The big IF

[bondovic]

The "if" being: what changes would you make if you could mod the source code?

[drone]

Change #1: fix the video issues to keep the game alive on newer hardware.

[Kaidonni]

Change #2: Make it so that if a marriage alliance is formed, the more prestigous family gets the general married (except for any heir apparent). If a French Princess marries into England, the French could get the general or the English keep him.

[Martok]

#3: Fix the AI so that small factions don't start wars with superpowers it has no chance of winning. Also, fix the AI so that it doesn't retreat so bloody often (especially when they're down to their last province).

[Matrim]

#4 Loyal AI: If allied to a certain faction and you come to their aid, especially more than once, they will do the same for you. Or at least, be less likely to declare on you. Something like Europa Universalis's relations meter.

#5 Military Access: Your troops may move into/through allied lands, so long as they do not stay more than, say, 3 turns. This will allow your "coalition" forces a better opportunity to fend off enemies and to bolster offensives. (To balance, if your troops are in allied countries, you cannot declare war/break alliance with them.)

[zera133]

#4 Loyal AI: If allied to a certain faction and you come to their aid, especially more than once, they will do the same for you. Or at least, be less likely to declare on you. Something like Europa Universalis's relations meter.

#5 Military Access: Your troops may move into/through allied lands, so long as they do not stay more than, say, 3 turns. This will allow your "coalition" forces a better opportunity to fend off enemies and to bolster offensives. (To balance, if your troops are in allied countries, you cannot declare war/break alliance with them.)

agree,add one point:
your troops can move faster in your own land(maybe 3 times spped will be ok). it is funny to take 3 years to move an army from Pairs to London. and it only take one year to transfer an army from any coastal province to another.

[Matrim]

agree,add one point:
your troops can move faster in your own land(maybe 3 times spped will be ok). it is funny to take 3 years to move an army from Pairs to London. and it only take one year to transfer an army from any coastal province to another.

#6 Highways
Maybe add the building option of "Roadways" or "Highways." This offers speedy access to neighboring provinces with roads. Say I have a Highway build in Anjoy, Ile de France, Lorraine, and Franconia. I can move troops from Anjoy to Lorraine. Normally a 2-tern move, but now it's done in one. I mean Alexander the Great moved his 40,000 man army through hundreds of miles of some of the roughest terrain the world can offer, fighting and moving, in a total of 7 years. That's pretty freakin' impressive, but I can't move even 100 troops across all of Britain in 1 year on foot. But to balance, maybe make the maximum extent 2 or 3 provinces. And, AND, increase the likelihood of rebels or "highwaymen" along those routs.

And something else I've seen incorporated into M2:TW...

#7 Siege Ladders/Towers
I would very much like to see infantry more able to scale the walls in more locations then just beating their heads against the gatehouse. And a Tower would do the same, just add more protection as they approach the walls. But eh, that's just me.

It would also mean that rampart defense would be needed, also seen in M2:TW (I don't own it, but I like some pretty screenshots!).

Of course, many more siege options would be neat. Like during the siege window that pops up telling you the casualties on each side and how long it will be... there would be buttons at the bottom with things you could invoke. All would need certain percentage chances of success, based on generalship or valor of Besieging General, size of defending garrison, or somesuch. Or make the addition of a couple of siege-specialty units.
-Poison Water Supply: Exponentially increases the casualties of defenders each year (added to the exponential increase of regular sieges), or you could use a trebuchet to launch a few rotting cows inside the walls, lol.
-Under Mining the Walls: This would send you into the Tactical Battle just like attacking the castle, but it would either reduce a section of wall or several sections. This would depend on the success percentage mentioned above.
-etc...

Also, though, I've often wondered about certain castles like Constantinople. This place was a natural harbor, so even if cut off outside the gates, ships could continue to come into the Harbor walls (built out into the bay with great chains to block attacking ships attempting the same). I would like to see some castles like this one have an increased ability to perservere through a siege, or even be reinforced, so long as the harbor wasn't blockaded. Just a thought. It would make sure certain armies would require siege engines instead of starving them out.

