Heretics and Hoodlums v1.2 sub-mod for BB4.24

**Drinka of the Rum** · April 03, 2013, 04:10 AM

"The real greatest pleasure of men is to repress rebels and defeat enemies, to exterminate them and grab everything they have; to see their married women crying, to ride on their steeds with smooth backs, to treat their beautiful queens and concubines as pajamas and pillows, to stare and kiss their rose-colored faces and to suck their sweet lips of nipple-colored."
Genghis Khan, as quoted in Jami' al-tawarikh

Heretics and Hoodlums v1.2 Custom Campaign for BB4.24

Getting tired of sending your forces to assault yet another rebel settlement guarded by yet another nameless and faceless rebel general?

Been wishing that rebel cities and castles were defended by Taiji's battle-hardened elite noblemen? You know, to do justice to the fearsome army you have assembled at their gates...

Been wondering who exactly was that irritating wall defender who followed that last bucket load of excrement with a shout of "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries?"

Well, wonder no longer. Taiji's original script includes names and a few stats for rebel governors, but due to reasons we mere mortals and only guess at, he left most of them as generic generals, ie bodyguard units without somebody to guard. This mod makes these generals named characters and gives them a few traits and ancillaries to approximate a back story. Occasionally I had to change a governor's name or army composition to get around stability issues but most are Taiji's originals. The aim is to add to the already strong RPG element of this mod.

Meet a few of the lads:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

Update 28/04/2013
H&H v1.2 updated beta for testing

I've now set this sub-mod up as a custom campaign to sit alongside the main campaign, but there will still be a few small changes to the Main Campaign. See below.

Major changes:
Rebels are now much more aggressive. Most factions will have to fight a defensive siege or two in the early game. Starting units have been increased to compensate. You will probably need to hire a few mercs for the defense of the land in the early game... Balance is still a work in progress so please let me know if any factions have it too hard or too easy.

Ireland and Scotland now start with castles.

Fort generals can and do move! I would love to have them sally out during sieges but I don't know how to do this yet.

All rebel settlements are now garrisoned by unique named characters. Rumors abound of strange goings-on within rebel settlements...

Alliances with Papal states are possible. Also, the Pope is now more active in the field.

After a long absence, Pirates rule the seas once more. Remember: a harbored fleet is a happy fleet...

I have activated Indie spies, assassins, merchants and princesses. I'm not sure where I am going with this yet, but if you want to check them out start as England and look near Southampton.

All Indie generals have new portraits (great idea, Cyprian) borrowed from other mods at the moment...

A bigger King's Purse for rebels. They slowly develop their settlements and even recruit occasionally.

For now I've allowed ransoms for rebels in order to give players a cash incentive to fight them. Thoughts?

I've now set this sub-mod up as a custom campaign to sit alongside the main campaign, but there will still be a few small changes to the Main Campaign. See below.

To play it Unpack the rar file below into your M2TW\ mods folder and overwrite, then launch DLV+BB, go to Custom Campaigns select Heretics and Hoodlums Campaign. The Historic Campaign is still broken.

This mod will restore the Imperial (Main) Campaign to how it originally was, ie it will remove the Wild Bunch mod except it will apply my fix to make Georgia playable in it.

The changes to the Main Campaign are:

Giumbix's map fixes- to allow easier crossing of the river near Azov. Thanks Giumbix!

one day's Kingmaker and Real Money Fixes. Thanks one day! PS: I'm not sure why his fixes include historic_events.txt and descr_walls.txt files but I've left them in.

Cyprian's great better faction colors fix. Thanks Cyprian! This has become a must have feature for me.

The Mongol Temple's fix. Now Ovoo's convert to Tengriism. (Thanks Me!) This faction still needs work to make it the force it should be.

Wall upgrades are available at one level lower of market building, ie market for Large walls and fairground for Huge walls. I think this should make settlement development smoother and prevent the current period of stagnation that occurs before fairgrounds are available.

Princesses can marry Indie and Papal generals. An awesome idea, one day suggested. Please feel free not to use this feature if you disagree with it. Mongols also have princesses now.

All religious buildings allow one extra priest/Imam unit per building level. Without this change even Huge Cathedrals have an agent limit of ONE! This is pretty harsh at the best of times but would make my campaign almost unplayable. Interestingly, Taiji allowed pagan temples one priest per level, so I don't know if this restriction was an oversight or deliberate.

