SSHIP ver. 0.98 - April 25th, 2024 - DOWNLOAD HERE

[Edofcan]

Hi,
Wanted to say thanks for the great mod you guys created!
I have been playing Total War games since Shogun 1 came out and enjoy your mod very much!
In particular, I like that you care about historical accuracy, the depth you put into the game, and that it is made fun to just stop conquering and building up the realm.

This upload is a game as the HRE with SSHIP0.98, August version, on vh/vh.
I stopped on turn 134 with 41 provinces and income of 180k, just as I received the crown for the first time.
This last turn, I took Rouen from England and the plan would be now, as crowned HRE, to conquer France and Italy, secure the Spanish Mark, and finally move against the ERE.

Other notes: There was a civil war, which was a nice flavour; I could reconquer lost territories (5 cities revolted) fast as my border armies were at hand; however, this created aggressiveness points, which I had been trying to reduce for ages.
My borders are safe and easily defensible; I refrained from taking any Hungarian settlements to keep a buffer to orthodox Serbia and the ERE; kept a Venetian buffer to Sicily and Serbia; and a Aragonese buffer to the Muslims in Spain. Also left the Danish capital intact so as to not create an imbalance in Scandinavia. The only nation I had to destroy was Poland, as it kept declaring war and sending large stacks of very capable troops, even after it only had a town (Danzig) and the castle at Plock left.
I love the idea of creating bloodlines with all the benefits, so my Habsburg line has now French, Nordic and Italian bloodlines incorporated. Sadly, when I tried Eastern Orthodox marriages, this ruined my heir's ability to be crowned (he had zero piety as he converted to orthodox), so I reloaded an earlier save-game pre marriage. Would be nice if I could re-convert him or increase the chances of his wife converting instead somehow but haven't found out if/how this would be possible.
In the beginning I expanded fast into rebel territory; I never declared war. Still I had constant warfare from around turn 14 to turn 83, at which point my borders where solid and nobody attacked me for long. I like that I had to fight for this.

[Edofcan]

a few more things, my apologies if they are known already:

.) if there are multiple generals in the same stack sieging, each of them seems to have to pay the supply line and sieging costs; this is in contradiction to the help text which states that only the siege leader has to pay.
.) I am not sure if the naming of Kaiser and König for the HRE is correct. Shouldn't it be Kronprinz (crown prince) for the heir just as you did for the Danes? To be called Kaiser you had to be crowned by the pope in that period, so maybe the leader should be called König until he is crowned and only from then on Kaiser (and defender of the faith) for HRE leaders?
.) there are many un-removable ancillaries. I was a little worried when my HRE leader had already 6 un-removables; when he finally was crowned, he just had enough space for the 'crowned' and the 'defender of the faith' ancillaries, so I was lucky, I guess.
.) I believe others have already mentioned that heretics seem way too powerful. I used save-spam, so I could deal with it, but I can see that without it, especially if you have no assassins and/or very few priests - they would be over-dominant. Furthermore, I have the feeling that the percentage chances are inverse: the lower the chance of success, the more often I succeed. But maybe that's just superstition.

.) What may not have been clear in my previous post: I really like how enemy factions stop attacking you after a while when they see it's futile. This allowed me to play much more defensively than I was used to and made me keep weak buffer states (as any new neighbour would have immediately attacked me). As there is a limit to how many troops are available for recruitment, this stops endless stacks of attackers and makes decisive victories really count. With Poland, though, I had the feeling that there were too many mercenaries available in some provinces (which allowed Poland to keep build large stacks even without the infrastructure), but that may be just a subjective and wrong feeling.

[Edofcan]

Hi,
me again, for the last time.
Now I started a game as Denmark on vh/vh (SSHIP 0.98, August version).
The upload is from turn 96 with 15 regions and an income of 31k.

My plan was to take out Norway and conquer Magdeburg and then slowly build up while defending against the HRE. Later I wanted to go for the British Isles and only take the victory provinces at the Baltic Sea once I had my cathedral to get the crown (for which I sadly had to transform my well located castle in Roskilde into a town) - so as to not have too many fronts to fight on.

The first part worked fine: I took out Norway, was excommunicated for that, but I had to be fast. As expected, the HRE attacked Ribe and Lübeck, but as it was early in the game, it had no reserves and so Magdeburg and Bremen were easy pickings for the naval counter-strike of my expeditionary forces. At which point the pope beautifully intervened and the war with the HRE ended. Now I could build up my defences in Bremen and Magdeburg, the only castle the HRE had had in the North.

