Shogun 2 Vragos Campaign - Version 2.9.6 beta released!

[wongyl86]

Hi Vragos,

Does all the patch be installed in the data (i am having frequent CTD)? Or do i have to delete all previous version. I do not have any other mods.

[Vragos]

Yeah, you'll need all updates since it is build on patch21.

[Gorhaax]

Hey Vagros, what's in 2.4 compared to 2.3? Also I think thae archers are ungodly powerful in mellee. My Hero unit on Horse were held off by Samurai Archers, is this supposed to be that way?

[Vragos]

Hey Vagros, what's in 2.4 compared to 2.3? Also I think thae archers are ungodly powerful in mellee. My Hero unit on Horse were held off by Samurai Archers, is this supposed to be that way?

2.4 is mostly the clan retainer units, and I did redo the battle entities for hero units. It turned out the game would use the cavalry stats for them when dismounted. Which essentially made them huge as a barn when mounted. That might be why you saw them take so much damage from archers. I'm looking into the issue again, and testing it a bit more. I think a small armour bonus for the heroes might be needed.

Edit: And now that I reread your post, I see your point. In a straight-up fight, the hero unit should come out on top - but just barely since the bow samurai does outnumber them 2:1. I'll look at the balance, thanks for making me aware of it.

[wongyl86]

Hi Vragos,

What about patch 1.3.1 does it have to be in there? An advice i would recommend would be that for your next release, could you kindly post all the required patches. Thanks alot for your effort in making this great mod.

[Vragos]

Hi Vragos,

What about patch 1.3.1 does it have to be in there? An advice i would recommend would be that for your next release, could you kindly post all the required patches. Thanks alot for your effort in making this great mod.

No, only the latest version of my mod is required. Old version might actually cause CTDs because they changed the format of several tables.

[Gorhaax]

2.4 is mostly the clan retainer units, and I did redo the battle entities for hero units. It turned out the game would use the cavalry stats for them when dismounted. Which essentially made them huge as a barn when mounted. That might be why you saw them take so much damage from archers. I'm looking into the issue again, and testing it a bit more. I think a small armour bonus for the heroes might be needed.

Edit: And now that I reread your post, I see your point. In a straight-up fight, the hero unit should come out on top - but just barely since the bow samurai does outnumber them 2:1. I'll look at the balance, thanks for making me aware of it.

Thanks Vagros. Just seemed like Archers where a little OP when getting hit by Cav. I wn't be a ble to try for a bit because i too busy playing Endless Space and Civ 5: Gods and Kings, also shogun 2 gives me terrible graphical glitches on win 8 and my win 7 machine is refusing to boot.

Other then that I really like the fact that Capitols are lvl 5. Not only makes the early game faster, customizable and more important, but also much harder to destroy a clan.

[simplex]

hej,

thanks for the great work.
i played 2.3 as takeda on hard and your mod feels more "the right thing" than vanilla.
i would like to give you some feedback, its a lot of criticism, but with the intention to make a good thing still better. of course everything i write is from my point of view:

bugs:
-the bowyer and the lacquer-workshop dont work: the endlevel of the bowyer has less bonus than the workshop
-bow-encampement is not buildable
-katana-cav was not available (to takeda)

impressions and feedback:

campaign:
-the 12month splitting is very much to my liking though it slows the game dramatically. i would increase the loses in winter and if possible introduce small loses in autumn (in fact i would go so far and also apply loses in winter to armys in friendly areas which are only diminshid by generals - upgradeable tweak). that would make timing the attack more important and would make you fear winter.
-castle-levels in the beginning set-up should be lowered. with nearly every castle at level 2 there is in fact a good defensive position everywhere and it is not necessary to build it yourself and make consideration if your defense is strong enough. in exchange i would lower the castle cost (but only a little bit - the extremely high cost of endlevel castles is good)
-the dojo-ability to enforce the defense is a good thing. i would only distinguish more about castles with dojos (good defense) and with cultural-buildings (low defence, e.g. the market gives ashigaru-defenders instead of samurai) so you have to build castles for recruitment, for defense and for commerce and not have everything at once in one place.
- the resource-system has become too simply for my taste. the "trom3-mod" has solved this problem very elegant in my opinion.
- the none-availability of ashigaru in the early game gives more thinking where to recruite and when to move but in the mid-game when you cover some area it is a pain in the ass not to have troops available where you need them. again i would like to draw your attention to the trom3 mod.

