Sicilian Vespers(2.5) vs. Road to Jerusalem, Stainless Steel, and Others

[redeyez]

Like other mods, Sicilian Vespers includes smaller mods, but what sets it apart from other mods I've played, like Road to Jerusalem and Stainless Steel, is its original gameplay.

Features I like about this mod:
-Levy-spawning: The spawning of levies when a town is attacked is the most original aspect of this mod
-Greater army movement: armies can move farther
-Greater Recruitment Capabilities: 3,4,5 slot recruitment queues. You have more units to choose from than either peasants or spearmen, because you can start in the Renaissance era and there's some faction specific units.
-AI is better, relatively. It's aggressive compared to the braindead vanilla MTW2 AI, though I have yet to see AI that sends literally everything at you and coordinates with other factions to do so. However the AI will not always attack you when you're at war. For 5+ turns the Angevins were dormant with their stacks after I conquered their province in southern Italy and disbanded my army to work on upgrading my cities, then suddenly they sent a stack north to my province Rome. Does anyone know if attacking an AI makes their allies more prone to declare war on you? or if attacking their enemies makes them inclined to ally with you?
-More regions. More cities concentrated in an area means more fighting, less boring traveling across the world, and more income.
- Diplomacy seems better than vanilla MTW2. Although I make "very generous" proposals for a ceasefire, the AI "just rejects" it every time. AI will more stingily trade their map information for yours if your empire is large enough, will not accept alliances but will offer them(don't know what motivates them to offer). All of this is as far as I have seen.

Of the mods I've played, there's more to this game, more content in SV because of the changes, improvements, to the gameplay (those make the most difference) like the levy-spawning, greater recruitment capabilities, and greater army movement. Other mods change things that don't matter that much or are a reinvention of the wheel.

My experience:
Very hard/very hard difficulties, huge unit scale, German and Danish factions, automanage taxes. I like to conquer as many regions as fast as possible. I use autofight. In other mods I expand quickly on all fronts, except in one which made the cost of everything high. I discovered I couldn't do that in this mod.

I started with the Holy Roman Empire, went in debt as I massed my units to conquer the Italian peninsula, until I had to respond to Hungary, in the first game I played, then massed my units to conquer France in the second. Then I started Germany again, disbanded everything and upgraded my cities which eventually allowed me to have positive cash to support 1 or 2 armies of spearmen/mercenaries. Then I played the Danish faction and discovered the power of the castle-produced units. My empire stretched from Spain to the Balkans, but the turns took increasingly longer as my empire got bigger, up to 2 minutes, and the game started taking 20-40 seconds to move forces from town to town. Anyone know how to fix this? Also diplomats and princesses try enter diplomacy with me and nothing happens. Is there a fix for this?

Concentrating my Forces
I discovered the necessity of concentrating my forces, which I will do in future mods. Because levies spawn when you assault a city, you have to have larger stacks (especially of weaker non-castle units) and therefore fewer armies. More motivations to concentrate your forces: When autofighting, better/larger stacks means you kill more of theirs and lose fewer, and with a stronger stack you can better conquer settlement after settlement (best in an area of concentrated settlements and against one faction at a time) since the better your stack is the more it can't be stopped by an opponent's lesser stack. And you'll avoid the evenly matched fights and vain efforts where you lose and have to reorganize your forces over and over. For example, playing Germany, I could've been using the resources spent vainly trying to finish off Bulgaria to make my main force in western Europe more unstoppable.

Other notes and tips
-Pressing the bracket keys, [ ], cycles between towns faster than clicking the arrow keys
-If there are many stacks around a city and you don't want to accidentally move to the wrong place, Ctrl-S can quicksave for if you accidentally click wrong, Ctrl T can remove city labels and J can remove banners that might be covering up the stacks or area around the city, hold ing down the mouse button to see a green line will let you know which path a unit will take to a city or when combining armies(so they dont take a long way around).
-You can drag buildings around in the building queue rather than cancelling everything if you want to build a certian structure first.
-You can rightclick on army panel and quickly click on each army to make sure you've moved all your armies.
-The M key merges your units after a battle e.g. 10 peasants combine with 50 to make a stack of 60.
-Some ways to keep your cities from revolting if you use autotax, which does not keep my cities from turning red or revolting: Pressing O and clicking automanage everything then automanage taxes may make a few cities stop being red. Instead right click on the cities tab, organize the list of cities by happiness, select each red one, press b to open the build window, click automanage everything then click the build policy arrow two to the left(which will turn the happiness green if you are not at low tax) then finally click automanage taxes. If you want to micromanage even less than that, you can only bother to send units to ones that are red and at low tax. This is the best way I know. Do you know a better way?
-It's quicker to use the city panels to view a list and see which cities are and are not producing units and buildings. E.g. In this mod, building the market and farm lines of buildings allows you to make toll roads, which give you greater tax income, so you can open the cities scroll, organize by poplation to have the minor/large cities capable of producing the tax structures at the top, the select the ones which are not producing.
-Disbanding armies and recruiting them on the other side of the map is cheaper than moving them, because the upkeep is a significant percentage of the recruitment cost.

I've played a limited sample of of mods. I am looking for original ones. I want to play one where the units use firearms and cannons. Anyone know of original mods or firearm mods? Anyone know how to stop the diplomats and princesses from trying to enter negotiations without anything happening? Anyone know how to decrease the time it takes to take a turn or the time it takes to move units between cities as your empire gets larger, or know other ways to get autotax to not allow your city happiness to turn red? Is the city 's income not actually the income, and actually a product of some formula that takes into account the city's population? If so how do you view the actual income? Is there a way to know which building will produce the most income?