Scandza: Total War (Preview & Download)

[Jurand of Cracow]

@Dansk viking: it seems to me that the script will also fire for the AI and it will lose population in such circumstances.

@FFJean: upload your save to have a look, if you don't mind :-)

[FFJean]

Dear both,
So that everybody knows it: I play many turns because of my style of play and of course because I love this mod
Regarding governors, I would suggest to have a kind of balance of the impact of governors being from -5 to +10, so that their impacts generally speaking is slightly positive (not sure what I say is easily understood, I hope you see what I mean, like a ladder, with no governor = 0 positive/negative impact, going from -5 to +10 with a governor).
Just two things I find surprising:
- 1 temple gives access to a archer unit, the surprise being that this archer unit is not a general, unlike the other units that the other temples give access to, which are all generals. Not sure if this is logical.
- some rivers can be navigated, but there is a problem that looks very unhistorical (except of course if there are antiship missile batteries in ports ) as you can't navigate, being stopped each time there is a port. I would suggest to give just the river room enough to navigate through the river despite ports.
Regarding saves, I have attached a 491AD save, at long last!
Thank you again, yours,
FFJean

[Dansk viking]

@Dansk viking: it seems to me that the script will also fire for the AI and it will lose population in such circumstances.

Yeah, all scripts are designed to work for the AI and the player equally. Now, of course the AI won't be able to adjust its behaviour properly a lot of the time, just like the player will be unlikely to know how to deal with every situation. It's part of the attempt to prevent late game blobbing. When AI realms become too big they will generally destabilise, and this will also happen to the player's realm if you're not careful.

Dear both,
So that everybody knows it: I play many turns because of my style of play and of course because I love this mod
Regarding governors, I would suggest to have a kind of balance of the impact of governors being from -5 to +10, so that their impacts generally speaking is slightly positive (not sure what I say is easily understood, I hope you see what I mean, like a ladder, with no governor = 0 positive/negative impact, going from -5 to +10 with a governor).
Just two things I find surprising:
- 1 temple gives access to a archer unit, the surprise being that this archer unit is not a general, unlike the other units that the other temples give access to, which are all generals. Not sure if this is logical.
- some rivers can be navigated, but there is a problem that looks very unhistorical (except of course if there are antiship missile batteries in ports ) as you can't navigate, being stopped each time there is a port. I would suggest to give just the river room enough to navigate through the river despite ports.
Regarding saves, I have attached a 491AD save, at long last!
Thank you again, yours,
FFJean

I'll consider whether to do something about governor cost/benefit. I see that a lot of your governors are very poor at management, giving huge malus to tax income etc. due to traits.

Hmm, perhaps you're right, all the temple high tier units should either create a general, or none of them should. Will consider it.

The ports obstructing river navigation is on purpose. They represent areas where you'd have to pull the boats past obstacles (waterfalls etc.) meaning you'd have to control the land area to be able to go further along the river.

That's an interesting save. I never intended for it to be beneficial to have that many highest tier settlements, but I see that e.g. the faction-wide benefits of the highest religious building are a bit too much. Generally, the mod has been balanced for play up until around year 450 or so (about 250 turns); beyond that you may have an unbalanced experience due to the effects of so many highest tier settlements. I'll see how I can rebalance late game probably.

[FFJean]

Dear Dansk viking,
Please, don't exaggerate late game rebalancing. For a few people (like me) who play late game, it is great to start managing the situation. It would be a pity if management would be destroyed by on purpose "balancing" .
For rivers, the, I would suggest to make them not navigable until you can really navigate past obstacles.
For general, your take !
Yours,
FFJean

[Joar]

Joar's buildings' icons are simply stunning!

Thanks!

[skatan]

Hello,

I have now played a decently long west-gautr campaign and figured I would pop in here to sing some praise and offer some constructive feedback.

