Greetings once again, everyone!
So that 1% chance of a future patch sort of came to fruition. Essentially there has been a bug where the mod would consistently crash when conquering Chang'an, but only when such happened later in the campaign. The error logs were not any help and I could not reproduce the issue, making it pretty much impossible for me to diagnose the issue, let alone how to resolve it. After v5.6 was released I was doing a Liu Clan play-through in the 194 campaign and ran into the bug. With the help of another excellent modder (shout out to Jojo!), essentially what was discovered is that Chang'an, in the late game, had too many available recruitment pools and such would cause a crash. Not to get too technical, but there is a file that determines what buildings can be built where and, by extension, what units can be recruited or retrained where. Both of those, recruiting and retraining, require "recruitment pools" for each individual unit and any particular settlement can only have a maximum of 64 active at one time. In the later parts of the game Chang'an would exceed that and the mod would crash when any faction (except the rebels) conquered or took control of the city. In any event, I couldn't just sit idly by and let people commit 100 or more turns to a campaign, only for it to inevitably crash and become unplayable. So I had to fix that and, since I was planning on releasing a hotfix for that bug, I figured I might as well include all the other minor bugs I had found as well. Below you can see a screenshot of Liu Bei, now the Han Emperor, sitting in Chang'an after capturing it during the Liu Clan missions (as well as the bonus from completing ceremonies at all 5 Sacred Peaks).
In this Hotfix, we also included the enabling of Surround Sound (EAX) with DSAOL, where in battle you actually get a stereo effect now. Quoting Gigantus: "I was flabbergasted when I moved the camera in the middle of a melee for the first time." Please refer to this guide on Total War Center for further info. Be advised that you do not need to download the .zip file, as the files are already installed when installing the v5.6.1 Hotfix. There was overhaul of horse/elephant combat bonuses/penalties for all peasant-type units and polearm/spear-armed infantry, as well as javelin damage to horses and elephants. While spear and polearm infantry have an innate bonus against mounts, it would balance combat a bit better if literal peasants didn't have any extra combat bonuses against cavalry. It wasn't really balanced when trash peasants could put a significant hurt on armored, heavy cavalry in melee. To reiterate, those types of units still have some bonus, due to the weapons they wield, however that bonus has been much reduced. In conjunction with that, javelins have had their damage to elephants greatly increased and are now pretty much the only reliable counter to rampaging elephants. They have also had their bonuses versus cavalry evened out across the board, as well as given the armor piercing trait. Below is an image of some Nanman Warriors unleashing their javelins onto some approaching Xianbei Lancers.
Another relatively minor fix that I included was the inclusion of ports for both Linxiang (Changsha) and Chaisang, with the Yuzhang region losing it's port. Chaisang, in particular, was notable in the Three Kingdoms era for it's naval port, as Zhou Yu used it as the main base for Wu's fleet, utilizing Lake Poyang as the fleet's training ground. Additionally, in the Liu Clan missions in the 194 campaign, I included an additional set of scripts that, when a new missions pops up with a conquest target, would both center the camera on the target(s) as well as reveal the settlement through the fog of war. I thought it would be a good idea to show people where their targets are, especially those who aren't very familiar with ancient Chinese geography, instead of forcing them to blindly guess where they are supposed to go next for their mission objectives. I also updated a few biographies that were lacking, specifically Ma Dai, Xiahou Yuan, Xiahou Dun, and Cao Hong, as well as updated or cleaned up the portraits of several characters. For the full changelog, please refer to the download page for this hotfix. So to close, here is a screen shot of Pang Tong defending an important bridge in a war against Wu. While Ling Tong and his allies outnumbered their adversary more than 2-1, in the subsequent battle Pang Tong held the bridge and beat the brakes off of the Sun Clan armies for a devastating heroic victory.
The Version 5.6.1 Hotfix can be downloaded here and has instructions on how to properly install the patch (point installer at Medieval II Total War folder).
Important notice: Must have the Rise of Three Kingdoms v4.5 Full Release and RoTK v5.6 Update installed prior to installing this update. This update is NOT save-game compatible (will break saves).
Happy gaming!