[Knight Templar]

#8: More complex diplomacy (like they did in RTW)
#9: Your princes should be able to get married and have children before your king dies. That is, if you're not lucky enough to have foreign princess

[seireikhaan]

Support for a sort of 'democratic' method of choosing a new faction leader; that is, perhaps having every royal general 'elect' a new leader of the available heirs. Would be used for factions like the HRE, the Golden Horde, Venice/Italy, and for the Genoese in mods like XL.

[Misfratz]

The military access could easily simply work in the same way as with crusades. In fact, you could have to create an "Alliance army" that would function like a crusade in that it was only able to move to a target province (eg that of a common enemy).

Improving the AI so that it wouldn't retreat so often, would be good. In particular I'd like it to choose to defend more easily defensible provinces in favour to less defensible provinces, etc. I'm sure there is an algorithm that decides whether the AI retreats or not (based on the relative sizes of the armies) and this could be expanded upon and tweaked.

The main change I would like to see would be to be able to play against other humans in the campaign game, with battles fought against them. This would be some undertaking...

[Ironsword]

- Oh Lordy; there has to be an overhaul of the naval battle system. Anything is preferable to the random event generator that's in place!

- Plus, I would like my troops to say more in the battle screens than the same phrase over and over again!

- Also maybe some kind of 'special' formation/attack/ability for generals/characters of a certain command level.

Crikey, judging by that lot you'd never know I actually really like the game! ;)

[jsberry]

Smaller province and movement areas. It is entirely unrealistic to assume that an army in northrern Aquitane can control southern Acquitaine - or that a control of Cordoba's Atlantic coast equals control of its Mediteranean coast - or that the entire Russian/European borden can be sealed with two "areas", etc. (the smaller areas could be combined with the "highway" idea to allow realistic movement in own territory).

Think about it, it is very easy for England to conquer all of France in ten years' game time. But in real life, it would take ten years to maybe occupy Flanders alone...

[Raz]

What I'd do? Hmm, I'd mainly do things that would help modders mod MTW. If you get what I mean... I guess I would increase the maximum number of units allowed (beyond the silly 256 limit). As well as increasing the maximum number of provinces, I'd also get rid of the dreaded BIF files and replace them with easy to edit TGA files (as well as removing any 256 colour pallets). I'd make it so, so much easier to make a new campaign map as well as improving that faction swapping debug feature when using the -ian extension (so you can play test different factions past the 20th).

[Roark]

Raz hit the nail on the head for me. I'd make the game more easily and broadly modifiable.

Also:

- Fix naval combat.
- Fix the AI factions' build/train methodology and economic management.

[Martok]

Yeah, I second Ironsword & Roark that it would be sweet if naval combat were fixed. As it currently stands, you might as well apply voodoo magic to the whole thing.

- Fix the AI factions' build/train methodology and economic management.

[bondovic]

I'd like to see deeper loyalty crashes for longer periods of time in newly conquered territories. I find myself racing towards the bloat rebellions just to feel like I'm playing a real empire with all the problems that they would face.

I had an idea to make unique buildings for each faction that radically boost loyalty while simultaneously bumping the 'rebellious factor' for every region by, say, 3. The loyalty buildings would be restricted to the factions' "homelands", so that anyone who conquers would face rebellions while the homeland owner would not. This isn't perfect. But with the current source code it's all there is?

[Martok]

I'd like to see deeper loyalty crashes for longer periods of time in newly conquered territories. I find myself racing towards the bloat rebellions just to feel like I'm playing a real empire with all the problems that they would face.

This is one reason why I like Cynwulf's Pocket Mod. It increases the rebelliousness of all provinces (to 2, I think), which forces you to make a more serious effort to keep the local populace happy.

[Matrim]

Speaking of Cynwulf's Pocket mod, what all does it entail?

On topic: I would very much like to see the modding community given a boost. I believe it was one of the Civ series games (or one similar to it) that petitioned the game-developers for the source code to the game, after it's "hay day" was past and they were on to other projects with much more up-to-date technology. After a short... 'battle' is too strong a word, but the community got thousands of fans to basically sign up, and the developers were so stunned, they outed the source code.

I wonder if TotalWar will ever release their source code. Unlikely, but who knows?

