1.5 patch impressions

**bordinis** · August 03, 2021, 03:20 AM

Just some impressions on the current build. A very enjoyable mod, the best mod currently, especially by looking at battle aspect. Great work on the unit balance, decisions seem logical and balanced arround what units could do and not do.

So about units and battles :
Great work done about them nothing really to say bad about it. The only two things I found maybe changeable from gameplay logic perspective..
1. Some units in the game have 0 armour. I never liked that but then again it s a consideration maybe giving some profesional untis 1 armour instead ( Moldavian foot archers horse archers etc )
2. Horse archers. They have a large variety in the game and there are atleast 4 or 5 factions who have them many. So my issue with them is that light HA are not really good in this game. I was playing Moldavia and recruited cuman ha and they seem to underperform in an aspect of not getting hit or chased down by heavy or medium cavalry. So one good example is EB2 where in my opinion they did light horse archers a good unit. They increased the skirmish range at witch the units retreats from encroaching enemy units and they gave them very good stamina and very good speeds ( basically maneauverability ). In the current build I had hard time getting away from the Mongol hreavy cavalry ( Mirza ) My cumans got chased down and got many casualties in battles. So why recruit them as they are now? stationary foot archers with sharpened stakes look way more appealing. I am not talking damage here or lethality ( it s made perfect in this game ) I m talking the strenghts of light or medium ha in this game via their speed and ability to no get chased and hit. Foot archers and other ha should be the hard counter to horse archers not heavy cavalry. So guys don t use cuman horse archers they are expensive and not fast enough to run away

Just a joke..
Anything else in battles, I have no complaints whatsoever. Enjoying them very much. It could take me a whole day to write what you guys did and got right about the unit and battle leathality and balance. Absolutely great job! Smart people put really good emphasis on the battles.. A thing other mods do not do these days unfortunetely.

So the battles and units and their balance are the best thing is this game. So let s talk campaign difficulty and especially economy of the campaign. I am a propagator of 1 year 4 turns and slower pace of campaign and economic aspects. It gives more immersion to the game in my opinion, gets a player involved more and ofc with that in mind you get historical characters which gives more interest in role play and immersity in which the player is put in. So it feels less casual and more fruitful in its depth.Right now we have a fast pace campaign, fast money, fast character traits appearing to them, loyalty system could work better if characters could get loyalty by harder means in the game ( the system fails when only one battle is needed for a general to get +1 loyalty so it undermines the current family system in the game ) So that could made slower, like 2 battles +1 loyalty? or faction leader has to have high authority for generals to slowly increase their loyalty over time?

Now economy : I have a settlement that gives me 15 000 per turn. that is equivalent to about 3 or 4 roughly powerful stacks. What happens when I have 10 settlements that give that much per turn?( keep in mind the victory conditon generally is to own 30 to 50 settlements on the map ) I get into god mode really fast. There is a corruption script and it s not enough I think. Even through that I get insane power that CAI does not even want to bother me since it calculates my power and makes a decision, so they offer alliance instead lol. So trade gives the most income which again undermines such building like whole irrigation building chain ( they are mostly worthless compared to trade building economic benefits ) , now good example again is EB2 where they equalised farming income to trade income to tax income. So it s 1/3 1/3 1/3 ratio. Late in the campaign a player will have 40k trade and 3 k farming and 10 k tax and surprisingly a corruption which gives a surplus ( I understand why moders did corruption in such a way, because we have factions that have colonies and basically they had to adress that having cities all acrros the map could make problems for these factions like Genoa, Venice, Ragusa). So trade in the game currently is way too much in my opinion it does not give any challenge to the player in mid to late game at all. I had 15 regions with Moldova and was steamrroling CAI like a god. Also if the irrigation building give growth why have buidling such as mills? In late game one has to destroy all wind mill buildings because they grow the population in a settlement on such level that CAI for example gets thrown out of their settlements because they have enormous population growth and numbers. So economy could be tweaked especially from corruption stand point and trade.

