Simple Terrain Mapmode Mod for Hearts of Iron 4

Paradox grand strategy games don't let mods create new map modes without some serious hacks - even something as important as truce map modes for CK2 and EU4 is still missing.

Fortunately at least here a hack worked.

If you just want to skip the explanations and get the mod:

• Vanilla version
• Kaiserreich version

How Hearts of Iron 4 map works

In most strategy games maps are generated dynamically, so there's always simple mapping from map data to what's displayed.

Even a lot of games with static map use similar technique - gameplay map drives what's displayed.

That's not how Hearts of Iron 4 and other Paradox games work. Instead, they contain a bunch of bitmaps driving what's displayed, and almost completely separate gameplay map data.

So it's possible for a tile to look like a forest visually while being a gameplay hill. In some parts of the map like Persia or Tibet majority of tiles are not what they look like.

This separation is supposed to make things look nicer, but I'd say it's not worth it. When players have a choice - like in Europa Universalis 4 - vast majority instantly disable default map mode (terrain) and nevel look back again; instead using political map mode 99% of time, and if they want to see terrain information they use simple terrain map mode which is driven by gameplay data.

Unfortunately Hearts of Iron 4 doesn't let us disable visual terrain view. And to make matters worse it contains no way to see gameplay terrain. Instead we're forced to see clutter which might or might not match gameplay terrain in every map mode.

Since visual and gameplay terrain match poorly, the result is that figuring out which way you can send your tanks is a hellish exercise of mouse-overing every tile to see its real terrain, and then trying to remember it all.

What the mod does

The mod changes visual map to make it match game map more accurately, by running some image editing scripts.

It changes terrain and tree layers. It make everything far more accurate, and while it loses some detail, I'd say map looks cleaner and better this way.

I experimented with changing heightmap as well, but that made the map look rather ugly, and other changes are usually sufficient to make terrain clear. Taiwan is an example of region where terrain and heightmap mismatch.

It doesn't completely wipe out detail on source map, just tweaking it in places where there's significant mismatch.

There are a few mods that try to make terrain look better by replacing textures used for various terrain - but they don't deal with core issue that data they're trying to display doesn't match in game map.

Compatibility

There are two versions:

• one for vanilla map
• one for Kaiserreich map

You can use them with other mods as long as they don't change the map - in particular Road to 56 mod works just fine, since it uses vanilla map.

As it's all a script if there's demand I can run it for other mods. Or you could use it anyway, it might be better than vanilla map anyway.

You can use it with mods that change map graphics.

Before

Good luck guessing where the mountains are. Or hills. Or deserts.

After

And these are the answers.

Issues

Some minor rivers flow through a tile, and it's still some guesswork if you get river penalty or not attacking it. Mod doesn't affect river placement in any way.

A number of tiles in vanilla are declared as "urban", even though game files declare them as something else. The mod believes game files. If anybody has a clue what's going on, I'd like to know. The only tiles affected that I noticed are a few VPs in Iraq region. Kaiserreich doesn't seem to be affected by this problem.

Review of Europa Universalis 4: the Big Blue Railroad

I have a rule I've been following with all games, especially strategy games (and Total War series in particular) - never play until at least six months after release. This saves me trouble with all the inevitable bugs and balance issues which are inevitable in highly complex games - and I don't think I'll ever catch up with everything I ever wanted to play, so I don't lose much by the way (it also doesn't hurt the game will probably be half the price by then).

With Europa Universalis 4 I took my chances. I liked a lot of what I've seen, and I have no doubts that it will be an amazing game after a few patches, and once modders start messing with it, but it sure has some major issues now.

The Big Blue Railroad

There's a handful of minor things I'll mention later, but let's just get to the core of the problem - EU3 and CK2 were sandbox games were player could shape the history in any way they wished. EU4 has some of that, but it pushes a lot harder than before to achieve certain predetermined historical outcomes, and I really don't like this shift.

First, and most infuriating of all - the game contains big scripted events to help France, Austria (and to lesser extent Castille blob) - like France and Austria dividing Burgundy between each other by event, every single campaign - even worse, with instant free cores everywhere, accepted culture, and everything. Triangle of power of France, England, and Burgundy led to very interesting balancing dynamics in EU3, now you only have Big Blue Blob.

And of course the third part of the triangle - England - is basically scripted to lose the Hundred Years War, and it has scripts (Scottish Highlanders) working against it. Speed bumps against blobbing I don't mind as much as scripted blobbing, but the outcome here is total collapse of triangle of power and France dominating Western Europe almost immediately every single time. At 0% overextension, and 100% accepted cultures.

If you absolutely have to make someone inherit Burgundy, make it some random countries. If France wants that, it will have to conquer and core them all, but I'd simply remove this nonsense.

And speaking of France - unlike every other nation in game it starts as culture union nation ("All French cultures view France as their own nation, thus giving no penalties"). A few other countries can achieve similar outcome by undergoing more or less difficult unification - but France starts as one. This is historically ridiculous before at least 19th century, and in terms of gameplay just adds to the Big Blue Railroad. I'm totally fine with nations being able to unlock this as some mid-game decision, or at some tech level, or an idea or whatnot, but they shouldn't start with that, especially not France. This mechanic isn't new, but culture penalties are much worse in EU4 than in EU3 (something I'm totally fine with, especially since culture shifting is so much easier).

To continue with railroading blobs (and not just France this time), EU3 had a lot of speed bumps against blobbing, and EU4 just drops them. Instead of infamy which hurt big countries a lot, and for small ones it didn't matter much there's aggressive expansion penalty, which is only as strong as the coalition people can gather against you.

If you're France, then Burgundy instantly collapses, England gets kicked off the continent (and even if England had any armies worth talking about, AI sucks hard at naval invasions), Castille (who is pushed pretty hard to unite Spain) has little chance of joining anybody else's troops and can be crushed separately, so maybe, depending on situation within HRE, the emperor can be a problem. Usually from what I've seen the Empire has constant internal wars and is too weak to challenge France, at least early game.

And speaking of coalitions against someone - even if you somehow managed to gather a coalition against a blob, that's usually still of no use, since you have no way to coordinate with your coalition partners, or for that matter your vassals. Blob's doomstacks will just roam the country unchallenged while your allies just sit around doing nothing. What's most annoying about it is that they solved this problem is CK2 already in two ways - first you could control your vassals' troops during a war, second you could link your troops to other allied troops in the same province, so they could put their troops under your command or you under theirs - and this would let you gather enough troops to face a doomstack. It's really annoying how EU4 just ignores all that and we're back to situation where blobs always win.

Another speed bump - most important of all actually - was war exhaustion. In EU3 it was proportional to number of troops you lost, so waging a successful war against a big blob like France, crushing all their armies, forcing them to release a bunch of states, would doom them to decades of fighting rebels and desperately trying to rebuild their armies, and kick them out of big politics for a long while. Usually by the time they could recover their neighbours like Burgundy (did I mention how much I hate EU4 scripting Burgundy out of existence?) or Castille or even Savoy would eat deeply into their territory, so a single war could change balance of power forever.

Meanwhile war exhaustion didn't matter at all against a small country - unlike big blobs small countries had very little trouble coming back up after being completely occupied and having all their armies destroyed.

