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>>2157733
>Knights of ze realm!

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>BOAT-ROWS

>>2157876
MYSTOPHOROI TOXOTAI KRETIKOI

Archers!

>>2157733
>Con quist adores

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>>2157733
VARRRANGIAN GARD

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TRIARI EYE

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>>2157733
>CH-NEE-TEHS!

SAY THE LINE, ANON

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCR8xV7fb5w

Total War unit quotes were always so absurdly shit and low effort. It's only with Warhammer that this assembly bothered to use some of their creativity.

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>javohl mein Kaiser!
>das Reich marches today mein Kaiser
>bring me zu ze enemies of ze Reich mein Kaiser

Is it not obvious that I am your foe, infidel?

>>2160539
RTW and M2TW should have extended to the Indus River desu

>>2161015
they both have mods that do that

>>2161063
Yh I know but still the base game should have done that desu

>>2157733
>he didn't install native voice mod

>>2161063
Too bad they remove America from the game. I loved exploring the seas and find the Aztecs

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HOPLITE

>>2161015
>>2161063
>>2161152
In all those mods the entire added part of the map becomes part of some ridiculous blob that instantly destroys the eventual mongol and timurid domstacks.

>>2157876
GAISO FULKHO FRIJOD

>>2158773
>>2157733
>>2161891

God the units shouting out their name like pokemon was SOUL

>>2160539
I fucking love the HRE campaign voice so much

>>2161891
>HOPLITE
AUP-LE-TAYYS

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>>2157733
>GEN-ER-AL'S BODYGAURD

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>WAR DOGS

>>2165011
before a certain Austrian fucked things up German was viewed as the language of poets and philosophers

>>2167540
lol
lmao
sure buddy

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>>2167540
before a certain Italian fucked things up Italian was viewed as the language of poets and philosophers

>>2167540
>I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and G*rman I speak to my horse.

Why did Italian spear militia have to be so overpowered bros?

>>2170070
Total War follows the RTS logic of exaggerating historical units to some degree, France gets good cav, England gets good longbows, Scots are all braveheart references, Medieval Italy is known for Mercs, Urban Militias, balkanization (and in addition to Mercs section are crossbow units as well being rich af) etc.

>>2157733
i recently migrated to linux mint (22.2) because dealing with windows was becoming increasingly cancerous
it completely fixed my rome 1 total war performance issues (known issue for some people no matter how good their rig is), now i can play EB1 again for a change
i tried everything else, 4gb patch, old disc version, compatibility settings, the custom .dll, changing affinity settings on task manager... nothing worked except migrating to linux, meaning it must have been a windows specific bug

it's not just rome 1 of course, i have seen crazy performance gains all around the board even with productivity software (gimp, blender, unity)

food for thought for anyone interested

>>2170294
How easy is it to migrate these days? I played with Linux for a bit many years ago and it felt too different.

Do most anons still use Stainless Steel?

>>2171155
I just backed up everything from my SSD to my HDD, then had a clean Linux install on the SSD from scratch (this is optional, you can just create a partition and dual boot at will). Took a couple of minutes.
After that I got most normieware and productivity apps set up within the hour.

I barely had to use the console, only to install unity hub but I didn't have to learn anything; the website detects you have linux and tells you what commands to run. It's completely retardproof.

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>FRANKENSTEIN

>>2171341
I don't. Stainless Steel's map is ugly and SSHIP is too bloated imo

>>2157876
BOWS OF ARTEMIS

>>2171341
If it weren't for the game breaking bugs I wouldn't use mods at all. Too many of them are bloated with nonsense or fuck up the clean UI design.

>>2170067
That was a century before Goethe and Beethoven

>>2173327
Where is Ethe and why am I going there?

>>2173327
Well that but talking german to the horse was also to say that german was the language of war/his armies.

>>2170067
>I speak Spanish to God
Charles grew up in Spain to a Spanish mother so his religious education was in Spanish.
>Italian to women
He was addressing the Italians as his lessers because he dominated them.
>French to men
French was the language of diplomacy and his greatest rival, so thats how he spoke to his equals.
>and German I speak to my horse
His reign in Germany was marked by military campaigns, internally, against Italy and the cockroaches. German was his language of war.

