Hello forum people!
I have recently picked up the game again and decided it was time to make the changes I felt were necessary the last time I played.
I'm sharing them here hoping that someone else can appreciate them. Any constructive criticism is well accepted, so let know what you think.
Of course all credits for the base files go to Byg/the SS6.4 team. At present the changes are as follows:
1) Recruitment of troops is back to the original recruitment buildings such as Barracks and Archery Ranges. They are not tied to walls anymore.
I hope this reintroduces the need for those buildings and castles, which I felt was seriously lacking; as well as a sense of progression in the units that you are allowed to recruit as more advanced buildings are unlocked.
I have also reintroduced some other functionalities of buildings. For example free upkeep has been partially reintroduced, but the economic penalty for recruitment buildings has been increased also.
2) Mercenaries no longer giving manpower is reflected in their description (e.g. Slav Mercenaries [1] --> Slav Mercenaries [0]).
I'm thinking about making only peasants available as mercenaries while providing manpower, to simulate a last minute effort to recruit more people into the army - I would probably make them quite expensive/giving a penalty to pop.
Also, I feel like the flat manpower cost per region is a bit unrealistic (eg 12manpower costs 200gold per region per turn independently of the number of regions).. but I'm not sure whether I want to change that or how.
Let me know what you think.
3) The Byzantines used to have 3 disjoint family trees (Laskaris, Doukas and Komnenos) which meant you could not see the Doukas and Komnenos trees.
I have joined the trees by reconstructing the family tree all the way to the common ancestor: Alexios I Komnenos.
Unfortunately there is 1 mistake in the tree: the Doukas branch descends from a woman instead of a man (after Theodora), but I couldn't find a way to change a male son's family name from his father's to his grandmother's. (If this can be fixed let me know how).
4) I have also made some changes to the traits, but these are largely still a work in progress. The main idea I had when I started these changes was to improve the distinction between generals (military minded) and governors (administratively minded) as well as improve the education system. At the moment the main changes are that all characters lose health (atm only affects hit points) while outside settlements (governors faster than generals) and recover it "resting" in cities/castles (governors slower than generals).. recovery is affected by the presence of baths and such. On the other side, governors have higher changes of gaining good governing traits on building completion.
Installation is really easy: overwrite the folder in campaign/sub/BGRV with the attached files (make a backup before doing this!!!). Than copy the BGRV.txt file from sub/BGRV to sub/ (up one folder essentially).
The latter operation is necessary because I'm now overwriting also the "names" files because of the new character in the family tree.
Best,
Kamma