Discussion and Announcements

[Zarax]

Hey DBH, do you have plans for an update? Need help for that?

[sik1977]

OK, now I am back again. There have been quite a few questions, so if I missed yours, ask again.

camz: Personally I play with the default unit size set to 100, and I find that a pretty good balance between large and huge. You can change this by editing the unit size line in xgm/preferences/preferences.txt.

hioner: Yes, you can install other skins and models. Make your changes in the xgm/data folder rather than the original data folder. Let me know if you need more detailed instructions.

Methoz: EVENTS.dat is supposed to be empty. If you use the original file many units will have either no voice or the wrong voice (but otherwise there will be no problems). Are you using the English version of RTW, or some other language?

Centuri0n: That looks about right.

Could you please refer to Post No. 644 above and point out why I can't activate night battles under V1.3 when I follow all the instructions for V1.5 except adding the line 'options bi' in descr_strat.txt in V1.3 (as that line was added post V1.5 patch). Also if its not too much trouble, can you re-visit this thread on the topic of night battles (you posted there twice early in the thread). http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=58142

Thanks

[DimeBagHo]

sik1977: If you use just RTW 1.3 + XGM, do night battles work? I don't think I ever tested that myself. From what I remember the only change to night battles that I made for the 1.5/1.6 patch was adding "options bi".

Zarax: I have a few plans. (1) Bring XGM-MM up to par with regular XGM (mostly changing scripts to work with it, adding victory conditions, etc). (2) VnVs are going to get a modest over-haul. (3) The Immortals unit you asked for will be added. (4) Over-haul of the Roman units - mostly just changes I have mentioned before.

A couple of other ideas I have been thinking about are: (5) A more developed AOR system that would apply to all cultures and require the construction of a colony to recruit elite units. I need to test this to see how well the AI handles it. (6) Unique temples for the home cities of the GCS sub-factions that would by tied in with a set of hidden traits to support some differentiation between the sub-factions. One thing I would like to use this for is to make it much harder to use a governor from a different sub-faction in these home cities (Sparta would become much more rebelious with an Athenian governor for example).

[Zarax]

Sounds nice, let me know if you need some beta testing...

[Orcus]

Centuri0n: That looks about right.

Since enabling night battles the "Faction Destroyed" FMVs aren't working:



Any idea why?

[DimeBagHo]

Orcus: Is this happening with an otherwise unmodified XGM install, or did it happen when you added night battles seperately? If it happened with a regular XGM install it may be because I added the -nm option to the XGM shortcut.

[Orcus]

When I added night battles separately. Strange thing is all the other FMVs (senate, wonders, etc.) are working. *shrug*

[DimeBagHo]

That is pretty strange. The only thing that occurs to me is that in BI the lose and death FMVs are the same. It may be that specifying different FMVs in descr_sm_factions.txt is causing a problem.

[kallad]

I've downloaded and ran the installer for the mod (on a fresh copy of RTW with 1.3 patch) The game starts up fine but when I click on the imperial campaign I get a message that says "Please select and item from the list." I've gone through the Prologue before installing the mod.

Afer exiting the game I get this message : "Script Error in xgm/data/world/maps/campaign/imperial_campaign/descr_strat.txt, at line 26, column 1.

Expected start date of campaign or battle."

All I needed to do was apply the 1.5 patch, sorry for the dumb question.

[Zarax]

Got another suggestion: Why don't you make rebel gladiators available as (very rare and expensive) mercenaries? Especially in the late republic they were actually recruited by various armies, including non roman ones.

Italy and north africa would be good spots for that (lepcis magna actually was the main gladiatorial "recuiting" center in the mediterranean, with an arena second only to the roman colosseum and circus maximus) and they would still be decent post marian units to face the legions as especially with BI AI you're going to have an hard time against post marian units, they are quite good at flanking and can very well ruin your day if you got a phalanx based army... Even silver shields got an hard time with that...

BTW, FBH I'm going to send you EDU and EDB files with some changes i made, they should be 1.5 compatible but you need to add some resources to the map... Makes gameplay a bit more interesting and varied imho.

[DimeBagHo]

I thought some might find this interesting - a full size replica of the Parthenon: http://www.nashville.gov/parthenon/index.htm

[Zarax]

DBH, did you receive my email?

[DimeBagHo]

Yes. Could you give me a quick run-down on the changes you made to the files so I know where to look? I like the idea of adding gladiator mercs. Progress on the next version has been pretty slow because, but it should pick up in the next week or so.

BTW, over at the .com a few people have said that they have had no disasters when playing XGM (no storms, floods, earthquakes, etc.) apart from the historical events. I haven't seen anything other than the occasional flood. But I also saw nothing but an occasional flood when I ran through a couple of vanilla campaigns. Has anyone else noticed this, or seen more disasters?