>>2174333
>He was addressing the Italians as his lessers because he dominated them.
Italian was the cultural romantic language, Charles enjoyed girls

>>2171341
i want to like stainless steel but it made cavalry so broken its ridiculous and the starting positions are chosen based on historical accuracy instead of player enjoyment so you got q big purple blob running amock. Vanilla did it better by sacrificing historical accuracy for balancing.

>>2174791
>it made cavalry so broken
Isn't that just a general M2 thing?

>>2174842
cavalry are buggy as shit in vanilla medieval 2 but i think what that anon was trying to say is that cavalry is overpowered in stainless steel

>>2170294
It’s because Linux uses dxvk as a wrapper, people can do this on Windows as well to fix performance. Instructions are on the pcgamingwiki page for Rome 1. Same goes for Medieval 2 to fix the slowdown that happens when walls are crumbling.

>>2174842
>>2174862
It is OP in both game but in vanilla heavy infantry may at least swallow a cavalry charge if positioned right. In SS if a regiment of knights charges into the front of your battalion of dismounted Huscarls you got no more huscarls.

>>2170294
Do the fmvs work? Last time I looked into Linux, games with fmvs just wouldn't be able to play them, so you generally had to deal with games not having pre-rendered cutscenes.

>>2174917
Ah that kind of oppressively OP. That explains things.

Did Hospitallers mog Templars irl too?

>>2174917
>if a regiment of knights charges into the front of your battalion of dismounted Huscarls you got no more huscarls.
I wouldn't mind this if knights were as rare as they should be.
But when you can easily get a full stack in a few turns, it's pretty ridiculous.

>>2157733

>>2175334
Teautonics mog all

>>2175334
In a way yes, since they were still highly appreciated and continued doing epic shit like defending Malta from an Ottoman invasion while the Templars pissed off a bunch of rich people and got burnt alive.

>HEAVEH INFANTREH

>>2174791
>Vanilla did it better by sacrificing historical accuracy for balancing.
Don't give me that crap about balancing.
Some faction should have an easier time, others struggle to stay alive.
If everybody has the same start then why bother playing other factions?

>>2160529
Rome 2 barbarians might be the worst

ZE REICH SHOWS ITZ OPPVIOUS SUPERIORITY ONCE AGAIN

>>2160529
nu-TW quotes sound so fucking generic and limp it's unreal

>>2181015
GODS OF THE AFTERLIFE
SPARE MY ARSE

>>2181015
>Rome 2 barbarians might be the worst
4 da twibe

add variation if you want but did anyone actually find playing the large blobs in stainless steel, byzantium, the hre, the moors, etc, funny?

>>2181015
>The enemy warlord is running like a frightened goat. Chase him! Goats make good eating!

>>2181015
>the worst
you mean the best?

>>2167540
It still is. No other country has as strong a philosophical track record as Germany.

>>2188858
Greece and Frogland. Also the Chongs if you count non-western.

>SPEEAAAHHS

>>2157733
AFTER ALL
WE HAVE BOHEMIANS TO LOOK DOWN UPON

>>2197902
kek

>>2158732
based

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>"I AM THE WILD ROVER"
>singlehandedly raids and disrupts a whole fucking army

Has anyone ever seen the AI accept a demanding proposal?

>>2218055
Even better when the champion is a woman

>>2220871
Have you tried with the diplo bug fix?

>>2220871
Not really no, my diplomacy always involves me making tons of cash

>>2160529
ALL OF ROME WILL BE AMAZED AT SUCH A VICTORY
THE DAAAYYYY ISSSSS OUUURRSSSSSSSSS

>>2174791
It's better when you mod the hit rate to normal levels again (SS devs made it 3.0 and that's why cav charges demolish everything) but honestly, the more you try to fix the more you realize Stainless Steel is an incredibly primitive and unstable experience. More recent mods really put it to shame in terms of overall enjoyment, if only because things actually work like you'd expect.

>>2160529
ROME HAS CONQUERED!

>>2171806
>and SSHIP is too bloated imo
SSHIP would be good if it didn't take 5000 turns to get to any interesting unit.

>>2223975
>THE DAAAYYYY ISSSSS OUUURRSSSSSSSSS
I unironically shout this sometimes when I achieve something IRL.

