I recently picked this up and have been having a good time with it. Well, I haven’t entirely liked the endless “6-front war”, but it’s not as bad as some earlier games in the series on that. I can often make peace and change the situation through diplomacy for once! And I suppose I can hardly complain since I played France anyway. It’s just that some nations’ AI intermittently goes psycho and refuses any peace after I mash them up again and again, forcing me to take over terrtiry I don’t really want.
Questions:
1: What is the :“financial” ranking? I’ve conquered all of France, and extended into Spain, Denmark, the holy land, eastern Europe, and I own northern Italy after the Milanese went nuts on me. Despite having a working budget of over 25,000 florins. I am still #3 in Finance and constantly upgrading ports and markets. What does that even mean?
2: I figured out how to get most guilds, but I don’t even understand what some of them do. What’s the Mason’s guild for, and why haven’t I seen one? What do Alchemists do? It just says they “can upgrade firearms”. How do I get the special archers guild as England? What about the Templars and Hospitlars? Do they just show up randomly after crusades? What lets you upgrade guilds?
3: Speaking of gunpowder, when does it come in? I’ve played over a 100 turns and I’ve got cannon available (and just now getting battleifled artillery to use). When do I get firearms?
I just wanted to say that while I liked this game’s battle mode, the non-battle portion of the game is completely inferior to the first Medieval game. I don’t know why they made the interface so clunky and confusing, but I found it too unbearable to actually play through a campaign of that game; I only play custom battles, because I can’t take the campaign mode.
The Alchemist guild lets gunpowder troops start out with extra experience levels. The Masons guild gives a bonus to public order. As for gunpowder troops, you have to wait until gunpowder is invented, and then build up your infantry buildings, and you should be able to create them.
OK, anyway, so how do I get a Mason’s guild? It doesn’t seem to show up at all. Secondly, the public order bonus must be hidden, because all it says you get on my building browser is pike militia (or pikemen, whatever).
And about when will gunpowder appear? Does it show up with cannons and that’s it, or is it a seperate event?
BTW, how fun is it to play, say, Scotland? I hav to say the Scots Guard as France are grotesquely fun troops. They are brutal towards everything short of heavy cavalry.
Another question: I’m a little curious as the point of the late-game cavalry you can recruit from towns. Is this intended for the player who converts all castles to towns and relies on militia the whole way? (Probably a bad plan, but I won’t judge.) They seemed to be weak and a little overpriced.
If you’ve got cannon, you’ve got gunpowder :). IIRC (it’s been a long, long while since I played the vanilla game), gunpowder troops are recruited from high level city halls, military academies and the like. Mostly in cities. Check the building browser.
However, don’t expect much from them, as they… have the properties of a vacuum. Handgunners are only good for the fear effect, mostly in counter-charge volleys (they have decent melee stats to make up for it), otherwise they can’t hit a thing ; arquebusiers/musketeers are a PITA because they require a ton of macro : they technically use a fire-by-rank method (first rank fires, then moves to the back of the unit, starts reloading) but it’s badly broken and most of the time the entire unit will stop firing because one guy is stuck or something. For best results, use them in single line - they don’t fire often, but they’re less likely to fuck up unsupervised.
All of them are utterly rotten in sieges/city battles, as they’ll try to arc their shots.
My advice : stick to pavise crossbows - and if you play as the English, it’s a no brainer. Longbows are the most broken unit in the game, bar none.
Very fun, and very annoying at the same time. Fun because they’ve got a unique mix of troops, and their own soundset. Annoying because they’re heavy on pikes, and pikes suck in the vanilla game - they can’t hold formation, switch to their swords, get rolled over. Against cavalry, they’re better… but cavalry can run around them and roll them over from the back.
Yes, the point is : they’re created in cities. Cities make tons more cash than castles. More cash, more troops. More troops, more cities !
As a general rule, a good ratio to go by is 4 cities to a castle. Only use castles as troop producers/reinforcers, mostly in your border provinces. The defensive aspect of castles is virtualy nil : not only can’t the AI siege worth a fuck and will always try to zerg through one bottleneck, but cities get free militia, and they’re ridiculously easy to take back should the AI zerg one of yours.
If you’re playing an Italian faction, you don’t even need castle troops : Italian Militia and Pavise Crossbow militia obliterate pretty much anything, and a Merchant guild will supply very decent albeit morale-lacking cavalry until you can get your hands on a Hospitaller guild or two. The Moors are another faction that can do without castles, since they get both good cavalry and excellent sword infantry in cities. A castle or two to make Desert Archers and Lamtuna spearmen is a nice plus, but you can totally get by with mercenaries.
