The Campaign

[Lusted]

It is indeed intimidating, complex and very easy to get wrong/screw up. All rading invade/defend types have been removed. The only invade types i now use are buildup, immediate and opportunistic so it will be better but not perfect. I need to do some work on my latest experimental AI as the AI is a bit too aggressive, and too prone to make alliances with each other but not with human.

[Garnier]

The way I'd love the AI to make war, is to build up until they are strong with full stacks, then attack - and if they lose, to seek peace. I'm sure its very hard to reach a balance like that though...

[Lusted]

Well my latest AI does attack with lots of stacks and does build up more beofre it invades.

But what i think it really needs is almost another complete reorganiation and rewrite with just a few invade decisinos with actual invasion entries, then a lot of invade decisinos to help the AI decide what to do in each invasion.

Only problem is the use of continue statements appears to have borked the AI use of alliances as it makes loads of them now.

[Valdamar]

The way I'd love the AI to make war, is to build up until they are strong with full stacks, then attack - and if they lose, to seek peace. I'm sure its very hard to reach a balance like that though...

Close. What needs to happen is to consider the strength and wealth of the faction they intend to attack (strategic), use spies to check garrisons and army strengths, and attack with an appropriate force (tactics). You don't want them attacking a one unit garrison with a full stack with the opponent having two full stacks within reach. I think something like this has been proposed but it's beyond the limits of the program. It's amazing how the answer to this problem is the same answer for ineffective government: More money! Good thing inflation isn't modeled in this game.

[Kawligia]

IMHO...

Population growth is a bit slow in the beginning, but a bit fast in the end. Its often very hard to get past the first couple city/castle levels and I often wind up with Fortresses/Citadels before I can get some places past Wooden Castle. However once you get to Castle, it speeds up a LOT and I rarely get to build half the buildings before its time to upgrade again...unless I get unlucky with non-stop plagues killing everyone. LOL

Also, it seems that the AI gets HUGE bonuses to population growth. I realize they need bonuses, but it makes it very easy for me after I take a couple Fortresses/Citadels when I was dealing with Castles just a couple turns ago. HEHE I sometimes just turn ALL my "hometown" secure provinces into cities and just TAKE castle-type provinces rather than build them up myself.

Economics...Seem great to me! The AI maintains solid military forces and infrastructure. For the human, you can do the same IF you plan and play well. If you get careless or proceed without foresight, you can run into trouble. Perfect IMO.

Military...Great! AI forces are pretty varied and up to date, though they are still a little heavy on seige equipment. They also do like to attack with puny forces that could never win the battle sometimes. I have had the Moors set sail from their lands with 6 or so units , skip over factions they were already at war with, and lay seige to my almost fully garrisoned fortress and assault it. ROFL! >XD Then I made them pay thousands for peace. This happened like 3 times over 10-20 turns.

Diplomacy...not perfect but much better than vanilla. Alliances hold fairly well until you start to get powerful. Marriage alliances don't seem any stronger than regular, but then again they never were. One weird thing I noticed is that if you go to war early in the game before you have made your alliances, all the AI factions hate you with a passion and will barely even accept trade rights without payment.

Agents...Great except for spies. Base success chance is entirely too low IMO. It really shouldn't be that hard to slip into a city unnoticed. Considering how hard it is to get into a city that has a friendly spy in it, I think that is enough for balancing purposes and to make subterfuge useful.

Religion...Seems great too. I would prefer if religious unrest were toned down SLIGHTLY. As it stands now, its very easy for unrest to spiral out of control with only the small conversions from a few turns of an opposite religion cleric in a province. But nothing major...it keeps me on my toes with priests which I may forget to recruit otherwise..

P.S. As far as traits go...at least half of my people are ignorant, dysfunctional, untrusting of technology, and abhor drink. Not sure if that's intended or not.

[Garnier]

Much of what you want there, such as growth being regulated more closely to time passed, I intend to do if I make an addon for LTC 4.0.

I will make an addon (since the addon is simply my modifications to LTC), but it takes a good bit of work to make it usable by others.. to release it.

I've already done this for my version of LTC 3.1 - I have units and buildings come available following the progression of time, while population only affects income really. This way, gothic knights are only available really late in the game, and so on.

[Lusted]

I'm aslo doing some tweaks to income, population growth and unrest.

[Ciaran S]

One thing I´ve noticed in many mods is that it´s too easy to maintain good public order at Very High tax rates even with minimal garrisons, which, in turn, means that the player easily swims in money. Taxes, the Plague, sieges, rebels in the province, etc should have higher impact on public order.
It´s not possible to link rebel spawning with regional happiness, or is it?

[Lusted]

It´s not possible to link rebel spawning with regional happiness, or is it?

It is, but it would be a huge massive script that would slow the game down for not much benefit.

And in this mod it is harder to maintain public order due to higher religious unrest, general unrest, distance to capital penalty etc.

[Valdamar]

It is, but it would be a huge massive script that would slow the game down for not much benefit.

And in this mod it is harder to maintain public order due to higher religious unrest, general unrest, distance to capital penalty etc.

It's a shame that this game is so limited in scripting possibilities. The turns to zip by pretty fast now and I wouldn't mind a little wait if it meant better game play. Hopefully you can have longer, slower scripts run on higher difficulty levels.

Public order in standard 3.1 is very good. As Milan I had a hell of a time establishing order in my Kingdom of Jerusalem. Even the castles gave me trouble. A massive amount of conversion needed to be done if I were to occupy a city. Actually had to sack one, it made me mad.

[Lusted]

Well i don't want to do that amount of scripting anyway, as there would likely be about 10 different ones for each settlement(so different level/size armies for different level of settlements, and for different time periods), and that for every settlement ingame with the rebels changed depending on the region. You can actually do some pretty interesting things with scripts, it's just they take along time and some things just aren't realistically feasible.

[Valdamar]

Anno Domini claimed early on to be a heavily scripted game and they may have some ideas or whole segments of code that would reduce the work. You do great on your own but I really hope you take advantage of other modders experience. I'm not much of a code monkey myself (good show!), not even a code primate...

[Lusted]

AD has a lot of scripts in it i'm just not interested in. There are only a few scripts i would ever be interested in implementing into LTC.

[Garnier]

I agree. Most scripts don't add enough to the game to be worth it. And DLV for instance, is insanely slow on the campaign map due to the size of it and the scripting. LTC is very good in that way.

[Lusted]

Thought you guys would be interested to hear i'm going to be implementing the Teutonic faction leader/heir system and lack of family tree for the Holy Roman Empire, Venice and Milan in 4.0 given how those factions were in real life, and the Teutonic system being better than the vanilla one for them.

[Garnier]

Thought you guys would be interested to hear i'm going to be implementing the Teutonic faction leader/heir system and lack of family tree for the Holy Roman Empire, Venice and Milan in 4.0 given how those factions were in real life, and the Teutonic system being better than the vanilla one for them.

I'm gonna have to find out about that.. I never fully understood it.

Is it just no family tree, but you can adopt generals and when the leader dies, one of your generals becomes the leader?

[Lusted]

Is it just no family tree, but you can adopt generals and when the leader dies, one of your generals becomes the leader?

Bingo. Your generals can get married and have kids i believe as well, and the heir is chosen based on their attributes.

[Valdamar]

What are the drawbacks though? It sounds too easy.

[Kawligia]

Lusted if you can put in a system where the BEST family member becomes the heir, PLEASE add that to ALL factions!

[Lusted]

What are the drawbacks though? It sounds too easy.

You don't see the family tree and how it picks the next leader isn't exactly clear to me.