>>2232780
>The virgin Medieval 2 modder wanting you to only get a unit on the EXACT date that a particular tech was invented (or even later)
>The chad Europa Barbarorum modder that lets you pursue unit unlocks on your own initiative

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>>2175334
>>2177298
Idk bros, neither the Hospitallers or the Teutonics get the attention that Templars have gotten through the ages, either as heroes or antagonists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B10ECkQXQtU


Teutons burned any good will and lost their path when they started killing to convert Europeans en masse and later warring against fellow Catholics. Only the Hospitallers stayed true to their mission as long as they could, and are the 2nd best order for that.

Reminder that when the average person thinks of a crusader, they picture a guy wearing a white tunic with a red cross despite not being the image of the typical crusading knight. In wrestlling terms, the Templars are the Michaels of the crusading orders.

>>2236866
>sl*vs
>europeans
the teutonic knights were based because they killed polaks and tried to kill ziggers

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>Tried
Didn't go well, did it?

>>2170285
You forgot how Byz had flamethrowers and Morocco with gun mounted camels.

Then again all TW games had these super ahistorical units like Shogun 2 with the hero units it’s only Rome 2, Attila and Britannia TW where they decided that no fun was allowed.
>>2171341
Nah it’s garbage and unpolished, Cav is overpowered and wipes out entire units on the first charge and the game crashes a lot to the point that all progress is ruined.

>>2174917
Knights and other cav were not OP in vanilla Med2 a single levy spearman can kill off high tier knights if positioned right like forests or choke points but in SS no matter what you have to sacrifice a couple of units to kill off a single cav.

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>>2240266

>GLORIOUS VICTORY, SIR, SOON TO BE YOURS

>>2233902
The latter is what I want to see. Shit that unlocks more dynamically based on conditions in the game. For M3 something like mongols should arrive at a suitable time, not specific on the dot a certain precise turn. Have black death show up when trade is really international and again the RNG activates it.

Honour dictates I inform (You) I intend to fap.

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>>2157733
>I carry many great wounds, all honourably earned in battle.
>Aye, and all earned in honorable service, like a TRVE ENGLISHMAN!

Fear is a weapon, wise generals, USE WILL!

>>2240280
>Knights get rekt if they attack infantry specialising in killing cav in the ideal situations to kill cav
yeah that sounds balanced, meanwhile in ideal charge conditions those some knights can wipe out those spears in a single charge. In SS/SSHIP knights can charge into braced heavy spears and still kill half the unit which boosts the retarded ai who like to suicide charge their cav constantly.

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>"INFIDELS"

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>>2257455
>if they attack infantry specialising in killing cav in the ideal situations to kill cav
They're levy spearmen, realistically they would get shit on by heavy cav in 90% of circumstances

>>2157733
En voie chevalier!

>>2160529
That's why nobody quotes them and you're straight.

>>2170070
>be Italy
>build city watch
>entire army for the whole game
>crossbow militia even have fucking swords
>north eruope level 3 archers are "crossbows"
>They're just peasant crossbows... again but they cost more
>no shield

>>2282705
It's funny how Hungary's Crossbow Militia is better and cheaper than the Crossbows they get in castles.

https://honga.net/totalwar/unit.php?v=m2tw&f=hungary&d=Crossbowmen
https://honga.net/totalwar/unit.php?v=m2tw&f=hungary&d=Pavise_Crossbow_Militia

>>2171341
SShip is the only mod I still replay sometimes

>HE VEY INF'A'NTRY

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>>2280515
not all levies are untrained and in SS it didnt matter what infantry.

>As was frequent in many battles during this period, the impulsive charge of the French cavalry proved disastrous, as they were too far ahead of the rest of the Castilian army to receive any support, and were charging uphill at a narrow fortified defensive position while being pelted with showers of arrows and crossbow bolts, which killed many horses, injured some men, and caused confusion. The French, however, being heavily armored, were still able to enter close combat with the Portuguese vanguard, where heavy fighting ensued with the dismounted Portuguese and Anglo-Gascon men-at-arms. The losses of the French cavalry were heavy and the effect of its attack completely null. Support from the Castilian rear was late to come and the knights that did not perish in the combat were made prisoners and sent to the Portuguese rear.