Firstly, the map is gorgeuos. I'm swedish and decently well-versed in history, but not on a very detailed level for scandinavian geography of this period, but seeing the old town names of cities I know now placed in (as far as I can tell) good position is really cool (Skara, Varberg, Visings-ö etc). I like that some rivers are traversable by boats but from Vänern the travel to the sea is blocked by the port of one of the half-Dani cities there. Perhaps it's intentional, I have no idea if that was traversable back in the day before Götakanal. Not sure what the plans are for the future (if any) but the rest of the map to the east and south is very empty. I would have loved to send pre-viking raiders there to loot and pillage the poor settlements in modern day germany, poland and baltics, but there's basically nothing there. I have never modded so I know not about the map possibilities, but the map feels a bit smaller than the original, no?

The music! Love it! There is one flute like tune in the campaign map that feels like an odd choice, but other than that it's great. Even my GF roaming around the apartment while I had been playing started to whistle on some of the songs, hehe

The units look cool and I like the names, Karlar, Drengir etc. Feels authentic. The gear seems to as well, though me personally am firmly standing in the "overhand vs underhand" spear debate deep in the underhand camp, so seeing the overhand "hoplite" spear animation is not my personal preferred aesthetics. But it's all subjective since I have no idea if there's historical proof that was the custom.

The special units from altars are ok, but as often with these specialized units in RTW, they become under utilized because you gain access to them too late, they are too costly, and their numbers too low. 24 good grade units vs 240 is just too few outside of autoresolve.

but now to more hands-on experiences after taking over most of modern day sweden as the west-gautr;

Playing hard/hard may be a fun challenge (i chose my first playthrough as per the recommended), but makes zero sense historically. It makes it very gamey from a challenge point of view and forces the player to always engage enemy stacks with more units since you can't employ much tactics to break units with a numerically inferior force as you routinely do in RTW vanilla. This makes the game create an articifial difficulty setting just to slow down the human player's advance but breaks immersion for me personally.

This leads to the second feedback; the morale of all units is too high. It's incredibly hard to break enemy units and make them route even using a three-pronged attack (leaving one side open so to avoid the fight to death mechanic). I played maybe 20-30 larger scale battles in this campaign and basically only ever won because of having more units so that I could engage 1-to-1 head on and having one unit to attack from flank. I personally prefer game play where my use of tactics have a bigger impact on the outcome (which is my main gripe with ie EB1/2).

I would say that 99% of my battles against east-gautr, sud-svear, syd-danr, and the south norwegians whose name I've forgot was about half Karlar and half the first tier javelin guys (loesenmenner?) + a general or two. I went for lots of archers at start before I realized they were pretty weak in this mod. That's ok, I kinda like that. Archery doesn't feel like it was historically used as much (from what little I know) so that is reasonable. Personally I would have preferred to make the archers better (higher attack) but fewer instead (let's say from 120 to maybe 60 to reflect their scarcity in larger armies) to have the same net effect of kill ratio but make them more fun to play. As they are now, firing from the front into ie Karlar makes hardly a dent on them. You have to run them around and fire from the back to have an actual impact, which is cool when it works of course but relies on you having roughly 1-to-1 number of infantry units as your opponent.

I enjoyed the mod a lot for the 50 or so turns I played. or maybe more, I don't know (I stopped when the game crashed in a battle against sud-danr but I had basically reached the point where the snowball effect was about the begin anyways). We are not spoiled with good mods that focus on scandinavia and too often I am stuck playing some kind of germanic tribe as the closest relatable faction. Playing one faction is enough though since they are all the same. The lack of diversity between factions means the replayability is basically zero.

Thanks for this mod and for keeping the RTW community alive.
Cheers//Skat.

[Dansk viking]

Hey Skat, thanks a lot for the feedback!