agents:
-bribery-costs are astronomical so that this option has become completely irrelevant
-ninja-costs are too high (ninja-sabotage is very powerful but i would rather lower the success prop. than make them so expansive or at least lower the cost for assasination)
-agents feel like there is only one way of skilling that makes sense, i would suggest to lower the bonus for bushido-arts for the generals and give the ninjas that ability
-the bonus for campaign-movement from agents (which i never used in vanilla) would make very much sense for your mod. i only tried it once in the mod and it didnt seemed to help a lot so i would increase the bonus.

battle:
-since archers are that strong the diversity in the army-rooster is strongly diminished
-for the increased defensiveness of units i found the onslaught-bonus useless. my yari-cav (onslaught 50) killed two archers in onslaught.
-it seems to me that in the early game arrows nearly deal no damage. in mid- and end-game my monk-archers (precision 70) deal 1/8-1/4 of the casualties that enemy archers deal (if they do at all).
-i found spear-inf is too weak and therefore unnecessary. the heavy-nodachi are good for in fact everything so there is no need of naginata and yari-samurai. the katana-cav to balance this is missing.

economy:
-the legendary buildings can be built more than one time - this makes them lose theire exclusivity

[Vragos]

Thank you so much for the feedback.

-the bowyer and the lacquer-workshop dont work: the endlevel of the bowyer has less bonus than the workshop
-bow-encampement is not buildable
-katana-cav was not available (to takeda)

- The bowyer and lacquer workshop has been fixed, will be included in the next update.
- Yeah, the buff-buildings are giving me a bit of a headache. I'll look into reactivating the Hunting Lodge with some apropriate buffs. I'm just struggling with the amount of buff buildings available, which means you end up with just one Dojo in each region. Thus the hunting lodge is intentionally disabled at the moment.
- Katana-cav is available to Shimazu, as one of the few clans who are good/dumb enough to charge into battle with the katana as their main weapon. It's intentional that it isn't available to Takeda.

Regarding attrition increase: The AI completely ignores seasons, so it would benefit the player too greatly.

Regarding castle levels: The current levels are based on getting a quicker start, for all factions. Because with 12 turns per year, increased building time, recruitment time, reduced campaign movement and so on you woul otherwise spend the first 70-100 turns sitting on one region, with no army, waiting for upgrades, buildings and tech to finish.

Regarding the garrisons: I've been meaning to reduce markets to one units, just like the armory-chain. So dojos will in fact give a stronger garrison.

Regarding resourced: You are right, and it is one of the next things I'll have to work on.

Regarding raising an army when and where you need it, I find that to be the most important aspect of increased recruitment time. That you can't always just leave your regions undefended, and rely on raising an army when you need it.

Agent costs: Correct, I set the prices high, but after several adjustments to the economy they are now too high. I'll fix it.

Regarding battles: I've rebalanced archers again. The effect I'm after is that ashigaru fire quicker, but less accurate and less deadly - they essentially blanket an area with arrows. If they are in tight formation, and not in cover, they take pretty brutal damage from samurai or monk archers. Samurai can, as the only archers, stand and take incoming fire, for a while.

In 2.3 and 2.4 all units have stronger charge, and will gain significant bonuses to it from tech.

[simplex]

glad you took the criticism the meant way. i am not used to forums or in general to modding but if you are interested in ideas or feedback i can give a lot more - though i have no idea if they are qualified.

Regarding attrition increase: The AI completely ignores seasons, so it would benefit the player too greatly.

you mean the opposite - it would be too much a disadvantage? i am puzzled because the AI-armys get losses when i sabotage them with ninjas in the winter - so why are they ignoring the seasons?

[simplex]

Katana-cav is available to Shimazu, as one of the few clans who are good/dumb enough to charge into battle with the katana as their main weapon

i found the balancing, arch-cav, yari-cav (anticavcav) and katana-cav (antiinfcav) quiet good. the katanas are strong enough to hit and run. but i have to admit that i fought mainly against the AI.

Regarding castle levels: The current levels are based on getting a quicker start, for all factions. Because with 12 turns per year, increased building time, recruitment time, reduced campaign movement and so on you woul otherwise spend the first 70-100 turns sitting on one region, with no army, waiting for upgrades, buildings and tech to finish.

true. but the most tense time is in the beginning with 2-3 provinces when u r too weak to expand further without leaving your homeland undefended - so i appreciate that castles in your mod are really smthg one can use for defence, but there should be a high price for this so that it doesnt become too easy. my suggestion to fix this would be (though i am not sure if possible) to make the price depend on the position i.e. for takeda in kai a castle costs x elsewhere y (like there would be a stonemason in kai exclusively for takeda) an other possibility would be raising costs, i.e. first castle x, second 2x, third 3x and so on capped to a max of 5x - for example.