The "le levy spears only" quickly falls apart anyway the moment you actually do tests and look into the files and see that all mounted units were just overtuned either because the modders had no idea what they were doing or because they obsessively think of cavalry as invincible on the battlefield (both likely). You can charge knights into late pikemen uphill and win. It's not balanced, fun, or even historically accurate. But Stainless Steel is also the ultimate bottom-of-the-barrel mod of the game, so really who cares? You can fix it easily enough but it still doesn't change all the other problems it has.

>>2240266
>Morocco with gun mounted camels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamburak

Also the fact it is close to impossible to level to the highest level of cities without cheating or intense micromanaging unless you conquer one from the ai

So it seems to be agreed that SS is absolute garbage, but what's some historical Medieval 2 mods that are good by today's standards?

>>2283221
That would have been preferable but still fantasy just from the time period alone

>>2283254
Depends on what you're looking for. Tsardoms (not Fall of Constantinople, unfortunately), EB2 (unfinished but still playable), and Broken Crescent (old but still well regarded for balance and campaign ai) are the options I checked out recently and I'd say they're all worth trying out. SSHIP I haven't tried at all but to my understanding it's also unfinished.

>>2240266
Attila has giant catapults hurling explosive shells with contact fuses.

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>>2283254
SS is not garbage at all, the only real complaints people have is cav is OP and AI suicides it's general therefore they buffed his HP so much on hard/very hard that he starts fighting 1v30 and surviving for minutes on end. Well guess what, Cav is OP in almost every mod and the AI is usually worse than SS's, which atleast attempted to fix it. The general suiciding is a problem in every mod.
SS is still just better Vanilla and SShip pushes the game to the best Vanilla-esque experience you can get. Other mods dump their OC armors and weapons that don't mesh with anything and they don't touch the AI making the mod worthless. Play SShip. It's better than shitty fantasy mods.

>>2282891
So the cav ran uphill and got dismounted, then ran into man-at-arms (similarly armoured dismounted knights). Doesn't really highlight infantry withstanding direct cav charges

>>2284343
where do you see the line about the french Knights dismounting

>>2181382
How did they get away with this

>>2283971
>the only real complaints people have
Lel
>Ugly poorly designed overland that leads to horribly slanted battle maps, more than in vanilla
>Horrible performance, crashes common contrast to mods like Tsardoms and Third Age that can run more scripts for hundreds of turns and still be stable experiences
>Mod bloated with crap nobody cares about or that doesn't work well because it's just a compilation of whatever was available back in the late 00s, see previous point
>Bad campaign balance that just leads to a few factions predictably blobbing every single time (Egypt and ERE)
>Advertises historical accuracy when it comes to balance decisions but is really just like vanilla
>Reforms are terrible, with you having to wait far too long for fun units that are really the best you got for faction variety depending on who you play
>Faction variety worse than vanilla. Redundant trash units everywhere despite the 500 unit cap.
This is all just off the top of my head. There's definitely more that other people who have played mods for this game can share.
>Cav is op in almost every mod
Objectively wrong and you can prove that just by looking at text file numbers and playing the fights out yourself. You'd know this if you actually played other mods.
>AI is usually worse than SS's
Also objectively wrong. SS runs an old outdated version of ReallyBadAI so it's not even the best with its own AI. Skynet also typically mogs it.
>best Vanilla-esque experience you can get.
Is vanilla, you absolute nutter. Go play that or KGCM instead and save yourself the trouble.

>>2157876
BAZBAZBAZ

>>2284978
>Ugly poorly designed overland that leads to horribly slanted battle maps, more than in vanilla
literally just vanilla
>Horrible performance, crashes common contrast to mods like Tsardoms and Third Age that can run more scripts for hundreds of turns and still be stable experiences
depends when you play, if you play as soon as the new update came out then yes, it's unstable as shit, and yet SS 6.4 is one of the most stable mods in the games history.
>Mod bloated with crap nobody cares about
Proofs? Projection? Name your favorite mod. SS is basically Vanilla with a few extra units and buildings. No bullshit OCs that other mods add.
>Advertises historical accuracy when it comes to balance decisions but is really just like vanilla
Good. SShip is more autistic on the realism.
>Reforms are terrible, with you having to wait far too long for fun units that are really the best you got for faction variety depending on who you play
How is this a bad thing? You're playing a historical game, if cannons appeared in the early crusades that would look retarded.
>Faction variety worse than vanilla.
Vanilla playable factions: 17
SS playable factions: 26
>Redundant trash units everywhere despite the 500 unit cap.
Your favorite mod has this problem. Also garrison units are not redundant.