The map has always been the main attraction for me as a modder, so I've spent a lot of time over the years polishing one area after another. The places where ports block the navigable rivers represent areas where you'd have to pull the boats past obstacles such as waterfalls (e.g. by Trollhättan). All of them are intentional. You can't sail the entire length corresponding to the modern Göta Kanal, since there's no connection between Lake Vänern and Lake Vättern, but just like with Göta Älv, you can get out of and into Vättern through Motala Ström (with several ports/obstacles).

I do want to flesh out Finland and the Baltic countries at some point, just like I intend to include parts of Britain as well, for some later bookmarks. There's no knowing when or whether it will happen though.

The most effective tactic for infantry is to get around the flanks with the javelins. You can hold the centre with some good shield units (Karlar or Þegnar for example, they will absorb a lot of the enemy javelins) and then run your lighter and more vulnerable infantry around the flanks. This way you can defeat numerically superior armies as well. Also, don't let your small elite units get annihilated by javelins, save them behind in the beginning, until the enemy wasted their missiles.

Well, most of your critique is valid I think, thanks for taking the time.

Cheers!

[hrolphi]

Tillykke (congratulations) med udgivelsen!

[Siger099]

Dansk viking,

First of all, great mod you made! I love the historical time period mixed with the legends an sagas of old!

I have some questions about the mod.

• Will there be more different type of units in the future? I like the design of the current soldiers you can recruit, but for most of the factions the soldiers are the same.

• How do you combat the migratory tendencies effectively? Because at some point in the game you get a minus 45% penalty and I find it very difficult to combat the penalty. I know that you need a lot of farms and temples, but some are ‘lockedÂ’ behind a town hall upgrade, which in turn boost migratory tendencies. How do you need to balance this out? In my opinion the malus is a little bit too high. I understand that the time period is about migrating but getting to a level where you can counter the migratory stuff is not worth it if you will get more people to migrate because of the upgrade.

• And the last question, where can I read more about this subject? I am really intrigued.

I would love to see your mod grow, keep up the good work!! 😊

[skatan]

Aah, I get it. Smart thinking about the rivers and boats being carried over/around! Rechecked my save and it was in the year 406 with 50 won battles/12 lost and I had 31 settlements with an ongoing war against sud-danr.

I saw you had modern day Finland pretty well mapped out so I assumed the rest would follow one day. Glad to hear it's in the plans and fingers crossed it will come true one day. Adding the british isles would be fantastic since I love these games not only to replay what happened but to play out some "what if?" scenarios.

Yes, the way you describe the battles was kinda like I played but I admit I didn't end up using tier 1 jav guys as much after the first 20 turns or so. As said, flanking around and javing Karlar/thengr in the back (or using bogemenner that way) basically only worked well for me if I had roughly 1-to-1 number of melee units to engage each enemy melee. The AI was pretty good otherwise to break out melee units to chase away my weaker javs or bogemenner which made me last armies mostly consist of only Karlar who brutalized their way through enemies by sheer volume.

Anyways, I remembered one thing I forgot to feedback. And please note your vision is yours and my feedback is but from one player. Just because I don't enjoy all aspects of course doesn't mean you should change anything. So, about the unrest mechanic for migration. IMHO I found it a bit too strong and the actual decrease in pop too low. I would have preferred it the other way around, a much tougher negative pop effect during spring and maybe summer and a less harsh negative unrest effect. As it was for me now, even if I used my capital Skara to pump out quite a lof of units, I was still highest tier city size at around year 400 (it was 7106 at year 406). This is as said all IMHO though. A massive negative population forcing you to think about how to balance building units vs letting a city build up, perhaps making it so you mostly recruit during autumn / winter and then fight during spring / summer. But this is only speculative of course.

[Dansk viking]

Tillykke (congratulations) med udgivelsen!

Takker!

Dansk viking,

First of all, great mod you made! I love the historical time period mixed with the legends an sagas of old!

I have some questions about the mod.

• Will there be more different type of units in the future? I like the design of the current soldiers you can recruit, but for most of the factions the soldiers are the same.

