Greetings once again, everyone!
I found myself pretty busy over the past month, with work on this update first starting as some minor corrections and tweaks, but quickly evolving into some pretty serious work being done on battle models and anything else I could get my hands on. In regard to battle models, this updates includes both the creation of new models and textures for some existing units, as well as the addition of a couple of entirely new units. The Tiger and Leopard Cavalry, one of the elite of Cao Cao's army, has an entirely new model for their soldiers, as well as a new texture for their mounts. Goujian's Chosen, the unique unit of Wang Lang's faction of Yue, was similarly shown some love and given an completely new model and textures. With some of the standard units, new halberd, bow, and crossbow weapon models were given to the light Han units, while additionally some changes were made to that same tier of units - the base unit is now the former upgraded regional varients, while an entirely new model takes the place of the fully upgraded light units. Buqu, or personal bodyguards, also were revamped, making these highly important and elite units quite a bit better to look at on the battlefield. In regard to new units, two have been added for this update: Han Armored Crossbows and Hexi Frontiersmen. For the former, they fill a role that had essentially been vacant in the various Han faction's unit roster. Up until now all units in the 'Armored' tier were either infantry or cavalry, with these new crossbowmen being a new option for armies wanting a sturdy, well-armored ranged unit in the latter periods of their campaign. The Hexi Frontiersmen represent Han settlers, sinicized 'barbarian' peoples, and mixture of both that resided in the relatively recently acquired Hexi Corridor, fighting as agile light cavalry. In both the 190 and 194 campaigns they are available as mercenaries in the north-western regions of China. Additionally, in relation to battles, I also created new unit battle banners for all factions. These banners not only make a faction's units more conspicuous due to their color being more pronounced, but they are a lot more stylized with each unit type utilizing one of the five celestial animals.
Below you can see screenshots of the new Tiger and Leopard Cavalry with the new cavalry battle banner, below them is the new fully-upgraded light Archers, then the Zhongyuan regional Buqu soldiers, and finally the Hexi Frontiermen at full-charge.
Medieval 2's engine can be fickle and sometimes things just don't work, regardless if they are coded correctly. One issue that has popped up from time to time is historic children coming of age without the biographies and traits they were coded to receive. To circumvent this issue for children not of the main ruling family, I decided to create new events for their coming of age and spawn them onto the campaign map. Specifically this has been done for Guan Ping, Guan Xing, Zhang Bao, Zhang Shao, Zhu Ran, and Ling Tong. And this has actually worked out pretty well, with no issues in spawning in any of those characters, plus when spawned this way you can also assign their portraits. Also, in conjunction with giving a good cleaning to the 'historic coming of age' entries, the ones that remain seem to have been working fairly well. In my last two test campaigns as Cao Cao, all of the historic Cao and Xiahou children (Xiahou Shang, Xiahou Wei, Cao Pi, etc.) all came of age at the correct time with their correct biographies and traits. Now, I'm not stating that the issue is fixed, as I never trust the Medieval 2 engine, however I don't think it's a coincidence that significantly cleaning up the 'historic coming of age' entries has resulted in more accurate spawning of these children. Anyways, below I have a screenshot of Guan Ping being spawned via event, as opposed to coming of age via secondary family tree, with his correct biography and even portrait.
Another important part this update I'd like to mention is some of the newly updated assets on the campaign map. In the previous v5.3 Update, the terrain textures and Fortified Passes (among other things) were updated to create an entirely new, and better, looking campaign map. For this update I did a bit more and included improved textures for all road types, bridges, as well as ports. The aforementioned were all from vanilla Medieval 2 and the campaign map looks much better with those assets all replaced. Additionally I cleaned up the trade ship model and made other minor adjustments to the map, mostly in the west and south. But, back to map assets, below is a screenshot of some of the new assets. In the foreground you can see the new port model and cleaned-up trade ship, then the new texture for stone roads leading to and from the main city, while the new dirt paths and wooden bridges (top right) can be seen near the top of the image.
The last part of this update, that actually does have to do with battle, is the revamping of trait experience gain that a character can obtain whenever they fight a battle. In a general sense, experience gained is determined by the current trait level of the character, the type of battle, the odds for or against, and the type of victory. The lower the trait level (like Leadership, Attack, and Defense), the more experience that will be gained - additionally, fighting battles with the odds in the enemy's favor and decisively winning will result in significantly more experience gained. Similarly, characters that already have high trait levels, or fighting battles with the odds greatly in their favor or barely achieving victory will result in lower experience gained. I further added experience for Siege Attack and Siege Defense, as well as experience for Strength, the latter of which is gained by the character's bodyguard unit killing enemies in battle. So while a 'trash' commander can become very good, understand that it will take time and many battles being fought and won, specifically battles that are even-matched or against a more powerful army and decisively won.
The Version 5.4 (Zhongping) Update can be downloaded here and has instructions on how to properly install the patch (point installer at Medieval II Total War folder).
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must have the Rise of Three Kingdoms v4.5 Full Release installed prior to installing this update. This update is NOT save-game compatible (will break saves).
Happy gaming!
Keeping that nostalgia alive ;)