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Medieval 2 and its expansion, Kingdoms, are discounted on Steam today, and I'm debating on whether or not to get them and some mods. Does anyone have anything extra to say about Stainless Steel? It seems interesting, but if it's one of those mods that have cheating, endlessly subsidized AI opponents and annoying 'realism' features that can't be turned off then I think I'll pass.
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Sep 30, 2012 11:39
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 07:40 |
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Doctor Reynolds posted:So I'm playing as England in Medieval 2. I own the entire island, and am working on France. I haven't even "met" Portugal, yet out of the blue they land an army of A Peasant on the shores of Caernarvon and declare war on me. There are some things that can be done within Medieval 2's diplomacy system. Namely, bribery. If you want to avoid a war with a faction, park a diplomat in their territory and offer them a gift of 100 coins every turn. For some reason, the computer does not value a 'gold per turn' -type of deal as much as that singular donation. The small cash boost should help you even in forming alliances. Note that you only have to do this to factions that border you or are across the sea from you, and if you're Catholic, the pope. Of course, the diplomacy system is still very hard to read. I was doing the above donation campaign to the pope in my game as Spain, and enjoyed very good relations with the Vatican, even getting my own clergymen elected. Then my relations began to drop, all the way down to very low (I still didn't get excommunicated, probably because of the bribes). Poking around the forums provided the answer: I had made a trade agreement with the pope, but didn't have a land connection, and the pope hadn't upgraded his fishing village into a proper port that could receive ships. That meant that the computer was getting angry with me because I wasn't fulfilling our trade obligations  Another non-obvious thing that came to my mind while writing: putting your merchants into unit stacks above tradeable resources will enable them to continue trading, but will prevent rival merchants from seizing their assets, because they can't interact with military units. Handy for earning pocket change for the bribes!
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Jan 11, 2013 13:32
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Captain Diarrhoea posted:What am I missing with merchants in M2/SS? When I park them on resources what little ability they started with always drops to zero and they get a load of bad traits. Literally one in ten will keep their ability and continue to generate a whopping 26 florins per turn or something like that until they die, or are eaten by one of the AIs super merchants. There was a kind of funny anomaly where every nation sent dozens of merchants into my barren Kingdom of Norway like it was the new USA for a while. Medieval 2 is not very good at telling you about merchants. Firstly, train merchants in your most developed towns. Merchants trained from cities without law-providing buildings have a higher chance of getting negative traits. If you get a merchant guild, train merchants from there since they'll get a bonus. You can keep your merchants safe if you park a military unit on top of a resource and have a merchant join them. This won't make any sense if the unit's upkeep costs more than the merchant generates, but you can stack multiple traders on top of the same resource that way. That'lle let them accumulate traits, and act as a honeypot to foreign merchants: you can out-compete the weakest ones and return to safety at the end of turn. Real money is made abroad, though, since traders get bonuses from that. Try sending your merchants all the way down to Timbuktu, where's gold to be traded. Alternatively, you can place your merchants on the Mediterranean islands: I haven't seen the computer ship its merchants around.
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Feb 14, 2013 22:28
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Shes Not Impressed posted:Someone mentioned pages and pages back that if you put a small stack of troops (maybe even 1?) on top of your merchant's resource, it'll protect it from enemy merchants rolling in. If you can get half a dozen of those 700+ a turn resources, that alone could help bankroll armies and upkeep. I believe it's also possible to have a character build a fort on top of the resource. Then you can stack merchants into it and avoid having to pay the annual upkeep cost, netting pure profit after the initial costs have been covered.
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May 12, 2013 19:32
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Speaking of this, how is the rise of the samurai campaign? I'm currently playing a campaign as the Fujiwara. The biggest things that come to my mind is that all generals are horse archers, which makes them very powerful. This especially notable in the beginning, when you mostly rely on the weak levy troops. There seem to be wider quality gaps in general: foot samurai, for example, are a very strong unit and can probably carry the campaign for you. The Minamoto start out with them, or at least very close to them, which gave a lot of trouble to my culturally-inclined Fujiwara. Diplomacy is quite clear-cut between different clan allegiances: you can't be friends with a clan supporting a different claim to the throne, and the biggest clans seem more durable than in vanilla. You have a sister clan who'll back you up until realm divide, but they seem to have differing levels of utility. My Fujiwara sisters are bottled up by me in the north of Honshu, and can't assist me aside from guarding my shipping lanes. It is a good campaign with a lot of detail, but like others have said, it'll probably get repetitive at some point: going up the tech trees won't really give you new units but reinforce the advantages you had at the start of the game. Hero units might be fun though once I get to them.
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Jul 21, 2013 09:37
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Fodder Cannon posted:This is great, do you have any similar advice for Rise? I recently got back into Shogun and got the DLC during the Steam sale. He does. Shalcar completed a very nice Rise of the Samurai let's play recently, with both an entertaining narrative and lots of in-depth game mechanics analysis. The link to it should be put to the OP of the next Total War series megathread.