Now it's the opposite - war exhaustion depends on army size, so big blobs have zero trouble with it, but small countries are completely buried under it.

But let's forget about all these minor problems - the biggest railroad is the game, and one thing that completely screws game balance, and really needs to be patched or modded away, or the game is doomed is the new manpower mechanic.

In EU3 manpower regenerated fully every 2 years and it was pretty close irrelevant unless you started as a non-European OPM. It made perfect sense to either make it matter, or just scrap it completely. Unfortunately switching to 10 years regeneration is the biggest pro-blobbing mechanic of them all.

If you're a small country, even if you somehow manage to defeat a blob, your manpower will be crushed forever without any hopes of recovery - meanwhile the blob will get theirs back real fast. And if you actually lose a war, it will take far more than 10 years to rebuild your armies since manpower is usually a lot less than your force limit. Not long enough until the blob attacks you again.

And as if it wasn't enough, blobs invariably have more monarch power than you, so they'll have better tech, better generals, more ideas and so on. Back in EU3 small trading powers were tech leaders. Now it's the Big Blue Blob (which is of course exempt from cost of coring and culture shifting things in takes).

Unlike bugs which are mostly minor annoyances and will likely be fixed in patches anyway, the railroading problem (especially with manpower and Burgundy event) is one are are which seems like a consciously made horrible design decision, and it hurt the game to the point where I want to wait for mods (or mod it myself) rather than suffer from vanilla. It's basically EU4 equivalent of gavelkind. Nothing else I'm going to mention is anywhere near as bad as this.

Oh, and it's something I don't care about, but others do - if you want achievement, now you have to play with lucky nations set to historical - as if France really needed any more railroading than it already gets. They could let people choose random or none, but they sure want to see the blob train.

Diplomacy and war goal system

EU4 changes to a completely new war goal system inspired by some aspects of EU3's and CK2's. It is quite interesting, and I think diplomacy and war goal systems are both huge improvement over what was there in the previous games.

However, it's still either bugged as hell or just really non-intuitive, whichever way you prefer to look at it.

Even if you don't let war leader negotiate for you, war leader can still negotiate for your vassals.  Austria was the war leader. I was their ally Brandenburg, and I had Teutonic Order as a vassal (who held Hinterpommern on which Pomerania had a core). Of course I disabled their ability to negotiate for me - but they still gave Hinterpommern to Pomerania in the peace deal. No enemy troops got anywhere near me or Teutonic Order at any time, so it sure as hell wasn't occupied or anything.

A big rule of the war goal system is that except returning cores (which by the way should result in a very high positive relationship modifier if you're just gifting territory to someone who's not even a party to the war, not just +10 for doubling their territory) - only country actually controlling a territory can get it in a peace deal.

This sounds fine, but when the primary goal is of the war is your claim for some province like Hinterpommern, and your Polish allies are first to reach and siege it, you can still only ask for it to go to Poland, not to you. So much for your claim.

Even more bizzarely, Poland started a war to subjugate Teutonic Order, where I joined hoping to get that damn Hinterpommern in a separate peace deal. I ignored enemy armies and rushed to siege everything Teutonic Order had - then the moment war ticker reached 100% Poland pressed subjugation option, and Teutonic Order ended up as my vassal, not theirs. I couldn't even vassalize them in a separate peace since for me that was 198% war score, but since Poland had a discount due to CB, they could vassalize them under me.

I think there should either be exception for war goals so they can always be pressed for the right party, or sieging a territory with a claim should make it go to the claimant not to the besieger (at least when the claimant is the war leader), or something like that, otherwise a lot of silliness will ensue. This isn't really game-breaking but it's sure extremely nonintuitive.

Right now the proper way to act in any wars where you have allies is to ignore enemy armies (since even winning means extremely painful manpower losses) and just siege everything (regardless of who's the war leader, besieger gets everything). I don't think that's such a great design.

Another issue is that when you are attacked by OPM who's a coalition member, that OPM remains coalition leader. This means a single siege gets the war score to 100% and you can force other coalition members to give you huge unearned concessions. This is much less of a deal than other problems here.

Overall, I think the new war goal system needs a bit of polishing, but it's a huge improvement over what was there in the past - and EU4 diplomacy is just a lot better than in any previous game.

User Interface Issues

I'm really really happy with interface improvements - CK2 was already a huge improvement over EU3, and EU4 makes it even better.

There are finally hotkeys for most things, map modes are really well designed, and the game looks really pretty.

There are a few things that could be improved, but they're pretty small:

• Alt-mouse drag to select all ships like in recent CK2 patches would be nice (but not a big deal, since you have far fewer armies than in CK2)
• Diplomacy view mod (or some other mod) really needs to show coalition members against you.
• Some kind of casus belli / truce map mode would be nice.
• Tooltip showing diplomatic relations should maybe show how fast "improved relationship" is changing, right now that's only in diplomacy view.
• Diplomacy screen really needs to be larger. Fortunately there's already a mod for that.
• Ledger page showing charts with culture seems to be broken and shows them all (or maybe all from the same culture group?) as same color without even any dividing lines.
• There doesn't seem to be any explanation of technology "neighbor bonus" and it sure doesn't work like EU3. I had a few theories on how it might be calculated, but none of them fits very well. Anybody has an idea?
• Micromanaging diplomats is really annoying. Worst of all you need a free diplomat to even view your options (like CBs you have), not just to send an offer. They really should let you view such things even if you can't act on them at a moment. AI for sure knows all that itself, so it's just user interface pain, not any real game mechanic. (I still prefer that to EU3 diplomats system, which was just unbearable and I modded it away every single time I played)
• It would be nice to be able to see this big war summary dialog for all wars, not just ones you're in. Most of this information is already available, just scattered over many places.

And assorted minor issues

I really like how they replaced one random mission with a choice of 3 missions - unfortunately very often all 3 are totally generic and none of them are things you want to do, or have much chance doing. That's one area where just throwing more content at the game can really improve it.

Military expansion within HRE feels about the right level of difficulty - people will dislike you for it, but not ridiculously so (in EU3 you'd get 4 infamy for taking a province, then 12.5 ticking infamy before it cored - very few provinces were even close to being worth that).

It feels like money is a much bigger problem than in EU3, and everyone is pretty much forced into trading, not just trading powers. This was another thing where small countries used to have advantage over blobs, but now blobs dominate trading just like they dominate everything else, and trading is now a lot more important than it used to be, so help blobs even more.

As a small country you'll be starved of monarch points - you won't have enough money to buy any decent advisors (who by the way are totally all free for AI, AI also suffers no naval attrition, has no fog of war and cheats in a few other ways), while big blobs won't have such problem at all.

Anyway, to summarize this review - EU4 has huge potential and I'm pretty sure some modder will turn it into a game it deserves to be - a fun sandbox, not the big blue railroad it currently is.

EDIT: I wrote a minimod for EU4 1.1.1c to reduce railroading a little. It hasn't been tested too much.

Simple and correct algorithm for determining colors of Magic: the Gathering deck

This sounds like something completely trivial, but every single site including deckbox, tappedout etc. is doing it wrong, so I'm writing this public as a public service announcement.