However, then Poland attacked. First it went for Danish Lübeck, then it took neutral Brandenburg and attacked Danish Magdeburg as well. I had hoped leaving Stettin and Brandenburg to Poland would satisfy them and it would look for a fight elsewhere, but no, it continued its attacks relentlessly, even to the point that it was excommunicated by the pope. So I had to take Danzig to split up its forces, and after that Brandenburg and Stettin. Blessed (pagan) Lithuania then attacked Poland from the east and - I couldn't believe my luck - proposed an alliance with me, which I of course fullheartedly accepted.

Now, as in the previous game as the HRE, I was confronted with endless high quality Polish stacks and will have to eliminate Poland again. I'd probably take Posen first, then conquer Olmütz and give it to Hungary, and Plotz to Lithuania. Maybe that way I don't have to conquer all the country and expose myself to many new neighbours. I surely hope so.
But I am not sure I really want to continue this game, it's more work than fun.


Every country in Europe has its weaknesses: Portugal, Castille and Aragon have to fight the Muslims in their backyard. England keeps most of its forces on the British Isles and never really commits to the continent. France has many enemies early on and its stacks consist mostly of weak spear and axe militia. Same for the HRE. Denmark, Norway and Scotland have no cav early on. Hungary is surrounded by two empires. Serbia has weak units and a hard location. The Italian states are crowded and once you have a full army there, you can safely take out one city after the other.
But what about Poland? To the east is weak Lithuania; to the south, Hungary is usually occupied by Serbia, the ERE, and the Cumans (but if it can take Olmütz early, it does become a danger to Poland, as I saw in a previous game); to the west, Germany has battles at all fronts.

The real problem, though, is that Poland has a perfect unit roster:
Its professional Eastern Spearmen have, compared to standard spearmen, added abilities vs cav; plus they get heavy armour.
Its elite infantry are axemen and thus infantry and armour killers.
It has strong cav plus an extra source of charging cav, so double the amount than others, and this shows in its stack compositions.
It has a large family tree, so many generals.
While most others use cheap archer levies, its stacks usually contain professional archers.
Its woodmen are better than the standard axemen, plus these get a bonus against cav.
It as access to a variety of javelin throwers, so again more available sooner.
Its one weakness is likely against horse archers and horse javs, as also seen how they seem to suck when fighting against Hungary.
As all these fine troops cost lots of money, a human Poland player will likely have to diversify and use cheaper units. However, the AI, at least on vh, doesn't have to worry about that problem. It has the money and the elite troops, so it rightly wants to put them into action. The HRE in this game sometimes probed but always backed off when it saw my garrisons. Poland knew it had a good chance so never backed off.

My conclusion after the last two games, one as the HRE, one as Denmark, is that Poland is too powerful. Playing as any neighbour of Poland, the first task must be to neutralize them. Which gets repetitive and boring after a while.
Then again, I may be wrong.

As a last word: please don't get me wrong, I love your mod, its much better than anything I have ever played in MTW and one of my favourite mods of all time! So thanks again for this, much appreciated!

[Edofcan]

Here is the zip-file with the game save of the Denmark campaign. sent_to_twcenter_sship2.zip

[Sllhouette]

edofcan, i feel like you should post in the general discussion thread. you'll find a lot more traction there for your posts. i feel like not many people read the "download" thread, its more for helping people who can't install the mod easily. i know i never come here. your input is valuable, because SSHIP is great but it definitely needs more work and experience from players like you

[Edofcan]

Thank you for your feedback, Sllhouette!
Yes, that's a good idea, maybe I will aggregate the four posts above into a single thread under general discussions. I'll think about it, and how to frame it.

[kostic]

The thread about downloading SSHIP_098 is one of the threads I read regularly. I also read the "general discussion" thread as well as many others !


@Edofcan: As far as your feelings are concerned, I can understand them, but personally, it's rather against the HRE and the Byzantines that I've had these problems of overpowered armies coming back again and again, while I've essentially only been able to recruit weak units.


In VH/VH mode, the AI's recruitment possibilities are often excessive in relation to those of the player. As a result, I sometimes get bored or give up in the face of this unfair imbalance.


There is, however, a way to obtain cease-fires more often, and gradually build up your territory. To do this, you must almost systematically release your prisoners, especially those of your most powerful adversary. This will give you a good reputation and friendly relations with your opponents. You'll see that your diplomat will then be much better able to sign peace treaties.


Balancing such a rich game is a real challenge, especially as each player doesn't necessarily use the same strategy.