Merchants are back

... in a limited way

. One per city regardless of building level, but starting at market. Another great idea from Giumbix. Please use your merchants responsibly

Hedjaz faction can now recruit siege and missile units. This faction's roster still needs a lot of work.

The config file is now set to record more detail- for better troubleshooting.

Probably a few other things I can't think of right now but which should be very minor.

I have left out Giumbix's fix for mongol princess speech, for now. This disabled my strat map music for some reason. I use Kaiser's awesome music/ horns etc mod and will need to make these 2 compatable. G's files are included in the rar if anyone would like to take a look at this.

Coming soon, I hope :

A mix of Wooden and Stone forts. Great idea, Sandy.

Unique traits and ancillaries for fort generals.

AI general advantages versus rebels. I assigned a bonus against rebels (heretics) to the AI_General trait but it made the other traits disappear from the character's card (when spied on/ fought) so I've left it out for now.

Fix for the defense spending system. At the moment Lvl 4 gives 7 units free upkeep and lvl 5 only gives 6 free upkeep.

<<<< Your ideas here >>>>

All suggestions and feedback are welcome! Solutions are even more welcome!!!

I'm 99% sure that every rebel settlement now has a named governor and that their traits and ancillaries are working properly. Please post on this thread any bugs or omissions you come across so I can correct them. If you've got any other comments or character designs to suggest please feel free to post them on this thread.

NB: This mod makes DLV + BB ever-so-slightly more difficult than it already is. This probably a good thing for more experienced players but newer players are advised to start their first campaign playing one of the major catholic powers, eg HRE, France, Venice... As a rule factions that have less Indie settlements on their borders are in an easier position, but England and KoJ are in particularly dire straits in the early game.

Download here: http://www.gamefront.com/files/23262...6+H+v1.2.1.rar

Installation:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

**Drinka of the Rum** · April 03, 2013, 04:16 AM

Damn... meant to post this to the DLV mini-mod page.

The server's really dodgy today... I've been getting loads of "500 - Internal Server Errors" today.

Anyone know how to move a thread once it's up?

**Cyprian2** · April 05, 2013, 09:18 PM

Wow, Drinka. This sounds great. The already brilliant DLV + BB can always use a bit more local colour and skullduggery.

Just a couple questions:

Will this work on a 4.23 install (minus the 4.24 graphics stuff)?

And does it also include your fix for the Lithuanian/Mongol temples?

Can't wait to try this!

**Cyprian2** · April 06, 2013, 05:29 PM

Grr. Glitchy forum is glitchy. Won't let me edit my post. Anyway, strike that second question -- I can see it's a seperate fix. Looking forward to trying this tonight. thumbsup2

**Drinka of the Rum** · April 09, 2013, 05:31 AM

Hi Cyprian. I hope you have enjoyed trying this little mod out. Looks like you and I are the only ones who tried this so far. I'd love to hear what your impressions are.

Unfortunately the traits and ancillaries I have given settlement generals make it harder to get a spy in to actually see that general's info page. But you always get a full view of the general's info when you are about to enter the battle map. In testing I used peasant units to besiege the city for a turn to make them sally forth and take a look at them...

I did not really intend this to be a difficulty mod but since playing it I have noticed things are a little tougher for the player. Some changes bring the game a little more in line with historical reality but you will have to adapt those time honored M2TW battle strategies to the new challenges.

I plan on writing a bit of a strategy guide for this mod, when I get more time, but here's couple of tips I gleaned from my testing:

1. Forget about assaulting rebel castles without siege engines. Even if you bring overwhelming force you will probably lose so many men that your army will take years to recover. A long drawn out siege becomes a much more viable option, even at the high field costs for besieging. Taiji's boiling oil makes rams pretty useless and ladders are much less successful with a named general to inspire defenders. I usually make a couple of breaches in the wall with a trebuchet and try to use infantry or suicidal cavalry to force a flanking or pincer maneuver on defenders.

2. Controlling captured rebel cities is much harder now. Castles are usually not a problem. If you are used to playing Lithuania or the Mongols this situation will already be familiar to you. A good tip would be to bring along the King or his Heir as they are better at crowd control than most generals. You can always put the population to the sword if you've lost too many soldiers in the assault and feel you may not be able to hold on to the city. It's a real possibility that newly taken rebel cities will rebel again and boot your defenders outside the walls again. So be prepared! I think this is more in line with history.

