Turks are a bit weak on campaign map - I wiped them out after 5 turns!

[GenPatton]

wow was that a campaign on this mod? because one thing i don't see anymore is AI having stacks upon stacks

[bigdaddy1204]

wow was that a campaign on this mod? because one thing i don't see anymore is AI having stacks upon stacks

Yeah I like the fact that there are not too many armies. It means that battles matter, and it avoids the endless spam battles which can be tedious. I think this mod has a good balance on that. I thought the same thing as you - it sounded to me like he was talking about a vanilla M2TW campaign.

[Larkin]

Yeah I like the fact that there are not too many armies. It means that battles matter, and it avoids the endless spam battles which can be tedious. I think this mod has a good balance on that. I thought the same thing as you - it sounded to me like he was talking about a vanilla M2TW campaign.

Vanilla Stainless Steel, actually.

[bigdaddy1204]

Vanilla Stainless Steel, actually.

Lol, I amused myself by going back to vanilla Medieval 2 Total War last week. I actually enjoyed it at first. But after a while, once the crazy OP factions like venice started sending massive OP stacks of elite units at me, I got bored and lost interest. Also, wtf is up with the movement points in vanilla - lol it takes like 5 turns just to move down the coast of Anatolia... nuts!

Really makes me appreciate how far the game has come with the help of mods. Vanilla feels like the 'arcade' version of the game by comparison.

[Dekhatres]

via Imgflip Meme Maker

[bigdaddy1204]

via Imgflip Meme Maker

This is brilliant. Well played, sir!

[Geoffrey of Villehardouin]

Actually, I do like playing Scots

As mentioned before, there's no plan to delete any faction for now. Removing Scots is not a good idea for the gameplay. That would leave England alone on their island. None of the other factions would be able to give them trouble when controlled by the AI (as the AI is not able to manage a real naval invasion).

If the English are an issue then they can be removed, too. Their rulers were just former Norman nobility who after a while fancied fighting the French. They were rebels in a sense, living in their quiet corner off the edge of the known world, like sleeping pirates aboard a ship on a calm sea, waking up from their slumber now and then to fight some distant heathen on a holiday trip or to pick the odd fight with the French when they were bored out of their brains discussing the weather. The only reason these two factions have been included is for new players so that they will not have to worry about the Mongols. The Turks are far more interesting, especially if you play as the Turks.

Are you gentlemen playing with the Gracul AI?

[jurcek1987]

If the English are an issue then they can be removed, too. Their rulers were just former Norman nobility who after a while fancied fighting the French. They were rebels in a sense, living in their quiet corner off the edge of the known world, like sleeping pirates aboard a ship on a calm sea, waking up from their slumber now and then to fight some distant heathen on a holiday trip or to pick the odd fight with the French when they were bored out of their brains discussing the weather. The only reason these two factions have been included is for new players so that they will not have to worry about the Mongols. The Turks are far more interesting, especially if you play as the Turks.

Are you gentlemen playing with the Gracul AI?

Removing England is not an option imo. But I agree about the Turks, if any faction needs removing it should be Portugal.

SSHIP uses Savage AI. But the AI behaviour is different (better) than vanilla SS.

[MWY]

Haha I don't think he was that serious. But well written nonetheless.

And no, SSHIP uses my very own AI, built almost from scratch.


Oh and thanks for the very first SSHIP meme!

[Larkin]

Lol, I amused myself by going back to vanilla Medieval 2 Total War last week. I actually enjoyed it at first. But after a while, once the crazy OP factions like venice started sending massive OP stacks of elite units at me, I got bored and lost interest. Also, wtf is up with the movement points in vanilla - lol it takes like 5 turns just to move down the coast of Anatolia... nuts!

Really makes me appreciate how far the game has come with the help of mods. Vanilla feels like the 'arcade' version of the game by comparison.

Yeah, vanilla M2 is so childlike. What gets me is how small the map is. How few provinces make up huge areas of land etc.

[Lifthrasir]

If the English are an issue then they can be removed, too. Their rulers were just former Norman nobility who after a while fancied fighting the French. They were rebels in a sense, living in their quiet corner off the edge of the known world, like sleeping pirates aboard a ship on a calm sea, waking up from their slumber now and then to fight some distant heathen on a holiday trip or to pick the odd fight with the French when they were bored out of their brains discussing the weather. The only reason these two factions have been included is for new players so that they will not have to worry about the Mongols. The Turks are far more interesting, especially if you play as the Turks.

Are you gentlemen playing with the Gracul AI?

