EB2 live beta preparations

[RubiconDecision]

The stop work is on 4th of August, afterwards we asses and test the build for stability and gameplay issues.

If everything goes well shortly after 15 August you'll have it on your hard drives.

Wow, that's great news. I figured the last second of August near midnight. Kinda stunned as it's real now with a timeline.

[Admiral Piett]

I recommend using CFF Explorer Suite and patching the exe file to address 4GBs of RAM. This is a very common fix for lag in most games.

http://fs-uk.com/forum/index.php?topic=54930.0

[Coldfire88]

I recommend using CFF Explorer Suite and patching the exe file to address 4GBs of RAM. This is a very common fix for lag in most games.

http://fs-uk.com/forum/index.php?topic=54930.0

Im wondering does this work for RTW too?

[The Wandering Storyteller]

The stop work is on 4th of August, afterwards we asses and test the build for stability and gameplay issues.

If everything goes well shortly after 15 August you'll have it on your hard drives.

Yes!!! Though that's when my collage results are coming out... One day before 15th though...

Also mate, can AAW use EB 1 music in their mod?

[nein]

Do the Saka have Asian faces in EB2? Always weirded me out that those guys looked mostly European despite being near modern day china.

[DenniZ]

I'm starting a rewatch of Rome S01 and S02. Bring me in the mood for the release !

[athanaric]

Do the Saka have Asian faces in EB2? Always weirded me out that those guys looked mostly European despite being near modern day china.

I take it by "Asian" you mean East Asian, i.e. Mongolid. I'm not privy to the latest inside information but I'm pretty sure that'll not be the case. The reason being it would not be historically accurate. From archaeological finds it can be deduced that the Saka and other peoples/tribes on the EB map in general had Europoid features, although there's a small number among the elite that displayed Mongolid features (the remains of the elite are better preserved that those of the commoners). Also, the Saka were an Iranian culture. The westward expansion of "yellow" people into the EB-relevant parts of Asia began well after the starting date of EB's campaign. Modern day Central Asians are a mix of various races, but that's after more than two millennia of migrations of countless tribes hither and thither, and most of those migrations feature Eastern Central Asians (Turks, Mongols, etc.) moving westwards and the many of the original inhabitants of the region moving south and west into South Asia and Europe.
So, no. The most you'd see might be a few faces among the warriors (or maybe some Chinese ancillaries?). FWIW, the Yuezhi who at the time lived in modern day (Western) Gansu/Xinjiang had "European" features as well. This is why I object to the usage of the generalizing term "Asians" for East Asians: brown people and white people are just as native to the continent as they are.

[Legion_IX]

Do the Saka have Asian faces in EB2? Always weirded me out that those guys looked mostly European despite being near modern day china.

Saka were caucasians (europeans) and linguistically iranians. Why should they have Asian faces? In fact the whole Central Asia (todays Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) where inhabited during the conquest of Alexander and up to early Medieval by Caucasians. The whole demographics changed only after the Mongolian Conquest.

[Tureuki]

Its changed way before Mongol conquests.

[Legion_IX]

Its changed way before Mongol conquests.

Hmm, probably I'm wrong, but I always thought otherwise. For example "real" kazakhs or volga tatars (bulgar) are typical caucasians with mostly green or grey eye colour. And when has it changed and by which migration?

[QuintusSertorius]

How can I check my game is working properly in preparation for EBII?

I don't want to install another mod (then have to uninstall it), and I'd rather not have to play vanilla if I can possibly help it. How do I check the version number in-game? The patch installer said it was updated to 1.5, but then a dialogue box opened up afterwards saying it might not have performed the installation correctly. When I followed that through, it said the patch had already been installed.

[Casual Tactician]

In the options menu of the Grand Campaing it should state "ver 1.03" (not 1.05!) and in the options menu of all the kingdoms campaigns it should state "ver 1.05".

I've recently reinstalled M2TW Kingdoms + 1.05 (aka 1.5) and I'm playing a little ChivalryII to get used to M2TW, as I normally only play RTW mods. Works fine.

[QuintusSertorius]

Alright, just played a custom battle which worked, and it definitely showed v1.05 on the Kingdoms mod.

[Vexillifer]

How can I check my game is working properly in preparation for EBII?

