Announcement: Europa Barbarorum 2.2b is released!

[Barnabas]

In Windows 10 mandatory post installation instructions part after trying to install the first link (DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer) I got the error " a cabinet file necessary for installation cannot be trusted. please verify the Cryptographic Services are enabled and the cabinet file certificate is valid".
Google led me to this Microsoft fix: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...f2e9dcf?auth=1 which leads to this XP fix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822798/ requiring some heavy Windows XP (not Windows 10) messing (around 4 pages i'd say)..

Any Windows 10 users encountering a similar problem?

Edit: fixed the error' spelling

[romanius24]

In Windows 10 mandatory post installation instructions part after trying to install the first link (DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer) I got the error " a cabinet file necessary for installation cannot be trusted. please verify the Cryptographic Services are enabled and the cabinet file certificate is valid".
Google led me to this Microsoft fix: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...f2e9dcf?auth=1 which leads to this XP fix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822798/ requiring some heavy Windows XP (not Windows 10) messing (around 4 pages i'd say)..

Any Windows 10 users encountering a similar problem?

Edit: fixed the error' spelling

I never had any problems on windows 10 and also never had to install any separate things. Is this actually needed because of 2.2b? Seems strange.

[QuintusSertorius]

Just tried the installer version on my other machine, I got the "graphical error" crash on my first campaign attempt, but running fine afterwards. I don't trust the pre-packaged map.rwm, so deleted it before installing the new EDB.

I'd highly recommend anyone who gets a crash on their first campaign attempt to delete their map.rwm from ebii\data\world\maps\base before trying again. Just to be sure.

[Sar1n]

Good work. Downloading now...

Did any new unit make it into 2.2b?

[QuintusSertorius]

Good work. Downloading now...

Did any new unit make it into 2.2b?

You'll have to have a look for yourself.

[bordinis]

You'll have to have a look for yourself.

We mostly see you here as very smart and intelligent person with much respect, but we never knew that you rarely put a smile and that smile is a yellow one ;D

[al-Zahir Baybars]

Does it matter if there is no such thing as a kingdoms.exe, as in all current Steam versions? It's the full version of M2TW and Kingdoms, but Steam opens the mods seperatly, not by means of a kingdoms.exe. So I did not try yet, just a question before I start

[Rafkos]

but I might even wait for v. 2.2c,

Who said there will be one?

@edit
Ugh, Quintus some posts above, haha

[Roma_Victrix]

Who said there will be one?

@edit
Ugh, Quintus some posts above, haha

Don't toy with my emotions, sir! Don't toy with them!

[romanius24]

I think it does need kingdoms.exe
Other mods require it too.

The steam version should work fine though and it has the latest patch. You just need to make sure its not installed in Program files.(not sure why anyone would want to keep games there anyway)

[Dooz]

I think it does need kingdoms.exe
Other mods require it too.

Couple things you might consider - you only need to tick one of the kingdoms campaigns to install during the installation process, and after that's done you can even delete the folder of that campaign within the mod folder to save more hard drive space if you like. So I only install the British islands or whatever it's called campaign cause it's the smallest size, then delete that folder inside the mods folder. The kingdoms.exe remains in the main M2TW folder and functions fine with any mods that require it. Plus keeps your mod folder cleaner, if that's of concern to you.

[al-Zahir Baybars]

Couple things you might consider - you only need to tick one of the kingdoms campaigns to install during the installation process, and after that's done you can even delete the folder of that campaign within the mod folder to save more hard drive space if you like. So I only install the British islands or whatever it's called campaign cause it's the smallest size, then delete that folder inside the mods folder. The kingdoms.exe remains in the main M2TW folder and functions fine with any mods that require it. Plus keeps your mod folder cleaner, if that's of concern to you.

No, turns out you do not need a kingdoms.exe on it's own. The good guys of EBII in all their knowledge made a great workaround in the Steam gameproperties section as explained on the first page. By starting M2TW it automatically refers to EBII

[Dooz]

No, turns out you do not need a kingdoms.exe on it's own. The good guys of EBII in all their knowledge made a great workaround in the Steam gameproperties section as explained on the first page. By starting M2TW it automatically refers to EBII

Ah, I'm non-steam and referring to the following line from the first post.

3) You must have Kingdoms installed - at least one of the mods, though not necessarily all of them. EBII needs the kingdoms.exe to run.

[Casual Tactician]

Now... take it easy, EB team. I'm away for a few days. And when check in here, there's EB 2.2b...

You guys ~

Thanks for all your great work! Much appreciated!

[romanius24]

It seems to be working fine for me so far. Just finished downloading and re-installing M2tw.

I noticed some battle sounds from the Rome series. Noice.
Also noticed the Phalangitai Deuteroi shout their name now, i assume there are others?

[al-Zahir Baybars]

It works like a charm I thank you all, now playing Macedonia back to Alexandrian Hellenistic glory

[Dooz]

What's up with triarii arms/hands? Something seems off about the color/texture, look kinda like human animal hybrid limbs. Just me?