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Jul 29, 2013 16:06
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Mans posted:
One thing I noticed in my brief test (CTD when the computer sallied from a siege) was that moving my guys around gave their commander 'forced march' trait, which supposedly gives penalties. However, he also picked up 'forced march expert' which negated all of these, so I don't know how penalizing they are. There's also the 'reduced movement during winter' trait which does make sense. Going back to Medieval 2 is pretty rough after the good, clean design of Shogun 2. Browsing those traits, for example, is painful because you can only see a small amount of them at a time: all my Roman guys sort of blended into one another and I had trouble finding out which of them were actually useful. There also a lot of completely superfluous "traits", such as 'this man belongs to this family' and 'this man used to be a tribune, but isn't anymore' which don't seem to actually have any effects. Expect a lot of S.P.E.R.G. jokes, they sure make it easy. Going to give it a couple of more tries, but the mod seems pretty crash-prone at the moment. I had one crash just from browsing the different factions.
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Aug 26, 2014 10:37
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I've tried to get into EB2, but it doesn't really grab me. Most of the starts I've seen give you an army you can't actually support financially, so you either have to disband units or try to conquer something - and even conquest might not get you back in the black. The battles seem to be boring as well, and the maps are buggy. I played a siege battle as the Britons where I first had to wheel my entire army to a new location because my rams were unable to reach the palisade from my starting point. Then a pretty fierce fight followed as the defenders held the breaches I made until their general died. The survivors fell back to the town square, where I witnessed 15 slingers, dozen light cavalrymen and one spear unit bottling up my entire army in a bottleneck - they just wouldn't break. I couldn't go around them, because the cursor kept saying 'obstructed'. Even after I pixel-hunted a clear passage for my skirmishers and had people throwing spears at the back of the defenders they wouldn't die or flee. I ended up fast forwarding until my guys finally edged their way into the square and the countdown timer started - at the end of which the game declared I had suffered a close defeat, killed off the remaining defenders and kicked my army out onto the strategic map, putting me a couple of thousand denars into debt. The next turn I walked into the city to claim my spoils: 91 coins. With two towns and disbanding half of my remaining army I began to make a profit of 180 coins per turn, at which point I gave up.
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Sep 6, 2014 10:38
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Mans posted:In EB you really can't play with barbarian tribes. They have a design philosophy of having "decisive" battles instead of loads of armies butting heads over and over again. While interesting in theory what that means is that troops are incredibly expensive so you can only have very modest armies. Well that's disappointing. I recall joyriding with chariots from the British Isles to Spain in EB 1. I took your advice and started out with Carthage, and it is a lot more manageable. I had to abandon one city in Spain because it was costing me money, but in about 20 turns I managed to raise a respectable amount of cash to get started. Only one conquest in those 20 turns - I took over Syracuse, but they soon revolted and joined Epirus (?). Luckily they only spawned javelin cavalry as their garrison, so a couple of mercenary phalanxes mowed them down. All that rioting cost the city about 3000 households though! It seems the mod is designed with a 'play for 600 turns' mindset. I'd suggest toggling fog of war off for anyone else playing the mod: that way I at least got some entertainment out of watching AI antics while waiting for riots to stop or cash to accumulate. A Macedonian army has doggedly tried to reach Athens, but keeps accidentally marching onto an island just south of it.
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Sep 7, 2014 13:53
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Played some more EB2 to about 50 turns and I'm starting to get bored with the grind fights. As Carthage, my method has been to hire some phalanxes and send them to clear the streets in the cities (siege battles are still the majority). Then I just speed up time and wait or do something else. It takes a silly amount of casualties before a unit will even start considering running away: even archers will fight to the death in melee against a phalanx. So even though the battles are decided early, they take a long time to play out and require little input from the player. I'll have to make a gif the next time I see that last surviving defender being continuously stunlocked for a solid minute before giving up the ghost. My favourite moment so far was watching a single Cretan archer wrassle endlessly against 500 or 600 men in the town square. I had earlier tried to break the defenders by running over them with elephants to no avail. All of a sudden the elephants, despite having been pulled away from the fight, went berserk and rampaged through my army while the last Cretan kept being slapped around. From less than 20 mercenary casualties to 60, all because of one man! 
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Sep 10, 2014 14:13
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Any tips for siege defense in Fall of the Samurai? I made the mistake of starting a campaign in northern Japan, where everything is poorer and further away, so I have to stretch my forces really thin. Sadly the garrison troops are trash and are unable to cope with even a few dedicated melee units.