[Zarax]

well, basically:
- made back merc hoplites and made them use shield wall (they're more an abstraction of generic greek mercenary infantry) recruitable by carthage on africa and hellenic lands, adjusted their stats to be almost vanilla like

- numidian mercs buildable for romans in africa

- sarmatian mercs made recruitable into the steppes for romans and seleucids (pontus might be another good candidate for it)

- (half done) samnites recruitable in italy by carthage (this faction is an excellent testbed for ZOR) in non hellenistic italy, might be a good idea to have them recruitable by GCS or macedonia

- made praetorians recruitable only in italy and urbans only in rome, first cohorts available everywhere else, can't remember if i made legionary cav recruitable only outside italy

- upped 10% upkeep costs overall, makes gameplay a bit slower and hasn't affected balance so far (other that making life easier for seleucids it seems)

- reduced general bodyguard numbers with different criteria for barbarians and "civilized" factions (half and 2/3)

- added BI formations and swimming, 1.5 ignores them but seems to run fine while BI exe will make full use of that...

That should be all, you need to add a "steppe" resource on the map to make sarmatian mercs recruitable but otherwise the files should be bug free...

major modification proposal:

- take the peasants out of the game and move on the governor building units like town militias or skirmishers on their place, this way you will have more room to improve the recruitment system and will reduce the effectiveness of scorched earh tactics by the player.

- take out one roman faction and make a senate for GCS, it might be an interesting experiment, especially with them giving you stuff like spartans for free...

[zodmaner]

BTW, over at the .com a few people have said that they have had no disasters when playing XGM (no storms, floods, earthquakes, etc.) apart from the historical events. I haven't seen anything other than the occasional flood. But I also saw nothing but an occasional flood when I ran through a couple of vanilla campaigns. Has anyone else noticed this, or seen more disasters?

Well, in my Thrace campaign I got 3 floods and 1 earthquake in succession, which is not historic I'm sure. But in my Macedonia and Seleucid campaign I haven't seen anything (yet...)

Oh, and I think there is a bug, but I'm not too sure. It seems that the damage that the disasters causes in the province doesn't dissapeer even after many turns have pass: In my Thrace campaign, for example, the province of Byzantium got flooded, which reduced, among other things, the movement rate of the troops. Now the problem is that 10 turns after the flood (5 years in game time) the movement rate won't return to normal (now it takes 3 to 4 turn to move through the province instate of 2, and this with paved road built!)

And can anybody do something about Egypt? I've see them expand well up into Asia Minor and into the black sea area (imagine my surprise, playing as Thrace, that suddenly came this big yellow blob right next to my city in Byzantium.) and eliminated the Seleucid all in just 50 years! (by around 230-220 BC the Seleucid and Pontus is no more, just giant yellow blob and Parthia in the east.) Playing as a Seleucid I find it impossible to hold back these yellow menaces especially with all these eastern faction coming at me.

Otherwise, great mod DimeBagho. I just got it yesterday and I must say I'm mighty impress, keep up the good work!

(By the way, thoese changes sound good Zarzax. Can't wait for the next version! )

Edit: Add Egyptian complains and correct various typos.

[Zarax]

(By the way, thoese changes sound good Zarzax. Can't wait for the next version! )

I'm not officially on the team, I just tinker with the mod to see if anything can be improved quickly (i can't model or skin to save my life) and ask DBH to add what he sees fit.

It's his mod so he's got the last word on what he wants in there

Personally i just see how mods (or even other games, I just love the old "great battles" series) make some interesting stuff, find a way to simplify them, make them easy to add and then I just write here my ideas or send DBH some modded files.

Other than that I read historical research done here and use a Delbruckian approach on how to implement it...
That's why I'm against merc phalangites, even carthage didn't rely on mercs to hold critical points of the battlefield while hoplite style mercenaries are much more likely (don't think as 400BC hoplites, just guys with spear, shield, some armour and a sword) due to their more flexible equipment and tactical usefulness as heavy spearmen (just because they didn't have a sarissa doesn't mean that they couldn't make most cavalry regretting to charge into them) or generic medium-heavy infantry depending on training and actual equipment.

[zodmaner]

Well, in that case, let just say I support your ideas and hope that DimeBagHo integrate them in future version then.

Edit: typos & gramma error.

[DimeBagHo]

One idea I am going to try out for the next version is changing the Hypaspists, Sacred Band, and Greek Mercs, to spear only heavy infantry using SignifierOne's over-hand hoplite animations.

zodmaner: I'm glad you like XGM. You should find that the Seleucids do a lot better in the hands of the AI now. They often become the dominant faction in the east. But, they are still very hard for humans to play in the early game.

[Zarax]

DBH, using the new animations looks fine to me, but you should think about unit variety before removing the secondary weapon from everyone imho...

[hzh]

I think it happened in 1.3 patch without the mod, not sure. now 1.5 with extended greek mod on, the problem seems more obvious. I always experience this 0.1 sec lag if i move my camera around, making the movement annoying. At first, i thought that my graphic card was not good enough, so i bought an ati Radeon X 850 pro only enabling me to set everything to highest and have awsome picture, but did not solve the problem. I sespect the this came up after 1.3 since i never experienced this playing 1.0, 1.1, 1.2. I know for 90% it may not have any thing to do with the mod, but if someone also have the problem, will you plz suggest some solution?