And just curious, are BAI's from different mods universally applicable across other mods? Are things like formations and attack priorities and whatever else just based on unit classes which exist for any mod, therefore would probably make sense if used interchangeably? The best I've ever seen was the G5 ReallyBadAI which was included in BGR V for SS, would love to know if it'd carry over in fine working order to EB2...

[z3n]

The short answer is yes depending on the mod, EBII isn't necessarily one of those. (1614/the DLV submod by Taiji/KGCM are other examples that come to mind)

To give you something of a backstory to the various AI's over the years, G5 is one of the names that comes up quite a lot (similar to CavalryCmdr, Darth Vader, GrandVizier, Taiji, Lusted, Xeryx etc) however certain people refused (back in the day) to acknowledge new information or adapt other techniques and worse there have been insults/competition in the past. I will try not to get too far into that, particularly in regards to the G5 BAI but suffice to say, every BAI I've ever looked through ,and I've seen just about every BAI/CAI ever created by a modder on these forums, has it's own advantages and or disadvantages. Certain rigid beliefs held by certain people resulted in some erroneous processes not to mention methods. That said, the most advanced BAI aside from EBII was created by Taiji as it built on fundamental principles used in other previous BAI's while including entirely new ones. Although some people weren't able to learn how to use M2TW's battle scripting language (Taiji's unfortunately was limited in that sense) so it is limited in that sense, others weren't able to learn how to utilize the full potential of XML and the schema (G5 was limited in that sense). I've used and played on quite a few, also testing them in custom scenario's as well to get a feel for them before starting to create my own and eventually over the various iterations thanks to player feedback/internal testing we were able to come up with what we have now which is a combination of different principles in regards to the BAI.

Therefore I'd like to think that ours in EBII is not only tailored to the mod, but that it improves on many things no BAI has ever touched or attempted to improve before. For example, you'll see missile units attempting to flank, the improved cavalry use/flanking in general, not to mention the new defensive siege AI or the way the AI reacts when in a defensive position to missile fire/cavalry charges, the AI is also meant to use the terrain much more effectively (elevation/hills), along with better unit distribution across it's battle line. Honestly, I could say a lot more about this entire subject but I'd prefer to stay out and above these things.

I hope one day someone else will take what I've done and make it even better which is why if you want to read a couple of things about either the CAI or BAI feel free to check out the AI Workshop, we could always use some new faces discussing or creating things. There are instances where an AI was truly designed for a mod, these being 1614/EBII/KGCM. TATW is worth mentioning while also being something of an exception as it has a script written for it which only applies to a city (Imladris). Just in closing, I'd like to say I learnt a little bit more from every person who posted or made a BAI. It was definitely an enlightening and intriguing journey, despite being tedious at times running the exact same series of tests over and over to check the effect of each change.


By the way, I sincerely do hope I have not insulted anyone in the above post. It's simply my (hopefully impersonal) impression of the facts.

[Johnadiw26]

The short answer is yes depending on the mod, EBII isn't necessarily one of those. (1614/the DLV submod by Taiji/KGCM are other examples that come to mind)

To give you something of a backstory to the various AI's over the years, G5 is one of the names that comes up quite a lot (similar to CavalryCmdr, Darth Vader, GrandVizier, Taiji, Lusted, Xeryx etc) however certain people refused (back in the day) to acknowledge new information or adapt other techniques and worse there have been insults/competition in the past. I will try not to get too far into that, particularly in regards to the G5 BAI but suffice to say, every BAI I've ever looked through ,and I've seen just about every BAI/CAI ever created by a modder on these forums, has it's own advantages and or disadvantages. Certain rigid beliefs held by certain people resulted in some erroneous processes not to mention methods. That said, the most advanced BAI aside from EBII was created by Taiji as it built on fundamental principles used in other previous BAI's while including entirely new ones. Although some people weren't able to learn how to use M2TW's battle scripting language (Taiji's unfortunately was limited in that sense) so it is limited in that sense, others weren't able to learn how to utilize the full potential of XML and the schema (G5 was limited in that sense). I've used and played on quite a few, also testing them in custom scenario's as well to get a feel for them before starting to create my own and eventually over the various iterations thanks to player feedback/internal testing we were able to come up with what we have now which is a combination of different principles in regards to the BAI.

Therefore I'd like to think that ours in EBII is not only tailored to the mod, but that it improves on many things no BAI has ever touched or attempted to improve before. For example, you'll not see missile units attempting to flank, the improved cavalry use/flanking in general, not to mention the new defensive siege AI or the way the AI reacts when in a defensive position to missile fire/cavalry charges, the AI is also meant to use the terrain much more effectively (elevation/hills), along with better unit distribution across it's battle line. Honestly, I could say a lot more about this entire subject but I'd prefer to stay out and above these things.

