Marathon build speed mod?

Eddi

Chieftain
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
83
Hi, i haven't played this game in ages, but what always bothered me was the build speed in marathon.

i'm fine with buildings and research taking longer, but i really dislike that units take longer as well, so when war comes, you have basically no way to react or reinforce.

is there a way to mod just the buildspeed of all units, leaving the rest of the game unchanged?
 
Interesting that you should have this complaint because on Marathon, unless I'm quite wrong, the unit build costs are actually scaled such that unit build times are proportionally faster than on any other game speed. Something like, every cost is multiplied by 3 except unit hammer costs are multiplied by 2.

I can't remember the exact numbers but it's enough of a change that some players consider Marathon to be almost like cheating.
 
well, my concern is with unit costs in comparison with how fast they move and how quickly they die in combat, which is unchanged in marathon.

and given how my play style is with barely any units at all, it's a rather deadly combination.
 
I can't remember exactly but obviously the slower your game speed, proportionally the faster units move (this is a big factor in making units more desirable over other options on slower game speeds).

I think modifying the hammer costs of stuff is relatively easy, you could probably do it yourself by editing the game files (I have no idea how to do it, but I'm sure it would be trivial for someone who knows what they're doing to explain it to you).
 
Well, ideally there'd be a point where i can specify the marathon multiplier with a single change, instead of modifying all unit costs individually.
 
There should be a file called GamespeedInfos.xml in Beyond the Sword\Assets\XML\GameInfo that's responsible for game speed changes.
 
... and, in that file, iTrainPercent is responsible for unit production (incl. Settler and Worker).
 
Or learn to whip. Marathon is known to be unbalanced, because unit production is so cheap. HA costs 100:hammers:, you get 180 from a 2 pop whip. Add in a math chop and you only need 20 naturally produced hammers to get 3 HAs from one city in 3 turns. When war comes you can often have the initial force out in less turns than on normal speed.

If you edit iTrainPercent to same as normal speed, you are probably hurting your own unit pumping potential, as it will remove the option to 2 pop any units until cuirs. Even cuirs couldn't be 2 popped with forge.
 
I think the point is while building units is "faster" in Marathon, moving units is even "faster" still.

Maybe the thing is to scale up the map size to make empires larger and travel distances longer.
 
Maybe the thing is to scale up the map size to make empires larger and travel distances longer.
That's why you play marathon on huge maps. ;)
 
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