3. In BB4 the economy is more important than ever. You have to focus on building a strong economy before planning to go to war. With my WB mod installed you will also need to build up a strong religious base as well. Usually churches/ mosques etc are pretty pointless to build beyond the first level. Now you will have to get together a critical mass of churches/ priests/ and Theo's Guilds in order to be in a position to capture rebel settlements. Remember that having a pious leader in a settlement allows priests to convert the population more easily.

**Vipman** · April 09, 2013, 09:30 AM

Oh I completely forgot about this. Looks very nice! I'll look into the problem you have with Trebizond and Turov

You can pm a moderator and ask him to move this thread in the mini-mods subforum. In the main DLV forum look at the bottom, there it says the moderators of this forum and members that view this forum.

**Drinka of the Rum** · April 10, 2013, 05:29 AM

Thanks for all your help, Giumbix. If you don't have another modding project to work on at the moment, I would be delighted to have you (and one day!) collaborate on this one in any way you'd like. Actually, I'm not sure how much help I would be to you... You've been doing most of the scripting for me anyway...

I've posted this as a separate mod rather than a fix since it does change the flavor of Taiji's game a little. This was really only my first attempt at adding depth to the Indie Kingdoms. I posted it to see what people think but I'm worried players already find BB difficult enough. I could dumb down the governors traits etc but I'd love to hear what you think about this.

I wonder why Taiji didn't place a named character in all of the rebel cities in the first place. Do you have any ideas about this? It does not effect stability at all. That is, once I worked out which cities were causing the problems (ie Turov and Treb) He went to the trouble of naming them but left them as generals. This change certainly has the effect of making the rebels more active. I've noticed the rebel armies join up more often, and I'm having my capital besieged by them far more since applying this mod. I've now started to preempt the rebel armies uniting by attacking them in the field before they can unite... The game is now a little more dangerous for the player, although this was not my intention.

I was worried governors may leave the settlements and wander around the map, but so far I have not seen one leave a city/ castle. Taiji made his stone fort generals Immobile 1, Bed ridden 1 ( or something like that,) and I thought I might have to do the same, but apparently not. I would like to make fort generals capable to sallying forth (right now even a single peasant archer can exterminate them if he is willing to wait 3 turns) but I haven't tried changing their traits or ancillaries yet. I will let you know when I do.

The Slave faction is actually split into several sub factions (as I'm sure you know,) with a leader and loyalty etc. I would like to explore what can be done with this. Do you know of any other mods that have done this well? I know the slave faction can't be scripted (that's true, right?) but perhaps starting them with the right conditions could have a similar effect. I suppose the idea would be to have the player's faction fight a kind of civil war (of unification) in order to become the nation they will be in the mid and late game.

A small problem is that while some of these changes make the players game more challenging, I want to make sure the other AI factions can still expand their territories. It would be great to have a HatesPlayer or FearsAIFactions trait available for rebel generals, but this is probably impossible, right? The longer (and less elegant solution) would be to spawn rebel governors with different traits depending on the faction the player chooses, in the same way that rebel armies are now spawned. A positive result of this would be that there could be more variety in the governors traits. There could be totally different characters in each rebel city depending on the faction that the player chooses... (Sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it?)

I'd particularly like to know what you think about the little addition I made to rebel buildings ...

**Vipman** · April 14, 2013, 10:39 AM

What scripting, I just understand how most stuff work, but I'm not able to create any kind of script myself

1) Unfortunately I might disappoint you a bit, I'm now sure how much I can help you, but I'll try. I am working on some kind of modding project, on a mod aimed for hotseats to be more precise, to improve the auto-resolve (used in battles vs humans) and everything I can think of to improve general gameplay, based pretty much on retrofit mod but including a few bits of other mods too.

Also I'm in my last high school year and I am and will be very busy, so the problem is I don't have much time. I'll keep checking here and help you with fixes and stuff that don't take much time to do.

2) In descr_campaign_db.xml there is this setting <min_turn_keep_rebel_garrison int="999"/> that I'm pretty sure forces rebel faction to keep garrisons in settlements for the specified amount of turns (999), so unless this setting is changed garrisons will never move out of settlements. Forts however might be a different story, I'm not sure. This must be the reason why Taiji gave the generals in forts the Immobile and Bed ridden traits. You should try removing these traits from a few generals in forts and see if they leave their forts empty. The traits are the reason why they don't sally out because they can't move.

