The Urban Citidel

[Philippon]

One of the things that always sort of frustrated me in the game was the castle city set up. When the Middle Ages started, you were looking at an agricultural based economy culture which centered socially around the castle. While there were some walled cities out there, they were few and far between and mostly remnants of the old Roman Empire's urban settlements.

The Vanilla came up with a decent enough balance in that you got the good troops in the castles and the good income from the city making it necessary for you to have castles, but of course the AI always just built what it started with and never converted meaning that you often ran into swaths of cities with no castles. This improved your income but also made it difficult to get your good stuff to the front.

So I always felt that the mod should start out with only those cities which had stone walls represented with the rest of the provences being castles of various types. There would be no villages or towns represented and the player would have the option of conversion as he so wished as the game progressed. In other words, cities woiuld start out few and far between for the most part.

But likewise there was another factor in Medieval Europe which could be represented. That is, that sooner or later the castle transformed into a city proper. Toledo is a classic example. Starting out as one of the most impregnable fortresses in Spain, it gradually spread beyond it's borders and it today of course, a very large urban center.

So when a castle gets built to Citidel status, what I would like to see is that the player would be able to start to build some of the financial buildings which were, up until that point, reserved only for cities.

These would initially be limited of course, since the citidel does not have the same population as the bigger urban cities. But when the population reached a certain level, you could then build "The Urban Citidel" which would be still using the citidel mesh but would now have all the capabilities for construction that a city did. Thus you end up with a mesh of the two, all the financial abilities of the city with all the military options of the citadel. A sort of 'reward' for holding on to a few castles during your early stages of the game.

Otherwise, the only castles you really want are those close to your borders since, if you are a competant player, you won't be seeing any AI armies penetrate deeply into your country ravaging your cities.

I've seen other mods do things like this. One mod gave you the abilitiy to build villages around the citidel and so on, so it's doable. The idea is that you can keep your citidels and slowly over time transform them into a city which has all the defensive capabilities of a citadel but is likewise just as urban as a city of similar population.

[Basil 11]

One of the things that always sort of frustrated me in the game was the castle city set up. When the Middle Ages started, you were looking at an agricultural based economy culture which centered socially around the castle. While there were some walled cities out there, they were few and far between and mostly remnants of the old Roman Empire's urban settlements.

The Vanilla came up with a decent enough balance in that you got the good troops in the castles and the good income from the city making it necessary for you to have castles, but of course the AI always just built what it started with and never converted meaning that you often ran into swaths of cities with no castles. This improved your income but also made it difficult to get your good stuff to the front.

So I always felt that the mod should start out with only those cities which had stone walls represented with the rest of the provences being castles of various types. There would be no villages or towns represented and the player would have the option of conversion as he so wished as the game progressed. In other words, cities woiuld start out few and far between for the most part.

But likewise there was another factor in Medieval Europe which could be represented. That is, that sooner or later the castle transformed into a city proper. Toledo is a classic example. Starting out as one of the most impregnable fortresses in Spain, it gradually spread beyond it's borders and it today of course, a very large urban center.

So when a castle gets built to Citidel status, what I would like to see is that the player would be able to start to build some of the financial buildings which were, up until that point, reserved only for cities.

These would initially be limited of course, since the citidel does not have the same population as the bigger urban cities. But when the population reached a certain level, you could then build "The Urban Citidel" which would be still using the citidel mesh but would now have all the capabilities for construction that a city did. Thus you end up with a mesh of the two, all the financial abilities of the city with all the military options of the citadel. A sort of 'reward' for holding on to a few castles during your early stages of the game.

Otherwise, the only castles you really want are those close to your borders since, if you are a competant player, you won't be seeing any AI armies penetrate deeply into your country ravaging your cities.

I've seen other mods do things like this. One mod gave you the abilitiy to build villages around the citidel and so on, so it's doable. The idea is that you can keep your citidels and slowly over time transform them into a city which has all the defensive capabilities of a citadel but is likewise just as urban as a city of similar population.

I agree with these points... I raised a similar question a while ago - I think the team are planning for the construction of villages or something within castle regions, but I am not fully sure about this... :hmmm:

[jonny duck]

Perhaps the best way to do that would be to have special buildings for castles which are slum>village>town, and represent that with a collection of buildings on the battle map? These buildings would greatly increase the income of the castles.