Medieval II: One To One file

M2:TW - One To One mod by Arnoldio - ver 1.12 (internal 1.25) - 08.02.2021

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First of all, thank you for downloading M2 - One To One!

I am not even close to a capable TW player whatsoever, BUT my OCD still got in the way. So I started playing M2TW a few days back out of boredom, and I could remember the "timescale to 0.5" before even running the game for he first time. I started playing a bit, then it dawned on me: The buildings should take 4x longer to build if we want to keep this nicely proportional.

My goal was to make the game less meta and more forgiving in short term, but still requiring looking ahead into the future, basically a slow paced experience where every new unit, army and building have some weight.

Keep in mind that this is intended to be played with vanilla version of the game, campaign difficulty Medium or High, battle difficulty Very High and for multi-army battles let the AI fully control the other armies.

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Changelog:

1.0
- Building times increased by x4.
- Building costs increased by x4.
- Unit train time changed depending on the original price and mount, varying from 1-8 turns.
- Trainable unit price increased to base value of x1.5, with additional positive and negative modifiers for training, manpower and equipment status, varying from x1 to x2,25.
- Trainable unit upkeep reduced by x4, with additional modifier for mounted units.
- Mercenary unit prices vary from x1 to x1.5, depending on the training status, while retaining 1 turn to join the army.
- Mercenary upkeep is reduced by x2, with additional modifier for mounted units and training status.
- All upgrade costs increased x2.
- King's Purse reduced x4.
- Settlement population requirements increased x4.
- Fixed building missions to be acheivable.

1.1
- Fixed mod structure to work properly.
- Disabled autosave via configuration (possible crash reduction).
- Removed files that were not needed.

1.11
- Adjusted minimum settlement population to make occupying decisions valid.
- Adjusted agent wages.

1.12
- Reduced population-based squalor to fit the x4 population count.
- Increased ship prices to be in check with other units.
- Removed sprites in the cfg file.

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The jist of it is that you should take care of your army and carefully plan ahead. Castles behind frontlines should be making better troops since the train times won't be interrupted by sieges, whilst frontline settlements rally whatever commoners are around that can pick up a spear. On top of that, the long build times will force different settlements to be specialised in a specific function, instead of everything being avaliable everywhere. Capable units get more attention and main armies would return back to their homeland for refitting/retraining instead of plowing ahead. Mercenaries are a quick fix, albeit costly, and as such shouldn't be used for prolonged times in warmongering campaigns. I imagine getting the most out of diplomacy and merchants is also a good thing for the later game. AI seems to follow the prices and corresponding budgets they have at their disposal. I was also looking for a workaround that could open more building slots as the city/castle was upgraded, but saw no such thing, someone mentioning that it's hardcoded. Other than that, the game is basically vanilla.

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Installation:

Copy the "one_to_one" folder to your mods folder, located in the game directory. Mod can be run with the "Medieval II - One To One.bat" file, for which you can also create a shortcut and assignt it an icon.

There is additional immersion/graphics settings in the configuration.cfg file that can be enabled/disabled by removing the # infront of it.

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Known problems:

When starting a new campaign (any faction), game might crash. A restart of the game fixes it. Sometimes it can also happen at the end of the turn, solution is the same. Since I am suspicious that autosave does this, it was disabled, save manually regularly via Ctrl+S. It is advised to save immediately when the campaign loads and then do it every turn prior to End Turn. It should happen only once on campaign load and once on the turn start, if the files are changed.

The Command AI army also does not seem to work correctly, it is best to leave that option unchecked.

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Future plans:
If the M2TW Engine Overhaul will permit multiple buildings at once, it will be enabled for settlement upgrades to add a building slot everytime it is upgraded.

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Last but not least, many thanks to Gigantus and the Bare Geomod preset that makes missing files work.