception to this would be a diplomat, spy or princess.
Movement by armies in territory that you own should be at least doubled. In six months to a year an army, if marching through a friendly area should be able to go from Baghdad to Venice. This game has a ridiculous movement rate. In the vanilla game marching from Antioch to Constantinople takes something like 24 years. It take 5 or 6 turns or 10 to 12 years to sail a ship from Constantinople to Venice. You could crawl or swim faster than that speed.
Movement by an invading army in territory that you do not control or at least have under siege should be reduced to 1/4 the rate of travel in a friendly area. This reflect that the army would have drag supplies or forage. In you own lands you can have bases, storehouses and better logistics not to mention a presumably friendly population.
Ships in this era could not conduct naval blockades. They could land troops.
You should be able to marry a princes to a rebel and then add that territory into your empire. Maybe this is possibly but I've never been able to do it.
Some factions were more politically stable than other and this should be better reflected in the game. The Byzantines, for example should have more problems with civil wars than they do.
A faction should be able to buy, or steal access technology that is not in its tree. Alternately, if an empire that hasn't yet been able to develop a particular type of ship, or gunpowder manages to capture a castle or city that has access to that technology then they should be able to exploit that technology.
There needs to be a Mercenaries Guild.
Level One: Mercenary guild allows you yo recruit three kinds of (Perhaps a particular set for each faction based upon holes in their force list) mercenaries in a town as though you were in the field provided you are not besieged.
Level Two: Master Mercenary Guild as above and recruit mercenaries without the cost penalty
Level Three Headquarters: Recruit mercenaries as above in all cities or castles regardless of whether a guild is present or not.
Just some thoughts.
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