Some minor things I noticed in the campaign : CAI really does not invest into religon at all so when they conquer a region they don t build imams or priests or religous buildings. Notice how low their state religon is in newly conquered lands and notice that you will never see a priest walking arround from CAI standpoint ( except heretics ). So this does keep some trouble for CAI to keep it s settlements in place and not get rebelled.
Genoan, Venetian, Ragusan colonies give unique mercenaries for the factions that build colony buildings, but there is a bug or something to that nature when units like venetian colonian archers or genoan crossbows dissapear from recruitment pool and are gone. Only after reloading a save one gets to recruit those units again and then after few turns they dissapear again..
The Eastern part of the map in Anatolia where Hospitalliers reside and Aynids is very bugged and it bugs the movement of CAI for those particular factions. Maybe those small islands bug the AI? Crusading armies can t seem to reach the Rhodus settlement and Timurids aswell cannot reach them I noticed. So Rhodus can never be conquered by crusade or CAI in general. Also Karamarids and Aynids are the most inactive factions currently they never fight each other for supremacy and seem odd with their innaction. Timurids come and conquer them easily. Sometimes these factions just lose their family members fast and early into the campaign and get destroyed. Also Aynids park their armies on those small islands and never move them. So that part of the map is difficult for CAI. Hussite rebel stacks stand just above the Austria and are very innactive aswell. They don t attack anyone.

All in all best game and best battles I had overall with med2. Those who made battle system and balanced it deserve a medal, tell them they are geniuses. So much thought and emphasis has been made, and units look stunning and awesome. So the campaign could use some work and economy balanced a bit. Thank You for such an experience! people are going to play this jewel for years!!!

**Wallachian** · August 03, 2021, 08:31 AM

Thank you very much for the detailed feedback. We wish we got so much feedback from other players.

I will take each topic at a time. I think jurcek can reply more in relation to some of the topics:

1) Armour - this is for jurcek, but we use the RR/RC system like Stainless Steel so all our stats are directly based on that

2) Horse Archers - yeap I completely agree with you here, we actually have some units which are not really worth recruiting which is a pity because they could be really cool. Perhaps some of the HA can get some buffs

3) 4 turn campaign - If jurcek is kind enough and he has enough time he might create a 4 TPY campaign. We are also starting work on the 1448 campaign which will be 4 TPY which means some of the conversion from 2TPy to 4 TPY can be shared

4) Economy - this is pretty much the hardest thing to balance in the game. Every time we change a part of the economy to fix, it breaks another part or something like that. I do really like your idea of reducing trade income and increasing farm income. Currently, farms are really not that useful which is both a shame and also unrealistic. There is a lot of work to be done here and sadly not enough time/manpower. Every time we make a change we actually need someone to test out the changes.

5) CAI and religion - this is probably related to the AI personality types. Again, here there are problems because if we change them than the AI becomes passive and no longer attacks you or no longer expands.

6) Genoan, Venetian, Ragusan colonies - I believe this is not a bug. The recruitment of those colonial units is also tied to your relation with those factions. So if your relation drops below a certain level you can no longer recruit those colonial units even though you built the buildings. We probably never explained that anywhere. There will be text added explaining this in the next version.

7) Anatolia map - yes, AI has lots of problems with pathfinding and there are also some chokepoints. Rhodos can only be reached via ship. And the AI rarely if ever does sea invasions. The Karamanids and Aydinids probably need more characters and also perhaps some financial help to get them to conquer the rebels around them. There is generally a major issue with AI expansion.

8) Hussite armies - yeap, before now we couldn't script rebels to attack settlements. With the new engine overhaul project i think it's possible to actually script them to attack certain settlements. Again jurcek will know more here.

**PavleSubich** · August 03, 2021, 06:47 PM

I think that it is apsurd that it is harder to conquer rebbel settlments in anatolia than bizantium when i play ottoman.

**bordinis** · August 04, 2021, 09:02 AM

I recently only found this. There is a guy on youtube with a channel based on total war mods, so from him. I play all mods basically but never heard about this one so that might be the trouble, that many people simply never heard of this project. I would be interested to hear what other people think and their ideas. You don t have to take my opinion as a consideration ;D This project was like a thunder from the sky for me despite you guys doing this for many years. So it s not very well known.