• How do you combat the migratory tendencies effectively? Because at some point in the game you get a minus 45% penalty and I find it very difficult to combat the penalty. I know that you need a lot of farms and temples, but some are ‘lockedÂ’ behind a town hall upgrade, which in turn boost migratory tendencies. How do you need to balance this out? In my opinion the malus is a little bit too high. I understand that the time period is about migrating but getting to a level where you can counter the migratory stuff is not worth it if you will get more people to migrate because of the upgrade.

• And the last question, where can I read more about this subject? I am really intrigued.

I would love to see your mod grow, keep up the good work!! 

Cheers!

For future versions there's likely to be more units, yes, but that might have a very long time horizon... Yes, currently there's basically only two rosters: West Germanic and North Germanic.

To avoid getting bogged down with migration unrest, you have to expand and develop carefully, and not too fast. Basically, you want to make sure you don't have more than one or two second tier settlements before you've upgraded farms and other buildings giving more sedentary belief to a degree where you get the belief in most of your settlements to sedentary. When you've done that, it would be a good idea to only develop a few settlements to the top tier (where you can get faction-wide sedentary conversion through the great temples) at least initially. You can try to manage population with taxes, so if you want to postpone the development of some settlements, you increase it. Also, from the start, make sure you hunt down enemy agents and check through your settlements regularly to see whether you have one of the culprits in your regions, spreading migratory belief.

I can recommend checking out heimskringla.no, but unfortunately most of the material is in Scandinavian languages.

Anyways, I remembered one thing I forgot to feedback. And please note your vision is yours and my feedback is but from one player. Just because I don't enjoy all aspects of course doesn't mean you should change anything. So, about the unrest mechanic for migration. IMHO I found it a bit too strong and the actual decrease in pop too low. I would have preferred it the other way around, a much tougher negative pop effect during spring and maybe summer and a less harsh negative unrest effect. As it was for me now, even if I used my capital Skara to pump out quite a lof of units, I was still highest tier city size at around year 400 (it was 7106 at year 406). This is as said all IMHO though. A massive negative population forcing you to think about how to balance building units vs letting a city build up, perhaps making it so you mostly recruit during autumn / winter and then fight during spring / summer. But this is only speculative of course.

I definitely see your point. The thing with population management is that it's very tricky to avoid some issues when doing it. Especially the issue where you get stuck with the minimum population (400 pop) because the percentage growth isn't enough to counter the yearly scripted subtractions. I might reconfigure the scripts etc. for a future version, who knows...

[Majkl]

I randomly stumbled upon this mod due to Gudea uploading a small preview on youtube and I have to admit, I am spoiled by M2TW so I find it difficult to enjoy RTW due to pathfinding, but that 2D art of this mod is simply stunning. Especially building and loading screens. Whoever made them is genius.

[l5c4sl3m0s]

Primally, congratulation for the mod Dansk! Only yesterday and now today did I have the opportunity and will to play it, and it really is a jewel, congrats again!

This is the main part of my review about him (Scandza) on his ModDB page:

"The modification can be considered as one of the best historical mods in a completely unique scenario. With new features in addition to implement mechanics such as Migration and Sedentarism, which lead to unrest in villages, interfering directly in the game, making in certain cases you change your strategy and choose one that suits your situation. The 2D Art for the units, buildings, interface and portraits gives a new perspective until then, both made by Joar. Completely immersive soundtrack by the Krauka group, it stabilizes, porting you to a new game."

Obviously, it would not be possible to say exactly everything contained in the mod here, without running the risk of the review becoming too long.

[Dansk viking]

I randomly stumbled upon this mod due to Gudea uploading a small preview on youtube and I have to admit, I am spoiled by M2TW so I find it difficult to enjoy RTW due to pathfinding, but that 2D art of this mod is simply stunning. Especially building and loading screens. Whoever made them is genius.