3) The rebel faction isn't actually split into subfactions. It is and it acts as 1 faction. Just that the regions have a faction creator to imitate their culture, names, buildings and trainable units and maybe more of a faction (also the region can defect to the faction creator if it still exists), and through descr_rebel_factions some other rebel factions can be created with unique units (that appear when rebels spawn in a region). The leader, family member status and loyalty should be irrelevant to the rebel faction as they have no family tree and don't revolt. However if you say they became more active because you made them named characters, there must be something I'm missing then. As I have said, I do not know much about scripting, but what do you mean when you say rebel faction can't be scripted? It should be possible, depending on what you want to do.

I don't know how exactly to do these, but I'm pretty sure you could script the spawned rebel armies to besiege your settlements, to give the player a message on turn 1 that there is a civil war or that a pretender to the throne has risen and you have to defeat him then go to capital and claim the crown of the kingdom, or something like that. Also someone did a submod for SS that makes dead factions reappear if their original settlements rebel from the one who conquered them, this script could be adapted to DLV I think.

4) You are right about the traits, from what I know it's not possible for traits to have effect only against human player or AI factions. For the method you described to work it needs all the governors from the cities to be spawned along with their armies from campaign_script depending on what faction the player took. And you'd have to remove all the governors with their armies from descr_strat. Because from what I observed (I'm not 100% sure though), if there already is an army in a city and an army is spawned in the same spot, it will spawn near it and not merge with the army already in the city.

If I am correct on the above, this will be quite some work to do, but I think it's possible to integrate this with Taiji's rebels spawning script that we talked about, so it won't be needed to start from scratch.

5) I'm very sorry, I didn't have time yet to check your mod nor to see what is the problem with Trebizond and other settlement

I have started writing this post like 2 hours ago

(of course I've been doing some other stuff in the meantime too)

PS I thought I'm the only one who makes long posts, now I finally found someone that does the same, thank God I'm not alone

**Cyprian2** · April 14, 2013, 08:13 PM

Hi again, Drinka.

Originally Posted by Drinka of the Rum

Hi Cyprian. I hope you have enjoyed trying this little mod out. Looks like you and I are the only ones who tried this so far. I'd love to hear what your impressions are.

Yes, I've been playing as Hungary and having a good time. I've only just finished mopping up the rebels in and around my starting regions -- and, yep, they do have a bit more of a sting now. It would indeed be interesting to see how the garrison commanders behave without the "immobilized" trait. At the moment, it's a bit too, um, tempting to send that single unit to besiege them for a couple turns and thus avoid the veritable bloodbath of an assault.

That said, I generally play out my assaults to the last man standing and I had a very close victory taking Sofia (not a PSF, but still) without any trebuchets or catapults -- fighting almost to the last man. Great battle!

Unfortunately the traits and ancillaries I have given settlement generals make it harder to get a spy in to actually see that general's info page. But you always get a full view of the general's info when you are about to enter the battle map. In testing I used peasant units to besiege the city for a turn to make them sally forth and take a look at them...

I like what you've done with the generals, giving them solid traits and thus actual personality. It'd be nice to find some custom character portraits besides the vanilla ones, but it's no big deal. Now that I mention it, there some great portraits in TaronQuinn's unreleased Chansons de Geste (which also makes use of some great named rebel characters). (I'm not sure what permissions would be required to get those, but I'll PM you with more about it in the future.)

I did not really intend this to be a difficulty mod but since playing it I have noticed things are a little tougher for the player. Some changes bring the game a little more in line with historical reality but you will have to adapt those time honored M2TW battle strategies to the new challenges.

Well, I for one don't think it adds too much by way of difficulty -- at least nothing that any DLV player worth his salt shouldn't be able to overcome. And there's a lot more potential for role-playing now, which I like a lot. In fact, touching on some of your other comments here, I'm planning to make a little mod of my own that somewhat alters the starting positions and makes it even harder for the player...because a true DLVer should also be a bit of a masochist.

I plan on writing a bit of a strategy guide for this mod, when I get more time, but here's couple of tips I gleaned from my testing:

1. Forget about assaulting rebel castles without siege engines. Even if you bring overwhelming force you will probably lose so many men that your army will take years to recover. A long drawn out siege becomes a much more viable option, even at the high field costs for besieging. Taiji's boiling oil makes rams pretty useless and ladders are much less successful with a named general to inspire defenders. I usually make a couple of breaches in the wall with a trebuchet and try to use infantry or suicidal cavalry to force a flanking or pincer maneuver on defenders.