>KGCM
Imagine shitting on SS for crashes and then recommending this pile of shit instead.

It's fine to admit you don't know what you're talking about since this game is full of mostly pointless esoteric knowledge but you think that cav being broken is a Med 2 thing and not a strictly a SS thing so I'm going to assume you haven't even played vanilla. Btw, SSHIP team thinks SS balance of cav is retarded so they nerfed it, but you wouldn't know that

>>2288355
>but you think that cav being broken is a Med 2 thing and not a strictly a SS thing
why lie

>>2283971
>the only real complaints people have is cav is OP and AI suicides it's general therefore they buffed his HP so much on hard/very hard that he starts fighting 1v30 and surviving for minutes on end.
And the millions of other cheats the AI gets that makes it retarded to engage with most mechanics in the game. They get infinite money with massively reduced costs super skilled agents no public order penalty no squalor huge growth boosts, it's so egregious that the first citadel the player will receive won't be one they build themselves, because that would take like 50+ turns with dedicated effort on lowest taxes and a good administrator, it will instead be one the AI is given for free by like turn 13. Your power base as any faction won't be your starting zone, it will be the max size settlements you capture from the AI while you max tax your starting ones because it's just not worth ever trying to build them up.
If you remove or significantly nerf all of these AI cheats then it becomes playable. But the devs have their heads so far up their own asses that they hate the idea of the AI not cheating harder than a deity AI in civ that they never released a reduced cheats version and you have to do it yourself.

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>>2160539
PicRel is the reason all the HRE's vfx are forever burned into my brain. This was with Stainless Steel 6.4 with some Byg's Grym Reality Submods added in. VH/VH (only way I've played since like 2011). It took six years off and on of my actual life to complete and I didn't even start it with the intention of it being a World Domination run.
I've often contemplated whether or not I can pull it off in SSHIP but nowadays my 'tism is firmly locked in on a Warcraft Total War mod. Back then I was playing out a TradCat Monarchist fantasy.
As unforgiving as I know SSHIP to be, it's both a tantalizing and daunting idea.
Maybe after I get my Grand Alliance run done in W:TW

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>>2163355
I wish I still had all the screenshots from >>2295608 to show how wrong you are.
Mongols literally owned one fourth of the eastern side of the map. None of the factions in their half could actually stop them until eventually the Timurids did show up. All the extra factions did was slow them down a bit but it didn't stop them. Even then the Timurids just forced them to refocus. Novgorod and Kiev formed a dual alliance against them and thanks to their heavy anti-cav builds they were the first to actually touch the farthest east the map went.
The Timurids locked themselves down in modern-day Iraq and Iran and nobody could ram their way in there; all the Islamic factions were busy trying to kick me out of Egypt and the Near East. The Timurids were still there for me to fight and if I hadn't built a beast of an economy and built custom-stacks with Late Period units, all with max upgrades, I never would've beaten them.
My first fight with them they crushed one of my most veteran and battle-proven Crusader armies.
Thomas Ravencroft's, "Remember O Thou Man," was playing as I lost the battle. That song is hauntingly beautiful and still gives me PTSD flashbacks. Also given the song's subject matter, one couldn't pick a better theme.
You know you're really invested in a campaign when you're mourning literal faceless pixels of an army in a decades-old RTS.

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>>2165011
Not as much as me.

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>>2170067
Charles V was the closest we came to having the WHF Empire IRL. Extremely underrated figure. Bro had so much promise but was killed with a thousand cuts by more selfish men of pettier vision. No one European Emperor has ever controlled so much of the world in their lifetime for longer than him.
As you can probably tell he was the first emperor I had a developed adoration for.
I still think we might've had an unfathomably based future if his dynasty had instead gone on to rule a united European world with a globe-spanning Empire.

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>>2174785
True but his most noted mistress/lover was a red-haired Austrian actress.
Man had exquisite taste.
Also, they produced one of the most pivotal figures in European history: John of Austria.
He's the guy up in the command deck sending Turks to the bottom of the Mediterranean.