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Oct 11, 2014 18:04
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Koramei posted:They should be able to do okay? At least to the point that they won't immediately get shredded, at least against early game units. Put your ranged levies on the walls to shoot them as they're walking up, then switch those for the spear levies as they start climbing, with your ranged levies behind them shooting into the blob (or preferably on a tier above the spear levies if there is one). You won't be able to stand up to a full army with just the garrison troops but assuming forces are equal in number and they don't have elite units the battles should be winnable. I've been keeping everyone on the top tier of the castles, since in my experience guys like spear levies will just flee immediately if they try to hold off katana samurai while levies shoot into the blob. It might just be that those few chevrons make all the difference and my garrison guys are unable to rout the enemy. I'll give your advice a try. Speaking of FOTS, how feasible is working with the allied clans? I've been thinking of training some revolver cav and sending them to shadow my allies' armies so I can participate. It might just be more effective to use them in my own army if the AI clans get into unwinnable situations. e: Well what do you know! The spear guys did indeed flee, but the katanas took enough casualties to start a chain rout. Thanks for saving the province of Shimotsuke 
Promontory fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Oct 11, 2014 |
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Oct 11, 2014 19:02
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I should try that 'quicker technology advancement' mod for FotS. I only play short campaigns and there's a lot to do, so I've never seen gatling guns. In my latest playthrough I focused on getting ironclads: three Kotetsu-class ships give you five uses of very accurate naval bombardment. It's an acceptable substitute.
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Oct 15, 2014 07:38
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supermikhail posted:So, Medieval 2 and frustration. This seems to come up pretty regularly in the thread. The usual tips people give for Medieval 2 include: - your 'honour' rating, visible in diplomacy I think, effects how willing the AI is to attack you. Having alliances and releasing prisoners increases honour, breaking agreements and executing prisoners drops it. At the start of the game, sign a few alliances with people you're not going to fight in a long time. Never execute prisoners. - if you are a Catholic kingdom, send a diplomat to the pope as soon as possible. Park him next to Rome and have him give a gift every turn. A 'single gift' to be specific, since the AI values it more than a gold per turn gift. The gift can be just the minimum (100 gold?), but as long as you keep doing it your relations with the pope will improve. Bonus points if you can ally with the Vatican. Having good relations with the pope gives you leeway to fight other Catholic kingdoms (since the pope will not immediately order you to cease attacking) and lessens the penalty for not going on crusades. - Similar bribery also helps with other kingdoms. To get pocket change for the bribes use merchants, the best place for them is Timbuktu. If you get a merchant guild event, only build merchants from that city to get a bonus. If you want to keep them within your own borders, you can use the 'merge with unit/fort' trick to keep them safe from enemy agents.
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Nov 11, 2014 14:35
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One way to get around papal disapproval is to hold off attacking until you have siege weapons and can attack immediately without waiting for rams etc. to be built. All you really need is a ballista to force the gates. That way you can sue for peace and keep the city, since the pope's order won't arrive until after the turn you declare war. As Spain you might consider training lots of priests and shoving them across to North Africa. They'll get loads of piety from converting people, which together the Vatican Slush Fund gives you a decent chance to get your own people as cardinals (and possibly get them elected to be pope).
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Nov 11, 2014 15:46
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Wooper posted:Those had the best battles, with the smartest AI. Shame the graphics are loving ancient. I picked up Medieval 1 from a sale to see if it really was like that, and I'm a bit amazed. After playing for a bit over the weekend, I've seen the AI: - make me pay for a bridge crossing by crushing my leading heavy infantry with its general and bottlenecking my chaff troops. It probably only lost because it kept some units covering the other bridge, too. - respond to my oblique order attack by shifting its entire battleline to pull away from my heavy hitters while going for my weaker flank - send a single horse unit to search for my hidden units in forests, followed by its entire army - send a single sacrificial shield unit to attack my castle and finish off the weakened defenders with its elite On the strategy map it makes odd decisions as ever, but I don't even remember when was the last time I felt challenged in these games. The battles ebb and flow and the AI puts up a fight. Also, running a different program in the background lets me play appropriate music in the background even after the game's sweet but short tracks end. I'm playing Total War and I'm having... fun?
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Nov 29, 2015 22:37
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I'm interested in the bronze age setting but I think I've gotten bored of Total War battles. They are too routine. I'm sceptical of Pharaoh's weather system shaking things up, it's been a feature in previous games as well.
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Oct 14, 2023 18:00
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 07:40 |
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Played a campaign of Shogun 2 thanks to the tv show. The visuals, soundtrack and atmosphere are still great. Colourful armies look fantastic against green summer fields and it's neat to spot little battlefield dramas playing out. What bothers me most on the strategy layer is the tech tree, where everything just takes far too long. This playthrough I aimed for matchlock samurai from the beginning, but was still 5 turns short when I finished the long campaign. If I had skipped the few economy techs I took, I might have trained some just in time for my victory parade. At least in the later Three Kingdoms game it didn't seem too difficult to get to neat endgame units thanks to the retinue system.
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Mar 29, 2024 09:01
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