Wrong algorithms everybody uses

There are two very popular algorithms:

• Check colored symbols on lands, use that as deck's colors
• Check colored symbols in mana cost, use that as deck's colors

This sounds about right, but it fails on anything more complicated than a core set intro pack:

• Phyrexian mana a deck has no way to pay for other than with life counts - so all Pod decks ever were suddenly "/u" because of 1-of Phyrexian Metamorph, half of UW Delver decks were "/r" because of some sideboard Gut Shots etc.
• Hybrid mana makes a deck all its colors, so deck with no mana sources but basic Mountains which contains and some Boros Reckoners and Rakdos Cacklers is somehow an R/b/w deck.
• Reanimator decks which literally cannot cast half of their off-color fatties still count their colors.

And in addition to extra colors this logic would also miss a lot of cases, like non-land mana sources, sources of "any" colored mana like Cavern of Souls, off-color activated abilities and so on.

Basically, a total disaster. Now if there was no way to do it correctly or the algorithm to do so was too complicated that would be excusable, but it turns out it's really simple.

Simple and correct algorithm

So here's a simple definition which deals with all these problems. X is one of the colors of a deck, if the deck:

• Can use one of its cards to generate mana in color X
• Can pay colored mana cost X to cast one of its cards or pay for ability on one of its cards (colorless mana costs don't count, hybrid, 2/c, and Phyrexian mana costs are all treated the same as normal costs)

And the algorithm is correspondingly simple:

• Take all cards of the deck, including its sideboard
• List all colors any of these cards could produce
• List all colors any of these cards could use
• Intersection of these two lists is the answer

And that's all! It's really simple, and deals with all problems I mentioned.

Thanks to Oracle using very regular templating it just takes a few regular expressions to make a list of colors card generates and can use. I even put the list on github as .tsv file.

Possible and impossible improvements

There are some decks for which simple algorithm given here doesn't work perfectly, but for such cases I haven't been able to find any consistent answers, and any more complex algorithm just lead to different problems.

The monored deck mentioned before with Boros Reckoners and Rakdos Cacklers is correctly identified as monored, but if we include Cavern of Souls in it, it's now R/w/b, since you can now tap Caverns for white/black and use it to cast Reckoner/Cackler - you have no real reason not to tap it for red, but the algorithm doesn't know that.

The algorithm could instead try to find the smallest group of mana colors fully cast everything, but then if you for some inexplicable reason put Cavern of Souls and Boros Reckoner in otherwise monogreen deck, minimal coloring for this deck would be both G/r and G/w - G/r/w the algorithm gives wouldn't be minimal, and G would be incorrect. There's simple mathematical proof based on lattices that explains why this won't work if you want to do some theory. The algorithm could check if lattice's least upper bound is also a solution, and if so give it, otherwise give greatest upper bound, but it's fairly inelegant.

One way the algorithm could be improved but at cost of quite a bit of complexity is by tracking entire costs as an unit, not each symbol. So an otherwise monogreen deck with Progenitus, Quicksilver Amulet, and Noble Hierarch will be treated as G/w/u (since w/u are in colors of Progenitus, and Hierarch can pay for them), even though it's literally impossible to hardcast Progenitus. This is one area where a better algorithm is possible, but it doesn't seem to be worth sacrificing simplicity.

The algorithm doesn't track number of colored mana sources, so otherwise monogreen deck with 4 Birds of Paradise and Progenitus is treated as 5-color deck, even if it doesn't have any way of casting hard-Progenitus without 8 Birds. This is difficult to fix, since any kind of "another mana of the same color" effects, untap effects, blink effects, clones, etc. can all increase amount of colored mana, and we'd need to track them. Right now we don't need to care since they never add another color.

And then of course there could be crazy decks. Maybe your plan is to Act of Treason someone else's guildmage and your 5-color mana sources are meant for paying that? Or maybe you're planning to steal some Birds of Paradise for your off-color flashback costs which you have full intention of paying? With enough crazy it's possible to come up with a deck that breaks every algorithm.

Available on github now

I put script implementing algorithm described in the post on github. Feel free to use it any way you wish.

Borderlands series review

As you might have noticed I enjoy video games and cats a lot, so today I'd like to review Borderlands series in one go - some time ago I played Borderlands 2 (as Zero and then halfway through as Geige), and then replayed Borderlands 1 with all the DLCs.

The games have far more similarities than differences so it makes more sense to review them together.

The good

First of all, Handsome Jack - Borderlands 2 managed to pull off one of the most memorable antagonists in the history of gaming, even though you only actually meet him in a brief (and fairly easy) fight. In most games villains are totally replaceable, and you could switch any Mr Doom with Doctor Destruction or Big Bad Alien and nobody would even notice - you just go forward because quests tell you to, not because you care about the ending all that much. In Borderlands 2 Handsome Jack contacts you every now and then to taunt you and otherwise acts as a total douche and throughout the game he manages to build a lot of personality this way. I'd give some examples, but I don't want to be spoilerific about something so awesome.

The next great thing is cartoonish style. Yes it's a postapocalyptic wasteland kind of environment, but it manages to be really happy and colorful! Just as Simpsons (in the old days), South Park and Family Guy (more recently) have shown - you can get away with a lot more if you look silly and cartoonish. I don't really see any "serious" series being able to pull off things like Tiny Tina.

That's one thing I really disliked about Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim - they try too hard to keep this awful brown/grey/different shade of grey (plus some snow white in case of Skyrim) color palette popularized by "serious business" modern shooters, and it really doesn't suit them.

I really liked how various playable characters from Borderlands 1 become major NPCs in Borderlands 2 - that's the best storyline transition to the sequel I've seen in any game.

I absolutely loved how you can respec your characters for a small fee. In far too many games you need to make your spec choices before you have any idea what you're doing, and there's no way out of them other than by restarting the game. The idea is either that it's "serious business" or that it adds to replay value, but it's bullshit either way - every game should have some way to respec your character, no exceptions.

Another thing I quite liked contrary to many other reviews is how vehicles worked. In most games they are pretty awful. In particular Bandit Technical with barrel catapult was a lot of fun to drive.

The bad

The worst thing about Borderlands is levelling system - it's almost as bad as Oblivion. It forces you to do all the side quests in the right order, since if you delay any for a few levels it will be laughably easy.

The first time I played Borderlands 1 before any DLCs came out, it was a reasonable game. The second time I played it with all the DLCs at about the level I was supposed to - and because I got a bunch of levels fighting DLC zombies the entire main story line (and all the side quests since their level is linked with story line level) were just laughably easy.

Levelling systems for open-ended games are always a problem, but in Borderlands the difference even 1 or 2 level difference makes is so ridiculously big even minor problems completely screw the game the way they wouldn't usually.

Borderlands 2 figured this out and at least moved all DLCs to after the main campaign, except for Geige one which provides a new character without any new missions.

A fairly annoying thing is that enemies respawn too fast. I'm not terribly fond of respawn mechanics in general, even though I realize they're essential, but it's one thing for enemies to respawn after you leave the map and come back a few days later, not respawning 5 minutes after you kill them like routinely happens here.