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>>2174842
>heavy cavalry broken
>in an era known for said unit dominating warfare
>acting like you don't eventually get gunpowder and pike squares in mods and vanilla that weaken them severely

>>2175420
The mods anon is complaining about address this problem. In SSHIP if you try to built knight deathstacks like most every France player does you're going to bankrupt your kingdom in one turn.

>>2180291
This.
If you're bitching about historical accuracy in a mod designed around the premise of historical accuracy, you're not the crowd the mod is made for.
There's something immensely satisfying about having a challenging starting position and being invested enough in said faction with a shit starting position and making them into a regional power or actual globally-recognized empire.

>>2197902
I love how many levels of history you gotta know to truly understand the context of this quote.

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>>2233902
Yeah I much prefer how EB2 does it. If I'm advancing at breakneck pace in a mod that unforgiving, you're goddamn right I should be able to get full-on legionnaires early.
For example in Stainless Steel the whole secret to my success was spending all of early game building up my economy and diplomatic relations so I had massive buffers around me. My only expansion was abroad into Non-Catholic territories. It took ages for any sort of coalition to form against me - even by it did, they couldn't outspend me.
Do you really think something as silly as a four-front war is going to bankrupt me when I survived the Black Plague with a fucking treasury surplus? That, alone, is what probably put me on track to take over the world.
That being said EB2 is a grueling mod to play. I love it a lot and one day I will devote serious time to it but anyone who thinks SSHIP is unforgivingly realistic should go try that on for size.
I wonder if anyone has without exploits gotten Rome to it's maximum, historical borders in that mod. I'd love to see it. If I do it I'm actually gonna do world conquest and really break people's minds.

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>>2236866
The Templars are rightly iconic. Their military legacy is jaw-dropping in terms of achievement. These guys were known for being fearsome to face and having balls of metal alloys that wouldn't be discovered for another five hundred years.
Although I never do get into the beef over which order is better. I think they all have pros and cons.

>>2257455
No shit Chivalric/Imperial/Noble knights in far heavier armor with better training, weapons and horses are gunna face-fuck militia spearmen no matter how tightly braced they are. What kind of crack have you been smoking that damages your brain enough to think that ISN'T how it works?
If you take even my precious Gothic Knights, Gendarmes or even something like the Scholarii from SS6.4 that are objectively the most OP Heavy Cav in the game and run them face-first into a pike or halberdier square, you're gonna at least take out half the unit.
Also if you just park an anti-cav unit, unsupported, then get shocked when sometimes the cav wins the fight if they get too far into the Square then you deserve the ass-whipping you got.

>>2283184
>you can charge knights into late pikemen uphill and win
I am so tempted to reinstall 6.4 and give you my SteamID and play Edelweiss with you in the downhill deployment zone and show you just how wrong you are.

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>>2283248

>>2295631
Anon did not talk about SSHIP

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>>2283971
That's the way. Fuck these casual niggers. They ain't built like us.
Although
>>2283287
>>2283254
This; there are mods for every taste and desire in Medieval 2. It's what makes it so fucking great and immortal in the franchise. If you don't like a mod, check out others. There is one for almost every period of fictional IP you can think of.

>>2295648
You could log in and post a mp4/webm of you doing this you know

>>2284934
It was a time before we let women and nons not only into the hobby but gave them a say in how shit oughta be. We never realized fully how critical gatekeeping actually was.
I fully expect one day the game will be retroactively ruined especially as Medieval 3 gets closer. They know we're all fucking crackheads and need our fix. But if they do that I'll never forgive them.
I mean for fuck's sake there are traits your general can get for being gay, or retinue of literal cross-dressing hookers and these are all debuffs to your general. Thank God no Wokie Idiot has noticed this yet.

