Byg's Grim Reality - Supply and Command (BGRIII, BGR IV & BGRIV Enhanced)

[Byg]

NEWS

BGR2.1 is ready for testing.

Please contact me if you would like to download and test the new version. It is intended to work in ANY mod. A version for kingdoms is included separately. More on this if you wish to sign up.

Ideally when testing:

Some modding experience would be useful for reporting, but not required.

You would check out the traits as your generals progress through a campain, making sure the traits act as they are supposed to, perhaps putting generals in unusual situations too.

Feedback on your battles before and after posessing traits is useful.

This first test version is recommended for meticulous experts who play on vh/vh. A less harsh version will follow.

[Byg]

Hi all,

I am posting to get feedback (from gameplay and history lovers) for a completely new version of my mod for SS5 that I have been working on for some months. I hope to do this for all mods, but first for SS5.

In brief, it is a new system of recruitment based on my old supplies mod that is in SS5 and DLV.

Apart from the refinements I have added in v2.1, v3 currently contains 10,000 lines of new code and may reach 100,000 on completion.
(So far it works without noticably lengthening turn time.)

History
The idea is based around the tendency towards absolutism in medieval times where recruitment became increasingly centralised as progressively more control was desired by kings.

Kings were often in charge of the only army a faction possesed. I have steered the mod in many ways to make the player favour the King as their general.

I have also tried to address the tendency of large empires to ultimately collapse.
My personal belief is that this is due to:

1) a watering down of the original all conquering faction zeal by those it conquers

2) overstretched troops from the original homeland now trying to hold many times their original territory

3) corruption and a disinclination to fight when there is money to me made by exploiting new found wealth

Gameplay
Like all of my mods the intention is to make the game deeper, more challenging and ultimately losable.

The total war series is great, but it lacks two fundamental elements of gameplay and that is that a game should be losable and opposition should become tougher as a game progresses, not weaker.

Though unfinished, these are the current effects:

Only the King and members of his war council can recruit knights.
As their faction becomes more powerful relative to others the king gradually becomes the sole creator of knights.

Units of middling rank are recruitable by all family members
Increasing faction power diminishes this.

Militia are recruitable by anyone.

Recruits need supplies.
Recruitment requiring Kings or generals to be present (all but militia) can only proceed once the general is fully supplied.


The result then is that as your empires power increases, the best soldiers become increasingly overstretched. ( This should also help to ensure a high difficulty for factions with large starting territories, like HRE, which has 20 settlements )

This will hopefully lead to diplomacy actually being needed in your game (to beg for peace) even when your faction is large and perhaps you are faced with a crippling second front.

Mercenaries are currently unaffected and this introduces the realistic effect of armies being of increasingly foreign composition as a faction increases in size. I had thought of doing an area of recruitment mod, but mercenaries effectively do the same thing perfectly well in this scenario.

The increased use of mercenaries also raises costs relative to power, which should help keep the difficulty level up.

All effects together should help stop that aweful snowball effect that always arises at some point in the game, which happens after conquering fewer and fewer settlements the better you become as a player.

[uk_john]

Byg - you know I love your mod - and if you include the above things you're thinking of for SS5 then i'll love it even more! It would make the game so fantastic with just auto-resolve on battles - because the campaign would be so interesting!

Oh - and a PS: Thanks to your 2.1 and the medimod I am playing it in, I am a little stymied at what to do because of the way the AI has gone about defending itself both in Scotland and France! They have units of a size I have to worry about within any town I am considering to strike! The way the French troops move around also keep me guessing as to what their intentions - I have also noticed how the traits movement is more pronounced based on what you are doing with your General, so all in all, at around 100 turns, your 2.1 is doing the business!

[The Border Reiver]

Byg - you know I love your mod - and if you include the above things you're thinking of for SS5 then i'll love it even more! It would make the game so fantastic with just auto-resolve on battles - because the campaign would be so interesting!

Oh - and a PS: Thanks to your 2.1 and the medimod I am playing it in, I am a little stymied at what to do because of the way the AI has gone about defending itself both in Scotland and France! They have units of a size I have to worry about within any town I am considering to strike! The way the French troops move around also keep me guessing as to what their intentions - I have also noticed how the traits movement is more pronounced based on what you are doing with your General, so all in all, at around 100 turns, your 2.1 is doing the business!