I dunno, I’d say that unit for unit the Vardariotai are the most broken unit in the game: a cavalry unit that you get right off the bat that’s just as good in a melee as everyone else’s beginning heavy cavalry AND can fire arrows. But you get so few of them that longbow/pavise spam probably makes up for it in volume.
It seems that the Financial ranking is the amount of money you have in the bank, not your income. To test this try to spend nothing for a couple turns in a test save and see if you increase your rank (note: I have not done this test.)
The Mason’s Guild I think was probably victim of bad programming: I’ve only gotten offered it like twice in 2 years of playing, whatever criteria for getting offered it are probably ratcheted so high that it rarely occurs. But when I did get offered it, it wasn’t for anything notable I remember like making huge stone buildings early in the game, so I don’t know how one goes about getting it. I prefer Merchant Guild, anyway.
I also dislike the psycho AI, not so much that it will randomly attack you after decades of peace with no warning, as much as it will refuse peace when you are clearly about to eliminate them, at the very most offering a simple ceasefire when you outnumber them 8 to 1. Sometimes I am not trying to conquer the continent as fast as possible, but working on my citybuilding strategy, and don’t want to be bothered with a drawn out war.
The Turks are also good without castles: they don’t get foot archers in cities till late in the game but Merchant Guilds and Racing Tracks can get you plenty of cavalry. And Large Cities can produce Janissary Heavy Infantry with the upgraded City Hall, which are more than a match for Italian Spear Militia (not to mention Saracen Militia, which are exactly like Italian Spear Militia if gotten one step later than them on the ladder.)
Oh, and Scotland is easily the weakest faction in the game, with the worst units combined with the worst land. Only Russia comes close, with pretty weak land spread far apart and a beginning militia unit of ARCHERS (yay, archer spam for armies!!!) But at least Russia has the second best unit in the game, the Dismounted Dvors (the best archers in the game, sorry longbowmen), and aren’t Catholic so can attack with impunity. That said if you want a challenge Scotland might be fun
My counter to this is a scorched earth policy. Suppose I’m playing Spain and want to maintain “peace” with France and advance through North Africa and by picking off Mediterranean islands. France, of course, will attack me at some point. So I take the bordering French cities, destroy every building in them ('cept the church if you don’t want to piss off that Pope dude), if a castle convert to a town, crank the taxes to max and bugger off (leaving an army hanging around to ensure that the French don’t retake it before the rebellion.
Now I have a rebel province on my border that won’t wage aggressive war against me, and what’s more when the French finally manage to retake it won’t be able to produce anything but peasant conscripts. At which point the routine is repeated.
With minimal effort you can keep a border pacified with this technique and keep your offensive operations focused on the front of your choosing.
Lots of mods have attempted to tweak the diplomatic AI, some with more success than others - but most of it being hard-coded and behind the scenes, there’s only so much we plebs really understand or get to fiddle with. I’m happy with the one used in Lands to Conquer (and I think Stainless Steel, too). The AI doesn’t get much more clever about *how *it does things, but the why is much less rabid/schyzophrenic, and long term allies can be trusted for the most part.
I agree with you about Vard’s though, I had forgotten about them - I never play Byzantium, as I dislike starting with too many provinces, buildings and units to reorganize to my liking. Which is also why I never really got into Kingdoms. Gimme a blank slate
Will this tax my processor substantially more than it already is? I run the basic game perfectly. However, I’ve previously tried to get mods for Rome: Total War to work and it ain’t happening. They would run but be really choppy with long load times.
And second, does STainless Steel overwrite the game data or work like Kingdoms?
Speaking of which, I do like Kingdoms. Not as much replayability, but very enjoyable with a lot of variety.
Thanks for the help so far. I’m playing as France now and was a little surprised how much enjoyed it.
I don’t have much experience with Stainless Steel myself, but considering they did some re-texturing work, it’s possible your game will take a performance hit, yes. Depends on the extent they went to, and how detailed their complete reskins are.
All major mods work like kingdoms, with a separate folder and a command-line switch. Every time the game launches, it checks which files exist in the mod folder, and loads those instead of the default, which is in the main data folder. M2TW was designed from the ground up to be very mod friendly.
On re-reading, I realize this probably needs clarification.
