Titanium Suggestions & Complaints

[gsthoed]

I've noticed in other total war games, slower combat seems to make it more enjoyable & seem realer. Outside of pure genius tactics & extenuating circumstances, playing out battles of thousands in over a hour seems more enjoyable than battles lasting 15 mins. More time to think about strategy & implement tactics, when units hold longer & take causalities at a slower pace.

My impression is the opposite; battles that last over an hour are boring; even in battles that last "15 mins", I press the "speedup" button quite often. If you need "more time to think about strategy & implement tactics", you can simply pause the battle.

[Chef_Jimmy]

you are modding this not me... so we have to agree to disagree. The larger units, slower movement speeds & longer combat are things that draw me to DEI mod for rome 2, NTW3 & others like it. I prefer more immersion, & longer play. The only thing keeping me under the 200 turn turn mark is either massively failing campaigns or better updates to the mod. Maybe a lil ADHD but that's my problem :p

[Chef_Jimmy]

The idea of tickable playable factions in the set up screen also seems like a cool idea & nice work around to hard coded limits. If said faction is ticked as playable in the set up then the necessary files are loaded to include it in campaign. With 1 free faction slot & this option in the set up, theoretically you could load needed files & have a infinite number of playable factions, assuring everyone can play the faction they desire.

[gsthoed]

you are modding this not me... so we have to agree to disagree.

It doesn't go like this. I'm not the one that decides what it is to be implemented or not. It is just a different point of view.
I have played Rome Total Realism, in which battles lasted pretty long. And yes, it was fun at first. But after a couples of times I got bored. As I was caring of going on with my campaign, I had started to auto-resolve several battles.
My last campaign in SS6.1 was a late byzantine one. I had started a war with the Hungarians pretty early. As a result, until 100th turn, I was playing 2-3 battles during end_turn (and it was quite fun). If each battle was lasting 1+ hour, I should have had to spend a whole evening to end each turn; when battles are shorter, you can do much more than this during the same time.

About tickable factions: The 31 factions limit is not for the playable factions, but for the total number of factions. Everytime you add or remove a faction, there are several files that are affected; we speak for a different sub-mod.
Although this is possible, the real difficulty is to balance the game for all factions combinations. And this is not easy: if we have 31 tickable factions, we are talking for 31! combinations (it's over 8*10^33)... If, for simplicity's sake, we have 50 factions and we limit the option to 30+1 slave factions in every campaign, we are talking about (49 30) combinations. Both these numbers are astronomical; even if there were 100 modders in this project who were spending their whole time in modding, they wouldn't have the lifespan to complete it.

[Chef_Jimmy]

I also noticed the all the faction AI personality types are pretty much set to default. While there is a couple labeled as fortified or trader, all are still labeled smith. I mean in the descr_strat near the head of each factions entry. Was this intentionally overlooked? Not gotten to yet? I've noticed that in base 6.4, only the late era descr_strat has modified values for this file. In my own version I have edited the early era descr_strat to my liking. Not that I've noticed a massive difference in play, but still anything I can do to tweak AI for more enjoyment.

[paleologos]

I also noticed the all the faction AI personality types are pretty much set to default...

It's only an Alpha my friend, the purpose of that early version was to allow players to discover bugs and imperfections for the team to fix.
This makes the community an extension of the team, sort of a virtual member dedicated to Alpha testing.

[Chef_Jimmy]

with a settlement goes into uprising, buildings are damaged & need repaired, would be nice if the same building damage could be applied while a city is under siege. During times of unrest, army takes casualties, civilians die, & buildings are damaged. I think they same thing should apply to a settlement under siege.

[DieStunde]

I don't know if that's being asked before:
Will there be unique settlement models? (for example: Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem and others)

[paleologos]

I don't know if that's being asked before:
Will there be unique settlement models? (for example: Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem and others)

We are only a handful of people and among them I am the only modeller and have never bothered learning anything other than unit models.
I don't know if there are any unique settlement models already made by other people.
Do you have any recommendations?

[GenPattonx]

That would be awsome, so far as i know only TATW is doing unique settlements and it seems everything is possible, people should stop remaking units (no offense that too is important and amazing) but it's about time to focus on creating relatively historical accurate settlements, starting with the most important ones, but of course which ones are important can be a mather of great discussion, so i guess voting would solve the problem. I have 0 modding experience but creating settlements from scratch for this game that's something that i would love to be a part of, personally i'm studying architecture and i know how to work with some 3D programs, but from what i've seen the programs to create models for this game are not familiar to me

[gsthoed]

True, in TATW there are custom settlements and they are often the cause of some serious bugs, especially in siege battles. I wouldn't oppose, however, to some reskining of walls, building etc... But I consider even this as a feature of least significant importance.

[paleologos]

Truth be told, I would love to be able to fix the stupid layout of some city walls and if I had the skills required to do it I would do away with the distinction between castles and cities in this game and I would model cities with both walls and a citadel.
Not to mention, I would love to model the walls of Constantinople.

I, however, do not have the required skills and the opportunity cost of learning them is more than I can "afford".

...so i guess voting would solve the problem...