>>2180291
>>2295632
it is not even historically accurate since as posted previously all heavy infantry in the early periods of the game are worthless against cavalry and Byzantium just swallows the seljuk invasion and remains a big purple shitstain

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>>2284978
>Ugly
Skill issue. Don't fight battles on shitty ground. Learn how to deploy on the campaign map and how to maneuver.
>crashes
Name a mod without this problem. Get a better PC or optimize your shit.
>bloated
It adds extra shit, that's part of the appeal you fucking goober.
>Bad campaign balance
It's a historical mod. Some factions will have better chances of succeeding. People bitch about this in Fantasy mods for many IPs but don't realize these are passion projects put together by lore autists. Don't start crying because your favorite faction lost it's plot armor.
>just like vanilla
Except objectively better in every way.
>Reforms are terrible
It prioritizes historical accuracy over cheese, but I do kind of agree with this one. I was able to build cannon foundries and gun smiths centuries before I could get gunpowder, but that meant I had a massive edge over every other faction.
>Faction variety worse than vanilla
Bro have you even actually played the mod and looked at the units? The variety is WAY better than Vanilla

>>2292112
If you remove these cheats the AI literally can't perform. You could say just use a better AI and I would agree with that, but not all Modders get along with each other or want to share work with each other. Sad but true.

Which mod has the best AI?
This was always the most important thing to me.
Who cares about winning if you won against a retard that can't play.

>>2295650
Might've replied to the wrong anon, my bad.

>>2295664
This is just factually wrong. Byzantium does not swallow the fucking Seljuq invasion every campaign. In fact in the one I've been posting about they got stuck in Thessalonica and were being tag-teamed by Kiev, Venice, Hungary and the Turks.

>>2295674
This is the main reason I try and get my friends into the mods and hunt down discords and steam groups for them. I've played tons of mods and all of them crack for me eventually in singleplayer.
There's no substitute for a human on the other end who knows what they're doing and, honestly, it gets better the longer you play each other because you know how the other person thinks and you've actually learned their tells and such.
God I can't wait for the Engine Rework to give us actual multiplayer campaigns.

>>2295680
multiplayer takes out half the fun (the battles) and you just auto-resolve everything

>>2295676
That was my experience back when I played it. Now looking at four timelapse videos they eat the turks in all and become a blob in three, only taken down by another bigger meaner blob so your campaign seems like an outlier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzTKv_2szGk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD0Iv71zM2I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDYw7eyinQU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZkU8GYkzss

>>2295683
I'm not talking about campaigns but skirmishes.

>>2295710
then it's the same problem but reversed

>>2295704
You really thought I wouldn't watch all these, didn't you Squidward?
>1st timelapse the ERE didn't defeat the Seljuqs, the Khwarezmians and Fatimids did
>2nd timelapse is interesting but ultimately also doesn't help your thesis because once more the main reason the ERE is successful is the Cumans, Khwarezmians and Crusader States forced them to focus on a bigger threat
>3rd timelapse is the only one where the Byzantines seem to genuinely in a head-on war destroy the Turks
>4th timelapse the Turks basically got driven off the Persian Gulf in like one turn by the Khwarezmians; that's a devastating economic blow. So once again the reason the Byzantines succeed against them is that their most dangerous and aggressive competitor had other concerns
Now in the interest of total honesty there is one outlier with my campaign I forgot to mention: one of the first things I did when I started out was working on diplomacy to keep all the Catholic factions together. It was difficult and expensive but I did it, with a few minor wars within Christendom required to do so but by mid-game everything was breaking down. Part of this policy involved making the largest navy in the entire campaign which I used to blockade every port of every faction that didn't stay in the Alliance or wasn't Catholic. So, the sheer economic impact of that probably had a lot to do with it since so much of the ERE's wealth in the mod comes from overseas trade.
Also: do you know the kind of edges the ERE has if they survive mid-game? They get access to some of the best units, the most capable roster AND they're the only faction that can build Highways which are INSANE in terms of what they allow a player to accomplish in terms of army movement and economy.

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>>2295734
So not only are the byzantines ahistorically strong, the turks are laughably weak
>Now in the interest of total honesty there is one outlier with my campaign I forgot to mention: one of the first things I did when I started out was working on diplomacy to keep all the Catholic factions together. It was difficult and expensive but I did it, with a few minor wars within Christendom required to do so but by mid-game everything was breaking down. Part of this policy involved making the largest navy in the entire campaign which I used to blockade every port of every faction that didn't stay in the Alliance or wasn't Catholic. So, the sheer economic impact of that probably had a lot to do with it since so much of the ERE's wealth in the mod comes from overseas trade
So in your own example where the byzzies did poorly you were jumping through hoops to keep catholic factions from expanding anywhere but outwards and weakened them too

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>>2295761
Silly anon. Do you really think I would allow the Primus Inter Pares of Christendom to be challenged?