I think campaign balance is the real issue here so that will have to be solved as you guys want to make a late era for this. There is really two ways to make a mod, one is casual where there is no depth only battles and another one is the one with more things in it with depth to ancillary system and camapign design. I can test for you guys if you want and really would be nice for people to step up and atleast try to offer solutions atleast i understand that you guys are only two now in the project?

**Macaras** · August 04, 2021, 09:27 AM

4) Economy - this is pretty much the hardest thing to balance in the game. Every time we change a part of the economy to fix, it breaks another part or something like that. I do really like your idea of reducing trade income and increasing farm income. Currently, farms are really not that useful which is both a shame and also unrealistic. There is a lot of work to be done here and sadly not enough time/manpower. Every time we make a change we actually need someone to test out the changes.

Maybe it would be enough to lower the factors in descr_settlement_mechanics - especially for trade ? Than if some factions are too weak in the beginning you could just add some money to the purse. I tried this before just for myself in SS and it worked. It also makes the game more difficult in the beginning, as the player struggle financially. In addition if you double the prices of the units in export_descr_unit and descr_mercenaries then you will get rid of tediousness in the late game- no spaming of armies anymore.
This are just some ideas, it looks always easier in idea than in practice but nonetheless maybe worth trying..

**BanYanko** · August 04, 2021, 09:45 AM

I would also like to share some feedback as well (seeing as this thread addresses that aspect lol).

1) So, I did make an earlier thread about religion in general behaving weirdly (specifically for Judaism in Western Europe), but also in general the religion (Judaism again) just randomly starts increasing after a certain pount (not sure when it was, after turn 100 or something), which can only be properly countered by having built religious buildings (main building + those extra ones like madrasas, monasteries and covenants, although this is just effective for cities, castles are pretty difficult to convert). Not much of an issue, simply just weird.
2) Crashing - Oh yeah, I know how much mod devs hate addresing this question, but overall at least you can take and finish a campaign to the end unlike in 1.4 where it just crashed during the turn process and nothing worked to budge forward, so there is still progress made, kudos for that. It still is incredibly annoying after a big battle, though, can't help not complain about it

.
3) Faction leader ancillaries - For some reason, my faction leader will never receiver the "leader ancillary" after the first (sometimes even the second) leader of the campaign dies and I've played 5 campaigns on 1.5 so far. Is there supposed to be some sort of condition to be met first, some action to be done, or just another bug? Also connected to the faction leader issue, the model on the campaign shows a regular general model for the faction leader after the first one dies, although heir ones are fine.
4) Traits and titles - I would definitely also like to see more impactful titles and traits to be implemented or improved upon - for example, if I am playing Bulgaria and get King of Serbia or Voivode of Wallachia after conquering the faction, I would like to have some sort of effect on public order or conversion for those regions needed to get that title (could be tricky to implement, but just an idea).
5) Rebellion and loyalty - just as OP mentioned, loyalty should be harder to earn, but the "RIBELLE!" thing is simply just weird in my eyes and just makes the character a walking burden through the rest of his life, it becomes even more awkward if he is also the faction heir lol. So, while this sounds pretty ambitious, the fact the faction can rebel from within (moving the leadership from one house to another) should cause that house and their loyal followers (character loyal to a certain house should have a trait like that like the Italian poltical system) and basically become difficult rebels the player has to clean up (maybe even take the cities they have the titles in as well, but that could probably be too difficult). Again, I know you guys disliked the shadow factions, but making them regular rebels could work too. If not, better just remove it entirely and make disloyal generals have bigger chances to turn rebel like in Vanilla.
6) I think you guys already addressed this, but reduce the age characters can live up to (People in the 14th century Tsardoms universe beat even the modern life expectency with all those people living to 90 years old, haha). In my opinion, just use the Stainless Steel system by making characters feeble and lose their traits as they become older, should feel more immersive that way (and random death occurence based on older age, of course).
7) Other houses - another thing that can spice potential civil war possibilites is making marriages proposals more common, especially for other houses. Currently, players only focus marrying off their main successors and the rest just wither away as virgins lol (even within the same dynasty). I get this might not work due to engine limitations, but just an idea to throw out.
Anyways, I've been loving this mod quite a lot and I look forward for the newer version to come. Wish you guys the best and keep up the good work

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**jurcek1987** · August 04, 2021, 03:40 PM

Ok thank you all for the feedback, I'll try to answer as best as I can.

