The Campaign

[Marto]

The only thing I would say about growth rates is that in my experience the Americas don't stand a chance to get anywhere in terms of development as they are limited to begin with and end up with zero growth and a minus income to start. But maybe that's because it took a while for me to get there (only 60 turns left) and I never bothered with them in Vanilla so can't compare....

Fantastic mod though, really makes the game worth playing, and it feels right. Plus it is a 'proper' length now.

One of the only things I would suggest tweaking (if you have further plans) is to cut the traits building aspect quite severely. I don't think this has been altered from Vanilla and there's too much contradiction and so many traits that it's hard to work out how to nurture your generals as you want to. Specifically, in terms of economy, it would be good if you could develop 'fiscal' governors so that they could help ailing provinces etc.

Can't fault what you've done with the gameplay

[Papal_Knight]

agreed. gameplay is solid has heck. most of my MTW2 hours played have been done so using one iteration of LTC or another. it's been great fun. as far as the topic of the thread, I think it "feels" best when your campaign unwinds SLOWLY. Like being able to hit a turn button for 3 or 4 times sometimes and not have to fight a battle. that kind of slow.

that's how I prefer it anyways, as I really do not care for the mega stacks, and 3 or 4 hairy battles per turn. yuck .

As for the generals/commanders/heirs that are crappy "civic" leaders, I don't think it's so much a function of LTC, but more of a function as to how MTW2 seems to work. I recall in RTW (and various mods), that if you left a leader in a big city, with libraries, and other "learning" and "civic" structures, they generally picked up good governing traits by and large. contrarily, if a general was out in the field fighting all the time, he picked up no good govereing traits (except the benefits of heroic reputation, etc). instead, he picked up butt-kicking field leadership traits for battles. this, it seems, is how it should be.

I liked that system and "feel" infinitely better. . made for a great game, and allowed the player to specialize in his use of his leaders, as he would be in real life, having the ability to put the best man in place for the job, etc.

thoughts?

[Lusted]

If i redid the traits, it would be to make it so characters get fewer and traits have more effect, but i doubt i'll ever have the time to do that.

[Marto]

That's the gist of what I'm getting at. The gamplay has the feel right and the timings in the game make for a better game - I'm still building, improving, and creating with 60 provinces and only 40 turns to go!

I too like the way you can sit back and 'develop' without constant war all the time, then create both diplomatic strategies and a strategic war machine and strike as you design.

With Lusted's evidently packed schedule maybe it's for someone else to do a traits-mod that could be used across the board. I am a fan of traits as they add to the interest, but they're just overdone in Medieval 2.

[Lusted]

One thing that might be possible to do as it shouldn't be too difficult is that i might compare the RTW traits to the M2TW traits, see if i can't nick any of the triggers from it or do at least a few changes. But of course this all depends on how much time i have.

EDIT:Hmm i wonder, a temporary solution might just be to reduce the chance of all traits happening and then go into more detail looking at the triggers.

[Papal_Knight]

that sounds plausible. I think we need to hire you an assisstant!

[Lusted]

What i'm probably going to do first is just halve the chance of all traits happening and see what effect that has ingame. Then i might add in duplicate triggers for some traits to take into account Military Academies etc. and make them give a higher chance of a family member getting some traits.

[Papal_Knight]

I'm likin' that idea.

[Garnier]

I already did this a while ago..

Here's my traits file. Its the LTC 3.1 traits file with all triggers halved.

[Lusted]

Did you even half the triggers for the traits that are affect by buildings such as academies etc?

[Garnier]

I halved all the triggers. Of course there may be some that were 100 and should remain that way, but I wouldn't know if you'd want them to be 100. You can always look through the 50's and see if any should be put back to 100.

What I did was find the line with "Chance #) and halve the number, automatically.

[crazyj]

I'vr thought about adding in the stone forts from Kingdoms and making them permanent, but i've decided against it as it would only really benfit the human and the map could end up covered in the things.

I've thought a lot about that, but it might not be so bad. I don't think the map would typically become "covered" at 2,500 a pop, and even if it does, that doesn't mean they'd all be occupied. Plenty of field battles in the Brittania and Crusades campaigns, with empty castles in the background.

Hard to judge though.

[Garnier]

Stone forts are not a feature, as the AI has no idea how to use them right. When I play the britannia campaign, the AI always abandons their forts.. they will storm my forts and leave the next turn so I can re-occupy it..

[Johan217]

Lusted,

I do not know to what extent you have modded the trait/ancillary files, but here's an interesting mod that seems to fix most errors (i.e. spelling mistakes, missing triggers, inconsistencies).

Trait and ancillary fixes by FactionHeir:
http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showpo...72&postcount=1
(DL link about halfway the post)

I agree with Marto and Garnier, characters tend to get too many traits. When the character scroll shows 20+ traits, it is too much for the player to make sense of it all. I'd rather see a smaller number, but more variety.

I've only just begun to look into trait files, but it seems you can use a condition "and not trait..." in the trigger. This could be useful to avoid contradictory traits or traits that are very similar.

A possible danger of setting higher tresholds or lower chances could be that certain traits will never appear and that you will see the same limited number of traits over and over again.

I am principally against removing things from the game, but if all else fails, maybe some traits should be removed, e.g. by merging them with similar traits (as an additional level).

[AllConsuming]

I played to turn 50 with Russia last night. Got in a big fight with Poland around turn 35. They sent in small stacks of armies and two generals and all of them grouped up outside one of my cities. As if they were waiting for enough reinforcements to show up. Got me excited because it felt very realistic to see them do that. It also gave me time to properly send reinforcements from Novgorod and other "neighboring" cities.(Can u consider them neighboring with how far apart they are in Russia???) I finally sent a diplomat in and asked for an alliance which came up very demanding, so I kinda got the idea that they were gonna try and take my small castle.

I sent a full stack once all my reinforcements came and utterly destroyed their armies. They all placed themselves right next to each other on the map, so the battle was pretty sweet with all the reinforcements coming in for them!

After that, I was doing pretty well early on except once I hit turn 40 or so I started losing florins. I had about 7 regions under my control and all had dirt roads and most at least land clearance if not communal farms. One city just wouldn't grow. The family member there died and after I set the auto command to growth it starting growing much better. So I must've had a crappy governor there. This mod makes the game a ton better. U actually have to think about what you want to do before you do it. I need to practice making $ before I play again tho!

[ImKyleJames]

I would just love to see more teamwork in the Campaigns. I wanna see both France and The HRE attack a Danish settlement or see some AI come to my rescue or if i come to their rescue they like me more. I wanna see a faction ask me for help, i wanna see them thank me for my help, i wanna see someone help my enemy, i wanna see some REAL diplomacy!!!!!!!

[Shadibadoo]

This mod seems interesting. Don't let it die down!

[Garnier]

Lusted, one thing that really annoys me in the campaign, is the AI sending small and ineffective stacks into my lands when we are at war - often they lay siege to a city with a garrison bigger than them. It is obvious that I could beat these stacks, since I have full armies on the border. I took a look at campaign_ai.db and found a part about raiding, I wonder if thats what it is. This is very annoying because I hate fighting pointless battles that I know I'll win, and on VH campaign, I can't use autoresolve..

I seem to recall that the early version of UAI that I used worked well in this respect, the AI didn't usually invade without a full stack.

[Lusted]

If you check out the Stainless Steel forum you will find that i've been working on the campaign AI.

[Garnier]

Yeah I know, I just wondered if you did anything about this in particular.

Maybe when LTC 4.0 comes out and I play M2TW again, I'll figure out the campaign AI file... it's just the most intimidating thing I found in modding so far.. lol