Just like with every other game I really hated max item limit. It was especially horrible in Borderlands 1, so on my second playthrough I just edited the save game to make it 99 before I even started playing. Dear games, stop doing this bullshit. It's tedious and doesn't provide any value whatsoever. In Borderlands 2 at least it was possible to increase it by spending some eridium, so it ended up being less annoying, but I'd still much rather not have any limits.

I'm not a big fan of the random item looting mechanic. It's pretty much inevitable that 99% of random items will be worse than your current item, and it's just unnecessarily tedious to sort them out. What's worse - 99% of quest reward items tend to be total crap, or 100% if you do quests out of level order. This by the way annoyed me far more in Skyrim where unique Daedric artifacts were a lot worse than random crap you could make with medium-level blacksmithing. Why can't games simply increase power level of unique items across the board to make this at least somewhat less annoying? 

While I really loved Borderlands 2's primary antagonist and he together with many other memorable characters drove the storyline well, Borderlands 1's storyline was of simply "go there, shoot some bandits" variety. 

The rest

Borderlands 1 and 2 are very similar games in most ways. Some people have irrational dislike for sequels being too similar mechanically to the originals, but I don't mind - I'd much rather see the sequel keep parts that worked and improve what didn't (like Borderlands 2 with the storyline and various minor enhancements) than completely screw everything that was good about the original, like:

• Witcher 2
• FarCry 2
• Crysis 2
• Doom 3
• and other such total crap (OK, Witcher 2 wasn't as crappy as the other examples, but drop in quality from awesomeness of Witcher 1 was huge, and only partly explained by pandering to the dirty console-playing peasants and their shitty controllers)

I totally don't care for multiplayer nonsense Borderlands is full of. Multiplayer coop is just a stupid idea every time, and the only proper kind of multiplayer is pure PvP.

Anyway, I recommend both games very highly despite all their issues.

Europa Universalis 3 Divine Wind second impressions

Over a month ago I wrote first impressions review of EU3 Divine Wind. Since then I've played it a lot more, and did a tiny bit of modding, so here's an update.

Modding is easy!

First, modding is ridiculously easy. Pretty much everything is a just a bunch of text files.

To get started you just need to make a simple mod skeleton, copy over defines.txt and any other files you want to tweak, and just edit some data.

New values you're trying don't necessarily have to result in a "better" game, it being different from one campaign to the next can be very interesting.

Some things like giving everybody a lot more diplomats, or making basic buildings not get destroyed when province changes ownership are fairly easy to do. Unfortunately "fixing" infamy or providing faster mission cancelation option for particularly stupid missions seems like a lot of work, if it's even fully possible.

The game is full of bugs

So far I had two different save game corruption bugs - and since save games are plain text files (something very rarely seen in any game ever) I managed to fix them both manually. The first was achievement exponential growth making save games double in size each time, the second was some kind of string escaping problem that added a lot of crap in the middle of save file - and interestingly moving back to last good save the problem would still reappear in a month or two.

In addition to these serious bugs there are countless things in the game that don't work like expected, or in a sane way - for instance just a few game-years ago when my vassal was sieging a province held by rebels and I sent some spies to bribe defenders away, my spies were detected and of course that screw my relationships with my vassals.

There's even more things which might or might not be bugs, but in any case work in completely undocumented ways - I still have no idea why my relationships with other countries go down (usually) for no apparent reason at random times. It's amazing since the game openly provides such huge piles of data and algorithms, and still manages to surprise every single time.

Even when things work as designed, it's really hard to know what's the design unless you alt-tab to a browser with EU3 wiki. The tutorials and in-game explanations are so bad as if they were nonexistent, but after a few games you figure things out on your own.

There is no balance

Some games make a serious attempt at balancing things - I doubt they even bothered with EU3. There are so many broken things you can do, like become Holy Roman Emperor, establish Baltic or Black Sea tolls, seize Rome/Jerusalem/Mecca, establish land route to Africa or India and so on.

These things tend to be game-breakingly good, but then if the prize wasn't great what would be the point putting major effort into such goals?

Exploits

There are quite a few fun mild exploits I recommend trying.

Start multiple wars at once. Sadly the casus belli system makes it unprofitable to get anything out of countries that joined existing wars, but there's an easy workaround - save 5 diplomats, then stars 5 wars on the same day with each member of the alliance! A massive 5-way Crusade against Ottomans/Saruhan/Candar/Kardamon/Ramazan can net you 10+ provinces and up to 5 annexations at 1 infamy each.

War goals against leader sometimes work against alliance members. If you declare war against a country and it loses war leader status, you have no casus belli against anybody except that country. But if other countries join as minor parties your war goals often still apply! So declaring a Holy War against Muslim country, you still get 1 infamy/province even for taking provinces from their Christian allies. It's quite useful against Bosnia and Serbia early game. It's not as good as multiple war technique, since you'll rarely be able to afford taking more than 4-5 provinces in peace talks per war and you won't be able to annex anyone.

Bait ships in port with 1-ship blockade. AI is somewhat competent at land warfare when it has compact country like France or Burgundy, since it's pretty much impossible to screw that up. Naval warfare on the other hand - it's just amazingly bad at. If you want to sink some ships that happen to be in port, just move your entire fleet one province away and leave one ship blockading their port. AI will invariably sail out of the port to attack that ship, then your fleet returns to sink them.

Baiting fleets before blockades are invented. Similar technique works even before blockades - if your land army is crossing a narrow strait, AI can't resist trying to stop it, even if that crossing is fairly irrelevant to its goals. Of course your superior fleet is just one province away, waiting for them.

Naval patrols. That's not as exploitative, but useful when you have massive naval superiority, but don't want to micromanage. Just set your whole navy to go in circles (set route with some shift-clicks, select start patrol) - for example around eastern Mediterranean when you're fighting assorted Muslim minors. AI will see that your ships sailed away and will leave port even when it has no reason to, then it won't get back in time when your patrol reappears.

Land route to Africa or India. This is a surprising game mechanic, but can be extremely powerful. Provinces are counted as "overseas" when they're on another continent (somehow "continent" boundaries are not quite geographic), or when there is unbroken land route of actual control (not ownership) from your capital to the province. This makes is extremely powerful for European power to control land route to Africa or India, since then they count for far more money and manpower. You lose some special abilities of "overseas" provinces like colonialism casus belli, ability to culture shift with one colonist etc., but since what matters is actual control not ownership you could temporarily make these provinces "overseas" again by letting rebels take one of key provinces on your land route.

Breaking alliances. Do you want to attack your ally's ally? First, attack a third country and get your ally into your war on your side. Then attack your target. Since they're in existing war on your side, they can't take the victim's side in the new war, so their alliance will break. It's pretty damn useful if you get alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor, get them into a silly war on your side, then you're free to attack anybody in the empire at flimsiest CB and they won't intervene.

In other words - it's an awesome game to play, and an awesome game to mod!

Medieval 2 Total War Concentrated Vanilla 0.61

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):

• 0.60
• 0.53
• 0.52
• 0.51
• 0.50
• 0.08
• 0.07
• 0.06
• 0.04
• 0.01

Gatecrash Sealed Simulator

Continuing the grand tradition I made Sealed Simulator for Gatecrash, which you can use to practice before the weekend Prerelease.

Here's Gatecrash Sealed Simulator.

