Mod: Better Independents

[Foodstamp]

I have been playing a pretty massive game as well with this mod. Here are my observations so far.

The AI builds less units, but atleast the units it build are useful. I think the AI gave me a harder time before, because he would hit me on so many fronts.

Now the attacks are normally concentrated in a few armies instead of a gazillion militia forces taking provinces left and right with me having to chase them down all over the map, one province behind them the whole time

It may be my imagination, but it seems like my load times have gone way down now that the AI has to use it's forts to produce units. I am at a point in my current game with around 35 nations on a medium sized map where the turn loading would reach a point where I would call it quits. With this mod, the turn processing seems fairly reasonable, and I think it is because the AI does not have to figure out what to do with all those trash units.

I like the mod, I will probably use it for now on in my single player games, or atleast until someone comes up with a more elegant solution to the junk indies and the AIs <3 for them.

[Edi]

Thanks for the comments, guys!

The reason it decreases hosting time for turns is directly related to the number of units that have been recruited in the game. Each one of those units takes up memory, requires appropriate calculations in battle etc, which slows the game down. That's why the hard limit for units that can be on the map at the same time was only tripled from Dom2 instead of being maxed out. Maxed out, it would bring any system, no matter how top of the line, to its knees.

[Sombre]

I like it. I still prefer the NI maps, partly because I like non-site indy mages being absent.

This mod has a big advantage over NI maps in the respect that it can be used with random maps.

[Foodstamp]

I found a bug with this mod. When you conquer keeps formerly held by the AI, if those forts are able to recruit units that have had their resource costs raised, the AI will still try to create those units.

This causes the queue to back up with 800 resource commanders and units that will not allow them to recruit their national units from the keep. So the only place the AI can build units at are their original capital keeps. If we can find a fix for this bug the AI would be more challenging.

As it stands right now, this mod makes the AI less challenging I have noticed in my single player games. I still like the mod though because I get tired of fighting indy zergs.

[Edi]

Damn. So much for that idea then. I suppose the AI makes its recruitment decisions based on the original cost of the units, using the original values, since mods are just an overlay on it.

Looks like we're back to square one or using NI maps. Highly annoying. Thanks for letting us know.

[Ballbarian]

Edi, couldn't you just raise the gold cost instead of resources, then the AI wouldn't be able to even add the unit to the queue unless it had too much unspent gold. (Might be that you already discussed this and I just missed it.)

[Edi]

The problem with that is that you can get upwards of 50 militia from events. If each one of those costs 800 gold, the upkeep will wreck the economy.

And even then, it is possible that the AI would make purchasing decisions based on the original values.

I suppose it's worth a try, just so long as I do not change the militia type (monster 30) you can get from unit events. I'll post a modified mod later. Right now I do not have the luxury of time to test how it works, so I would really appreciate it if somebody played a test game or two to see if the gold alteration helps. I'll test enough to see that we don't get "bad mongold" or similar errors.

What we really need is to be able to mod existing poptypes so that we can reassign different units to them. That way it would be easy to disable any necessary units. Especially if you designed a good poptype mod that disables the problem units, then start a game with a blank NI mod where you copy the actual NI mod contents, so the units that appear as indie defenders will be according to vanilla game and then the problem units only get disabled after that.

[Juzza]

Oh, I'd also like to add that this mod is fantastic! and really good for testing new nations, I found my newest nation, "Free Port" very interesting and difficult to play against with an impossible AI.

I suggest for anyone doing nation modding to test their own mod on an Imp AI and this mod.

[Edi]

Juzza, Thank you very much for the kind words!

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All right, I've done some revisions to the mod.

Enabled (i.e. commented out) units:
26 Light Cavalry
50 Slinger
39 Heavy Infantry
126 Woodsman
1118 Markata

Reason: Included in some national army lists, so that those lists do not get broken. Affected nations were the ape nations, nations with slingers (which can be useful, hence enabled again) and MA Man (has both slingers and light cav). The HI is enabled because it IS heavy infantry for EA and not utter crap. Woodsman was enabled because it gives some raiding potential for those who find them even if they lack national stealth units.

For people who are wondering why some indies are still enabled and some are not, read the mod file. It has a fairly extensive commentary section in the beginning which contains the rationale for WHY things have been done the way they have and why for example indie Pale Ones are unmodded (they are amphibian, so they can allow expansion to water from land). I am a firm believer in the maxim that undocumented code is only half-finished at best, and that also means giving a brief explanation on design principles.

The goal of the mod was NOT to eliminate ALL independents completely, but to eliminate the useless crap and totally worthless hordes of chaff that the AI likes to build while preserving the better units and allowing some options. Militia number 31, which is available to MA Man will NOT be enabled. It stays at 9000 gold a pop because it can be found in no less than three poptypes and I refuse to mangle the purpose of the mod by allowing it. MA Man will just bloody well have to do without that unit. If you're playing MA Man and in such desperate straits that you need to recruit the militia instead of spearmen to serve as chaff and archer bait, there's no hope for you anyway and the mod stays truer to its purpose.

The mounted commanders were never affected by this mod because those poptypes are far less common than the infantry ones and the nations with crap leadership deserve SOME chance of finding good commanders. Militia #30, which can appear from "lucky" events (ok, sometimes it is lucky, but more often not) is unaltered so that it doesn't bankrupt anyone, but unfortunately it appears in three poptypes, so you WILL see some of it in the AI armies. But there will be less chaff than normal and none of the indie archer hordes unless the archers are national troops, longbows or woodsmen.

Note that the mod version and filename has not been changed, because I really can't be arsed to do that. Just replacing the mod file with the new version will overwrite things and change existing games on the fly. If you're using it in MP, make sure everyone changes it at the same time.

Hopefully this lengthy post answers most questions you may have.

[Juzza]

You know, it wouldn't be that difficult to just #copystat these units and just add them to the nations with them recruitment lists, if you want some help, I'm better at coding that sprite drawing