Medieval 2 Total War Concentrated Vanilla 0.53

A new Concentrated Vanilla released. It's a fairly minor update:

• Game's main menu now has yellow "Concentrated Vanilla" label added, so you won't have trouble figuring out if it installed correctly.
• Rebel settlements start with slightly fewer units, since AI had too much trouble dealing with them. They still have a lot more troops than vanilla so they won't be too easy to take.
• Some bugs with rebels having units without proper textures fixed.
• New settlements of Sijilmasa and Belgrade made smaller since they were causing trouble to AI.
• Artillery accuracy scaled down a bit from 2.5x to 2.25x vanilla values.
• Upgrading units' armor and weapons now costs nothing extra, since you're already paying one turn's upkeep by having them sit idle in a settlement.
• Mercenaries pools in Concentrated Vanilla are larger and replenish faster. This makes war feel different depending on location, but unfortunately it can easily lead to all factions relying heavily on mercenaries and reduced differences between factions. Therefore mercenary recruitment and upkeep costs increased by 25%. They're still very often a bargain.

Peasants

One thing I've been pondering but haven't implemented is finding some use for peasants. Currently they see zero play since Militia units are far better and easier to recruit.

Would it make sense to make Peasants recruitable as mercenaries in large numbers in every region as a way to pad army size quickly?

Or maybe add a garrison script that automatically adds some Peasants to defend a settlement whenever it's sieged (for both AI and player, but not rebels)? This would be similar to what Matchlock-armed Citizens do in Empire.

I've heard that garrison scripts can result in excessive slowness (due to Number of Settlements x Number of Factions x Number of Settlement Levels x City/Castle triggers), but maybe it can be dealt with.

Both ways make historical sense, and would see Peasants see some action without reducing the need for any other unit type, or affecting game balance too much.

What do you think?

Source Code

The mod is released with source code, but no tutorial how to use it. Someday I plan to write a post how to make your own mod with tweaks to Vanilla or Concentrated Vanilla, but go on and play with it now. I'd love to hear from anybody who tried.

You'll just need some version of Ruby, text editor, and sources below.

Credits

Concentrated Vanilla 0.53 uses some files from the following minimods:

• Sinuhet's Battle Mechanics
• Lusted's Better BAI/CAI
• Agart's Cities/Castles Strat

Links

You can download mod here.

You can download sources here.

If you're interested in how this mod evolved, posts about previous versions (with links inside):

• 0.52
• 0.51 - full installation instruction are also in this post.
• 0.50
• 0.08
• 0.07
• 0.06
• 0.04
• 0.01