Or if you want to play with older sets:

• Return to Ravnica
• M13
• Avacyn Restored

The simulator works in a way identical to RTR simulator. Strangely we had 4 single-set Limited formats in a row - I don't think that ever happened before, or is all that likely to happen anytime soon.

The one for Dragon's Maze will need to change since it will be a three-set format. And then presumably two more single-set formats.

Any feedback welcome.

Good luck on the Prerelease and may the best Crocodile Frog win!

Europa Universalis 3 Divine Wind review

Over the last couple of weeks I've been playing Europa Universalis 3. A lot.

You could vaguely compare it to Total War games, but without battles, and with a lot more complex and deeper campaign mode. There's an obvious idea of mixing Total War style battles with EU3 style campaign, but EU3 is extremely complex and would probably be inaccessible to most casual players, and it would be far too easy, since any half-competent human player can crush AI in Total War battles even with significantly smaller armies.

So here's my list of issues with EU3, since do I ever do things in my reviews other than complain?

Infamy and Stability

These two numbers are the main way game controls pacing of the campaign and prevents one country from just conquering the world right away.

You gain 4 infamy for each annexed territory and 4 extra for annexing whole country, and with really good reason you can get it to as low as 1 infamy per territory (like in a holy war). You also gain 4 infamy for forcing defeated enemy to become your vassal, and then 1 infamy per territory for annexing them later (but you also lose 1 stability, and all your other vassals strongly dislike you, so it's not that easy either). Your infamy can get pretty high before everybody gangs up to beat you, so it's not an immediate problem, but it takes forever to go down.

Stability has smaller scale of -3 to +3, and if you start a war without casus belli (-2), or against someone you have dynastic ties to (-1), or break truce (-5), or annex your vassal or country you're in personal union with (-1), or change domestic policy (anything from -1 to all the way down), it will make your stability hurt. Stability matters right away since it drastically increases revolt risk and lowers your income. It is relatively fast for small countries to recover, but extremely slow and expensive for big empires.

These two numbers mostly work well, but they often lead to extremely frustrating situations.

Annexing provinces which are core provinces of your country currently under someone else's control can cost 0 infamy, but only under some narrow circumstances - otherwise it's full 4 infamy penalty per province. I feel that's one thing which really needs fixing - even if you get only a partial discount without the right casus belli.

If you're attacked, then as defender you get to annex attacker's provinces at only 3 infamy each, but it doesn't always work, and for many defensive wars it's still full 4.

And generally any discounts you have only apply to your primary target - never to its allies, even if identical conditions apply to them as well (like reconquesting your core provinces, or holy war).

The game could really tweak these mechanics to reduce number of frustrating moments.

Or it could provide more ways to reduce your infamy. One thing I feel should really burn some is forcing others to release countries. That should be at least 1 infamy per released nation, or maybe even as much as 1 per released province + 1 extra for each released nation - and perhaps even a bit for forcing nations to free their vassals, but that might be getting too far.

Or there could be some decisions that you could use to convert prestige to infamy reduction at some steep rates. There are too many ways you can gain prestige (which maxes out at 100 anyway) - and there's little you can use it for other than expanding your sphere of influence, for some minor diplomatic bonuses. If annual infamy reduction used your total diplomacy (ruler skill + size of your sphere of influence), not just your ruler skill, that would be a really great prestige sink.

Agents

You get some number of agents - diplomats, merchants, missionaries, colonists, spies, and magistrates. I don't have many issues with most of them - except diplomats are always in extremely short supply if you try to do anything interesting.

Seriously, diplomats should either be completely unlimited, or at least massively more plentiful. The way it is now, it's hard to do anything interesting when not at war, so you just sit there waiting for a diplomat to come while chasing rebels around the map.

It wouldn't lead to much abuse, since all diplomatic actions have some kind of associated cost - converting your diplomat to a general or admiral costs ton of money and army/naval tradition, while any diplomatic mission has limit of one a month per target country, and you get relations penalty if your proposal is refused.

So mostly not having enough diplomats is just annoying.

Peace talks

After any war there are peace talks, where some of war's gains can become legitimate and permanent, while others revert to pre-war situation.

This of course, leads to some extremely annoying moments. First - only country which took a province can annex it - if any of your allies did so, you're screwed. Oh, you can force them to release that province, but you take the infamy hit, while they get the province.

And you cannot annex the country, unless you personally took every single one of their provinces. If you took 3 of 4 but your ally took the last one - screw you - no annexing for you for the next 5 years.

There have been far too many times when I wished my allies would just make a separate peace treaty and exit the war - either annexing that damn province they took, or releasing it so I can retake it myself, but they never felt like it.

Random missions and events

There are two things driving the game forward. First, there are your own goals, like uniting some particular country, defeating some nearby enemy, becoming the Holy Roman Emperor, or whatever you want.

Second - there are randomly generated missions and events. And very often these are the only thing moving the game forward. If you don't like a mission, you can cancel it for -5 prestige hit, but then you won't be able to cancel again for 5 more years.

I really wish it was possible to cancel mission more often, even while paying full prestige penalty. A lot of missions are either pretty much undoable - for example while playing as Burgundy with five coastal provinces, and fleet already over support limit, I was asked to "make larger fleet than England" - there's pretty much no way in hell to do so. Or to completely screw my standing in the empire by either attacking one of electors (who even happened to be my ally with royal ties and currently voting for me), or annexing some vassal on whom I don't have proper cores.

Or missions could be possible but they would take ridiculously long time. I had to convert Tangiers to Catholicism as Portugal, or convert all of Spain as Castille. This is all doable, but missionaries have low chance of success per year (like 5%/year), and there's no way to speed them up. So do you cancel the mission right away, or wait on average 20 years, or possibly a lot longer - Tangiers never converted in my entire over 100 years campaign.

The most annoying of all are missions requiring you to go to war with someone you just entered a truce, or even worse - you're already at war. Since your current war has wrong casus belli for the mission, you can either do what mission demands (annex something or vassalize them etc.) for a huge infamy hit - or finish current war, wait 5 years, and only then start a new one properly. Even assuming nothing will get you into another war with them in the meantime.

Quick fixes

Fortunately there are ways around this. First, there's lovely console where you can fix most of these issues.

For infinite diplomats, just use diplomat command - something I've been doing all the time anyway. You can also do that to other agent types, but I very rarely felt the need, other than when I was trying to figure out the mechanics.

You can also change infamy and stability this way - by commands like stability +3, infamy -8, etc. This gets quite solidly into cheating territory, but then if your choice is between infamy -20 and quitting the campaign out of frustration, go for it.

For stupid missions the easiest way is to edit save game file and delete the mission. Save file is a neatly formatted YAML-like text file - imagine that in this century - and it's super-easy to edit with any text editor.

Of course then you'll very often just get other stupid missions, so maybe the right fix is just add larger collection of sensible missions to the game, or tweak them so they are more appropriate.

I haven't been able to find even a very cheaty way of kicking an ally of territory the occupy, but that's probably just a matter of save game editing too.

Slow fixes

The game looks amazingly moddable - everything is just a bunch of text files with very little bullshit, so many of the issues I have I could probably solve by just writing a minimod - the same way I did with Medieval 2 Total War, Empire Total War (I never really released that one) etc.

