Playing another mod while waiting for 2.2b, 12tpy really has me spoiled. And I imagine it'd be even more fantastic with EB, especially with Roman office system and a year actually affording some meaningful time with which to do something.
Anyone else into the idea? Anyone with the time/ability to do something about it? I figure it'd take a lot of attention to detail to make sure everything falls in line with the longer timescale, from building/training times, to cultural conversion rates, to who knows what else, in order to be a perfect 1:1 transition from the intended 4tpy. I'dunno. I'd love it.
Spoiler for subsequent ramblings:
Turning this thread into submod now to save space and make into something useful that grew out of it in the first place.
So I ended up trying and loving a longer campaign character/army movement range, with the caveat being that I didn't actually play the test campaign myself as the player, rather just let the AI take over and run its course over several decades (so I imagine a player might be able to exploit it and make things easier on themselves, but I'll leave that up to you), about 150 turns. Good things happened, in my estimation. Exciting things. Things like this -
Spoiler for campaign screenshots:
Around 258 BC, the Leusitane begin sending raiding parties up North
Eventually assembling larger hosts and launching full scale invasion
And by 255 BC, the Leusitane had taken this bit of Northern territory for themselves
At about the same time, the Greek League was sending excursions into the Mediterranean
They took island territories from Carthage, as well as from the Epirotes, then reinforced their new holdings with troops from the islands back home
The largest extent (oh shoot, no it's not actually, they had lost Sparte by the time I took this zoomed in screenshot of the map) of the Greek Empiric League around 249 BC
Here's the world at 249 BC
They eventually did lose some of that territory back to Carthage and Epirus, and the Ptolemies had even taken Rhodes by 235 BC, where I stopped for now
From my very rough estimations, armies move at about 10km/day on average... I think. All the same movement modifiers that are in play regularly still apply, relevant to the increased values now, so traits and weather and whatever else that helps or hinders movement will have its effect, including for agents who can make some nice long trips at a much faster pace which probably makes sense for solo or small groups of travelers. And generals/FMs can move across the map real well on their own without attached armies, for getting to and fro cities, handling business. It all pretty much makes sense to me, scale wise. At least, definitely more so than the scale is by default, which is I'm almost positive painstakingly slow for army march speeds compared to any numbers I've seen in what little research I did online for this. And even though I initially wanted to make this change mainly just for this reason, the realism aspect, it turned out to have a big positive effect on the gameplay itself in my opinion. Classic win-win.
Some more positive gameplay effects with how AI handled its armies included the way it attacked targets and reinforced its own forces. Even though a lot of small groups or individual units wouldn't join into single large armies, the way they would array those units all around a target was really cool, and might make for tougher battles against AI as the player I imagine (or easier, depending on how you play it). Because of how enemy reinforcements would be coming into the battlefield from all sides since a lot of times they'd move many single armies and partially surround the enemy, since they had the leeway to move and arrange units as they saw fit for the most part. And it's not like since the AI has this newfound ability to move really far, it uses 100% of the available distance all the time. In fact, most of the time it just moved armies around to key points, borders, ambush locations, reinforcements, things like that. It's just simply the fact that it was able to do this in one or two moves, rather than cueing up for several turns and having plans get interrupted and things change before they're ever able to be enacted in the dynamic campaign environment. This actually ends up making the campaign feel more dynamic, but also the AI more responsive within it, which is like a double boost of awesome.
There's honestly way too much I wanted to say about all this as I was watching a lot of the campaign unfold and getting all excited over what I was seeing and realizing the potential, but I didn't take down notes and it was a week or two ago at this point so some of the finer points have escaped my memory. Also I've rambled on enough at this point and I feel like the best way to get an idea for what this looks like is if you try it for yourself, so
Here's the quick and dirty:
Use Notepad++ (as opposed to default Notepad or other text editors to avoid potential file corruption issues) to open ...\Medieval II Total War\mods\ebii\data\descr_character.txt (make a copy of it first though, in case you want to revert)
Ctrl+F to bring up search bar and look for entries named starting_action_points
Change the value for each of them to what you want (starting with the ones from under "type named character") and save
Or you can download the descr_character.txt I've attached to this post and overwrite the one at the location mentioned above. It's just the default EB 2.35A one with this change made to it. But save a copy of the default one in case you want to go back, just remember you'll have to start a new campaign to do so. I chose 500 (1500 for navies) as the value based on initial estimations with the default, and what I wanted to aim for based on some numbers I saw thrown around online for what speed ancient armies might have marched at . It turned out to be right around where I wanted it and worked well, but you can feel free to mess around to your heart's content if you want to fine tune, give different characters/agents unique numbers or whatever it is you feel might make for a better experience. I hope someone tries this and likes it as much as I think I do!
This submod increases the movement distances of all character types on the campaign map. The attached file changes starting_action_points to 500 (default is 250), with navies 3x that at 1500 in keeping with the default mod ratio. Both these values should yield the lower end of realistic ranges for average daily march rates according to this article for land units (around 8-16km or 5-10mi/day in game) and average sailing speeds according to this article for naval units (around 50km or 30mi/day in game). Named characters will usually have higher ranges based on their traits and ancillaries affecting movement, making it quicker to travel alone for elections or other management duties.
Note on naval movement: measurement estimates with 500 resulted in around 10mi/day, which is what I'm basing my 30mi/day estimate on for 1500. Also, these don't take into account admiral traits which will increase or decrease movement, but even increased by as much as 300% they should fall within the ranges in the linked article. And when units are aboard a fleet, that fleet's movement is reduced to whatever movement points those units have remaining.
To use the attached file with the values described above, first make a backup copy of your default descr_character.txt in ...\Medieval II Total War\mods\ebii\data, then overwrite the original with the downloaded one. To customize your own values, using Notepad++ (as opposed to default Notepad to avoid potential file corruption issues) hit Ctrl+F to search starting_action_points and edit the entries.
[Submod] Enhanced Campaign Movement (v2.35A R3.5)
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