To understand and predict the TW AI, one needs to internalize a seemingly nonsensical part of how it “thinks”, and I believe much of the grief the AI gets stems from that misunderstanding. It boils down to a geometrical translation in terms. Bear with me.
The average player tends to think that a state of peace with a faction means the factions are neutral WRT each other. In other words, that peace means peace - the faction won’t attack unless it gains something significant, especially if it’s got other fishes to fry. Which is not the case. A state of peace is really a state of active war, without any action occuring…yet.
In the “mind” of the AI, the direct antagonism is always there. “peace”, and “ceasefire” even more so, are interpreted as instructions to build as big an army as fast as possible, and attack as soon as the massed forced are deemed to be likely to overwhelm immediate defenses. Assuming there’s no Rebel target in the equation, the AI guns for those first - but the trick is, between an “at war” and an “at peace” seizable province, the AI won’t differentiate overly much. Peace, as it is construed by most people, that is to say “you leave me alone, I leave you alone, and we both concentrate on our immediate enemies”, is really what the game calls an Alliance.
And by that same token, many people think “Alliance” in the game means what we generally consider alliances to be : work together to accomplish a common goal, and help each other. The game is actually much closder to realpolitik thinking, in that it distinguishes between “allies” and “trusted allies”. The first, and most common kind, really means “non-aggression pact lasting only until such time as I got no more pressing matters, helping only when convenient and I gain more from it than you do, otherwise get bent”.
Trusted allies, on the other hand, will be more supportive and loyal, but then it’s also much more difficult (and takes much longer) to establish a trusted alliance… if at all. I haven’t checked the latest patch’s gamefiles, but the “trusted” setting was originally disabled for humans as it made the game too easy. Lusted’s AI re-enabled it, with hard-to-reach reputation levels as prerequisite.
Reputation being another weird, non-intuitive mechanic ;). But that’s another story.
I’ve wondered about that one, too. Never break any treaty that I’ve agreed to and have a terrible reputation, and other countries routinely attack me literally the first thing after signing a peace treaty and they’re spotless, what up?
Speaking of which, only the last month or so did I try to buy peace with an enemy (because early on I learned that unless it’s on Very Hard/Very hard or I’m outnumbered 6 or more to 1 on the strategic scale I will win eventually, I only tried to make peace to attempt to quickly get to the gunpowder era.) And I learned to never do that. The majority of the time I buy off an enemy they simply pocket that money and immediately attack me (not even waiting a turn.) Which is good for them in the short term, but if you look at the AI as a person, it’s a horrible strategy because now you know not to trust them as a player, so there is less of a chance of a genuine peace offer/blackmail ever working for that “person”.
But I too have learned that the AI only looks at short term gains and not the opponent’s overall strength or peace or war, and even the Pope’s disapproval is only a contributing factor to the choice of war which can be overridden much of the time. Keeping around half a stack on the frontier settlements seems to do much to avoid preemptive war, even if I have by far the most amount of resources behind those weakly defended settlements to back them up the opponent will ignore that.
But the wonky AI does remind me of the several times I’ve agreed to a huge, 10 or more turn tribute plan in return for a territory, only to have that country immediately turn around and attack me. That I don’t mind as much, free territory for me.
Reputation works on two fronts : mutual reputation, and global reputation. The items that make both go up and down are the same, but of course mutual relationship will be affected much more directly. The entire world frowns when you’re an asshole, but the guy you’re being an asshole to is downright pissed off
Positive reputation is a very simple point tally - each turn we’re allied, the tally goes up a little bit. That’s it. The more people you’re allied with at the same time, and the longer you stay allied with them, the better your global rep over time.
Negative reputation is way more evil. First thing to know : if you’re in the top 3, rep’s converging towards zero every turn, no matter what you do (except if you’re in the negative already). The inverse is true for the bottom 5 : they get to pull all the shit they want, it’ll converge towards zero too.
There are tons of things that cause your global rep to tank. The first and foremost one is : being at war with any faction (possibly excluding Rebels, I don’t remember for sure). That’s a slight dip every turn, no matter what happens. Two allies make up for one war.
Other repfucking items, not all equal to each other in terms of severity :
if two allies of yours enter war, siding with the attacker (but siding with the defender doesn’t give you anything).
Executing or ransoming prisoners (but letting them go don’t make it go up).
Sacking or plundering a city (but merely occupying it doesn’t make your rep go up).