Or maybe such minimod already exists somewhere. The game even has options for tweaking some settings - like making merchants cost 0 money, making colonists 4x faster etc. (both probably good ideas), but unfortunately not the ones I want.

If I ever get to do anything like that, I'll let you know.

Make your own Medieval 2 mod, with blackjack, and random campaigns!

I'm as biased about it as it ever gets, but I'm pretty sure this is one of the most awesome things that happened to Total War modding ever.

Here's what in the release:

• Concentrated Vanilla minimod - essentially vanilla with a ton of minor fixes and enchantments for more dynamic gameplay.
• A program you can use to easily make your own minimod, customizing your gaming experience in many ways.
• Random campaign system, allowing every single campaign you play to be completely different.

Pics or didn't happen

For some nice campaign maps, go here, here, and especially here.

Here are some screenshots of just some of the things you can customize:

Installation

This is first public release of the mod builder, so it wasn't extensively tested. You might have problems with any of these steps - in such case just contact me.

• Install JRuby. Download link.
• Install 7zip. Download link. (in case you don't have 7zip or another unpacker for .7z archives)
• Download mod builder and unpack it. Download link.
• Start mod builder by double-clicking start.bat. You should see GUI like one in screenshots above.
• Customize in any way you want. If you want random scenarios, be sure to tick "Enable random scenarios" checkbox.
• There are two presets you can choose with File > Open. "Default" preset is Concentrated Vanilla minimod. "Minimal" preset is almost vanilla Medieval 2 Grand Campaign. You can then customize them any way you want from either of these starting points, including enabling random scenarios for both.
• Build your mod. It's as simple as using File > Build command. If there are any errors, you'll see them in a separate window. (if so, screenshot and send to me if you need help)
• Install your mod. If your game installation was detected correctly, File > Install command will install the mod.
• Run your mod [Retail version]. If you use retail (or cracked) version, use File > Run command, or double click concentrated_vanilla.bat file in your game directory.
• Run your mod [Steam version]. If you use Steam version with builtin launcher, start Kingdoms (not Medieval 2) from your Steam Library, then select Concentrated Vanilla from launcher's menu. This is least tested way. If in doubt, try to get retail version.

Troubleshooting

In case of trouble, screenshot whatever errors you see and send it straight to me.

If installer doesn't work, try running it as administrator.

If builder can't find your (retail) game installation, copy and paste all files from output directory to your game directory, then run concentrated_vanilla.bat from your game directory.

Support for Steam launcher is extremely experimental, and I just finished it moments ago, so if it crashes, just provide me the best information you can and I'll try to figure it out. For some reason starting launcher as "Medieval 2" rather than "Kingdoms" invariably results in a crash on my computer. (even though the mod actually uses Medieval 2 not Kingdoms engine).

Saving your work

You can save your settings with "File > Save", but format of that file is not guaranteed to be compatible across upgrades. For now it probably won't be.

Random seeds should result in the same map as long as you use the same version of the mod builder, and identical scenario settings. Different machine, or different settings for anything else are not meant to affect it, but no guarantees. In the future in would be nice to make random seeds shareable like in Minecraft.

Using Install command will overwrite previously installed version of Concentrated Vanilla. It won't touch your saved games.

Using Uninstall command will uninstall Concentrated Vanilla, but will not touch your saved games.

Limitations

This is early release so it has many limitations. Just some of them:

• Only Concentrated Vanilla map is supported (which has 7 extra regions over vanilla map). In the future vanilla map, and possibly other maps will also be selectable. Each map requires a bit of support code for random scenario builder. If you have any map you want supported, send me all the files, and I'll try to include it in a future release.
• Mod builder is somewhat fragile and hasn't been extensively stress tested. Unusual combinations of options might not work. Error reporting is currently minimal. If you find any errors screenshot errors, email me with as much information as you can.
• Scenario builder doesn't have any interface for ton of features it can do programatically. Features like leaving pope in Rome while shuffling everybody else around, adjusting city sizes randomly, or adjusting regions' religions to match ruling factions - and many others - would be fairly straightforward except for lack of interface. If there's any particular feature you want to see, just contact me.
• Only features I needed for Concentrated Vanilla are available in the mod builder GUI. I'm sure ton of other automated changes could be added. If you have any needs, contact me and I'll see what I can do.
• Medieval 2 engine can only run one mod at a time, but mod builder can add minimods to mod you're building. Currently only 3 such minimods are included. If you want your minimod included, contact me right away. (I especially need better CAI mod).
• Installer, especially for Steam launcher, is only minimally tested (and only on English 64-bit Windows 7).
• In principle this kind of customization system can work with Rome, or any existing mod. It would require some porting effort, but if there's significant interest, I don't see why not.
• A lot of people requested hotseat campaign mod. This would require switching the mod from medieval 2 engine to Kingdoms' retrofit mod as a base. It will probably happen someday, since Kingdoms gives us access to a bunch of extra features.

Good modding, and have fun.

Credits and links

Concentrated Vanilla 0.60 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):

• 0.53
• 0.52
• 0.51
• 0.50
• 0.08
• 0.07
• 0.06
• 0.04
• 0.01

Return to Ravnica Sealed Simulator

Orzhov Cat Spirit

I made Return to Ravnica Sealed Simulator, based on my previous simulator for AVR and M13.

Here it is - RTR Sealed Simulator.

It doesn't have guild packs, since I still haven't figured out what they contain precisely, and I'm a bit busy with everything since I just came back to London. Maybe I'll figure them out before prerelease, otherwise I'll just leave them.

Unlike for AVR and M13 times, for RTR it seems other websites have been much faster to add new set. Even Gatherer (which most sites use as a source) has RTR cards already, and it's still a few days before Prerelease, while Card Gallery I use for my source took a lot of time even after all cards were spoiled, so I couldn't update my simulator very quickly. Previously it was more than a week between Card Gallery and Gatherer.

If Gatherer keeps getting updates fast enough, perhaps there won't be much need for my simulator in the future.

Reply to Cheimon's feedback on Concentrated Vanilla

I got some detailed feedback on my Medieval 2 mod, and I thought I might as well reply here, since it's pretty long and it might be of some interest to others.

I have been playing Concentrated Vanilla for quite a while now, and felt like giving some more feedback to see if that ends up with a higher quality mod. I've been playing as Russia. 

First, the strong rebels. I'd like to re-emphasise that I reckon it's too strong: certain factions really depend on an early rush of taking different settlements (Russia, notably, starts with just Novgorod, and to take the rest of russia takes many years. Lithuania and various other rebels survive into the 13th century as independent kingdoms, which doesn't really feel like vanilla. It's crippling to some nations that start off small, essentially: they can't grow and the AI wastes their armies on sending them piecemeal. It makes for interesting gameplay, but AI doesn't like it and I don't feel that it concentrates the vanilla experience. It just makes the first section of gameplay last an extra 50-70 years in a campaign.

I've noticed that rebels are too strong, and I plan to scale them down just a bit for the next release.

In my experience factions like Russia benefit tremendously from increased campaign movement speed, whenever I used higher values Russia (as AI) was a superpower, with values closer to vanilla it barely expanded at all.

And regardless of AI expansion, vanilla rebels were far too weak for human player - it took zero effort to blitz a lot of rebel cities with minimal loses with just your initial armies.