Ok, so we need to remove Scotland and replace it by strong rebels and to remove England and share their settlements between France and Norses

[jurcek1987]

Yeah I tried vanilla last year just out of curiosity, then quit the game after about 30 seconds . I remember playing it extensively when it came out 9 years ago (time surely flies fast), but after discovering mods I really couldn't go back. The game looks awful now, ugly cities, ugly map, unit cards, models, retarded AI, diplomacy....
SS and now SSHIP made this game zillion time better.

[Larkin]

Yeah I tried vanilla last year just out of curiosity, then quit the game after about 30 seconds . I remember playing it extensively when it came out 9 years ago (time surely flies fast), but after discovering mods I really couldn't go back. The game looks awful now, ugly cities, ugly map, unit cards, models, retarded AI, diplomacy....
SS and now SSHIP made this game zillion time better.

Yup, SS made vanilla 100x better, SSHIP made SS 10x better.

[umbracatervae777]

i played vanilla version just for fun
it's so easy even in VH/VH

SSHIP is far more challenging

[bigdaddy1204]

Yeah I tried vanilla last year just out of curiosity, then quit the game after about 30 seconds [IMG]file:///C:\Users\holleye\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif[/IMG]. I remember playing it extensively when it came out 9 years ago (time surely flies fast), but after discovering mods I really couldn't go back. The game looks awful now, ugly cities, ugly map, unit cards, models, retarded AI, diplomacy....
SS and now SSHIP made this game zillion time better.

Yeah, totally agree.

Spoiler - I'm about to unleash a massive rant about vanilla Medieval 2 Total War. It's a bit long but I think it was fun to see the errors of the vanilla game, it helps to appreciate how good SSHIP is now

1). The vanilla game suffered from poor representation of several factions (Byzantines, Moors, Egypt, Turks) both on the campaign map (historically inaccurate start positions, poorly chosen province boundaries) and in battles. It offered a poor selection of units for some factions (mostly the middle eastern ones) as well as a terrible ‘look’ for Turkish and Egyptian soldiers, they looked ridiculous. The game was massively unbalanced, as small Catholic factions such as Milan and Venice were insanely overpowered and had access to better units than factions such as Byzantium and Egypt. AI behaviour was also irritating and absurd – I remember rage-quitting one campaign as Spain when a stack from Milan walked all the way from Italy through several neutral factions’ lands just so they could attack one of my cities. It was ridiculous and for me, it was a deal-breaker. Game over. I was not interested in continuing this idiocy any further.

2). Not to mention that on a deeper level, even with Stainless Steel mod, there were gaping holes in the campaign map caused by the omission of several key factions (Serbia, Zengids, Georgia, Crusader states, Abassid Caliphate) which meant that trying to play as Byzantium or one of the eastern factions didn’t really work very well. To be honest, it was blatantly obvious that all the effort had gone into western Europe and all the eastern factions were simply tacked on as an afterthought. How else can we explain releasing the game with something like 17 playable factions in western Europe, including Scotland and Denmark, when in the east we have the entire Middle East divided between just two (Egypt and the Turks)? Realistically, in this historical time period an accurate game would have been the other way round – it was the Middle East that led the world in terms of civilisation and wealth and sophistication at this time. Europe was just a backwater. So strictly speaking, a more accurate reflection of what was important at the time would be to have 17 Middle Eastern factions and maybe just one or two generic factions for Europe – I could imagine a campaign map with only two Catholic factions, labelled ‘Franks’ and ‘Germans’, and all the remaining factions consisting of all the different Emirates and states of the Middle East. Oh, and by the way, diplomacy in M2TW vanilla was broken and useless.

3). That’s just the campaign map. There’s also the battle mechanics. The charge bonuses were the wrong way round, so that units that charge uphill received a bonus, rather than the other way round! Also, the passive AI bug meant that AI armies would just stand there until you engaged them in melee. This meant you could win every battle by simply surrounding them with archers and wipe them out, taking zero casualties. I fought tens of battles where I attacked a superior enemy force and killed something like 3,000 enemies with 0 men lost. In addition, cavalry charged with their lances up until this was fixed in one of the patches. Also, siege towers and battering rams were invisible due to a graphical bug.

In short, the game was not in a fit state to be released when it was released. The work CA had done contained some brilliant elements, but really large parts of the game weren’t ready and needed time fixing bugs, making sure it all works properly and also more time needed to be spent on beefing up the factions and increasing the historical accuracy. I’ve no idea how long all these tasks take, but I’d say the game might have benefitted from an additional couple of months of development before being released.

Perhaps someone with a better knowledge of just how much work actually went into modding the game could give a better estimate of the difference, in terms of manpower and hours worked, between the vanilla M2TW release and the SSHIP version we are now playing? I’d imagine the difference might be equivalent to putting the entire game together in the first place – i.e. the work involved in modding M2TW is equivalent to the launch of a complete Total War game from scratch.

Thank you mod team, you are the best!

[umbracatervae777]

Yeah, totally agree.

