Hi Prof. Garfield, thanks for your post! Glad to hear you are enjoying Medieval Millennium, and I sincerely appreciate your kind words. I'm very pleased to hear that you find it a game which forces the player to make tough choices, since that was one of my primary goals -- providing multiple
viable paths forward, without it being obvious which one is actually going to turn out
best.
Question: How did you eliminate the superhighways effect?
There are
two improvements named Trade Fair Circuit. The one that appears in the build list is indeed using the slot of Superhighways, since that leads the AI to properly prioritize building it. However, as soon as it's completed, I
remove that improvement from the city and immediately replace it with the
second Trade Fair Circuit, which is using the slot of Coastal Fortress. Since shore bombardment is not permitted in MM, this improvement's native functionality is unnoticeable. In
onCanBuild(), the presence of a Coastal Fortress prevents Superhighways from being built, to close the loop. By giving them the same name and images, you can't tell that the improvement you build is not the one you actually get.
I think the only serious issue with the game is the siege engineer/siege tower mechanic. The problem is that it discourages fighting near your own cities and castles, and gives an advantage when you are near your enemy's cities or castles. This is especially true in the early game when the siege tower is much stronger than any other unit. Admittedly, I don't know much about medieval warfare, but I'm under the impression that there should be a defender's advantage. (It might still make sense to fight away from your cities to avoid damage to infrastructure.) I actually let a city get captured once, since I would then get a siege tower to counterattack with. The situation is particularly jarring, since the rest of the scenario is so immersive.
While I can think of a few suggestions for changing how the human player uses the siege engineer/siege tower, I have a hard time thinking of something that the AI can still use to make effective attacks, but doesn't require stationing units 3 square away from a town to ambush the siege engineers (and not build a castle out there as well). My best suggestion is to scale the attack/defence of the siege tower based on the strongest units available at the time. At least that way siege towers aren't better than other units, except when attacking a city with walls.
Ah, yes, Siege Towers. I've had a couple of private conversations about them with other players as well, so it doesn't surprise me that you'd start there.
But I will say that one of those other players, who initially felt pretty strongly that their stats and rules needed to be modified, eventually (after half a dozen games) backed off that stance and came around to thinking that they're mostly OK as they are.
I'm not quite sure why the fact that they make it advantageous to fight near your enemy's cities (instead of your own) should be characterized as a problem. This is what any good king would want, right? As you mentioned, it's always (or already) better to do that in order to avoid damage to your own infrastructure. So Siege Towers do nothing to change that preference, rather they provide you with an effective weapon to make an offensive strategy more successful. Without them, I think defenders
do have an advantage, and a pretty substantial one in the early game. A veteran, fortified Spearman defends at 4.5d... in a walled city, that rises to 6d, and outside a city in a forest, it's actually even higher (6.75d). Leaving aside artillery for the moment, the best early-game offensive units are Swordsman or Lancer at 3a, which rise to 4.5a if they're veteran -- well below entrenched defenders. Artillery can shift the probabilities in either direction, depending on how many are owned by the attacker or the defender.
"I actually let a city get captured once, since I would then get a siege tower to counterattack with." -- If this happened all the time, because it represented a broadly applicable "best strategy" for this type of unit, then I'd be concerned and motivated to make changes. But letting a city get captured means letting your opponent take one of your techs, which can be a pretty big penalty -- not to mention the risk of improvements/specialists being lost, even if you do retake the city successfully on the following turn. I've never actually tried it (at least for the purpose of gaining a Siege Tower). Honestly, my initial reaction is that it sounds kind of like the "guess what I did!" type of thing that makes a game interesting, sort of a "Trojan horse" moment but in reverse, that will go down in the legends of your realm.
"OK, men, we can't hold this city... but we're gonna risk everything and make a bet that the enemy won't be able to hold it either!"
That being said, I do have some changes in mind for the Siege Tower in the next MM update. My inclination is actually not to reduce their offensive stats, but rather to reduce their defensive stats (actually, defensive bonuses, by fine-tuning these with the new combat logic file). Indirectly, this may make them less powerful on offense, since Siege Towers that actually launch an attack on a city are more likely to be damaged and therefore easier to defeat. I need to do more playtesting, though, to see how my changes turn out.
What is the reason behind having both the Axeman and the Seax Swordsman?
JPetroski asked the same thing, and I don't have a great answer -- I'm aware that their stats (2a,1d) are identical. "Flavor" or "ambience" is perhaps my best answer, but they somehow seemed necessary as foundational pieces for those two weapon "lines", whose stats afterwards diverge: Swordsman is 3a,1d; then Axeman II is 3a,2d; then Swordsman II is 4a,2d.
The Basilica is extremely expensive when you have 10s units for martial law (especially under feudalism). It could probably use some other bonus to compensate.
In the next version, I think Feudal Monarchy will only provide free support for 1 unit instead of 2. That makes martial law more costly: a Basilica gives you 2 content citizens for upkeep of 1
gold per turn, but an extra unit (beyond the first) gives you 2 content citizens for 1
Material per turn, which is generally worse. The Basilica costs more Materials to build upfront, but may actually pay off long-term. I'm not sure I want to lower the cost, but I hadn't really considered the idea of giving it an additional bonus -- that's interesting, and I'll think about that some more.
Travels of Marco Polo seems a bit pointless by the time you get access to it. Perhaps it is of more use on a large map, but it could probably use some extra bonus.
Yeah, it's kind of a pointless wonder in the base game too. Again, I'd considered lowering the cost, but giving it an additional bonus is probably a much better idea. How about this: the wonder will also give you a free trade route between the city that builds it and the most distant opponent capital? Now that Lua can control trade routes in v0.17, this feels like a good fit.
The Constitutional Monarchy celebration information window should be split into several pages if necessary. It can barely fit on the screen for me now. My text module has a function simpleTabulation which does this. (You might find it convenient to change the first few lines of code to accept table data in the form you generate it, rather than use it as is.)
Ah, good point. I do paginate other "city list" windows but didn't do so here; I'll add this.
Based on a quick test, the 'population declined' message is shown when city.workers doesn't match the population of the city. Since you're updating the mod anyway, you might try saving city.workers for celebrating cities, and change that value at the same time you change the city size.
Thanks for the info, I never knew how the game determined when to show this message. I like this idea and I'll see if I can implement it.
You've probably noticed this, but instead of being disabled, the bribe city option for diplomats/spies is not disabled, but instead labeled as \@SABOTAGEOPTIONS.
Ugh, yes, this was working beautifully through all my testing and then at the last minute I made the mistake of cleaning up excess blank lines in
Game.txt.
It will be fixed in the next release.
The instant advice for the magistrate's office is also incorrect.
That one I didn't realize, thanks for pointing it out.
All in all, a fantastic scenario, and I am dreading the arrival of the black death.
I hope it's appropriately dreadful! The formula for that might be tweaked a little bit too, in the next update.
I've already built two maps of Western Europe that will ship with the next version of Medieval Millennium, which are identical except for resolution: one is "normal" size (45x89) which I think works best for MM; the other is closer to "large" size (64x126) for those who prefer to play on a more expansive world. Both were developed to provide best coverage of the region historically occupied by the 21 nations which are playable in MM. I'm just finishing my first test game as Poland on the normal-size map. @TheNamelessOne made multiple changes in TOTPP 0.16 which seem to have fixed all of the bugs associated with playing a mod on a pre-made map. (But even if you have a new version of TOTPP, please don't try pre-made maps in MM v1.0... there are also text file and Lua event changes that need to be made in order to support them properly.)
.