I actually agree with uk_john...although I didn't use it with SS5, but with DarthMod....your mod is fantastic and will PM you about adding it to my mod at some stage.

Looking forward to seeing the changes you have made since the last version!

[Kinjo]

Is there a way you could make your mod for Retrofit_1_0 since that is probably the base for most mods going forward. There are too many elements of SS for it to be compatible with retrofit. Look forward to trying your mod out.

cheers

[uk_john]

@Reiksmarshal I thought SS 5.1b had everything from Kingdoms that Retrofit_1_0 brought to the vanilla MTW2 game? I know I get the oil and the battle AI options, etc! Happy Holidays by the way to all!

[Byg]

I believe BGR2.1 will work with any mod. See the testers forum in my signature.

I don't know about retrofit mod. Does it do anything that may prevent 2.1 working with it that you know of?

You can also now use BGRIII. (from the testers forum)
This is for SS5.1 at the moment because it requires settlement names and unit names.
However, if you do not apply the campaign files you can still use it in any mod. You will not get the recruitment effects, but all other features will work and give an idea of how and when recruitment effects will kick in.

If you have a mod that you wish to use the recruitment effects with, we are working on things to input your mods units and settlements and generate the rest of the code around them, which will save a lot of manual work.

[uk_john]

Byg. PointBlank has told me your mod only changes the Export_Distr_Units file and you said the installer only adds to files if they exist, not replace them. I can see theat the above E_D_U file is headed as an RR + RC 1.4 file, but I would like to know how I find out your data has been added to confirm both mods are okay? Maybe you can install RR then your mod and look at the E_D_U file and let me know, as you would know what to look for!

I just know that either you or Point Blank should confirm that both mods are fully present when installing RR and then GR III?! I have even suggested to PB that you two should get together and merge these mods making them one fantastic combination!

By the way, I installed RR then successfully used your installer version of beta III.

[Byg]

Byg. PointBlank has told me your mod only changes the Export_Distr_Units file and you said the installer only adds to files if they exist, not replace them. I can see theat the above E_D_U file is headed as an RR + RC 1.4 file, but I would like to know how I find out your data has been added to confirm both mods are okay? Maybe you can install RR then your mod and look at the E_D_U file and let me know, as you would know what to look for!

I just know that either you or Point Blank should confirm that both mods are fully present when installing RR and then GR III?! I have even suggested to PB that you two should get together and merge these mods making them one fantastic combination!

By the way, I installed RR then successfully used your installer version of beta III.

It changes lots of files but the EDU is the only one we both have.
You can see the changes by looking at a general's (for example) mental stat in the EDU:
This is standard SS5.1, same for RR

stat_mental      13, normal, trained

Mine will have a different value depending on what number you enter in the morale modifier (it adds the amount you enter to what is sees is already there), which is your choice. (This effectively makes all morale values relatively closer, lengthening battles, causing more casualties, making routing require more skill)

Normally 2 mods sharing the same file are not going to work, but as BGRIII changes the content it will work with anything, potentially, as long as it does its thing last.

PB and I do communicate frequently to ensure compatability etc, but a user may not want both mods, so this way there is choice.

[uk_john]

Byg, I will check the EDU, but as to combining the mods, I meant making that combo a third mod choice, not to replace the two current mods!

EDIT: My EDU says:

"stat_mental 8, normal, trained"

And I do not understand what you mean by 'entering a different number in the morale modifier' is this a window I should see or a program i should have or something? because I do not know what the morale modifier is. Sorry if I have missed something obvious...!

[Byg]

Hi,

Perhaps you installed without seeing it, so your setting should be 10 by default. 7 or 8 is probably better, but not essential.
Here's a picture of the installer to remind you.

Are you sure that your "stat_mental 8, normal, trained" entry is from a general's bodyguard ?

[uk_john]

@Byg, I thought that window was asking where to install the mod, so yea, I missed it! I uninstalled the mod and reinstalled it and this time noticed the morale modifier, although I don't know enough about the mechanics (I just play the game! ) of the game to know what the number would mean and how changing it would mean!