2. Controlling captured rebel cities is much harder now. Castles are usually not a problem. If you are used to playing Lithuania or the Mongols this situation will already be familiar to you. A good tip would be to bring along the King or his Heir as they are better at crowd control than most generals. You can always put the population to the sword if you've lost too many soldiers in the assault and feel you may not be able to hold on to the city. It's a real possibility that newly taken rebel cities will rebel again and boot your defenders outside the walls again. So be prepared! I think this is more in line with history.

3. In BB4 the economy is more important than ever. You have to focus on building a strong economy before planning to go to war. With my WB mod installed you will also need to build up a strong religious base as well. Usually churches/ mosques etc are pretty pointless to build beyond the first level. Now you will have to get together a critical mass of churches/ priests/ and Theo's Guilds in order to be in a position to capture rebel settlements. Remember that having a pious leader in a settlement allows priests to convert the population more easily.

Yes, I agree with you. Good tips!

One thing I'd like to do for my own mod is make it so the starting generals within most factions are already disloyal (eg. by giving most rulers the trait "inspires civil war"). Thus, at least one general would have the trait "rebel" and be totally out of the player's control (for smaller factions, these would obviously be fewer, while a large "steamroller" like HRE might have several "rebels." I think this would be fairly historical, too -- approximating the various dukes and counts who were vassals in name only -- and thus building an empire would require some truly Herculean efforts on the part of the player (as in history). I have yet to experiment with how this might affect the AI's prospects for growth, but it's very early stages.

Anyway, thanks for the changes you've made so far. They've made an already great mod even better.

I look forward to throwing some more ideas around and seeing what other little tweaks might be in order.

**Kaskad** · April 14, 2013, 10:28 PM

Hi Drinka
I have installed you patch but can not see any changes... What detail in the game should I check first to confirm the installation has succeeded ?
I can see the difference of size 25MB with the original desc_strat file in my imperial_campaign folder, but nothing noticed in the game...

**Drinka of the Rum** · April 15, 2013, 05:18 AM

Originally Posted by Giumbix

Also I'm in my last high school year and I am and will be very busy, so the problem is I don't have much time.

Are you serious?

I had you pictured as an iPod app millionaire who amused myself by modding games while waiting for his stockbroker to call... Hmmm... Kids are much more mature these days... Anyway, never mind this modding stuff, you should be studying!

If your country is anything like mine, the result you get this year will make a huge difference to the rest your life! I get a cold sweat thinking back to my final school maths exams...

Originally Posted by Giumbix

what do you mean when you say rebel faction can't be scripted? It should be possible, depending on what you want to do.

I was thinking of this comment by Taiji on another thread... http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...=#post11601138

Originally Posted by Taiji

What's wrong is it's impossible to script a rebel sub_faction, isn't it?
Pretty sure that was what we concluded last time, Gigantus

We can't script a sub_faction for spawned rebels, Attyla.

Originally Posted by Giumbix

... For the method you described to work it needs all the governors from the cities to be spawned along with their armies from campaign_script depending on what faction the player took. And you'd have to remove all the governors with their armies from descr_strat. Because from what I observed (I'm not 100% sure though), if there already is an army in a city and an army is spawned in the same spot, it will spawn near it and not merge with the army already in the city.

If I am correct on the above, this will be quite some work to do, but I think it's possible to integrate this with Taiji's rebels spawning script that we talked about, so it won't be needed to start from scratch.

I've been thinking about this... I wonder if it would be possible (leaving the descr_strat at a minimum) to (campaign) script even different starting settlement distributions depending on player faction choice. It looks like a faction is granted a certain settlement if it has units spawn to this location. At least this is what changes to the descr_strat lead me to believe. I haven't tired it yet.

Originally Posted by Giumbix

However if you say they became more active because you made them named characters, there must be something I'm missing then...

