I've made a small mod, and I've decided to share it with the community.
So, you may ask, why this title? If you like black chocolate, and know what orange-flavoured chocolate tastes like, you may have a clue. This mod is like orange in chocolate: its flavour will not dominate, but you can actually feel the difference.
This is really not something ground-shaking. It has no new map, no new buildings and units, but has some changes that make the game play a little different.
These changes include the following
-Removed the units from the recruit pool of core buildings of castles.
-Changed the amount of agents that can be recruited from various levels of their respective buildings.
-Brothel, Inn, Tavern, Coaching House, Pleasure Palace allow for 2/0, 2/2, 3/3, infinite/3, infinite/infinite spies/assassins, respectively.
-Of religious buildings in cities, level 1 allows for 1, levels 2-3 for 2, and levels 4-5 for 3 Priests/Imams. Of those in castles, the first level permits recruiting one, and the second level two religious agents.
-There have been changes made to the traits as well.
-There are new traits for Spies, Assassins, Diplomats and Merchants, which have three levels, can be acquired if trained in a city with level 2, 3 and 5 of their trainig building, and raise the agent's skill by 1,2 and 3.
-There have been modifications carried out to chances of getting most of agents' traits; some have been hyped, some have been nerfed.
-Starting agents (those you have at the beginning of a game) start with their natural agent's skill, and not with the acquirable one; p.e. Spies now start with Spying talent instead of Adept Agent. It makes more sense, in my opinion.
-The settlement mechanics have got some touches as well.
-In general, earning money is easier; this is due to two facts: 1) I like rich treasuries (), and 2) AI players seem to act more intelligently if they have cash.
-Public order is affected more seriously by religious unrest, but it is easier to maintain by building law-buildings.
-Population is not so severely damaged by squalor, but more seriously by plague.
-To compensate castles a little, they gain more population from the base farming level, and their tax income has been increased as well.
-There are be more heretics scattered around the map (so that your Priests/Imams have someones to practice on ).
-Bribery is more likely to succeed.
-Sacking a settlement now gives more money than extermination.
-Armies are less likely to revolt.
-Merchants have been hyped (to earn their keep without having to travel half the world).
-Agents need to rely more on their skill than on circumstances.
-Most factions are playable from start.
-One turn=one year.
These are the things that I could recall right now; there might be some smaller tweaks that slipped my mind, but they're in anyway.
Because this mod basically alters only strategy-map play, and modifications are in a small number of files, it should go well with mods that modify battles. Also, altough it is built upon Retrofit mod, I can probably apply it to other, popular mods if requested (and if I get permission from the other mod's creator to do so), or can even make a version for vanilla M2TW eventually.
Note: this mod is NOT aimed at historical accuracy.
Installation
FIRST OFF: You NEED Retrofit mod in order to use this. For the sake of sparing space, the package only contains the files I've modified, and thus it will not work on its own.
After you've got and installed Retrofit, copy the contents of that mod to clipboard, and paste it into a new directory in mods, into one called LOIBC. Now, extract the contents of LOIBC.zip into your new, Retrofit-containing mod-folder's MAIN directory (so, NOT Data or any other sub-folder; place it right in the LOIBC root dir).
After this, you can launch the game with LOIBC.bat.
Credits
-Retrofit mod was made by Unspoken Knight (many, many thanks go to him for it).
-All changes in this mod were made by me, DrIstvaan.
I couldn't play-test the mod extensively, so if you notice any bugs (there shouldn't be any, but anyway), lack of balance, or anything that should be fixed/improved, tell me and I'll try to do it.
Last, but not least, you can grab the mod here.
I think that's all the information you'll need, so, whitout further ado... Enjoy!