Spoiler - I'm about to unleash a massive rant about vanilla Medieval 2 Total War. It's a bit long but I think it was fun to see the errors of the vanilla game, it helps to appreciate how good SSHIP is now

1). The vanilla game suffered from poor representation of several factions (Byzantines, Moors, Egypt, Turks) both on the campaign map (historically inaccurate start positions, poorly chosen province boundaries) and in battles. It offered a poor selection of units for some factions (mostly the middle eastern ones) as well as a terrible ‘look’ for Turkish and Egyptian soldiers, they looked ridiculous. The game was massively unbalanced, as small Catholic factions such as Milan and Venice were insanely overpowered and had access to better units than factions such as Byzantium and Egypt. AI behaviour was also irritating and absurd – I remember rage-quitting one campaign as Spain when a stack from Milan walked all the way from Italy through several neutral factions’ lands just so they could attack one of my cities. It was ridiculous and for me, it was a deal-breaker. Game over. I was not interested in continuing this idiocy any further.

agreed, not just terrible look, some units also have 'terrible' name, especially Byzantines
such as Byzantine infantry, Byzantine spearmen, etc

2). Not to mention that on a deeper level, even with Stainless Steel mod, there were gaping holes in the campaign map caused by the omission of several key factions (Serbia, Zengids, Georgia, Crusader states, Abassid Caliphate) which meant that trying to play as Byzantium or one of the eastern factions didn’t really work very well. To be honest, it was blatantly obvious that all the effort had gone into western Europe and all the eastern factions were simply tacked on as an afterthought. How else can we explain releasing the game with something like 17 playable factions in western Europe, including Scotland and Denmark, when in the east we have the entire Middle East divided between just two (Egypt and the Turks)? Realistically, in this historical time period an accurate game would have been the other way round – it was the Middle East that led the world in terms of civilisation and wealth and sophistication at this time. Europe was just a backwater. So strictly speaking, a more accurate reflection of what was important at the time would be to have 17 Middle Eastern factions and maybe just one or two generic factions for Europe – I could imagine a campaign map with only two Catholic factions, labelled ‘Franks’ and ‘Germans’, and all the remaining factions consisting of all the different Emirates and states of the Middle East. Oh, and by the way, diplomacy in M2TW vanilla was broken and useless.

because vanilla MTW2 (and SS) were western-oriented
not only that, all western european/catholic factions have generic units such as spearman sergeants, armored sergeants, feudal knights

[bigdaddy1204]

This could be a bit of an ask, but could we get the Danishmend Turks included in the game as a faction? I think this is kind of needed, as otherwise once the Byzantine player has captured Konya and Ankara, the other Anatolian settlements are all rebel and can be easily captured one by one without too much effort. Having a Turkish rival in Anatolia would also make the Seljuk of Rum campaign more interesting, too.

[jurcek1987]

Good suggestion, but this isn't Broken Crescent. I think the map is too small to accommodate another faction in Anatolia. But I agree that Rum is too weak at the moment. They need some stronger starting units and personally I'd add a region or two in the area like Dorylaion or Amorion.

[MWY]

The danishmends then would need to be even weaker than rum. Historically, they didn't last that long anymore after 1132...
I agree that they're an interesting faction, but they won't be represented in SSHIP, simply because the faction limit is reached.
As far as those cities are concerned: Dorylaion was in ruins apparently, Amorion was in bad shape aswell...

[bigdaddy1204]

I agree that they're an interesting faction, but they won't be represented in SSHIP, simply because the faction limit is reached.

We could always remove some minor factions that nobody cares about. Republic of Pisa, for example. That seems the most pointless faction to me, as they never achieved anything of significance and didn't control any territory. Another faction slot could also be achieved by removing the Mongols, since I've never once encountered them in my entire time playing Medieval 2 Total War in all its versions and with all the different mods.

With the 2 slots gained, we could then add the Danishmends and the Armenians of Cilicia. Or better yet, we could add a Muslim faction in the Tunisia area of North Africa, since it constantly gets invaded by the Sicilians and at the moment there is nobody to stop them. Perhaps the Hamadids or some local Muslim dynasty.

That area of the map (Tunisia) has long needed some love, I think. It's easy to forget when playing Medieval 2 Total War that until 1072, the nearby island of Sicily was under Arab rule and Palermo was in Arab hands. Syracuse was Arab until 1086 (a fact conveniently ignored by CA when they released M2TW - even though the game is set in 1080, they incorrectly gave Syracuse to the Normans).

So having an Arab faction in Tunisia really is a good idea, it would add balance and they could quite realistically launch an attempt to bring Sicily back under firm Arab control. While we are here, it (Tunisia) could also do with a bit more greenery just to the south of Tunis... : - )