That was not a very thoughtfully made point.
I am nobody's employee, what I make, I make because I want to see them in my game.
My hobby and the ways I allocate my time and effort are not subject to the rules of democracy.
(Or democracy might just as well become the situation where two wolves and a sheep vote on what to eat.)

[gsthoed]

but of course which ones are important can be a mather of great discussion, so i guess voting would solve the problem

There is no need for any voting; it 's you the one that has the vision. You 'll do what you want or are able to do; same goes for every modder. It depends on how far you'll go, but probably you'll have to make the battle AI to adapt to those new settlements.

[GenPattonx]

That was not a very thoughtfully made point.
I am nobody's employee, what I make, I make because I want to see them in my game.
My hobby and the ways I allocate my time and effort are not subject to the rules of democracy.
(Or democracy might just as well become the situation where two wolves and a sheep vote on what to eat.)

oh sorry if i offended, i didn't realise what u say, i said it because that's what i would do if it was me. I wouldn't want to create settlements that major people wouldnt care much to see in the game, i would do what everyone think its best. If i was a modder, of course that i would mode stuff for me, but i wouldn't want to change much without knowing if people would like it or not

[DieStunde]

We are only a handful of people and among them I am the only modeller and have never bothered learning anything other than unit models.
I don't know if there are any unique settlement models already made by other people.
Do you have any recommendations?

oh..i see..

from tsardoms total war:
Constantinople


Tarnovo



(for basic cities:
Byzantine Cities Strat Models:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...s-Strat-Models

The Idea, for each minor/important Settlement a unique strat model sounds great.
Sometime, i would love to start/learn modding. For now, i am only able to do some basic text editing changes (like in the: export_descr_unit and descr_strat text files )
The Settlements could be: London, Paris, Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo, Mecca, Baghdad, Moscow..


isn't that a unique model for Paris?
so that's already in?

[paleologos]

oh sorry if i offended, i didn't realise what u say, i said it because that's what i would do if it was me. I wouldn't want to create settlements that major people wouldnt care much to see in the game, i would do what everyone think its best. If i was a modder, of course that i would mode stuff for me, but i wouldn't want to change much without knowing if people would like it or not

I was not offended.
I understand your point, I do not reject it completely.
But it only applies if I want to mod two different "areas" of the game and (obviously I cannot do them both at the same time) I don't care which one I do first and which one second.
In this case I ask the mod's fanbase to gauge what is more desirable.
My point being that only I may call a "vote" on how to allocate my time and effort.
Even so, I wouldn't be obliged to do what other people want with my time and effort when I am not receiving any remuneration for this work.
(Except maybe the occasional rep point and even those are not consistent.)

@DieStunde:
I see you were talking about stratmap models.
It's interesting that people bothered to make new models for those.
Including them in Titanium is up the other members of the team, I don't bother either way as long it does not affect game stability.

[Larkin]

Wow, three settlements all for Constantinople... that must bug the AI out like crazy.

[GenPattonx]

If it's three independent settlements, why would bug the AI?

This is something that i also have been thinking about custom settlements, because many castles or forts that existed were inside cities, or eventually a city grew around it or there were many cities with 2 or 3 layers, much like a citadel, so to take that settlement one couldn't just ocupy the city, one would have to siege the castle inside it afterwards. So in the first part of the siege, the target would be to controll the central plaza or square of the city, then it would be to breach the fort. I thought on how this could be reflected in the game, and what situations could happen, maybe after taking the city, one would have to wait one or two turns in order to play the siege of the innercastle, which it would mean that your army would hold in that first part of the settlement during the turns and which it could mean that the enemy could send reinforcements in which case u would have to both defend the city and attack the castle, something like that.

I was thinking about London in the other day as a starting example, take a look at these plans of the medieval city:

http://prntscr.com/5fh7jy
http://prntscr.com/5fh6wx
http://prntscr.com/5fh7q3

I'm not from Britain so I don't really know London but from what little i could understand it seems the city had a fort, a citadel and "tower of london" fortification, when i saw this i started to imagine how complex would be to take this settlement, having so many defensive parts.

I also have been thinking on the possibility of allowing settlements to hold more then 1 stack. I mean the game actually isn't at the moment representing the scale of an actual siege to a all city. 1.500 or 2.000 ish soldiers defending a city vs another 2.000 or 4.000 with reinforcements is not even near the numbers we find in history of sieges. London again as an example seems to have had 7 different gates along the wall surounding the city, imagine having to use 1 full stack army to defend each section! Now that would be AWSOME XD

[Larkin]

Because you could imagine the AI attacking only the middle part of the city, declaring a ceasefire, different factions controlling each of the three parts, let alone how Jihads would work... it's a cool idea though.

We can't change the code of Med2 to allow more than one stack. A situation like the Tsardoms one with multiple settlements reflecting one city would kinda allow for that - but it is unworkable for a large map like Titanium because we'd have to drop many other settlements from the map to allow this.

[GenPatton]

different factions controlling each of the three parts

yeah didn't think about that, it could get very complicated at some point

we'd have to drop many other settlements from the map to allow this.

true, also didn't think about that

oh well, one can only dream for a M3TW XD