In What Electronic Entertainment Have You Been Partaking #18: Reticulating Splines

[Phrossack]

I was never all that ruthless in M2 aside from the constant assassinations and the plague incident, but then it's been awhile and I never played on VH.

That reminds me, I need to see if I can get the Thirty Years' War mod working again

 

[Lexicus]

From the very beginning of playing this game I've been playing to maximize dread. It's just so vastly superior to chivalry in my experience. A 10-dread general can make a whole enemy army rout just by approaching in some cases. I do usually sack cities but I always execute prisoners no matter what, I never allow the same soldiers I fought once to fight me again. The AI has too many troops without me giving them free ones.

 

[Sommerswerd]

What game is this? Sounds intriguing

Also... @Lexicus your post reminded me of this scene:

 

[Lexicus]

What game is this? Sounds intriguing

Also... @Lexicus your post reminded me of this scene:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4700/Total_War_MEDIEVAL_II__Definitive_Edition/

 

[Takhisis]

Even if you unanimously control the College of Cardinals, the Pope you select will still get pissed at you very fast (like from "perfect" relations to "abysmal" in a few turns) if you execute Catholic prisoners, exterminate their populations and so on.

Gee, who'd've thought!

 

[Lexicus]

Gee, who'd've thought!

The Pope sure doesn't get mad at the Catholic AIs for doing it to me.

 

[Takhisis]

Well, obviously.

 

[Sarin]

From the very beginning of playing this game I've been playing to maximize dread. It's just so vastly superior to chivalry in my experience. A 10-dread general can make a whole enemy army rout just by approaching in some cases. I do usually sack cities but I always execute prisoners no matter what, I never allow the same soldiers I fought once to fight me again. The AI has too many troops without me giving them free ones.

Chivalry is good for governors, dread for generals. You gotta choose. What kept annoying me is that my faction leader, who was sitting in the capital, kept accumulating dread from using my spy/assassin colleges-a random stacks of rebels that wandered to one of my watchtowers and was being used as training target. Good for picking up points for thief/assassin guilds, but terrible for faction leader.

Still, M2 was the best Total War. Newer titles can't compete. I still go back to M2 sometimes, currently waiting for new version of one mod.

 

[amadeus]

I was getting a little bored with my Shadow President game as basically nothing was happening. So I've opened up some of the files in a hex editor and started monkeying around. Hex offset 7B0F in the country files seems to be the United Kingdom's nuclear weapons status. 7BD9 for the USA.

I've determined each country is 202 bytes in data length, so now I can fix any country.

We'll have to see how aggressive the AI gets once Iraq tries to invade Kuwait in a couple of months.

edit, an hour later: not at all. I poked around with a few things; even when provoked, the AI is pretty docile.

 

[H4run]

lovely to see you back man, and yeah I'd love to play with you and Syn, but another time, I'm going on a short vacation home

Half back, I'm currently surfing above the storm now, Jakarta economy is collapsing but hey I think I still able to share a laugh with you just poke me when you're ready.

 

[HEF]

They should be worried that they...

You'll see.

 

[amadeus]

The Shadow President hex data pokery has recommenced, and I've found where the population values are stored. I also found where the data for the Saudi-Iraq neutral zone is, and that helped me figure out where the population data starts. I'm still not quite sure how it works.

Spoiler Shadow President edited stuff :

Republic of Zimbabwe
Population: Mr. and Mrs. Mugabe

I found where GNP growth is stored!
Not GNP values, but growth rates.

I tested to see how much the British economy would grow, and this 2980% actually gets calculated down to a modest 19% after processing. I think the programmers put this into the game to stop countries from getting on too much of a hot streak.

More stuff yet to find!

 

[Lexicus]

Chivalry is good for governors, dread for generals. You gotta choose.

My point is basically twofold there. It applies to VH, the only difficulty I play Med2 on.
First, having even a 10-chiv governor in my existing settlement won't give as much new income as capturing an AI settlement - especially given that the AI can grow its settlements to higher levels faster than I can. I'm going to get more income from capturing an AI citadel than sticking even a 10-chiv governor into a Fortress I already own.
Second, the use of family members on the battlefield is crucial to winning battles against the AI's lopsided numerical advantage. In med2 the general's bodyguard unit is incredibly powerful, far more powerful than almost any other unit in the game (the one exception being elephants, and special mention to archer units that can lay down stakes, but the AI doesn't do that) - even the highest tiers of normally recruited troops will be destroyed when fighting a general's bodyguard on anything close to even terms. This would be true even if I was simply defending my territory rather than capturing enemy territory.

I typically will have only one or two family members that I intentionally build chivalry for, and this is only in the special case of Crusades.

 

[Synobun]

I sure wish I knew how you guys were getting M2 to run well. The map is a blurry, skewed, overly bloomed mess that is indecipherable to the point that I can't even read settlement names, and the game itself stutters and moves like molasses. Same with Rome 1. I've had this issue across two different laptops now. M1 runs like a charm, looks great.

 

[Lexicus]

M2 ran just fine on my old HP laptop eight years ago. No idea why it wouldn't run on yours, unless yours is potato-tier or something.

 

[Synobun]

M2 ran just fine on my old HP laptop eight years ago. No idea why it wouldn't run on yours, unless yours is potato-tier or something.

Intel i7-9750H with 16 GB of RAM. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti.

 

[Lexicus]

Yeah, I didn't think it was. Are you trying to run the Steam versions or something else?

 

[Synobun]

The Definitive Edition through Steam. Laptop's CD-drive-free so I couldn't get my hands on a retail copy even if I wanted to.

I'm reinstalling it now and going to tinker with it. Maybe there's something in an .ini somewhere.

 

[Lexicus]

I'm reinstalling it now and going to tinker with it. Maybe there's something in an .ini somewhere.

I suppose you've already tried this, but I'd experiment first with the graphics settings.

 

[Synobun]

It was the resolution settings all along! (Yeah, tried those. But I'll do it again just in case.)