Cannons are fantastically powerful. This is brilliant. I use them in all my armies, along with cossack musketeers.

I'm glad you like it. In fact, I might have made them a bit too powerful, and perhaps I should roll that back a bit.

Pikes are also very powerful, which might or might not be good. They're vulnerable to missiles, but because the AI never tries to exploit this, it ends up making them very powerful indeed. Playing as Scotland was very easy for this reason: even a simple unarmoured pike unit could hold the line nicely against superior warriors from the Holy Roman Empire.

I did some Pikemen vs Militia testing as AI-vs-AI and AI-vs-player (they had a bit different stats back then, but close enough). They seemed reasonably balanced, it's just amazing AI stupidity that makes them look so overpowered or so bad depending on who's playing.

This is somewhat inevitable - the game needs to have units with very powerful abilities balanced by big downsides to keep things interesting - but AI tends to be much worse than humans at taking advantage of these abilities and minimizing these downsides. This applies to pikemen, cavalry, crossbowmen, and just about any nonbasic unit. Tactical complexity usually leads to AI disadvantage.

I'm somewhat annoyed by AI stupidity here too, and if I figure a way to make Pikemen less exploitable without making them completely useless I'll add it.

Sallying out is really, really easy to exploit...indeed, you can't stop them from going out. Russia overcame the enormous rebel hordes purely by sending out armies of archer militia with minimal infantry and pelting them to kill most of them before they were well out of the gate. My later gunpowder armies tend to treat sieges as a field battle where they're bunched together: get some cannon and lots of musketeers and make them run away before they touch the line or get organised. It's horrendously effective and it's weird to see that they don't try using the walls and streets, which would be much better.

This is a complicated issue. I didn't enjoy vanilla sieges much. They're repetitive, pathfinding in cities is buggy as hell, and there's not much tactics you can use if all units just form one big disorganized blob regardless of my orders (especially on higher unit sizes). I've tried huge number of very different settings to make sieges fun, and none were without downsides.

Concentrated Vanilla started by making settlement defenses far more powerful - towers always on, double rate of fire, much stronger walls and gates, really weak battering rams. This meant that it was really hard to take a well defended city, but it didn't mean that much if AI routinely leaves its cities with minimal garrison. Meanwhile, player's cities were almost completely impenetrable to AI, even if AI had 5:1 advantage in forces.

I tried to tone that down, and increase size of free garrison and even give free garrison to castles instead, but AI again was too dumb to take advantage of it, while it made defending them too easy for the player.

Then I tried to make AI sally out more, and it was a lot of fun when both armies were about even, or when my army was somewhat weaker. Whenever I attacked with similarly sized (or even better smaller) army, I'd have a big field battle followed by storming the settlement defended by whoever remained on both sides. If I attacked with overwhelming army, it was going to be a very bloody assault, with defenders having very powerful support from the walls.

Sallying out decision is controlled by sally-out-ratio parameter in data/config_ai_battle.xml. In vanilla it's 2.0 and AI sallies out only when defenders are at least 2x as powerful as attackers - which is to say never since why would player attack at some odds? After a lot of experimenting I arrived at current value of 0.65, which makes AI behave right.


This all depends on AI being able to judge balance of forces. If it's mistaken, it will make some really stupid sallies. I have very little control over how AI measures army strengths - it's derived from unit statistics somehow, but I don't know the formula, and even if I knew it I'm not sure which replacement formula would be better - army strengths are just highly dependent on context.

What you're describing sounds a lot like AI misjudging power of your army and then making a "sensible" decision based on this ratio.

For a quick workaround you can edit data/config_ai_battle.xml. I doubt there's any solution to sieging problems without some serious problems and without big potential for exploitative strategies.

If it's only late gunpowder armies with ton of artillery are so exploitable, it's not really a big deal since campaign tends to be mostly resolved by then, and it's even quite historically accurate.

I'm assuming it's impossible to make carracks travel faster over the ocean like you've made agents so much faster. It'd be nice if you could, since planning the response to aztec sieges years in advance doesn't feel right.

This is pretty much impossible in M2 engine (Kingdoms engine has a few ways to tweak it), especially not when they're transporting any units. Maybe giving generals trait "traveling at see" with big movement points bonus then removing it when they're on land would work.

Ships still get the same speed bonus as units, and they get the usual x2 speed bonus if they're carrying crusading armies, so it's far less of a problem than in vanilla for fighting on European seas. Americas will probably see as little play in Concentrated Vanilla as they did in vanilla - many mods simply remove them completely since they're so useless.

Characters don't seem to age properly. Is this deliberate, or a bug?

It works just as in vanilla, which is to say incorrectly. Each turn takes 2 calendar years, but characters only get half a year older. This seems fixable by scripting, but it would probably require some really serious rebalancing, so I just skipped it.

The only change I made was making initial Pope and priests older to make papal elections more frequent.

Cities are great and one turn building works very nicely. Given how useful chivalry is, I haven't yet seen a need to take taxes from anything but 'low', but that might just be me.

That's surprising, since I tend to have it on "as high as possible without city rebelling" usually other than for tiny town which really need population growth bonus.

What do you need chivalry for that much? Isn't dread far more useful?

The rebel version of Russia's 'Spearmen' Unit, frequently used in rebel armies, has no texture and appears as white. Any chance of implementing a fix? It must have been done by some modder or other.

I gave rebels some extra units without actually checking that slave faction has textures for them. In games based on Rome engine units have per-faction textures so it's more work to give unit to more factions.

In Empire engine there are shared unit textures so that's really easy to do - at cost of all units looking pretty much identical.

Anyway, that will be fixed in the next release.

Any chance of adding a message when a princess comes of age? I often miss them, and they get bad traits the older they get, like 'man-hunter' that makes them far less useful.

That would be a good idea. I didn't touch event notifications in the mod, so you only get notifications you'd get in vanilla.

Lands to conquer did a really nice job of making merchants make a decent amount of money without feeling overpowered (like Darth's merchants were). I think he did increase trade resources, which would speed up the campaign, which doesn't have to be bad.

I tried that - increasing trade resources makes regular naval trade just ridiculous. It's too easy to be flooded with money with no idea what to do with it late game already.

Merchants annoy me due to micromanagement more than balance.

As I said before, outlying provinces are great for merchants...while those mines do make a chunk of money, historically money also came from trade in chocolate and tobacco and slaves etc (which are there), and you're also losing about half of that money from mining to corruption. They're nice, but they're not worth going out of your way (ie fighting aztec hordes and spending years at sea) to get at the moment.

Was colonizing Americas ever profitable in any mod? I honestly admit I did zero balancing of Americas, since campaign never gets there.

Colonizing other resource-rich places like Timbuktu and Middle East is still extremely profitable, and you can fight corruption with law buildings, good governors etc.

Corruption is moddable by SIF_CORRUPTION parameter in data/descr_settlement_mechanics.xml if you wish to do so.

I never had any problems with it - are you moving your capital every now and then somewhere closer to the center of your empire? It will suck otherwise if it's on the opposite corner of the world.

If starting positions are more equal, you could safely reduce the peacefulness of Lusted's AI. The computer is very hesitant to declare war: you can practically ally with everyone in the game before they've got around to infighting, and it makes Europe in particular a very static place to be...as do the impregnable rebel settlements, but I've already mentioned those.

