Quote:
Originally Posted by Maerlande
Any suggestions on making a tougher single player game?
Regards,
Maerlande
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Well, from having played countless hours of SP games for 18 months before I ventured into MP games, I can tentatively proclaim myself to be the king of SP scenarios
Probably the toughest one I came up with that still made some sense (as other ones I used to play like staling the first 50 turns made less sense) was the following....
(note this was before the MA Ulm booster patch)
Start as MA Ulm, and for the entire game, you are only allowed to field Ulm's non-magic commander units. So that means you can not use regular units (which you are also not allowed to recruit) priests/prophets, or mages at any time in your army, apart from those that show up as part of your PD. You must also set any such units to retreat should they find themselves unavoidably in a battle (such as an enemy storming your fort with mages inside). In fact mages/priests should all be set to retreat as standard in case of any assassinations. Although your Pretender can be scripted to survive assassinations (although it sill can not be used in any battle, such as defending fort storms)
So the entire game will revolve around using MA Ulm's commander units as mini-thugs, and for example, instead of fielding 20 X-Bow units, you have to instead give 20 commanders X-bows to achieve the same effect. Although of course any commander with equipment will be an uber version of a regular unit.
This scenario may not have much to do with how a proper MP game will ever be played, but I did find it very useful for focusing in on specific parts. (which is what a lot of my SP scenarios ended up as). Such as just how tough a single unit can be in melee if it has good stats (which MA Ulm's commanders do when compared to regular units), how much of a killer fatigue is in melee combat (and we're not talking regular Thug/SC fatigue issues), and how to field mini-thugs with just a few items, that could each kill about 50 units on average.
Surviving the early stages will be key, and you will have to rely on your PD a lot for this, and there are no rules regarding how much PD you can use (although I did add some later when I won this scenario a few times). Getting up as many castles as possible is also obviously essential to increase your recruitment ability. One good thing you'll find though, is that when you are fielding 40+ commanders per battle, you very rarely lose any items from defeated units if you win the fight. As you'll have enough commanders around to mostly pick everything up. And fear stacking is also your friend when it comes to defeating large AI armies inside of 50 turns.
A few other points as well is that your starting army must be killed off on the first turn. Attacking with you troops placed front centre on "Hold" and the commander far back set to "Hold, Retreat" should do the job, as your units move too slowly to be able to escape while routing. You are not allowed to hire mercs obviously, and any units you get via events or freespawn etc. must be immediately sacrificed. As having any actual army might make the AI delay in declaring war against you, which again would make things too easy. No summons are allowed either.
You are also only allowed to have a human 10HP Pretender, so no easy life with a SC Pretender (although maybe skip this rule if you find it too tough). I'd recommend a strong researcher who can blast you up the Construction tree, allowing you to recruit non-mage commanders for battle.
The Better Independents mod will probably make this scenario tougher again, so you may as well throw that into the mix. (not sure if I was using this mod with this scenario. Not even sure if it was available to use). Other settings,
- Impossible AI
- 15 provinces per nation
- Indies on 5.
- Research Standard
- Supplies and Resources High
- Magic sites standard.
So there you go, not sure if that is exactly what you were after, but it is certainly a way to make SP games tougher
and I hope, still have some relevance as a teaching aid for some aspects of the game when it comes to proper MP games.
Re: Single player with #allies
Hybrid Mode