[Edofcan]

Thank you for your feedback, kostic!

Yes, I understand that your task is not easy, with every decision influencing many other aspects of the game :-)
I appreciate very much the time you guys invest into making this such a great game, so what I said and say below is just meant as brainstorming to help you get ideas to overcome some of the perceived shortcomings.

I do release prisoners often and I can get peace treaties that way, even with Poland (in fact in the Danish campaign it offered one not long ago, which I declined). However, it then just uses the time to refill its pools and attack with double the force. The AI does that because it can: it has the money and the units and nothing else to do.
In the HRE campaign, France never attacked for long, even though I took out many of its core provinces. England only made probing attacks on Ghent and immediately accepted peace and trade after some crushing defeats, where I indeed freed the prisoners. In the Denmark campaign, the HRE never attacked, even though it had lost core provinces to me: it probed my defences and backed off.
My experience with the big HRE and small Denmark suggests to me that, even though the AI is more willing to make peace when in good standing, it is the combination of excessive money and a favourable assessment of its armies and strategic situation that makes it decide to attack. Which is great, by the way, and as it should do.

I wouldn't want to take any unit away from the Poland roster, I love that they are so well fleshed out and the challenge they provide! However, to stop the literally endless attacks, a combination of less money and less recruitment options could make decisive victories count more and stop getting into a treadmill.

I experienced a little - and read in the general discussions thread - that the AI builds up all its cities and castles to the max, which, among others, reduces the strategic value of favourite castles. This again suggests that less money could be a solution.

Elsewhere I read that the AI receives lots of money so that it doesn't get bankrupt. If you look at the financial chart of my Danish campaign (it was the same in my HRE campaign), you will see that the HRE and Lithuania had a constant cash reserve of about 100k, whereas Poland had several spikes, spending all its money on troops, then getting crushed, after which money flowed in again, as there was less unit upkeep to pay, and so the cycle began anew. I have the feeling that this is because the AI decided to go all in as Poland but not as the HRE or Lithuania.


I don't know what is feasible to mod and haven't thought through all the implications, so what follows may be impracticable:
.) only give money to the AI in relation to the number - and quality - of towns and castles it owns.
.) cap the money influx and even take away money (only what you gave before, not what it earned itself; maybe before the AI goes to spend money in a turn) when it has more than it needs from its own resources.
.) if the AI money issue can't be solved, cap recruitment for the AI (but not for the player, who are limited by money anyway).
.) reduce the growth of AI castles - and also cities (who get to recruit massive amounts of elite units with the landowner building), so that they don't all become endless unit sources. Player town growth felt good to me, though; any lower would be a pain.
.) in the later game (I have not experienced that yet but I saw in your posts you had the problem that I had with Poland with all the other big nations - they recruited stacks of nearly exclusively elite units), maybe limit the number and type of landowner units so that, e.g., Scotland and Denmark can really stay infantry civs, Poland a cavalry civ, etc., and that they have to rely on their unique units more (with all the vulnerabilities this creates).
.) I believe the reason you allow a large pool of landowner units is to allow for a more defensive game-play, an idea which I like very much. However, it seems to backfire and be mostly used offensively by an AI with effectively unlimited money. So maybe keep the landowner pool low, but allow to disband them into the unit pool again, so that I can spend money recruiting the units and then 'let them go home' (to be immediately available if needed) once they did their duty to the country - or decide to keep them but then have to suffer the high upkeep.
.) Furthermore, maybe make the landowner units more faction appropriate - weaker Scottish knights, for example, and stronger polish ones, but therefore stronger Scottish elite infantry, etc. I also feel that city-landowner units should all be weaker than the elite troops castles produce; after all, that's what castles are for.

I leave it at that. Maybe one point or the other makes sense; I wouldn't take grievance if not, though ;-)

[kostic]

Many of your comments may be taken on board by modders @Jurand, @Macaras or @Belovèse, who are competent in most of the above areas.
As far as I'm concerned, I can unfortunately tell you that it's not possible to make skill differences between knights of different factions, as they're the same unit just differentiated by different textures.

[Edofcan]

Thanks, kostic!

I realized that you actually have different units at the landowners - Denmark has 2 heavy infantry types, for example.
And, as you said, there is always the option to reduce the difficulty level.

One last thing that came to my mind: maybe having a max number of certain elite units that one is allowed to field at any one time, maybe tied to the number of provinces one owns or the year, could help reduce the spam. I remember, for example, that in your Rome Total War mod (EB), you could only field a limited number of legions and that number increased slowly.
When all is said and done, I trust you guys, whatever you decide to do. You already did a great job with what we have. Thank you for that!