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>>2295648
You don't need to because AI cavalry running into spears is a Total War staple. Results are consistently in favor of mounted units defeating every single spear or pike unit of their respective era at least. Pic related is for you.

For those of you in the thread who like SS for some reason but DON'T like the monotony of cavalry winning every single battle, I recommend going into battle_config lowering the hit rate as a bare minimum step. SSHIP has half the hit rate of SS (1.5 vs 3.0) but I've never tested SSHIP battles so I have no idea what the balance of the mod is. Pic SS with a hit rate value of 2.0 so clearly that's not good enough. You'd have to also mess with mass as well which iirc spears are like .3 vs cavalry mass of 5.

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>>2296694
Also just as a comparative bonus, here's a numerically worse pike unit beating a numerically similar unit on flat terrain in Tsardoms. Casualties are from me misplaying while shuffling because the cavalry actually tried to flank. Not all mods are the same.

>>2296699
>beating a numerically similar unit
Meant numerically similar to the cav unit in SS, fug :DDDDDD

>>2296694
Now hes gonna say that you lost knights riding upwards into pikes which proves him right

For me, it's totalvanillabeyond. It doesn't fiddle too much with the base gameplay, fixes all the common bugs and glitches, more knightly orders, some more units, and more factions. With the map expanding as far east as Mongolia, adding factions like the Kwarazmians, Baghdad, Damascus, Cumans in the east, and unlocking access to the Americas from the beginning. Where another new faction like Norway has an earlier head start. And lots of other cool things. It's not hyper autistic like SSHIP, just adds all the things to vanilla I wish it had. It's perfect.

>>2296694
>AI cavalry running into spears is a Total War Staple
If you're not playing on Very Hard it is. Most of the time especially in mods I play they don't engage in suicidal aggressive charges like that unless the AI feels it has no other option but standing there and getting shot to death.

>>2297795
And it can vary based on the AI used by the mod, true. I tested it on Medium because I knew that AI behavior would act in a way that let me test what I wanted to test and would avoid having any difficulty accrued bonuses altering the results.

What do society of pop countries even do

>>2297888
Hey buddy I think you got the wrong door. EU5 thread's about 2 threads down.

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how do you Volks feel about medieval 3 getting POPS?

>>2301780
no reason to believe it won't be a half-baked feature like everything else CA has been shitting out for the past 15 years

>>2301780
M2:TW-style recruitment was enough. City growth can be a single abstract number for all I care

>>2189068
Germany is leagues better than both of them, but China is a fair shout

>>2157876
I just tried EB2 for the first time yesterday. Autistic, but cool.

>>2283971
>Play SShip.
Planning to try it out today. I hope units do look historically accurate *as much as Med 2 allows for that*.

>>2301780
Don't give a shit it's going to be rome 2 slop anyway

>>2284857
>were charging uphill at a narrow fortified defensive position while being pelted with showers of arrows and crossbow bolts, which killed many horses, injured some men, and caused confusion
were charging uphill at a narrow fortified defensive position while being pelted with showers of arrows and crossbow bolts, which killed many horses, injured some men, and caused confusion

Knights, knights, knights of cidonia-a-a-a

>>2305372
so some of them got dismounted while still being able to fight, which I can think of no total war game can actually model, and the main thrust made contact with the infantry line.
And as >>2296694 shows the SScav can do exactly as you quoted against pikemen (not just heavy infantry like at Aljubarotta) and win.

BARBARIAN MERCENARIES

>>2310075
did they really say that in ancient times?

>>2312303
yes actually

>>2302733
EB2 would be cooler if they made the rebel factions weaker. The rebels are so overtuned that AI starting next to other AI factions like the Greek battle royale is actually massively beneficial for them and you will see a major Greek power in ~100 turns while most northern/western minor factions that start surrounded by rebels would've done so little in 200 turns that they look exactly like they did on turn 1.

>select unit
>"NIGGERS TONGUE MY ANUS"
It truly was a different time...

>>2314313
It would be cooler if rebel factions could act like normal factions, basically Rome 2 and later game style.

>>2295633
Seems like a call-forward to the Habsburgs unless I'm missing something

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>EQVITES CONSVLARES!

>>2157733
Good thread

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>>2312303
Yeah