Increasing render distance

[WILHELM_II]

Is there any known way to increase the render distance of units in battles? At a certain distance they turn into identical low quality models and beyond that they turn into little 2D sprites. I can't seem to find any mods or methods that increase the render distance of units.

[Gigantus]

It's time consuming to change the render distance as it has to be done individually\manually and you may end up turning your PC into a slide show. You will need a formatted modeldb file (try my Bare Geomod) and then change the render values, example below with 6400 being the distance after which sprites are being used:

1 3 
68 unit_models/_Units/LN_3QPlate_HalfPlate/heavy_bill_militia_lod0.mesh 121 
68 unit_models/_Units/LN_3QPlate_HalfPlate/heavy_bill_militia_lod1.mesh 1225 
68 unit_models/_Units/LN_3QPlate_HalfPlate/heavy_bill_militia_lod2.mesh 6400

One way would be to remove the last two meshes and set the value of the first to 6400 and change the model count to 1. Or increase the values of the first two. Or use only the first two meshes....

You can also give this a try: open the medieval2.preference.CFG file with Notepad and look for 'unit_detail'. Set the value to 'highest':

 unit_detail = highest

Save and make read-only as otherwise the game will reset the value after the first game.

It will stop the use of the sprites, but beyond that I am not sure, eg if it uses only the top level model.

[WILHELM_II]

I'm a bit late but holy that worked so perfectly, thank you!

[AnthoniusII]

In most mods avoid to create lod1,lod2 sub models and this is what they do:
1 1
68 unit_models/_Units/LN_3QPlate_HalfPlate/heavy_bill_militia_lod0.mesh 6400

This and the srites entry in the end of each model quarantee the maximum detail in all distances.
Warning. That require a rather good PC but my 15 years olf one hundles it perfectly.