Regarding resourced: You are right, and it is of the next things I'll have to work on.

as mentioned before if u dont know the trom-mod you should defenitely take a look. its not perfect but the ideas are quiet good in my opinion.

Regarding raising an army when and where you need it, I find that to be the most important aspect of increased recruitment time. That you can't always just leave your regions undefended, and rely on raising an army when you need it.

i agree completely. my point was that a certain amount of flexebility would be nice. if your mainforce invades the date you would like to have cheap troops which strenghten kai. samurais are in the castle-defence but they are too few so ashigaru would be nice to make for mass and most important they would be affordable. in trom-mod there is a part of the tec-tree where one can research ashigaru. i would suggest smthg likewise: in the beginning one works with small samurai-forces, if researched there is the possibility to recruit x ashigaru, if further researched y additional ashigaru - for example.


@archers:
i am not very familiar with archers since i learned to hate them in vanilla, but in shg1 there was the effect that the more archers fired on one target the higher the damage of each one became i.e. 1 archer on target, x damage, 5 archers on same target, 8x damage.

@money
i could imagine that the 12 month splitting has some nontrivial impact on how to balance incomes from markets etc. in shg1 one collected money only once a year, so for your build that would be four times a year and all the stats could be used unchanged. a nice effect of this also would be that one would have to plan the spendings - especialy for the agents which would be weakened (ninja sabotage) in this way because the money would have to be reservated without other usage - without changing any balances.

[Vragos]

Thanks for all your feedback, it is very much appreciated. Ofcourse you are qualified to give feedback. I take it as oppinions, and it is always good to hear how others percieve my work. I like critisism, as long as it comes in a constructive fashion.

glad you took the criticism the meant way. i am not used to forums or in general to modding but if you are interested in ideas or feedback i can give a lot more - though i have no idea if they are qualified.



you mean the opposite - it would be too much a disadvantage? i am puzzled because the AI-armys get losses when i sabotage them with ninjas in the winter - so why are they ignoring the seasons?

Oh, I guess that could be misread. I meant that the AI does not consider seasons when invading, or even keeping troops in hostile regions. Thus they would take massive losses due to attrition. This is - as far as I know - hardcoded and cannot be fixed on our end. I looked at reducing the movement of troops to about half during winter, but didn't find a good solution there either.




I looked at TROM, regarding resources.

Personally, I don't like their solution. The problem is this:

We want to be limited in some way when not having resources, and we want to have to go out of our way to get them. At the same time, we don't want the AI unable to pose a challenge, because it doesn't understand the benefits it would bring to get these resources.

We want it to mean something, and we want it to make some sort of sense. In vanilla it sure didn't make sense - nor does it in TROM, in my oppinion. You can't just have your farmers produce silk, or cotton for that matter - that was exactly why it was so expensive, and in high demand. Not by ninjas though, as the game claims. But by the entire samurai class, starting at the top.

Iron was, to my understanding, made from sand containing iron - not from mines. And iron was produced in very small quantities all over Japan.

Lack of incense, would it prevent a temple from being constructed?

My point here is, that I'm struggling to find a good balance between getting the resources, and their applications in the construction of buildings and units. So far I cannot see a good balance, that's why I've minimized the effect of them so far - in all matter except as a mean of earning money through trade.

Any suggestions are welcome, just keep in mind it needs to be balanced between:
- Being able to get your hands on them, for all clans if needed for basic things.
- Being able to manage a war with a clan that is holding some of the trade nodes, without it preventing you from producing units.
- Not limiting the AI to the point they cannot progress or recruit strong units.
- Make sense... somewhat at least.

The "best" resources that managed that in vanilla was horses, stone and wood in my oppinion. Not perfectly so... but decent.

[simplex]

i want to say why i think the trom-solution isn´t that bad and actually counters most of your objections

- Being able to get your hands on them, for all clans if needed for basic things.
- Being able to manage a war with a clan that is holding some of the trade nodes, without it preventing you from producing units.
- Not limiting the AI to the point they cannot progress or recruit strong units.

all of this is solved when u have buildings producing it -which can be built by everyone if they do the research.

