November 2023: AI breaks the ice, new stuff across the board news - Mossflower TW mod for Medieval II: Total War: Kingdoms

Hello! FEB here. I had a really productive month, both IRL and in the modding hobby, so I hope I'll be able to keep it up. We are creeping closer and closer to the next release. I would not keep up hopes, but maybe this Christmas I could finish that mess up. Don't quote me on this.

First up - the strategic map. It's been the bane of my existence for months, and I believe it's finally reaching the final form. Sunob Repus approached me with a proposition to beautify my map. Check out his page on ModDB, he is truly a master when it comes to M2TW map editing. He did a stellar job cleaning up the mess of terrain tiles and creating varied elevation.

After a few adjustments, I've moved on to making the campaign map playable. As such, I've opted for the hotseat campaign testing method proposed here. Essentially, I would let the AI drive around every faction on the map until one of them reached their victory conditions, or the game crashed. A few problems quickly became apparent. Namely:

• the generals were too slow for how big the map is;
• factions could not recruit any of their units;
• factions would constantly go broke from unit upkeep because economy wasn't properly balanced;
• factions would lose all their settlements due to awful public order and revolts;
• AI would constantly shuffle small stacks of troops between settlements in order to maintain control and sit around doing nothing for dozens of turns.

At first I was devastated. As I'm quite new to wrangling AI into doing stuff, I felt quite lost and was under the impression that the core structure of the mod was designed wrong. In time, I was able to find a few changes I could make. Firstly, I've found that the Steam version of the game introduced an AI tweak that completely ruined their estimation of siege success (see here). By turning that off, I managed to make the AI a lot more aggressive towards rebels and other factions in general. That sped up the game considerably, but now the Ai would always prefer rebel settlements to other factions.

This was a problem. Fearsome Cluny spent all his time besieging random hovels instead of going for Redwall. To fix this, I came out with a multiple-step solution. Firstly, I've greatly buffed rebel garrisons. Then I've decided that, in order to make the map less spacious, I had to introduce new factions. To do so, I've essentially split Redwall into 3 factions and the rebels - into 2 factions.

Lilygrove. The town of Lilygrove and the Scout Corps from the Soma games. These guys were always semi-independent in my mind, so making them a faction made sense. I gave them the mid-tier Lilygrove Infantry and Lilygrove Scouts units, with some elites and cav planned in near future. They start off with a compact realm at war with Cluny and a large stack of bilge rats under Scumsnout ready to besiege.

Holdings of Gingivere. That's right, ol' Julian is getting his own faction. Why? Because I needed the good guys to populate the North-East of the map. I also want field mice to be their own deal and for Julian the noble cat to have a potential for a heel turn and Kotir restoration.
I've transferred all the field mice to this faction. You may notice that the Quail Riders are much beefier now. I made sure they feel like real cavalry.

Residents of Mossflower. I've been bugged by a dilemma for a long time now. If a settlement rebels against a warlord, it would make sense if the local population garrisoned it. In that case, if a good faction wanted to take that settlement, they would have to kill a bunch of their peers. To avoid this, I've added a new "rebel" faction. Their leaders get a trait that restricts movement, and extreme money debuffs make sure they don't recruit.
The idea here is that, when playing as a god faction, you would do quests for these settlements (e.g. building trade buildings or defeating bandits) that would build trust and eventually let you take over.
For now they have the old Volunteer units I took away from Redwall, as well as the new squirrel ones I'll talk about next. Basically, all the new "neutral" units representing the local population will end up with them.

With this new setup, I've ran a few campaign tests. After fishing out a few bugs I've got it to play stable for 50+ turns.The AI is MUCH more active now. In fact, Cluny got SO uppity he now besieges and takes Redwall on turn 3 almost every game. Let me tell you, watching him do that is like watching my baby son take his first steps. My sweet boy, my ratboy genius.

The next step is to adjust unit prices, recruitment time and upkeep to make the game balanced. This will take some time. Please contact me if you would like to help playtesting!

Now to the new units. I've been trying to improve my Blender technique, namely - to have cleaner models, better UV maps, and quicker workflow. My main source of inspiration was this video. Essentially, it teaches you to texture paint in the program itself using custom brushes. You can also integrate an image editing suit right into Blender following this tutorial. By doing this, I was able to crank out 4 new units in about 7-8 hours, which is a giant leap forward for me. Meet the Clan Slingtails, Clan Bowtails and Clan Shadowtails!

And don't forget about the new vermin bodyguards, rebel and Cluny edition.

Finally, the oh-so-important text stuf and everything else I don't know where to put stuff.

• I've added more then a 100 names for creatures pulled directly from the Redwall wiki. I've put both male and female names in the general list and the spouse list. This way, we can have our Redwall heroines. To avoid the egalitarian factions from establishing noble lines I've put all of them on Teutonic succession until I find a better solution.
• Added a bunch of traits that represent species. They give buffs and debuffs. In the future I may restrict marriage to the members of the same species.
• Renamed corsairs to Corsair Alliance. Gave corsairs regions along Great Inland Lake.
• Greatly expanded character movement range. Overshot, lowered base action points to 180 for generals.
• Fixed the CTD caused by adoption events. Possibly lack of general’s unit or heirs in a Teutonic faction.
• General morale rebalance: raised morale levels across the board to have less cycle routs happening and encourage player causing routs by flanking properly.
• Added 4 new custom battle map locations.
• Removed inaccurate campaign descriptions.
• Removed many buildings from the EDB. Removed guild missions and events, specifically guild payoffs. Removed the ability to transform castles into cities.

And there you have it, folks. Next update - around Christmas / New Years. I'd love to hear from you in the comments below and see you on our Discord server here.