[Horse crossbowman]

i am almost 400 turns into my Rus campaign and i think i can draw certain conclusions about AI armies, their unit compositions and how to counter them. I had three main opponents in this campaign: Qipchaqs in early game and then almost exclusively HRE and Greeks. And some Poles/Hungarians but most of the time they were too weak to actually be a threat and most of the time armies relied heavily on mercenaries.

Qipchaqs send after me elite armies - I constantly have to defend my border towns against stacks foot and horse druzhinas, basically 8-15 elites (often without general) supported by very small number of their militias or mercenaries. Their elites are very strong archers, mounted and on foot, capable of first shooting my army from afar and then finishing them off in close combat. The only solution at that time was to sit in the cities and catch their armies on sieges and hope after a while they agree to a peace. It was still a very expensive trade, losses in infantry and I relied on militia and irregulars in the beginning were huge and very often had to recruit a new army after defeating such sieges.

Later in a mid-game i met Greeks. From what i met most often they recruit gigantic stacks of heavy infantry recruited from the cities (tagmata infantry) supported by greek militia crossbowmen with extremely long range 10 damage missiles and 2-3 heavy cavalry units and led by good general. They all have 2-3 expirience from the start and armor upgrades as well. Suprisingly well balanced and well equiped force, they usually come in 3-5 full stacks.

Then there is HRE and those armies were almost exclusively sword sergeants and feudal (later chivalric) knights on foot, literally zero ranged units and only sometimes supported by 1 or 2 units of heavy knights. More often than not without general led by captains. Rarely i saw germans use ranged units and its either levy or mercenary crossbowmen.

At first I tried fight them - HRE and ERE - with standart army with frontline infantry like senior militia, scandinavian guard, berdiche infantry and various local mercenaries mostly prussian infantry and german mercenary foot knights with lots of archers for support but it quickly turns out that missile units are ineffective against such heavy infantry opponents. Arrows stun them but hardly kill anyone and in close combat my infantry was losing because both greeks and germans are simply better than my regulars. I just couldn't keep up with the losses. So over time I switched to foot boyars. They were still losing to the HRE knights in quality and numbers (i cant even recruit some many of them) but at least they were on par with the non-upgraded greek infantry and they were quick to recruit (upkeep wasnt a problem most of the time as i fed them into meat grinder almost immidietly). Then I threw out the archers since they were useless against these armored hordes. Only heavy infantry and heavy feudal cavalry remained in my unit composition.

It is 1330s now. Transition is complete. I stopped hiring infantry the only exception being the militia that keeps order in the cities. Even then i would prefer to hire heavy cavalry militia to guard my settlements as they are still a head above other milita units and only slightly more expensive. Only reason why i havent garrisoned my border towns by cavalry militia is supply, there's simply not enough fresh units to recruit. I still have some of my junior druzhinas, senior militias and foot boyars guarding some of my towns by its only because i decided not to disband them they're essential doing militia's job (and doing it worse lol). My field armies is just Heavy Boyars. General and 10-15 heavy feudal cavalry. They suffer very low casualties and are able to attack multiple enemy armies simultaneously and win. I simply divide the army into two groups. First group charges enemy frontline, retreats, charges again. Second group goes around and kills the enemy general/tying enemy cavalry. Battle takes about 10 minutes, I suffer losses of about 100-200 cavalrymen, opponents lose 1500-2000 men of which about half are prisoners. I even stopped using infantry to storm cities. Just send 3-4 spies ahead of the army to infiltrate the enemy settlement to guarantee that the gates will be open so i can attack right away. Considering that the AI usually doesn't guard its settlements well and there are usually only 1-2 squads of infantry inside, these fights can just be auto-resolved.

[Sllhouette]

AI gets 100k in reserve each turn?! even at the beginning of the game? that's insane. meanwhile you're trying to set up some dirt farm with potatoes and make some loose change, maybe in 3 turns you can afford a spearman unit

[Edofcan]

@Sllhouette: interestingly, it seems to also be capped at around 100k, so it may not use much of that money in normal circumstances - as you can see in the financial charts below for my HRE campaign: Poland kept low financial reserves in that game because it constantly churned out troops in its wars against me, which it fought mostly as a defensive war, so it didn't loose all its troops at once in its multiple sieges.