A full list up to now is:
(Bold for Big Issues, Italics for elements of "depth", regular text for other ideas)

1 - Video Issue for New Hardware Fixed
#2 - Political Marriage Tweaks
#3 - AI Last Stand Retreat Fixed
#4 - Loyal AI
#5 - Military Access
#6 - Faster Movement/Highways
#7 - More Siege Options
#8 - More Complex Diplomacy
#9 - Extended Royal Family (King's grandkids and such)
#10 - Diplomatic Vote System
#11 - Multiplayer in Campaign Mode
#12 - New Naval Combat System
#13 - New BattleCries
#14 - RPG Element for Special Characters
#15 - Speed vs Province Size Issue Tweaked
#16 - Increase Max # of Units/Provinces in Mods
#17 - More Good Fun Mod stuff I don't understand, but fully endorse!
#18 - Revamp AI (Economy/Buildtech, etc)
#19 - Increased Rebelliousness

And for #20...
Tweak Re-Emergence of Defeated AI

E.g. Once the Pope is gone, the fool is gone. I'm not saying he can't re-emerge like any other faction, but is it me, or does this guy come back more often than anyone else? I'm not saying cut him off, but make it a little more... realistic. It's sad when the Pope brings a larger army to fight you than the Mongols. (No joke: 5,600~ Mongols showed up in 1230. The next year 6,200 Papal clowns tried to bring down my parade.)

And I honestly wouldn't mind some of the Rebel provinces setting up to take control of neighboring lands. No doubt there would be some warlords with some ambition, and not simply sit idly by waiting for their neighboring superpowers to snatch them up. Like the Burgundians or Swiss popping up, have the run-of-the-mill rebels set up to do some fighting of their own (but no kings for them, just regular troops). Or somesuch.

[oz_wwjd]

Personally I think the mongol horde should be the biggest NPC army in existence at that time,as it was historically.Also yeah the ai really needs an overhaul,i cringe at some of the stupid armies I see them fielding lately...

[bondovic]

This is one reason why I like Cynwulf's Pocket Mod. It increases the rebelliousness of all provinces (to 2, I think), which forces you to make a more serious effort to keep the local populace happy.

I do this as well, and it really is the "second best thing". But I'd like to see invaders have a much harder time than myself in controlling my provinces. This is only fixable trough region+faction specific loyalty buildings, I think. But maybe you meant that Cynwulf has already implemented this (I haven't, as of yet, I might add)?

[Martok]

Speaking of Cynwulf's Pocket mod, what all does it entail?

You can see a full list of the changes here. The most version is available for download here, although it's still fairly rough at the moment. There's a number of bugs still in it, and I've not had a chance to do much playtesting myself (especially in the last couple months). Still, it really improves the gameplay IMHO, and I very much enjoy playing it when I have the chance to.

I do this as well, and it really is the "second best thing". But I'd like to see invaders have a much harder time than myself in controlling my provinces. This is only fixable trough region+faction specific loyalty buildings, I think. But maybe you meant that Cynwulf has already implemented this (I haven't, as of yet, I might add)?

Not in the way you're describing, no. It's an interesting idea, though, one perhaps worth implementing. Unfortunately, I know that Cynwulf has been too busy the last few months to do any work on the project, due at least in part to RL issues.

[kilooneniner]

On topic: I would very much like to see the modding community given a boost. I believe it was one of the Civ series games (or one similar to it) that petitioned the game-developers for the source code to the game, after it's "hay day" was past and they were on to other projects with much more up-to-date technology. After a short... 'battle' is too strong a word, but the community got thousands of fans to basically sign up, and the developers were so stunned, they outed the source code.

I wonder if TotalWar will ever release their source code. Unlikely, but who knows?

It was Civ Call To Power II. Sadly, even though the source code was available last time I checked (which has been a while), nothing much ever came of it. Hacking source code is a lot harder than plain modding I guess.

On a brighter note Call to Power II was an Activision game like MTW so a source code release isn't exactly impossible what with the precedent having been set.

[Matrim]

Well the only reason I was aware of the Civ CtPII source code was a couple of years ago, I was playing Age of Wonders pretty regularly, in amidst the little free time I had. When working on the road, I didn't want to risk taking games with me, so I settled for the ones I didn't need the disc for, such as AoW. But some modders there hacked the source cod of CtPII to pull certain facets of the game into a couple of smaller mods for AoW. Like you say, though, nothing much really came of it. Not like what MTW would be looking for, anyway. They mostly got scripted behavior for AI and neat little tricks in game. I wish I could remember them, but that is long gone from memory.