Pissing off the Pope by ignoring his orders, failing his missions or abandonning a crusade you joined (but opting not to join is no biggie as far as rep is concerned).
Attacking an ally, obviously
Any battle outside of your borders with a faction you’re not already at open war with.
Botched spying and assassination, be it on an ally, peaceful or enemy faction.
Having a very dreadful King instead of a neutral or chivalrous one (ties with the one above, since spying and assassination gives your king dread points, too)
Betraying any treaty, attacking a faction you have a trade treaty with being less of a problem than breaking ceasefire, it being less of a problem than betraying a right to military passage, itself being less than attacking a city belonging to someone you have secured military rights from, itself being less than breaking vassalage. But all are very bad. And no, breaking them through diplomacy rather than action doesn’t help
speaking of diplomacy : using the “agree or I will attack” option in a proposal
Breaking vassalage in any way, shape of form is the absolute worse : whether it’s not declaring war on the superpower your puny island bozo slave nation just attacked or was just attacked by (doesn’t matter), or rebelling against the nation you pledgde vassalage too, your name’s gonna be mud for a long, long time.
I must be forgetting some - point is, it’s mondo easy to get your reputation down the shitter, and takes proactive work to simply break even. And an alliance will only become trusted if both the mutual and global trust of both parties are high. Even if you’re Saint Jesus, it’ll take some time before your sworn enemy becomes your friend. And if you’re generally Saddam Vader, even your longtime partner will be wary of you. But if, if you always do the right thing, no matter how unintuitive AND your ally has an average to good reputation ? Well, maybe you won’t get backstabbed. No absolute guarantees
Another factor to know about is shadow factions. Shadow factions are factions hardcoded to hate each other. The general rule is : if you need to destroy it to win the short campaign, or it needs to destroy your faction to win the short campaign, you’re each other’s shadow faction. You’ll never be trusted allies. You’ll never even be simple allies, even if the AI accepts your alliance offer. Your shadow faction will never agree to be your vassal, will be even more of a PITA to get a ceasefire from than usual, etc…
It seems to me to be based on a reasonable (but a bit flawed, or simplistic) reasoning on the devs part : whatever your short campaign goal is is based on history, which itself is a function of strategical evidence : the French and English don’t hate each other because of some hazy racial or cultural issue - but because France is the most profitable expansion option for England and vice versa. So they opposed each other IRL, and so they oppose each other in game. Problem being, even should France be reduced to a backwater ghost town in Inner Yucatan, and England be in the process of marching on Moscow, the English will hate the French more than anyone else, and vice-versa. shrug
The major flaw in the system being, the strategic AI isn’t coded with its own diplomatic reputation in mind. Meaning all factions tend to have average to scum-of-the-earth global reps, hence they hardly ever get into trusted alliances with each other (nevermind the player), thus they’re always more prone to infighting and betrayal than coalition against the big dogs. Which one might say is realistic and true to history ;), but it makes the game easy, too. Again, Lusted’s AI alleviates the problem somewhat, but not 100%
And finally, campaign difficulty plays a role in it as well. On easy, the human’s reputation (both the global one, and each mutual one) converges towards 100 over time. On medium, no modification to the basic system. On hard and very hard, the player’s reputation converges towards -100 (the convergence being even faster on Very Hard)
You want a fair and rational campaign, play on Medium Campaign/Very Hard battles, with maybe a tweak to give AI factions a cash boost in order to give them the edge they need to compete with your brilliance. On hard, you have to work twice as hard to break even. And on VH, you’re going to get gangbanged, period. At least in my experience.
This is also true in Rome and Empire, BTW.
Ah, but there is a devious way to make it work. Instead of agreeing to buy peace with 5000 florins, buy it with 50 over a hundred turns, or even 100. That’ll bind them for real, since the second they declare war, they break the treaty. Doesn’t work consistently when mutual reputation is already down in the dumps, but as a pro-active measure to ensure a neutral or allied faction won’t attack you, a measly long-term gift is great insurance.
Yup. That’s because the equations that trigger this or that behavior from the AI are apparently based on immediate border strength comparison. If you have a huuuge army somewhere far away, the AI will ignore it as long as its army strength in province X is vastly superior to your defensive army strength in province Y. The actual strength calculations are very hazy, and we only get codewords for behaviors rather than the actual, do-this-and-that behavioral decisions, nor do we know what “borders” really mean when it comes to, say, naval invasions, but that’s definitely the way the code we see is set up.
