Tsardoms Total War - General Discussion & Progress

[rafa123]

(Only for curiosity)What are the critical bugs they have found?

(Only for curiosity)What are the critical bugs they have found?

[Wallachian]

Some of the more problematic issues were:

- crashes to the desktop (initially we had a large number of crashes during the campaign and it turned that this was due to the fact that the campaign models were too large and detailed and the medieval 2 engine actually has a limit so they had to be resized)
- several factions dieing in the first few turns - initially about half the factions were wiped out in the first few turns due to internal rebellions. We have fixed this mostly. But we still get reports from testers that Venice and the Byzantines randomly die off for no reason. So hopefully we will figure out why that is happening

We still get crashes but they are not as frequent and are unavoidable due to the medieval 2 engine age. Usually it's good to restart the game once in a while in order to avoid CTDs.

And of course we still get things like these from time to time:

[kingman1337]

I saw an image of Timurids in Tsardoms of the Elephant Archers on ModDB. I saw the driver of the elephant standing. Has this been corrected? I know Thera has the animation that can correct this.

[Wallachian]

No, we have not fixed that. Could you share a link to this fix?

[Rocha Magna]

Hello everyone, from northern Italy!
I’ve been playing total war games since I was nine, I’ve tried out many mods, keeping myself as a passive guest of the total war center, but your mod made me decide to register. I’ve been following the processes of this mod for many years, and I am astonished by the effort and the quality of your work. I am not an historian (I’m an anthropologist, whom worked as a writer for Santa Giulia’s musem and other projects) and I respectfully kept myself from giving advices, but since the covid outbreak, I followed this forum daily, and I decided that I should let aside my embarrassment and see if I could be useful somehow.
I know you needed venetian speakers (probably you already solved the problem), my origins are venetian, but I only know the bresciano and bergamasco dialects, maybe for some AoR lombard units that could be useful!
Also, I recommend some tracks for the “northern italian” faction group, related to the time period:


Francesco Landini’s work in general is perfect; you could search material from Landini opera “fior di Dolceça”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugdwh9-i8as
Notably, outside that opera:
Ecco la Primavera
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHXtzNxzOYs

Also a lot of Saltarello tracks could be optimal for the timeframe, since they were popular both on lower and upper classes.
An example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_7gdeIOaL0

Keep it up guys, you did great and you’re almost there with the release. The final product looks just amazing and promesses to be one of the most impressive mods of total war's history, the right price for your outstanding commitment.

Saluti e buona fortuna!

[Wallachian]

Thank you for your comment and the lovely tracks! Please don't be embarrassed and feel free to comment whenever. Our sound guy is out of action, he did add some italian tracks but these ones are beautiful as well so hopefully we can add them too at one point.

Also, as a side note which may interest you we are collaborating with the Italian guys from the excellent Machiavello Total War so expect to see a lot of their amazing Italian units.

[Rocha Magna]

I did see some of their work, that's amazing

[NapoleonMaster]

I would like to know how spread was the pavisier (the pavise spearmen) in Europe. That's because your mod represents them being widely used by many factions.

[Wallachian]

The pavise was widely used in Italy starting with the XIIIth century however it was usually handled by two people (one to hold the pavise and the other to hold the crossbow or long spear, this is obviously not possible in the medieval 2 engine). By the late XIVth and early XVth century it was adopted in Central Europe as well especially by the Hussites from which we have a large collection of surviving pavises in many museums. But it's not widely used by many factions in Tsardoms at all, the Italian factions have the most pavise units while the Eastern and Orthodox factions have none. For example, Austria have 3 pavise units (pavise crossbow, pavise gunners and pavise spearmen) out of a roster of about 30 units.

[Hrobatos]

They were widely used in Italy, and later also Austria and Bohemia and Hungary after late 14th century. There are few examples of small pavises from Croatia as well.

I am not familiar with any evidences of them being used in Balkans.

[Wallachian]

Yeah there was probably no point in having a pavise in battles against such mobile adversaries as the Ottomans.