- Make sense... somewhat at least.

silk / cotton:
silk was won out of caterpillars if i am correct. and there were things one could call farm for that, though the amount was indeed not that high. as far as i know the armours of samurais contained to some part cotton and silk - holding metalpieces together, like a chainmail. the silk for the ninja relates more to the building itself - the district depended on the geishas, hence the silk.
incense:
to build a temple, incense is not a necessity for sure, but with incense u kind of get a "better" temple - drugs in whatsoever form are always helpfull in that matter.
iron:
as you said the quantities were small so regions with ironsand that was higher concentrated were able to sustain smiths which could process enough metall to equip an army or produce weapons of higher quality.

the best soluion i think -though i doubt that it is possible to mod- would be to "harvest" resources in concrete quantities, e.g. a stonemason gives x units of stone per year and to build a castle u need y units of stone. the stone could be available through the mason or the marketchain but with the marketchain for exorbitant higher cost. other res likewise.

[druchii7]

Hello vragos!

I've played the mod a couple of hours (2.4v).

I'm happy to say that it's possibly going to become the best S2TW mod!!

Toning down the importance of buildings to recuit units is a great decission
Restricting unit recruitment is a great decission (maybe too restrictive IMO, but I've always thought that each clan should be restricted to a particular army style)
Bigger units make better visual experience.
You didn't add unnecesary units that give nothing to the game (for example ashigaru with short yari)

Now I have to report some bugs (B) and criticism (C):
- (B) Playing Oda, bow ronin recruitment is duplicated, and one of the choices has very expensive upkeep
- (C) Homing missles are stupid, thanks for taking that away, but I think arrows are widely too insignificant in battles (after 5 shooting rounds my ronin only killed 3 bow ashigaru and they only killed back 2 ronin)
- (B) Several campaign tooltips do not show a frame and are on the top of the screen, so they are illegible (white letters on white horizon is impossible to read)
- (C) Ashigaru upkeep looks far too expensive in comparison to ronin upkeep (deliberate? bug?)

[Junaidi83 de Bodemloze]

hahaha , realy good mod even darth mod dont get this unique , well done my friend you create a new type of mod here, well that quite brainstroming campaign , play oda clan and i found my cav regiment is realy poor hahahahha, but well that reality , any way i love this new kind of very complex and need more carefull planing since all military aspect became speciality

[penquin11]

If you dont mind me asking is there any way that the clan version of the troops can be re-added (aka Inf_Sword_Samurai_Hattori for example).

I tried re-adding them on my own- but found that despite editing the units_to_exclusive_factions, buildings_units_allowed (or whatever its called), and both the units_tables/units_stats_land_tables, I have been unsucessful in my attempts to get the Hattori for example to be able to recruit their unique samurai- is this a cdir_qualities conflict or what?

[5hinzou]

Hi Vragos and Vragos fans!

I'm loving the direction of your mod so far Vragos! Frankly I'm dead bored of Shogun 2's lack of variety between clans and the ability to steam roll the campaign map after reaching a reasonable level of trade income... and your mod seems solve this!

One suggestion I'd like to propose; is it at all possible to add a flexible unit cap to your mod?

See: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=532127

I've been trying to do this myself, but by the life of me I can't get it to start up with more than just a few units modified (Shogun 2 stops responding before it reaches the start up movies)... odd thing is it seems to work fine when I tested it with simply Katana Samurai, Yari Samurai, and Nodachi Samurai... if I try to add many more units, it fails to load.

[Hokussu15]

Hey Vragos, thank you sooo much for a such beautiful Mod, but one thing you need to change, Archery its can not be that Samurai Bow shooted 3 times and only 1 or 2 mens were shooted down so pls that one thing and this mod will be perfect!

Can you say me please what should i change in DB kv_rules to make archers a little bit more valuable?

Thanks and Great mod.

[Vragos]

Thank you for your kind words Hokussu. I have indeed adjusted the archery aspect of the game, a new release should be ready soon. Just testing at the moment.

My aim with archers is that at maximum range, the casualties should indeed be minimum for the first couple of volleys, and then slowly increase in damage as more and more volleyes land. To reflect that often an arrow would wound, especially against well-armoured targets, but over time they will cause some casualties.

At closer range the damage from archers is significant, especially if the archers are allowed to land several volleyes.

The overall aim is that archers role should be, to assist melee units that are engaging the enemy - especially when defending castles where it is much easier to get clear line of sight at short distances without getting rushed by the enemy. Monk and ashigaru bow units should be kept out of harms way, while samurai bow units can take the risk of being close to the front and shooting directly in support of the melee units.

The damage in the current release was underwhelming though, I completely agree and have adjusted it. The mechanics I want to achieve is a very fine balance though, so feedback remains very important for me.

[Vragos]

2.7 released, I recommend starting a new campaign after installing it. Enjoy.