Potential Project Thoughts

[charlieh]

Hello there gentleman, I would appreciate your thoughts on a technical question, regarding a potential project I have been considering.

The project would be to create historical videos of ancient battles within the EB2 time frame. Naturally, I would be using the EB2 mod for all battle map footage.

Regarding the battle footage specifically, I have been considering options that avoid working around the limitations of the AI. One of these, would be to connect two computers, via an Ethernet cable, in order to form a LAN multiplayer battle. This would provide exact control over different army manoeuvres.

My first set of questions are: Is this technically possible to achieve? Does anyone have any experience of successfully setting up a LAN multiplayer battle in Medieval 2 Kingdoms and/or its respective mods?

This leads me to my second set of questions, regarding refurbishing an old desktop I have. More specifically, if I wanted to refurbish this desktop with parts that could play EB2 on the highest settings (including huge unit sizes), what would be the most powerful, but cheapest, parts to get?

Thank you for your thoughts.

[Dooz]

I play on highest settings with a by-now ancient nvidia gtx 770 video card. Though also SSD hard drive which might make some difference, and plenty of RAM (overkill amounts far as I recall). The rest of the parts would mainly have to be decided by what would be compatible with the video card, so it's usually just working backwards from there to find what power supply, cpu, etc. to use.

I could find out specifically what I have there too if you like, but you might end up wanting something more powerful than gtx 770 ultimately since would also be running video capture and just to make sure you get as good as possible but without going far overboard.

Far as battles themselves, no idea about LAN but what about online battles with a cooperator? If eb2 can be played online... Could plan out what to do beforehand and/or chat during, etc. I know not ideal compared to full control, but might be an option if all else fails.

[charlieh]

I appreciate your thoughts on this Dooz. I have had some ideas recently, having started using the battle editor. I will need to create a base battle map and then iterate upon this, adjusting settings, such as deployment zones, for each individual shot. That will provide me with the most control possible, whilst mitigating some of the AI limitations.

I am aiming to use the battle map to show army movements before the battle, in order to provide context.

I will see how this goes, but may revert back to looking at those parts you have mentioned, if not.

[Shoebopp]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your project's goals, but couldn't what you described be achieved by what M2TW provides out of the box? You can access the Battle Editor by following this video tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACqseiRDqg8 . Apparently these are called "Scenarios". I'm not sure if you can play multiplayer battles on custom Scenarios, but if not, then you'll be restricted to using M2TW's battle controls. Here's an example in RTW of what can be achieved using vanilla Total War features https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXr1nI0KriM .

[Shoebopp]

As a side note, if you're trying to create a video, you don't have to record everything from a single battle. You can set up multiple Scenarios, each representing a phase or theatre of the battle, record that, and in the end combine all the parts together. This way you don't have to create a single uber-complex Scenario

[charlieh]

Thanks for the information and links Shoebopp. Yes, the multiple scenarios approach, within the battle editor, is what I am doing. I will likely have another go with the cinematic editor too. I have tried it in the past, but it was quite tricky to use.