That'd be Joar

Primally, congratulation for the mod Dansk! Only yesterday and now today did I have the opportunity and will to play it, and it really is a jewel, congrats again!

This is the main part of my review about him (Scandza) on his ModDB page:

"The modification can be considered as one of the best historical mods in a completely unique scenario. With new features in addition to implement mechanics such as Migration and Sedentarism, which lead to unrest in villages, interfering directly in the game, making in certain cases you change your strategy and choose one that suits your situation. The 2D Art for the units, buildings, interface and portraits gives a new perspective until then, both made by Joar. Completely immersive soundtrack by the Krauka group, it stabilizes, porting you to a new game."

Obviously, it would not be possible to say exactly everything contained in the mod here, without running the risk of the review becoming too long.

Thank you very much for the kind words!

[Dansk viking]

There's a new patch available. Get it here:

ModDB

Dropbox


The patch is cumulative, which means it includes all previous patches in one package.


Installation:
- Extract the "scandza" folder into your "bi" folder inside your main RTW folder (eg. "D:\SteamLibrary\SteamApps\common\Rome Total War Gold\bi") overwriting/patching the previously placed full version "scandza" folder.

(Can be applied to both a clean full version or a previously patched version - save games from previous versions can be continued without issues).

Patch 1.1 (14-01-22)

CHANGELOG

- An extra level of assembly (Great Assembly) can be constructed, which counters the faction-wide migration unrest penalty of 2nd tier government buildings. At 3rd tier government building (King's Longhouse) you can host additional quarterly or monthly assemblies that will give a 5% local sedentary belief bonus and extra public order, though it comes at a cost to your income (using the "stage_games" mechanic).
- Warlord's Stables allows you to host races for public order benefits, but also comes at a cost.
- 3rd tier government building gives another 5% faction-wide penalty to sedentary, and 4th yet another, but both can be countered within their own tier by Dynastic Barrows and Great Temples, respectably.
- Great Temples only provide 5% faction-wide bonus to sedentary belief, and only either 5% happiness or 5% law depending on type.
- 1st tier government buildings now only gives 0.5% growth bonus (previously 1%).
- Short descriptions of some new buildings have been fixed.
- All elite units recruited from temples will create a new general.
- All general's retinue units are marked as such in their description.
- Regular general's retinue can be recruited from the third tier government building and up.
- When the garrison is too big compared with population, the script that destroys government and recruitment buildings also adds significantly more population than before, to give the settlements a better chance of sustaining population afterwards.
- Named characters of the Raumar, Upp-Svíar, and Vestr-Gautar factions now use the general model with red clothing.

[hrolphi]

Hi Dansk viking

I haven't played Scandza yet as I don't have a PC yet. But I dream about it often!
One of the things i wonder about is the battlemap terrain. Do you have custom terrain in scandza?

I remember playing Roma Surrectum, and loving the terrain/trees and foliage depicting lush northern european deciduous forests etc.. Green, thick!
I m m e r s i v e !
But I didnt like playing cimbri as it was so underwhelmingly unauthentic... I dream of running my drengir around those RS woods...

So from this daydreaming, I would like to ask: (and I have no knowledge about how demanding this would be)
Do you plan on including RS terrain in Scandza?
Or could it be a submod? (like I remember there was for EB)

- Hrolfr

[Dansk viking]

It's possible I'll include some sort of RS/new battle map environment in a future version

[Magnentius]

It's possible I'll include some sort of RS/new battle map environment in a future version

The answer came a year later. During that time the Norsemen circumnavigated Scandinavia more than once... Interesting mod and definetely worth trying
Greets Mag

[Dansk viking]

Good things come to those who wait

Here are some screenshots of what I've been working on: New environments based on Roma Surrectum 3's - to be released alongside the forthcoming patch.

BATTLEMAP

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

CAMPAIGN MAP

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[skatan]

Looks incredible! Great to hear you still work in this.

All the best//skat.