@Horse crossbowman: that sounds like an epic adventure! Maybe that's the mindset one needs to have when playing on vh; makes me want to see my Denmark game through in the same fashion! If there wasn't the feeling that I had already done that with my HRE campaign and wanted to explore different regions this time... Then again, even the HRE game I ended early, perhaps way too early, and never saw the mid-game challenges you guys describe. Playing a french campaign now (far from Poland) and, if time permits, will see how this turns out in the long run.

[kostic]

@Edofcan: For a more aesthetic look, with the French campaign I recommend copying the "eventpics" folder from data/ui/southern_european to data/ui/northern_european.Event images will be more immersive

[Edofcan]

Thank you, kostic, I will do that! Please allow me to mention at this opportunity that I find your unit graphics (and the subtle faction colouring - just had a battle France vs England, it looked just perfect, with the faction colours emerging as if by magic), the unit cards, building pictures and event pictures (all so immersive!) very beautiful and very professionally made! That was probably one of the biggest surprises when first playing this iteration of the mod: This nearly 20 year old game looks so fresh and new with your additions!

[kostic]

I appreciate your comments. They encourage me to continue the project to the end!


Not all the graphic improvements are mine: the event images have been reworked by our friend @Cephalophore and should eventually replace all the vanilla images. @Ceph works from illuminations he finds on medieval manuscripts, and wants these images to be specific to each culture (it's because he hasn't finished work on the northern European factions that I suggest copying the southern European one onto the northern one. In the end, it's already much better than the vanilla event images and not so far from the target culture!).

The vast majority of the units have indeed been reworked by myself. The colors are sometimes arbitrary, but allow players to distinguish their units on the battlefield without having to activate the banners. In fact, I like to play without banners, ground markings or visible battlefield boundaries.
I've also redone all the Western portraits of the generals to remove the visuals that were too dated and, above all, too late for a campaign starting in the 12th century.
I've also reworked some of the unit cards and replaced some of them with new ones. Likewise, I have replaced a lot of the unit information images (unit_info) for the next release because a lot of them are obsolete.


The work is far from finished but the enthusiasm continues even more when it is appreciated by the players!

[Sllhouette]

@Jurand long ago you linked me to the page with completed SSHIP 098 campaigns. where can i upload my save file?

[Bruce Canzoli]

Hello, I can confidently say that this is probably the best mod for M2TW out there. How close is the developing team to releasing the next version?

[Maroslav]

Hello there,

Could someone advice me on how am i supposed to get a rule back to my bloodline? I am playing Norse and since my initial king, who did manage to spawn a son, although not old enough when a king died, rule was taken over by a regent.
And since this moment, faction leadership was passed on regents lineage. I didn't mind, since taking all the required lands for a crown was a long way ahead by that time.

But now, i did want to pass it back to someone, who has " of norweigan princelly blood" trait , because i already have required land and want to succes with true bloodline. However, regardless of use " choose your next heir" mechanic, the game don't pass it over and ignore mypick.

I let a old king die in battle against rebel spawn, thinking it would make current heir( automatically chosen) a king and my selected FM as a next heir, but instead it picked another, absolutely irrelevant FM without any " claim" power , anyhow related to either current leading bloodline or original one. So i am but confused how this mechanic " chose your heir" should work, but given how sparse a FMs can be, it shouldn't work the way i need to kill half my current arristocracy to get pleasing outcome.

Another thing is, that a old king i let to die, progressed from a regent to usurper and more than 1/2 of my FMs lost loyalty, Lubeck revolted ( despite there being no signs of bad public order before) and there was a civil war for 2 turns. After which he got a trait " eligible to be crowned" . Interesting is, that my FMs, after he died, didn't get rid of a "against usurper" traits and succesor king started with 0 authority, regardless being formidable warrior, succesfull crusader and had already some positive admin traits.

So i guess i am a bit in the dead end street. I am worried to progress to next turn, or don't know what should i do to narrow it a bit via save scumming.

Perhaps simply load it, and try to coronate old king and hope, that those 1/2 FMs( from precisely 9 active FMs) with bottom loyalty will be available to use again. By the way, the ration of new children and marriage offers is a bit weird given a size of a kingdom.
I know that i am to get a patronage offers, but a game should provide me better chance to keep my lineage alive, especially when there are many of FMs, who are married since early adulthood, have no fertility oriented ( or have possitive) traits and were not capable of spawning a child until their 50 - and even if they would, a succesor system would be broken again.

[nurker]

Hi guys. Which mod is more historical and realistic? SSHIP 0.98 or Bulat Steel 2.1.5 Extended ? Who did play both of mods? what are the pros and cons?