Moving Play along in Deus lo Vult: The “Campaign Pause”
Nine hundred is a lot of turns, whether you start MTW II in 1080 or 1180. The “Vanilla” solution to this problem is to have each turn equal a single year. Admittedly, characters live for about 120 years, but it does move the sim forward, cutting down the turn limit to 450. But it’s is also predictable.
Here’s an alternative. All you need are five standard six-sided dice and Shellshock’s Medieval Total War II Manager (MedManager).
Play MTW II as usual with DlV, that is at a rate of two-turns-per-year. Keep track manually of how many towns and fortresses you capture (even if you lose one; if you lose it and recapture it, count it as two). Beyond this, do nothing until the end of the first crusade.
When that crusade has resolved itself (that is when the pop up mission window is gone) and you have no other pending missions, save your game with some obvious file title and exit BEFORE advancing to the next turn. Note your sovereign’s “Authority” level before exiting. You only have to exit your campaign; you can remain in MTW II’s main menu.
Now, roll the five dice, total the results, subtract your faction leader’s “Authority” level, multiply this sum by the number of your captured settlements since your last “Campaign Pause,” divide by two and round up. Next start MedManager (if you are in MTW II’s main menu, Alt-Tab out), open your saved game, and advance the year by the number that resulted from this process.
For example, let’s assume that you’ve taken three settlements by the time the first crusade ends. Your faction leader’s Authority level is four. You have no pending missions as you complete your turn. You save your game as YourfactionAdvance and exit to the main menu. You roll five dice, with the result of nineteen. You subtract four for your leader’s authority, making the result fifteen. Multiply fifteen by three, for a result of forty-five. Divide by two, yielding twenty-two-and-a-half, rounding up to twenty-three. You start MedManager, open your saved game, change the current date from 1099 to 1122 (let Med Manager create a new file with a different name, just in case), and restart your campaign. Hit the advance-turn icon and off you go. Note that subsequent time advances will occur after the capture of a single settlement and wil be less dramatic (six-to-eight years, on average, a shot).
Thereafter, you follow this procedure at the end (before hitting the advance-turn icon) of any turn that you have no pending missions and have captured a settlement(s) since the last “Campaign Pause.”
Why not just play at the Vanilla rate of one-year-per-turn? That’s fine, too, but what I like about this system is:
- it is unpredictable, you could have more or fewer than 450 turns available to you;
- how many turns you’ll have depends mostly on luck, but also to a degree on how high you can get your faction leader’s authority level.
- I find it easier to rationalize this punctuated approach to time, given the fact that the characters don’t age correctly, than the Vanilla approach. I consider it time spent recovering from the dislocations of the campaign.
Keep in mind: time is relative!
Siculus
Speeding Up a 900-turn game!
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Originally Posted by Tharros