I don't want to install another mod (then have to uninstall it), and I'd rather not have to play vanilla if I can possibly help it. How do I check the version number in-game? The patch installer said it was updated to 1.5, but then a dialogue box opened up afterwards saying it might not have performed the installation correctly. When I followed that through, it said the patch had already been installed.

I think that the "error" was caused by the missing Kingdoms campaigns (the patch expects to find all the campaigns) but it is not a problem since you don't need all of them to play the mod. Relax and prepare for release

[RubiconDecision]

I'm interested for the mod team to give us clarification about talking about the mid-August release. Do you want for us to help market it, or do you want us to be quiet about it in case there's a delay? I'm assuming that one mod team member is going to release another PR statement so it can be a banner when people visit the site, do interviews, make a video, etc as so many are thrilled.

Do you want people to volunteer to broadcast the torrent? People might do this for the first week, as the peak demand will surely be overwhelming. It will be the best, fastest, more error-free means of delivery. It also means less CTDs due to that process, and should cut down on tech support issues.

Side note: the new Steam patch will probably be out in the next 48 as they're finalizing it. So hopefully that will make installation less of an issue, but I'd expect a ton of tech support problems and the same exact questions since most people are not adept at this.

Do you need help proofreading PR releases? Do you want us to do anything for the mod team to take up the slack?

[Kull]

Don't get too focused in on a particular date. We do have the internal plans, but those could shift a bit as we approach the deadline. There might be some things that need a few more days to complete, or we could have issues with bugs or the installer or the web site or any number of things. The idea is to have enough time to accommodate all the unknowns and still achieve "August".

The month you can count on - don't pin your hopes on any particular date WITHIN the month.

[Admiral Piett]

Im wondering does this work for RTW too?

The majority of games that are released in x86 (as in, 32-bit which installs in Program Files (x86) folder on a 64-bit version of Windows) were limited to address 2GBs of RAM. This includes the TW games, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, etc. It's a common fix which basically updates the game to address more than that, generally from 3 to 4GBs. If you have modded the game to use really high resolution textures (especially in a mod like Roma Surrectum II), it does improve the loading times and helps with the stutter you might have.

[RubiconDecision]

Tweeking your CFG file in EB2

The CFG file looks at the base settings you choose in the vanilla M2TW Kingdoms game and then by default these are the presets for video, sound, game, and others. It then sets certain values for EB2 based upon what the mod team thought was optimal.

Changing the CFG file is very simple, but it has to be done with a program like Notepad, that doesn't add word processor characters in there. The CFG program won't be able to interpret those.

Now there are a couple of settings that you might like, and we don't know what the CFG setting will be in EB2...yet. But here are some recommendations.
[video]
windowed = true
borderless_window=true
Borderless mode is a configurable setting. Since turn times can vary based upon the kind of machine plus your "tweaks", then if the settings of your desktop appearance and M2TW antiquated settings are identical, then by ALT-TABing when your turn is over, then you can use the Internet, perform some task, refer to a reference manual, etc. But if those two settings are not identical or very similar, then it can crash to desktop (CTD). Be careful. Also realize that if you run something like the Internet, and then ALT-TAB without shutting it down, then you loaded up some program like Firefox and are negating some of the benefits of "tweaking". Shut that down as you want to avoid anything which could cause lag.

ALT-TAB in Borderless mode takes no time at all to load. If turned off or not enabled, then it will take a while to refresh M2TW all over again.

assassination_movies = 0
sabotage_movies = 0
infiltration_movies = 0
We want our spies and assasins to infiltrate, sabotage, or assassinate a target, but after watching the movie once, they get old and waste time. You can turn them off with a value of 0.

[game]
auto_save = 0
Autosave shouldn't be turned on in my opinion. It's frequently a cause of CTDs. Why? Since many people have autoupdates on their computer (like Adobe PDF, virus checker updates, malware checker updates, Steam updates, flash player updated, etc)...then those things try to perpetually update in the midst of M2TW trying to Autosave, and it can't since the hard drive is busy.

In fact, I feel pretty strongly that autoupdate should ONLY be turned on for virus checkers, but as a matter of fact, if I'm running M2TW, which is known to be prone to lagginess, I halt scanning my hard drive while playing. That's up to you.

