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Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Medieval 2 Total War Concentrated Vanilla 0.61

Jumping after each other on mom! by Tambako the Jaguar from flickr (CC-ND)

Since 0.60 release I fixed a lot of minor bugs, and added a bunch of minor enhancements to the mod builder (big thanks to everyone who tested and reported the bugs, especially Guimbix).

There aren't any huge features, but enough minor fixes accumulated that I feel it's good time for an official release.

One feature that got added is File > Generate Map TGA command you can run after building the mod to see how campaign map looks without launching the game, and trying a different random seed if you don't like this one.  The map file is saved to output/political_map.tga

And one more thing - if you're using old versions of retail Medieval 2, make sure it's updated to 1.3 or the mod won't work. (you're also saving yourself a ton of bugs this way)

Fixed bugs and minor improvement

  • start.bat pauses with "Press any key to continue" after running the script, so you can read error message if it fails, usually due to JRuby not being installed properly.
  • Campaign map heigh map level 0 changed to 1, fixing many campaign map glitches
  • Belgrade's resources (timber vs wood and missing comma) fixed
  • Floods disabled completely due to being buggy in vanilla
  • Simplified building tree option works now
  • Clustering% fixed to mean that (it accidentally meant random%, reverse of what it was supposed to)
  • Mod builder now extracts map information from TGAs at run time, instead of using preprocessed data. (so it's easier to port it to alternative maps, even if it's not yet there)
  • When allocating the last few settlements, clustering is often impossible. Before the update algorithm tried to look at neighbours-of-neighbours, then just picked a random settlements. Now it goes quite deep searching for not too distant settlement.
  • There's a switch for "allocating rebels last" if you need even more clustering than you get by default. This often causes rebels to be pushed to borders of the map, so only use this if really necessary.
  • Various help texts and error messages improved.

Credits and links

Concentrated Vanilla 0.61 includes some files from Medieval 2 Total War game by Creative Assembly, and the following minimods:
  • Sinuhet's Battle Mechanics
  • Lusted's Better BAI/CAI
  • Agart's Cities/Castles Strat
Download link.

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

20 comments:

Zanfib said...

Clicking on the download link takes me to a page of giberish text.

Also, in the previous version, why can't I change unit armor or weapon levels in custom battle? Is it a bug or is there some reason for it?

taw said...

Zanfib: Download link should go straight to .7z archive file. Are you using some strange browser, or anything else that might affect the download?

The mod doesn't really change anything about custom battles, so it definitely sounds like a bug. Could you tell me more about it?

Zanfib said...

I'm using firefox. I was able to download it by right clicking and selecting 'save link as...' but opening the link normally gave me the afore mentioned giberish. It's probably something on my end.

There isn't much more to tell. Go into a custom battle add a unit of spear militia or something and it won't let you upgrade their armor. Armor can be upgraded in the campaign just not in custom battles. I only found out because I was trying to test how important armor upgrades are to unit effectiveness.

taw said...

Zanfib: That sounds like a strange browser issue. Your browser probably doesn't understand .7z format, and for some reason tries to open it as text file instead of opening "Save as" window as it should for unrecognized formats. I don't know how to fix that.

I checked custom battles and experience upgrades work, but armor/weapon upgrades don't. That's probably because the mod is set to make armor/weapon upgrades free on campaign map, and this confuses custom battles code.

Try disabling "Unit armor upgrades for free" option in mod builder - that should fix it.

Viski said...

Just wanted to say thanks for the mod, and chime in with the garbled .7z in firefox.

The file's mime type is shown as text/plain, which is why 'fox will try to read it as a text file if it has no associations with the .7z format.

taw said...

Viski: I don't think I can fix the 7zip problem on that server.

Anonymous said...

This download link doesn't really work anymore, and I really want to try your mod! Care to help me?

taw said...

Anonymous: Link updated, old server went down.

Anonymous said...

Hello, can you include this mod or somehow add support for it?
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?80174-Klink-s-garrison-script
I'm not an author.

taw said...

Anonymous: I'm totally open to add support for some kind of garrison script, but I currently don't have enough time to work on it. (I'm taking patches)

Unknown said...

Howdy! I am only able to play version 0.53. I'd really like to use this newer versions as it allows me to tweak the settings to my liking but everytime I finish configurating the settings on the installer and do File->Install it sends this error message: http://i.gyazo.com/bdbbaaeaf0d8f8b506d19d148983e681.png

I've also tried running the start.bat on Admin mode but it just says something like this: http://i.gyazo.com/d26e25890e271cd4be369446f89f97c5.png

(Translation: "O Sistema não consegui localizar o ficheiro especificado" -> The System could not locate the specified file | "Prima qualquer tecla para continuar" -> Press any key to continue. )

taw said...

Miguel Simas: Your admin terminal definitely opened in "c:\windows\system32" not in "c:\Program Files (x86)\Medieval 2 Total War Gold\cv_builder_gui" you wanted.

Try executing cd "c:\Program Files (x86)\Medieval 2 Total War Gold\cv_builder_gui" before to make sure you're in right folder before running the script.

No idea why it's doing that.

Unknown said...

Hi! Thank you so much for the fast reply =)

That worked perfectly, thank you very much! One last question: Everytime that I want to run this modded version, do I have to do the same process every time or does double clicking the medieval2.exe work with the mod loaded as well?

taw said...

There's a script that gets copied by mod builder to m2 directory, it's called concentrated_vanilla.bat if I recall correctly - just double click on that, and it should work.

(it also tried to install the mod to Steam launcher, but they changed the launcher, so I don't think that works any more)

Unknown said...

Yup, works perfectly! Thank you again for being so helpful :D

taw said...

Enjoy the game.

Unknown said...

Hey, excited to try your mod, but the installer doesn't work for me. I get an error message about Ruby not being recognized. Any idea how to get past this? Thanks.

Anonymous said...

does this fix the broken diplomacy?

taw said...

Anonymous: It include broken diplomacy fix.

Unknown said...

That jruby link is corrupted