The rebels are definitely more aggressive with is mod in place. Try playing as KoJ... I started a KoJ campaign last night and lost both Jerusalem and Tyrus to the rebels within the first few turns! Actually the rebels besieged Jerusalem until the garrison surrendered- ie no assault! USUALLY the rebel generals just stand around waiting to be attacked, or hide and hope for an ambush, but with this mod I think they check their strength against the garrison size and attack if the odds are favorable. Taiji's spawned general for the KoJ campaign are seriously OP, in my opinion. They also appear to join up a bit more frequently. I'd love to hear what others think. I'm looking at balancing these sorts of factors the next version. (PS: I will post the next files as a Custom Campaign so that it doesn't mess with the original BB at all.)

Originally Posted by Giumbix

5) I'm very sorry, I didn't have time yet to check your mod nor to see what is the problem with Trebizond and other settlement

Hey man, don't worry about that. Worry about calculus

Originally Posted by Cyprian2

It'd be nice to find some custom character portraits besides the vanilla ones, but it's no big deal. Now that I mention it, there some great portraits in TaronQuinn's unreleased Chansons de Geste (which also makes use of some great named rebel characters). (I'm not sure what permissions would be required to get those, but I'll PM you with more about it in the future.)

That's a great idea Cyprian. I'm not sure how to make a particular general take on a particular portrait but I agree it would be cool to customize them to that extent. Look forward to hearing from you.

Originally Posted by Cyprian2

One thing I'd like to do for my own mod is make it so the starting generals within most factions are already disloyal (eg. by giving most rulers the trait "inspires civil war"). Thus, at least one general would have the trait "rebel" and be totally out of the player's control (for smaller factions, these would obviously be fewer, while a large "steamroller" like HRE might have several "rebels." I think this would be fairly historical, too -- approximating the various dukes and counts who were vassals in name only -- and thus building an empire would require some truly Herculean efforts on the part of the player (as in history). I have yet to experiment with how this might affect the AI's prospects for growth, but it's very early stages.

Cyprian, why not have a go at giving traits/ ancillaries to the generals spawned by the campaign script? That is those generals that appear depending on which faction is chosen by the player. I would be happy to combine our work into a slightly more substantial mod... "Heretics and Hoodlums" or something like that?

Something bothering me is that my little rebel settlement surprise doesn't disappear when castles are captured, only cities. Unfortunately the AI doesn't destroy them so they end up not being able to recruit from ex-rebel castles... Does anyone know if I should define a castle version of this building, and if so, will it then be destroyed when the AI takes a rebel castle? Thanks in advance!

Originally Posted by Kaskad

I have installed you patch but can not see any changes... What detail in the game should I check first to confirm the installation has succeeded ?
I can see the difference of size 25MB with the original desc_strat file in my imperial_campaign folder, but nothing noticed in the game...

That should be 25kB (of bone chilling badness!) Kaskad. But yeah, you only get a good view of my generals if you assault their settlement and right click their army. Otherwise the effects will only be apparent in the game-play.
Have you tried one days patch? here http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...ix-for-BB-4-24
It includes and simplifies installation of some of the changes you've posted about.

**Drinka of the Rum** · April 15, 2013, 06:35 AM

Giumbix, the AI must have some sort of strength calculation it does to prevent small AI factions from launching suicidal campaigns against stronger factions. Perhaps the named characters alter the relative strength the of the rebels enough to put them on the offensive. With this mod the Indie Kingdoms have gone from a collection of leaderless brigands to an empire which starts the game with ~100 settlements and 200 generals! I suppose it's the their AI that keeps them on a leash.

Actually I was looking at this recently. I changed their setting in the d_s file from (I think) "trader smith" to "fortified smith." I haven't tested this much yet, but I hope tinkering with them will make them more aggressive still. Unfortunately it appears that there is a "high level AI" which is out of reach to modders. I've been looking at the AI files in various mods and they are very small. Looks like, on the campaign map, we can only slightly influence Long Term Goal Directors or something like that... Maybe I should look in the MIITW folder? Sounds likely to lead to a re-install, right?

Just once I would like to see the Papal States take Florence... Their AI has been crippled for some reason. Why shouldn't they build their own empire? Any thoughts?

BTW, I write posts that are far too long, so don't feel that you have to address every point. Any feedback is appreciated.

**Kaskad** · April 15, 2013, 08:44 PM

During the Middle-Age (and even after) the Papauty was owning the Spiritual Power, whereas the Catholics Kings were owning the Temporal Power on the Christianity. To schematize, the Pope had a moral power on the Kings (and all the Christians) by influencing their actions, and the Kings were the "armed arm" of the Church. But in reality, the only (but powerful) weapon of the Pope against the Kings that would not follow the Faith or his commands was the Ex-Communication, which was really feared by people of the time.
This is already well reflected in DLV, so making the Papauty a military force to be reckon in would be an historical non-sense imho.