A note to people that have to uninstall your mod and has the RR mod; before you reinstall the GR III mod, reinstall the RR mod, if you just reinstall the GR mod the game will crash on start up. So the method should be:

Install RR then GR III Beta.

Then, if you need to uninstall GR III (say for a GR update) do the following:

Uninstall GR III, reinstall RR, reinstall GR

[Borsook]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the supply system work via traits? If so only armies led by a General, not a captain are affected, right? Doesn't this undermine a bit the logic of the idea (adding realism)?

[Byg]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the supply system work via traits? If so only armies led by a General, not a captain are affected, right? Doesn't this undermine a bit the logic of the idea (adding realism)?

Think of captains as relying wholly on pillaging and becoming more unruly in the process, being without a proper commander. Generally they will just be batches of recruits on the way to meet and join their general.

Captained armies may rebel without warning leaving you in a very difficult situation if you have few armies. With the generals at least you can see by their loyalty level how reliable they are.

In the later versions I've added more code to help those low rank led armies to rebel even more.

So no I don't think it undermines the logic of the idea. Low rank captains were not allowed to command armies and had not the logistics to do so. Too much of a threat to the king for him to allow such people to command formiddable armies.

Take a look here

You can see that all noted leaders of armies were either kings, heirs or senior generals. I have encouraged that to be the case in the game.

[Borsook]

Think of captains as relying wholly on pillaging and becoming more unruly in the process, being without a proper commander.

Captained armies may rebel without warning leaving you in a very difficult situation if you have few armies.

In the later versions I've added more code to help those low rank led armies to rebel even more.

So no I don't think it undermines the logic of the idea.

Take a look here

You can see that all noted leaders of armies were either kings, heirs or senior generals. I have encoureged that to be the case in the game.

Ok, the rebelling of commanderless armies changes it for the better. Anyway I'm not an expert but would it be possible to tie the supply system to the number of units in the army? 1 unit should be easier to supply than 12...

[Byg]

Ok, the rebelling of commanderless armies changes it for the better. Anyway I'm not an expert but would it be possible to tie the supply system to the number of units in the army? 1 unit should be easier to supply than 12...

The thing is that the game coding gives us no exact reference to numbers. Presumably that's because numbers change if you are using huge unit settings rather than small.

So I think of the supplies being the x amount required for a y sized army, as that is all that can be done. I've been using supplies for a couple of years and they feel right in practice. It's a compromise like everything else in the game.

Supposing it were possible to give different amounts of supplies to different sized armies, imagine the complexity of the code that would constantly have to reevaluate the proportions of supplies that would have to be redistributed if say an army split into smaller groups or small groups came together. You cannot test for such things, but if you could it would not be worth it for the effect.

[Borsook]

The thing is that the game coding gives us no exact reference to numbers. Presumably that's because numbers change if you are using huge unit settings rather than small.

So I think of the supplies being the x amount required for a y sized army, as that is all that can be done. I've been using supplies for a couple of years and they feel right in practice. It's a compromise like everything else in the game.

Supposing it were possible to give different amounts of supplies to different sized armies, imagine the complexity of the code that would constantly have to reevaluate the proportions of supplies that would have to be redistributed if say an army split into smaller groups or small groups came together. You cannot test for such things, but if you could it would not be worth it for the effect.

Of course I had number of units not number of men in mind. Anyway - these are all valid points - still if it's possible to do such triggers - how about dividing supplies needed into 2-3 size groups, e.g. armies with 5 or lower units consume only half than normal etc. Of course it would be a big simplification (as at some point adding just one unit to the army would double supply consumption) but it would allow other tactics - like dividing the army into smaller groups to help with the supplies (which was a very common practice in Middle Ages).

[Byg]

Well, there's no such thing, for example, as "GeneralCommandsUnitNumber > 10" and nothing similar that would do.

[Methoz]

only for SS4/5 - DLV ?

[Borsook]

Well, there's no such thing, for example, as "GeneralCommandsUnitNumber > 10" and nothing similar that would do.

A pity... if another company made MTW2 one could petition adding such a trigger (since a patch seems to be in the works) but...