[Hrobatos]

Heavy cavalary was the king of battlefields in Balkans, and infantry did not formed important part of the army. Infantry were mostly militias ans conscripts and were poorly equiped. Anyone with any kind of resources fought mounted, either as light or heavy cavalary depending on their social status or light infantry.

Most defining Ottoman tactic was permanent raids into border regions even during peace times. These raids targeted villages and smaller forts, and were weakeaning feudal lords in those border regions by attacking their taxing and manpower base.

To defend against it, it was needed to be able to quickly assemble counter-raid groups, usualy mounted which had to be quick and mobile to catch up with Ottoman Akinji raid groups. So this was defining principle which led to development of Hussars, Stradiots, Hayduks, Uskoks etc.
Warfare was permanent state of border regions and was irregular kind of warfare, with raids, ambushes, and small scale conflicts. Such kind of warfare favoured small and mobile units which can be quickly assembled and could be quickly moved and then quickly disbanded again until next raid group comes along or even do counter-raids.
Raids were also very lucrative as soldiers were payed by loot.

[Hrobatos]

I would like to point out here that we in Tsardoms also decided to take a bit of a peek into what-if scenarios.

That means what if Ottomans never conquered Balkans?
So some of late Serbian, Bulgarian or Greek units have been made with upgrades that could have been had Ottomans not conquered these regions.

Serbia for example was importing weapons from Italy troufh Ragusa , and we tought its quite reasonable that wealthy and powerfull Bulgaria or Byzantium would have done same so we introduced some of those military advances from West in late 14th and 15th century to those factions as well.

[Rad]

Pavise shields were made and used in Dubrovnik, especially on ships and fortresses.

There seem to have been four types of pavise shield:
1. sentry post pavise - 4 of them cost 4,5 ducats
2. standard pavise - 4 of them cost 4 ducats
3. small pavise - 4 of them cost 3 ducats
4. galley pavise - 17 of them 11 ducats and 10 grosso

The differences in price are likely because of different sizes of shields. The small and galley pavise were probably more akin to standard shields in size and purpose.

Dubrovnik exported arms to Bosnia and Serbia, so it's possible that some pavises made their way there. There are records of shields being sold in the Balkan interior but I don't know if those shields were pavise shields or good old "scuta" - I will need to find the Latin transcripts.

The only visual example of what could be called a pavise in Serbia is the one wielded by Saint Artemius in Gračanica monastery. It is featured in the game - the upgraded Vlasteličić macemen carry 3-4 interpretations of it. Concerning Bosnia, there are stećak tombstones with depictions of quadrilateral shields.

Questions for Hrobatos:
1. What do you consider "poorly equipped"?
2. What are these what-if scenarios concerning Serbia?

[Basileos Leandros I]

Serbia for example was importing weapons from Italy troufh Ragusa , and we tought its quite reasonable that wealthy and powerfull Bulgaria or Byzantium would have done same so we introduced some of those military advances from West in late 14th and 15th century to those factions as well.

Byzantines rarely used, if at all, pavise. They barely used crossbowmen in general, as they had ample supply of archers and willing hunters to become archers, and as a result, the spread of the crossbow was rather an "anomaly" that was restricted to the foreign mercenaries often employes by the Empire in the 14th century.

Bans of Bosnia & Croatia, since they were closer to the Italian Republics which heavily used pavise, were more influenced by their military thinking. Some sources depict Albanian stratioti with square-ish shields, which are definitely influenced by the pavise of the Venetians / Genoese.

EDIT: No Ban of Serbia!

[PavleSubich]

Bans of serbia?

[Dead*Man*Wilson]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_(title)

[Rad]

The title of Ban wasn't used in medieval Serbia afaik.

[Dead*Man*Wilson]

Ah, I see.

[Jurand of Cracow]

The title of Ban wasn't used in medieval Serbia afaik.

So what title was in use? Maybe it's similar to Moldavia and Wallachia in the sense that the title "hospodar" hasn't been used there until the Ottoman times, but the title "voivode" was?