**Drinka of the Rum** · April 15, 2013, 09:39 PM

Kaskad, I'm not sure where you are getting your information from, but you should probably research your comments a little more. Here's the Wiki article on the Papal States, for a brief overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_States

From the above link, this shows the height of Papal territory:
"In 781, Charlemagne codified the regions over which the Pope would be temporal sovereign: the Duchy of Rome was key, but the territory was expanded to include Ravenna, the Pentapolis, parts of the Duchy of Benevento, Tuscany, Corsica, Lombardy and a number of Italian cities. The cooperation between the Papacy and the Carolingian dynasty climaxed in 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor."

So, while the power of the Papal States was certainly on the decline in 1180, when BB starts, it was still a power to be reckoned with... And including them as an active faction is hardly "non-sense."

The Papal States are playable in DLV 6.2, right? I wonder why Taiji left them out in BB4. Anyway, I'm not of the school of thought that believes we should be trying to accurately simulate history. Good gameplay is my goal. Anyway, I'm not talking about allowing the Pope to recruit Elephant Rocketeers, I was just thinking of enhancing their AI so they attack neighboring rebel settlements etc... The goal should be a challenging but fun game, based on historical fact, IMO.

Thanks for the feedback.

**Kaskad** · April 16, 2013, 01:25 AM

Sorry for using the term "non-sense" in my previous post, I didn't want to be harsh

My meaning is that IMO DLV is already well balanced, and as you asked for opinions I am just not a fan about increasing the power of the Papal states too much as they were not military so strong at the end of the XIIeme century.

By the way, I tried your 2 patches, "Georgia" and "Mongols", and everything is working well

.

**G|I|Sandy** · April 17, 2013, 06:03 AM

Drinka, very well done! Very impressive. DLV is awesome, has always been, and will be even better. Just a couple of things that really need working on:

1) Please remove old traits such as Knight or something like that from rebels and AIs that are left from vanilla DLV (this mod is for BB afterall). Or bring them all back to everyone. This is tedious I know, but what isn't tedious in modding? Haha.

2) Currently campaigns are too slow. I end up having no buildings to build, eventhough I usually focus on government points more (i.e. faster upgrades). I suggest to reduce the gov and military points requirements by abt 25-50%? Unrealistic, true, but at least the campaigns will be more fun. Otherwise very fast growth is meaningless (nothing to construct, nothing to hire).

3) Loan feature, I only used it once I think, and currently it doesn't seem to work. Is it even necessary?

4) The gold income is very fluctuating. I can have 80000 one turn, and -10000 next turn. Happens when empire is very big. This is due to inflation costs, but still... Also the income prediction is totally wrong. This is again because of additional costs (field, agents, castles etc.), but is it possible to somehow code this to be displayed in the finances window? Something I really miss from other mods.

5) Make only historically big cities have stone walls, and may be all capitals. There was some bug Taiji mentioned, but still, wooden walls make more sense. All other mods use wooden walls just fine. Some forts can be wooden as well.

I will keep looking into this. Haven't played DLV in a long time, but surely will check this out sometime later. I am busy modding now...

I got involved in some other projects, but will definitely come back to DLV and make some unit models worthy of this mod. Especially European factions require revamps. All are pretty much vanilla units. Eastern factions already have imported models from other mods (Magyars, Broken Crescent etc.).

And you aren't the only one posting long posts.

Sandy

**Drinka of the Rum** · April 19, 2013, 06:42 AM

Hi Sandy. Thanks for the ideas. I love the work you did for TATW. Having 2 left thumbs myself, I find the work you artistic types do amazing. I hope you do find time to work on a few units for BB. That would be awesome.

Regarding the points you mentioned in your post, I'm generally in favor of leaving Taiji's work as is (if it ain't broke, don't fix it sort of thing...) but I have been tinkering with a few features of the game. (one day has combined a few fixes we've put together into a small patch available in the mini-mod section.) I've found I've had to be very careful in the changes I make since Taiji has obviously put a lot of thought and effort into BB. I'm aiming for an even more BB'ish BB experience than in BB itself, rather than a major overhaul.