So I was reading an interesting Osprey book about Greek and Roman fortifications and artillery in the Hellenistic period and thought to myself: man, real shame that something similar doesn't exist in EBII. Well - now it does!
This mod will change the towers of large and huge cities to fire oxybeles bolts rather than their usual anaemic arrows. If that sounds wildly unbalanced and a great way to make sieges impossible, well - you would be completely right, actually, and my first attempt at this mod was ludicrously broken.
But, after several iterations, I think the mod is fairly balanced although it will obviously change the way you must approach fortifications.
This mod is built with two goals in mind:
1. Historical verisimilitude - defensive artillery was a key feature of Roman and Greek fortifications in the Hellenistic period and now that's reflected in the mod.
2. Change the siege dynamics for larger, better-fortified cities to make attacking them a more challenging strategic endeavour. Rapid assaults will be costlier - if you're taking an important city or fortress, starve them out, bring siege artillery, or accept higher losses.
CHANGELOG
- Large/huge non-barbarian cities' towers will fire the same shot as an oxybeles arrow-projector, but with half the range (so the attacker's stone-projecting artillery can bring them down). The shot will absolutely go through several units at once but has a very slow reload rate (expect no more than 2 volleys before siege towers reach the walls). Huge cities have slightly faster-firing arrow-projector towers.
- Rams and siege towers have double health so defensive arrow-projectors can't really bring them down.
- However, they can be set ablaze - ignition chance was almost meaningless in the base mod since only hot oil could ignite siege engines, but now your towers can too. All siege engines have a 10% or 20% (varying by culture and engine) chance to be set alight by a flaming shot. On average you will get two volleys before the towers/rams reach you so you may bring down a tower or two - in vanilla EBII there was no way to stop them at all.
INSTALL INSTRUCTIONS
- Download the attached file and unzip it to your desktop.
- Navigate to your Medieval II Total War\mods\ebii\data folder and make a backup of the descr_walls.txt and descr_engines.txt files.
- Copy the mod files from your desktop to your Medieval II Total War\mods\ebii\data folder, overwriting both the vanilla ones.
- To uninstall, just replace your modded files with the backups.
FINAL NOTES
This mod only changes the large/huge city walls of "civilised" factions, not the first-level stone walls or any of the wooden walls. If you spot a bug, inconsistency, or something else gone terribly wrong, post in the thread and let me know.
Have fun!
Wall_Artillery.7z