taw's blog: Medieval 2 Total War Concentrated Vanilla 0.51

Friday, August 10, 2012

Medieval 2 Total War Concentrated Vanilla 0.51

bee by lutty moreira from flickr (CC-BY)

Here's a very small bugfix/tweak release.

AI passivity problems should be fixed.
Units with missing texture for rebels hopefully all fixed now.
Crusade/Jihad/Hordes can now target more settlements.
Assassins enabled, since you don't really have to use them if you don't like them. Merchants still disabled, since they annoy me too much.
Priests now move with the same speed as spies/assassins (somewhat slower than diplomats/princesses).
Attack strength increased from 50% to 60% of vanilla values, since it nerfed AI cavalry too hard, and make spearmen (who still use vanilla +4 or +8 bonus against cavalry, not half of it) considerably too strong against cavalry.
Settlement towers now fire strength 3 arrows, so they're somewhat more dangerous to medium-level units.
Religious conversion by buildings decreased from 200% vanilla to 150% vanilla rate.
Source code cleaned up and now should work with Ruby 1.8 or 1.9 with fewer problems.

Various settings in the mod can be tweaked forever, and "perfect" balance will never be achieved.

Things I'd like to change in the future:

People have problem with installation. I might add some kind of logo to the start menu so people know they got the mod running correctly. Installation instructions are below, if you still have troubles do not hesitate to contact me.
Some parts of the map - especially North African coast, but also Scandinavia, Ukraine, and Caucasus have too few settlements spread too far apart so they see no action. I don't want to mod the map to the point where it has two times as many settlements, but adding like 5-10 settlements to fill the biggest gaps would be a good idea. I'd especially want Egypt to have a realistic option of expanding to the West and Moors to the East - right now Tunis/Tripoli become Southern Italy in every single campaign, no exceptions. I've never done it, but it seems like adding new regions is relatively simple in Medieval 2.
It wouldn't hurt to add a few extra factions like let's say Armenians or Bulgaria, but that would pretty much have to be including somebody else's mod.
I'd like the sources to be usable to everyone. If you want to tweak the mod, give it a try, and tell me how it went.

Installation - step 1 (all versions)

First, regardless of your version, find directory where medieval2.exe is located, and put all unpacked files (concentrated_vanilla.bat, concentrated_vanilla.cfg, and concentrated_vanilla directory) in the same directory.

If you're playing retail this directory should be something like C:\Program Files\Creative Assembly\Medieval 2 Total War . If you have Steam version, it should be something like C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\Medieval 2 Total War.

If you have retail version, that's it. Double click on concentrated_vanilla.bat and go.

Installation - step 2 (Steam)

With Steam it's much harder because they added crappy launcher and broke modding.

I recommend removing the launcher completely. Delete Launcher.exe, make a copy of medieval2.exe and rename the copy as launcher.exe.

Then go to your Steam library, select Medieval 2 Total War, right click on it, select properties, Set launch options - type @concentrated_vanilla.cfg in the box, and confirm. Then when you start Medieval 2 Total War from Steam it will load the mod.