Prisons, and prisoner exchange

[Kahath]

I have been toying around with this idea, and wanted to get some feedback from some other total war players. One aspect of warfare that has been missing from Medieval total war 2 is the use of prisoners especially royalty in negotiations.

We can have a new prison building to construct that allows a city or stack to contain up to 20 units of prisoners. Anyone captured in a battle, or surrenders in a siege battle are automatically put in the prisoners tab. You still get the option after every battle to execute, ransom, or release though. Destroying the a stack, or city with friendly prisoners automatically releases them. You can't execute prisoners during a siege however to keep people from abusing the system.

I would really like to see this in HTW especially because now I don't have to kill off all my favorite characters. But the real use for this is in negotiations with other nations, as having captured an heir or faction leader could give you a lot of leverage in negotiations.

But it could also be even more interesting with new spy and assassin abilities. Spy's have a small chance to release prisoners if they infiltrate a stack or city, and assassins can destroy prisons with a chance of killing some of the prisoners by accident.

I would like to hear some feedback or any ideas you all might have in regards to how the prisons might work in game.

[Duke Serkol]

Hate to burst your bubble there, but this mod did away with the family tree system, so I doubt the royalty bit will work.

[HTD]

Such things are too complicated for the M2TW engine.

[Kahath]

Such things are too complicated for the M2TW engine.

I am starting to think that HTW is too complicated for the M2TW engine in general. Oh well, maybe someone will come up with a better idea. One that works better with M2TW's limitations.

[Kahath]

Hmmmm... maybe it's a good idea to leave out the building, and agent abilities and just have a prisoners tab for captured units. I would love to be able to essentially recreate OoT, or TP by capturing Princess Zelda as the Twili or Gerudo factions. This being a Zelda game, it would seem a bit off if we could only kill Zelda.

[HTD]

The problem, again, lies at the engine. The prisoners are hardcoded like that: ransom, release and execute are the only available options. Keeping, exchanging or bribing prisoners are far too complicated.
In fact, M2TW's engine is far from good, it's [PROFANITY]in' terrible and whoever coded it should be shot.

[Kahath]

The problem, again, lies at the engine. The prisoners are hardcoded like that: ransom, release and execute are the only available options. Keeping, exchanging or bribing prisoners are far too complicated.
In fact, M2TW's engine is far from good, in fact it's [PROFANITY]in' terrible and whoever coded it should be shot.

That's a real shame, it's ridiculous to have so many hardcoded limits for abilities, buildings, and units. It's like they thought they would never have to make anymore changes to the game. I mean if they ever had to go beyond M2TW's limits they would have to build a whole new engine, if they haven't already. But I'm probably just preaching to the choir at this point, and everything i have to say has probably already been said many times before. Oh well, at least this gave me a chance to exchange ideas with some of you. Thanks for the info it's always appreciated.

[D_E]

Hmmmm... maybe it's a good idea to leave out the building, and agent abilities and just have a prisoners tab for captured units. I would love to be able to essentially recreate OoT, or TP by capturing Princess Zelda as the Twili or Gerudo factions. This being a Zelda game, it would seem a bit off if we could only kill Zelda.

You could sort-of get a system for this working through events. For example, it may be possible to 'capture' a character by killing them (though they would loose most of their traits), or by taking control of every city owned by the faction except the one the character occupies, or by fulfilling some other condition.

...Heck, you could even hack together a prison prison building, sorta. It could work sort of like how recruiting generals or exploring ruins does, ie, building dummy units or buildings to issue commands....

In fact, M2TW's engine is far from good, in fact it's [PROFANITY]in' terrible and whoever coded it should be shot.

It does what it was designed to do with a reasonable degree of flexibility and robustness. It seems a little unfair to condemn it based on how well it works for a completely different game.

[HTD]

It does what it was designed to do with a reasonable degree of flexibility and robustness. It seems a little unfair to condemn it based on how well it works for a completely different game.

Let me list several things that are too complicated for the M2TW engine:
- POW system.
- Disable adoptions without making a faction leaderless.
- Make a general without bodyguards (buglessly).
- Track an individual unit or character without having to resort to names.
- Move a unit instantly from a point to another via script.
- Add a female character who can function as smoothly as male ones.
- Add a 32nd faction, a 501st unit, a 8th culture, a 129th building, a 201st region or a 7th special ability. Considering virtually every other RTS engine has no hardcoded limits like this, I have no clue why the creators would put limits when they are not necessary, while there are several things in the engine that do not have hardcoded limits like ancillaries.
- Give generals the ability to use ranged weapons.
- Make stuff like UI, building icons, settlement architecture, siege weapons and character icons faction-specific. They are all determined based on culture, even though almost everything else in the engine is determined by faction. Considering so many things are determined by faction, it seems extremely short sighted and odd that these few specific things are culture locked and don't even have the option of being faction specific. Perhaps CA was too lazy?

[HTD]

<duplicate>

[Cryus]

I wonder... (Now this is really a nooby question I guess, and probably the answer is NO anyways, but still worth to ask) Is it possible... to edit the game engine? Its a code I guess, so it should be possible to rewrite at least part of it, shouldn't it?

I mean, I don't have any idea about modding and maybe this is total , though maybe it may be worth exploring to change a few of these subtleties, if its not encrypted or something like this anyways.

[Kahath]

I wonder... (Now this is really a nooby question I guess, and probably the answer is NO anyways, but still worth to ask) Is it possible... to edit the game engine? Its a code I guess, so it should be possible to rewrite at least part of it, shouldn't it?

I mean, I don't have any idea about modding and maybe this is total , though maybe it may be worth exploring to change a few of these subtleties, if its not encrypted or something like this anyways.

I was definitely wondering this myself, and it looks like HTD has confirmed my first suspicion. It probably has to do with copyright law, and how a developer can prove it's coding was used without it's consent.

[HTD]

It's illegal, as far as I know, to modify the game exe.

[Lortano]

If it was so easy to modify engines to our purposes, then Shogun 2 and Rome 2 would have their own conversion mods. At the end of the day, this mod has pushed the engine to it's absolute limit, and we shouldn't really ask for more than the engine can provide

[Kahath]

If it was so easy to modify engines to our purposes, then Shogun 2 and Rome 2 would have their own conversion mods. At the end of the day, this mod has pushed the engine to it's absolute limit, and we shouldn't really ask for more than the engine can provide

A man can dream though... a man can dream.