Firstly the battle aspect of the mod has been worked on for far longer than the campaign aspect and it shows. An enormous amount of time has been spent on making units and also the stats have been thoroughly worked on. We use Point Blank's Real Combat 2.0 system which is fantastic, when it comes to battle balance it's like 98% perfect (well perfect as much as the engine allows). I agree wholeheartedly about the skirmish ability of the horse archers, it's something I wanted to improve but it's not EDU related. Do you know how they increased the range when they start retreating in EB2? That would be very useful. Actually the Cuman Horse Archers are way faster than Mirza Lancers, the issue here is related to the previous point, they start retreating too late and it takes too long for them to reach high enough speed to escape those Mirzas who are charging at full gallop. There's actually very little units that have 0 armour apart from peasants. Archers that have little or no armour have on the other hand better melee stats, speed, defense skill and stamina.

I completely agree about the too fast campaign pace and growth. There was a feature from the original files which caused the population growth and income jump through the roof from the second turn onwards and I only recently pinpointed the cause. Those bonuses should actually be only for the AI but an error in the code meant it appeared for the player as well. This has been rectified, the settlement growth and economy is now way harder. Good idea about trade income vs farm income, I'll play with global values a bit, also the next version will have an optional 4tpy.

As I said the battle part of the mod has been worked on far longer than the campaign part so there's definitely room for improvement there. A lot of work has been on ancillaries but traits are for the most part vanilla. If you have problems getting the faction leader ancilliaries, please let me know and I'll explain the requirements, they all work and have been tested but for a lot of them it's quite difficult to know what you need to get them if you don't check the triggers. Most minor faction leader titles only require you to send your leader to your capital for one turn. Other more elaborate are explained in the opening info screen, though not all.

I don't know how to make some factions more active and to get them to recruit priests. Also not sure why the leader doesn't always have the correct campaign map model. I can easily make the Hussite stacks attack one of your settlements, the initial stack that appears with the "Hussite rebelion begins" event will attack Brunn. For those that appear in Austria the closest settlement is Wien but it wouldn't be realistic if they tried attacking it. I'd like to see rebels in general to be more active but I haven't got to the campaign AI part yet.

Some very nice ideas in the last post but they're either not possible or I don't have the knowledge and time to implement it. The max age of characters has been reduced to 71 and I did add those traits from SS for old characters. Problem is that I have many ideas for different areas of the game but no time to do it. The next version will fix a lot of the complaints but not all. Problem is that the 2 members that worked on the campaign orginally are no longer active. I was kind of hoping that the release of the mod will result in submods being worked on or even new members joining our modding team but unfortunately there aren't many M2 modders active anymore

**bordinis** · August 05, 2021, 04:35 AM

Hi again,

About the religion. We have government type buildings that needs to be installed in order to build certain buildings and to build of higher chain ones like trade military buildings correct? So let s say CAI has a Islam level on settlement 45% and cannot build a higher boywer because of religion requirement for a government assimilation building to be present in the first place to build higher chain of a building? If so, than it could explain why for example CAI is building low tier units in mid game ( again there is no way for them to make religion higher in newly aquired regions).

So in essence, CAI ends up with low tier units in newly aquired settlements. Would it be possible to code that when CAI takes the settlement that settlement gets like 70% religion then on a second turn it gets it? Or maybe to code for each CAI faction respectively a Theologian guild type of building that slowly increases their religion over time in the campaign? Like last tier of that guild building does.

Also some changes for Crusades would be nice, like for instance disabling Rhodus from crusading/jihad list? Crusades seems to go against Venice and Bulgaria mostly in my campaigns..

Some minor thing:
Can you guys do the Teutonic order highest building to be accesable for fortresses also? not only for large city? So fortress can recruit teutonic knights also..

