The disparity between characters' aging and the years of each turn

[Calypze]

I wonder what the reason is that the characters age differently from the time of the turns. The characters age half a year per turn, while each turn is two years. What is the reason for that? How do you even get that idea?

It's the same in the Kingdoms campaigns, except that each turn is one year. Nevertheless, the characters still age half a year. Why?

[Vipman]

Leftover from RTW I assume. In RTW a turn was half a year, so was aging. M2tw spawns on more than 400 years so they shifted timescale for 2 years per turn to cover it in 200 turns, or else it would be 800 turns, also while most players in their 2nd campaign don't play more than 100-150 turns.

But the aging and also the seasons summer and winter remained. If characters were aging 2 years per turn the average time you can use a general (18 to ~60 years) is 21 turns, which is too little... An english general that is 20 years old going on crusade to Jerusalem would arrive there at almost 40 years, then he barely has enough time to come back to England and die there.

[Maklodes]

It is fairly silly. One popular solution is to switch the timescale in descr_strat from 2.00 to 0.50, but that leads to some issues with population growth. (Basically, with timescale 2.00, a city with 3.5% growth doubles every 40 years. With timescale 0.50, a city with 3.5% growth doubles every 10 years.) Being able to change the "growth increment" from 0.5% to 0.1% (e.g., having crop rotation would provide 0.3% extra growth rather than 1.5%, a city that formerly grew at 3.5% now grows at 0.7%, etc) would be ideal, but as far as I know that is hard-coded and not modifiable.

[Aeratus]

The date year per turn is governed by the "timescale" setting in the campaign scale. You can adjust it to however you like, and some of the Kingdoms campaign have it at 1 date year per turn while vanilla adjusted it to 2 date years per turn.

The number of years a character ages per turn is actually not governed by either the time scale or the date year. Instead, the character age is hard coded to increase at the end of each winter. Under the default settings, winter appears ever 2 turns (regardless of timescale). Therefore, characters age once every 2 turns. If you mod it so that winter appears every 10 turns, then the character ages 1 year every 10 turns.

As noted in the post above, these are remnants of the RTW engine, where the character age and the date age actually coincided. Everything had to be "abstracted" in M2TW due to different time frame and gameplay reasons. Therefore, M2TW now has a problem in which character age and date year are not the same.

[Aeratus]

Well you could solve the growth problems by increasing the population required to upgrade the settlement. You can combine that with increasing the number of turns required to train units.

The ultimate problem, however, is that if you decrease the timescale to 0.5, then the campaign will be over in 50 years. This falls short of the 400 year timespan of the game. As a result, players would quit before getting to year 1400 which unlocks the ships to sail to the new world.

Still, the real problem is that the game simply isn't a good representation of how actual warfare is carried out. In the game, military action is continuous. However, in real history, military action only lasted a short period of time, followed by many years of inaction.