But if autosave is not turned on, you need to be disciplined about saving your game at key points, like right before battles. It's helpful to name the save something like, "Capua270bcSRebs" which would be a battle with the rebels at Capua in 270 bc and Summer. This makes it very simple to replay a battle and consistent naming means immediately grasping which battle it was. A month or more later, you might not remember what year you fought, but you will remember an amazing intense battle at a place. That's why I don't name save games 270bcSRebsCapua. But if you do this, then your save games are fastidiously in date order, which has limited value.

[game]
label_characters = 0
label_settlements = 0
M2TW will show the names and the settlements as defaults, but that's a lot of clutter on the screen. By hovering your pointer over the same units or settlements, it will still display text instead.

event_cutscenes = 0
M2TW will by default show the general dying when killed or captured, but in that brief second, you're not controlling your army! Yikes. I'd never have that turned on as an event displays and this is good enough.

morale = 1
fatigue = 1
EB2 is a historical mod, so if we want the MOST REALISTIC depiction of units getting tired or being demoralized, then these should be turned on. Otherwise your units will have higher morale or won't get tired as quickly.

campaign_map_speed_up = true
We generally want to see what the AI is up to for troop movements based upon our watchtowers and spies in the field or armies with excellent line of sight values. So this should be set to true so that the AI movements are done RAPIDLY, otherwise LAG results in turn times.

campaign_map_game_speed = 30
We want the scroll rate of moving across the map to be as fast as possible. Some modders forget that this is configurable. It's often set to 10. Setting it to 30 makes it much smoother and faster. Realize that the BEST way is to click on the map and not to scroll, right? Midgame, clicking on the map region is way faster as you might have conquered many territories and you're trying to redeploy, and it's irritating to scroll, and wastes time. Note that you can zoom in to a map and so pinpoint exactly and click too. However there is a BUG where if things were not set up properly with the map and the mod, if you zoom in on the map and forget to return it normal map appearance, then in subsequent turns the map displays strangely. This rarely happens, and saving your game, and then replaying it, resets it to normal.

Almost always this is set correctly:
Change "unlimited_men_on_battlefield = 0" to "unlimited_men_on_battlefield = 1"

[misc]
show_hud_date = true
Most people want to see the Season and see the Turn and see the Year. The Season is self-evident in Winter, but in many turn mods with forced 4 turns per year (to account for 4 seasons) then it's really important. We need to know the year for reference overall, and we need to know the turn in case a mission says to do some in so many turns too, right?

Now this is important, after making the changes, make the CFG to be read only. Otherwise, your CFG will default to the basic CFG of M2TW each time, plus you'll lose the above changes. But if you decide that some graphic setting would be more optimal (test this in a custom battle to see which setting results in the best gameplay versus LAG), then you have to turn off read only, make the video setting changes in the menu before battle, then make the CFG read only again to LOCK it down.

Side note: Every time you play M2TW and save games, then each of these is prone to fragmentation. Stay on top of your fragmentation of your hard drive. It happens every single day with updates, with patches, with streaming video, etc. You can easily have lag with fragmentation.

There are many more CFG tweaks here. If you do not know what those CFG settings are, then ask before changing them, or else you might end up unhappy.

EDIT: Be careful with windowed mode. It means that the M2TW window is like any other, and can be accidentally trimmed by clicking and dragging the corners of the screen, and that could be very distracting.

Each parameter can be easily changed BUT it must be changed within its subcategory. So look for [game] and then edit or add the line for some game function. Likewise to alter a video parameter, look for the [video] section and edit or add it in there. If you randomly add code, expect the CFG to fault.

A wise modder saves their old CFG that was perfectly tweaked by renaming it, and then if they up, then revert back to what worked. It's common sense, but anyone who has ever modded has forgotten to do this.

[Vexillifer]

game.event_cutscenes = 0
M2TW will by default show the general dying when killed or captured, but in that brief second, you're not controlling your army! Yikes. I'd never have that turned on as an event displays and this is good enough.

Thank you for explaining this, I never tried it because I thought it would have removed the spy/assassin cutscenes. +rep

[RubiconDecision]

Thank you for explaining this, I never tried it because I thought it would have removed the spy/assassin cutscenes. +rep

You're welcome. There's actually another setting for that, and I'll also explain how to remove them if you don't watch them. There are more tweaks that some players might like, so I will add to that post by revising or editing it.