I am waiting for answer what they did with HA in EB2..SO more to come

**bordinis** · August 05, 2021, 10:06 AM

Some other minor things I noticed while playing :

So clearly the balista s, the javelin cavalry are not very useful in the game. Could increase balista's accuracy maybe a bit, also javelin cavalry could maybe use more missiles, they have 2 or 3 max per person now I think and we have a few in the game: Mongols have one with 0 armour ( so very bad in close quarters and only a couple of missiles on them ) I recruited them and most of the squad died from crossbow volley, just fell on the ground lol. So maybe give more ammo for javelin units in general? Lightly armoured horse archers so under 7 armour could get very good stamina and the medium and elite ones good stamina maybe? Some units in the game like Vlach spearmen have fast moving speed for them so maybe for javelin and light HA we could do the same? Again I m just giving ideas, you guys don have to listen to this.

About the Hospittaler faction. I conquered their regions ( they had no culture on their own so they could recruit low tier peasants only due to that ). So Cyprus Rhodes and that small island near Rhodes and their "European reinforcements or generals" kept spawning even when I conquered those settlements. And the spawn rate on those is quite rapid. But they get Catalan knights and Frankish knights very often on those mentioned islands ( they basically do not need to invest recruiting knights since they get those European generals in a good rate).

Also about CAI war warrinies and auto-resolve: Maybe do some units better and lower in auto-resolve ? Like gunpowder units not so dominant for both player and CAI and also noticed that CAI often calculates the army of a player and stands with their units just where the player is sieging the settlement and waits till the last sally out turn and then only attacks ( wich siege diminishes their numbers inside the settlement ) So maybe balancing war warinnes a bit there for CAI? I m not sure if you guys know how to do it. Maybe that would make CAI more agrresive in those situations where their settlement is being under siege.

Also maybe make a script where for example if a player chose hard campaign difficulty AI factions get every 4 turns like +5000 and for very hard campaign AI gets like 9000k every 4 turns? That should make the game more challenging for some of us veterans. Because I see Aynid AI they have 5 regions and such a small army, undeveloped cities and religion in there and they make like levy bowmen and spearmen mostly. And maybe when the AI gets a famous general spawned for that particular faction they also get some strong units with the general aswell? Like a famous general + some elites and mediums ?

Another suggestion for a Golden Horde faction ( if it s played by the player ) Maybe do some like 3 Timurid stacks that venture out of the Caucasus to attack them in Crimea?

Also for battle difficulty could be made like on hard battles AI gets to its units +1 morale to each unit and very hard battles AI armies get +2 morale? Could be a challenge for the player in later stages of the game so he or she does not steamrole the map. I noticed that faction Capitals get good and strong reinforcements when sieged so maybe to spice up the difficulty every settlement on the map ( except player owned ) could make a garrison unit or two when sieged? Lets say I siege an Ottoman settlement and they get two additional medium tier units to defend or tree perhaps?

Edit: There is a bug with a faction of Catalan Athens where the Pope denounced me and after his death or my faction leaders death I did not get reconciled back. But I m still "at war" with Papal states, maybe because of that?
Edit: Fortresses cannot build final level of roads, intentional?

And you can always put culture conversion on those government assimiliation buildings, they give health and happyness can also give like culture conversion 2% or more.

**bordinis** · August 08, 2021, 01:14 AM

"Battle xml config file. Export descr unit then movement speed modifier. Adjust those." That s all they answered to me ..

**jurcek1987** · August 08, 2021, 07:45 AM

Ok thanks. Could you upload the EBII battle_config.xml please? Our file is actually from EBII because we use the same BAI but I'll compare the entries anyway.

**bordinis** · August 08, 2021, 01:31 PM

Sure

**MIKE GOLF** · August 10, 2021, 02:07 AM

A very well done mod gentlemen, looking forward to many hours playing. I ran a script checker and noticed that in the campaign_script there are several invalid settlement references.

Hadrianoupolis should be Adrianople
Florence should be Firenze
Radeistos should be Raidestos

The surname Moro should be added to venice in the descr_names file to avoid an error in the cs.

Here is an example of a settlement name, Florence has been replaced with Firenze:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

I hope this helps.

**jurcek1987** · August 10, 2021, 03:45 AM

Thank you mate, that's very helpful (+rep)!

Some coded settlement names have been changed over the years but not all entries in other files have been updated