I hope one day someone else will take what I've done and make it even better which is why if you want to read a couple of things about either the CAI or BAI feel free to check out the AI Workshop, we could always use some new faces discussing or creating things. There are instances where an AI was truly designed for a mod, these being 1614/EBII/KGCM. TATW is worth mentioning while also being something of an exception as it has a script written for it which only applies to a city (Imladris). Just in closing, I'd like to say I learnt a little bit more from every person who posted or made a BAI. It was definitely an enlightening and intriguing journey, despite being tedious at times running the exact same series of tests over and over to check the effect of each change.


By the way, I sincerely do hope I have not insulted anyone in the above post. It's simply my (hopefully impersonal) impression of the facts.

I salute your work, such an astounding work to made BAI for EBII, respect

Sent from my Smartfren Andromax AD688G using Tapatalk

[Dooz]

Thanks for the response z3n, very interesting. And I hope you take no offense at any of this, hopefully don't take it as not appreciating all the hard work I know absolutely went into everything. EBII is my favorite mod of all time, hands down, and that includes everything you've done to contribute to that.

Just to mention about RBAI, I did get it to work following the manual integration instructions for it (and had a pretty insanely awesome custom battle which I barely won on Medium after losing 92% of my forces and killing 89% of theirs), but it's not a sustainable solution because I had to overwrite export_descr_advice.txt and export_advice.txt with the RBAI ones. Trying to manually copy paste the text from those into the existing EBII ones would crash at startup. Needless to say, those default EBII advice files are necessary and look to contain a whole lot of things relevant to this specific mod campaign, so unless I can figure out what the conflict is (highly unlikely), probably won't be able to use this. (edit: d'oh! just noticed the lines about modifying the Spreadsheet MTW2-Advice.xls instead of the txt file itself right at the top, gonna look for that spreadsheet!)

That being said, I should definitely give more time experiencing the intended EBII BAI. I only saw a few custom battles, it's just that I noticed some (what I thought were) strange things pretty immediately that worried me - skirmisher units being in the same position as infantry so they were mixed together (instead of positioned in front of infantry like I thought), not a lot of unit cohesion in general, a lot of individual units moving about sometimes breaking apart from the main battle lines completely and advancing against the entire enemy army alone (and not necessarily skirmisher type units but what are described as "line infantry" who just happen to have javelins, maybe even some without javelins, leaving gaps in battle lines where the rest of army remains), not moving around as one army or line/lines when the army did move in full, going sideways instead of heading towards enemy lines, some (what seemed to me) strange formations/groupings mostly due to asymmetry and positioning of types of troops, a lot of what looks like respositioning of a single unit but not actually moving anywhere just ends up in the same place with soldiers just kinda swirling around in one spot during which time are totally vulnerable. But I don't know, maybe these are all working as intended and fully accurate based on historical information. That could certainly be the case and I'm just unaware. Maybe cohesive battle lines weren't the norm. Battles tend to end up disjointed, broken up into separate zones from what I've seen so far with small clusters of units fighting each other, instead of relatively stuck together lines meeting each other. These are all even more pronounced when, for testing purposes, I group my entire army and set to AI control. Then without me trying to keep my army intact, there's nearly no attempt at having it be kept so and things break apart on both sides.

I think one thing that would go a long way towards improving or fixing all this in one fell swoop might be, if possible (which I think it is based on what I've seen elsewhere), make the AI armies function as if "grouped". When the player groups the entire army and gives a move order, it stays about as well in formation as it can while it moves. Meanwhile, at the beginning of every battle I've seen so far, the AI army immediately breaks apart and units move in disparate directions. Just having them either start out in the formation they "want" to end up in, or forcing them to stay in the formation they start in, would make battles look and feel more cohesive I feel like. Again, I'm basing this on having seen it function like this elsewhere, but armies would move towards the enemy together, then the main body might stop a distance away and the skirmishers would move forward independently, but still as a line in their own mini-formation, and do their thing. Cavalry doing theirs on the flanks. All the basic stuff we assume and do ourselves as human players. As it stands, a battle starts, the enemy army immediately breaks apart and reforms and keeps on reforming throughout, down to certain individual units just moving around in place as I mentioned before.

I do appreciate your "invitation" (so to speak) to check out the AI Workshop, and I will take you up on it! Only recently I'd actually gotten very interested in CAI/BAI and wanting to dig in deeper for myself while I was playing another mod waiting for this update, wondering what makes these things tick. And your welcoming attitude about checking it all out and joining in on the fun has inspired me to do so even more. Just please please please don't hate me, I'm not trying to whine or complain, I love and appreciate everything you do and I know that you know more than me and do everything you do for a reason! It probably all just comes down to difference of opinion anyway, like you were saying about all the differing philosophies when it came down to the evolution of BAI's over the years and disagreements between different modders. So none of this is anything personal on my part, just voicing opinions is all. Thank you, and I love you all.