After work on trying to improve late era armies lately, it has become apparent to me that there are some serious long term problems with the campaign. That being that the AI will spend the bulk of its money each turn on new units. As a result this means that the upkeep costs soon prevent it from upgrading its towns, castles. This problem becomes worse later in the campaign when construction costs become more expensive.
Unfortunately from my testing in hotseat mode the AI is forever stuck on a Military build policy.. This is hardcoded and cannot be modded. Worse this has an effect on the town/castles growth. I have ran a number of hotseat campaigns over 200 turns recently and noticed how bad the problem was. So basically the AI in this game is worse than I first realised. For the whole campaign its stuck on a military build policy. This means the AI debt script becomes more and more important to keep the AI out of the red. However this eventually means there is not enough money for city upgrades etc later on.
What I am trying to get at here is that some compromises are going to have to be made in this mod. This is not easy for me to accept as I love the way the mod currently is myself. For example building costs, unit costs, upkeep costs etc are all challenging to the player. Some of you may never even play upwards of 200 turns and notice the down sides. But I feel like I am going to have to make some big changes.. sorry guys. Increasing the money cheat the AI gets each turn just is not the answer. Because the AI is forever stuck on a program of training more and more men... WHEN IT DONT EVEN NEED THAT MANY UNITS AND THEY CANT EVEN DISBAND. Sorry for caps.. basically my point is that in order for the AI to continue to grow and expand late in the game, we need to cater for it......
This means for a start all buildings costs have to come down again. Not quite as low as they were in vanilla but almost. Construction building times for 2 turns per year however can pretty much remain as they are.
Now onto a small update I am working on for the final KGCM patch. As mentioned above I have been working on late era recruitment. This involves getting rid of a lot of the high period units in the age of gunpowder. The aim is to have the AI recruiting pikes, musketeers, and cannons instead of the old. My work has gone really well so far but there is still much to do. Here is one example of a late army below.
Note in the above: in the next city barracks up the crossbow militia are no longer trainable. Anyway the task of getting every faction to build bombards and later cannon is not an easy one. Each faction has different unit rosters, some favour siege weapons some don't atm. So I have to try and balance out every faction to train the same quantity of units. This means that every faction will have to have units with the same priority settings at each building level. Thats complicated work and will take me some time yet to get every faction recruiting the same late era armies.
Dave