Which difficulty level is it? AI diplomacy is extremely dependent on difficulty level - it's meant to be quite peaceful on medium, quite hostile on hard, and extremely hostile on very hard.

AI also becomes far more hostile whenever it neighbours no rebel settlements to take. And since they last a bit too long, AI stays peaceful a bit too long.

If you play peripheral faction like Russia or Scotland, the game would be fairly peaceful anyway. Try playing as some mainland Catholic country and annoying the Pope sufficiently...

Starting positions were never equal in any Total War games, and it would be very strange to do so. If some faction is consistently far too powerful it would be a good idea to tweak that, but I never observed that (other than for whichever faction I'm currently playing)

It will take some time until I release the next version of Concentrated Vanilla, since I need to play at least a short campaign to test its balance, and I don't always have time for that.

Medieval 2 Total War Concentrated Vanilla 0.52 - now with more settlements

In my previous post I mentioned that what bothers me the most in Concentrated Vanilla (and other mods I tired) are hugs gaps in the map which result in no action ever taking place there.

So I thought I'd actually do something about it - I found a tutorial for adding provinces, consulted with Reddit historians on which settlements in relevant regions were actually most important, and after fighting through far too many game crashes I did it - where "it" is adding a bunch of settlements.

The map is not terribly optimized, I just added 7 new regions:

• Tlemcen
• Sijilmasa
• Kairouan
• Fes
• Benghazi (this one is really stretching historical reality, but I really needed at least one extra settlement in Libya)
• Belgrade
• Ancyra (Ankara)

They all start as rebels, but maybe at least Fes should be Moorish, since adding 3 rebel settlement in the middle of Moorish kingdom sort of screws them, especially with Concentrated Vanilla's big rebel garrisons.

I also added roads to Tripoli, Benghazi, and Alexandria, to make Egypt better connected with the rest of Africa. 

These areas should generally be pretty poor, since I didn't add any new resources. Belgrade gets gold and timber from Zagreb, which is only left with double-gold, so that's one exception, but neither of them has ports, so they're only moderately wealthy. I probably should add a few resources there, just without overdoing it.

Old distance-to-nearest-settlement map:

With these new settlements:

This isn't really finished, but it should make at least some areas playable, and I really want to just playtest it now to see if it's getting anywhere at all.

If you could help me with playtesting (and just have fun with the mod), I'd appreciate it very much.

Moors, Egypt, and Byzantium would be the most obvious playtesting campaigns, but I'm always looking for feedback from players. Especially if you try to build the mod from sources.

Source Code

Adding the first region was massive pain but thanks to the mod being based on solid source code and not manual messing with files, it soon got reduced to just two steps:

First, edit map bitmap in data/world/maps/base/map_regions.tga, marking new region with some new unique color.

Then, add another entry like this:

    add_regions_to_merc_pool!({
      "Fes" => "North_Africa",
    })
    add_region!({
      :name => "Fes",
      :faction => "moors",
      :rebels => "Saharan_Rebels",
      :color => "57 218 57", # <- the color you used in previous step
      :religion => [0, 0, 90, 5, 5],
      :resources => "none",
      :farming => 3,
      :level => "town",
      :population => 1500,
      :buildings => ["core_building wooden_pallisade"],
      :x => 65,
      :y => 62,
      :commander_name => "Yusuf Hissou", # anything from descr_names.txt, doesn't matter
      :units => [
        "Sudanese Tribesmen", "ME Town Militia", "ME Town Militia", "Desert Archers",
      ]
    })

which the code converts to edits in 5 different files automatically (and then multiplies garrisons a few times due to some other settings).

Oh, and there's also third step of compiling the mod and moving its files to the right place on the second computer, but that's automatable enough.

Credits

Concentrated Vanilla 0.52 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):

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

Fixing Medieval 2 Total War map

I have a lot of problems with Medieval 2 Total War map. At first it looks quite sensible, with all parts of the map covered by regions:

But that's an illusion, region borders don't matter at all, except maybe for diplomacy - AI gets annoyed when you cross its borders and it can see it - but it gets annoyed by just about anything or totally at random, so it matters little.

What matters is where the cities are. And heatmap of distance to the nearest city reveals something very different:

Now you can see that parts of the map have plenty of cities - and plenty of action - while others are huge gaps where nothing happens.

This map is an approximation - it ignores how difficult terrain is (deserts, mountains), how likely it is that there are already roads there and so on.

Almost the entire Western Europe is fully covered by cities with ton of action. There's also reasonable number of settlements on the entire Northern coast of the Mediterranean - all the way from Cordoba to Marseille to Italy to Greece to Constantinople to Antioch to Jerusalem to Alexandria.

There are a few small gaps like Burgundy, Northern Netherlands, or middle Balkans, but since they have a lot of settlements on all sides, they are an interesting aspect of campaign strategy.

One thing which I feel is somewhat questionable is how natural barriers like Alps which should provide a solid barrier between North Italy and the rest of Europe doesn't - the Alps are very well connected, and the big gap is in Burgundy for some reason. Anyway, I can live with that.

The problem with Medieval 2 map

Outside of Western Europe and Northern Mediterranean the map is filled with huge gaps where nothing ever happens. Every single settlement in Africa is so far from all other settlements it could as well be an island.

You know how Islam ruled the entire African coast, from Morocco to Egypt? That never happens in Medieval 2 since neither Moors nor Egyptians have any way to reach Tripoli or Tunis in reasonable time - or to even reinforce Algiers for that matter. So they become colonized by Italians in every single game I played.

And remote places like Timbuktu, Arguin? It takes so ridiculously long to go there, that you're better off sending just your general and recruiting all infantry on site. They never take part in any action, and neither does Jedda or Dongola which are simply part of a final cleanup after Egyptians have been defeated.

Sparsely settled places like Scandinavia, Black Sea coast, Caucasus, Mesopotamia - all suffer from the same fate of nothing ever happening there. Do you remember having any epic battles over Stockholm, Caffa, Tbilisi, or Algiers in any of your campaign? No way! But I bet most of you can easily recall some great battles over places like Paris, Venice, Antioch, and Jerusalem, or even smaller but well connected places like Bruges, Florence, Zagreb, and Acre see far more action.

This annoys me mostly as a gameplay problem. People often want to extend the map, but one third of it is currently so sparsely settled hardly anything ever happens there. If we connected all these isolated settlements into bigger areas of activity, it would lead to a lot of new fun.

It's also not very historically accurate - places like Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Northern Coast of Africa were fairly densely populated compared to a lot of places like Northern Europe.

Oh, and the thing many mods do - making the map bigger and adding a lot more settlements, but about evenly everywhere - it doesn't actually fix the problem. If Africa is 50% bigger and has 50% more settlements, it still has small islands of safely held settlements and huge gaps where nothing ever happens.

What should be done?

So the simple question to all of you - which historically important settlements would also enhance gameplay by filling the worst gaps? They should all probably start as rebels and pretty small to avoid breaking balance too much.

Would you like to play on such fixed map? Possibly independently from the rest of Concentrated Vanilla, since I can simply disable all other options in the build script.