Tech upgrade in 1066 for the christians

[Vandelay]

I agree with Endre - the technologies are sometimes completely inane and the European world anachronistically primitive. Among the more inane is Reinforced Longbows :wacko:

Some groups should be redesigned entirely (e.g. the Bow and Leather armour groups, but above all the Cattle Herding group) others could be simply renamed (e.g. Castles where terms like "Motte and Bailey" and concentric defenses could be used rather than the generic small/ medium/ large).

An alternative suggestion for Siege Equipment could be:
Siege Equipment

Battering rams and siege ladders removed since they were already known and used everywhere by 1066.

1= Catapults - a torsion powered dartthrower/ light stones thrower
2= Siege towers and mines - you could go over or under the walls...
3= Mangonel - a heavy torsion powered stone-thrower
4= Trebuchet - counter-weight stone thrower
5= Siege cannon - the cannons that were so decisive at the end if the Hundred Years War and at the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and Morea

Cheers,
Vandelay

 

[Endre Fodstad]

Or possibly siege equipment = siege techniques

1: Circumvallation
start tech. Starve the strongpoint to surrender

2: Siege Machinery and mining
towers, mines, all kinds of artillery

3: Conditional surrender
Pre-set time garrison must honorably resist until relief arrives before a conditional surrender. Used both in the middle east and europe.

4: Heavy siege machinery
early 14th century pre-gunpowder heavy artillery

5: Effective gunpowder artillery

 

[Endre Fodstad]

I have to admit I still find tech spread makes europe too primitive; and I've run a 150-year handsoff game in 1.01 now. Europe in 1225 is still, in most areas, more primitive than it was in 1150 historically...

Another little funny one is composite bow - another Gygaxism. Someone HAS been playing too much AD&D.

A composite bow is a bow made from composite materials , that is, for example, a bow made from horn, ash and sinew. Or ash and birk. Or yew and ash! Your usual late medieval longbow is often NOT composite - it's simply made of yew...but it still has 180lbs pull....

The word the developers was looking for is probably recurve bow , the form of bow traditionally associated with nomads and middle easterners. Never mind that examples have been found from dark ages europe...

And the Livestock herding group is pretty funny. No chicken for you!
The castles group could be worse-rating them in size makes it difficult to get something that is entirely inaccurate.
As mentioned, the leather armour group should probably be renamed the Cloth Armour group and look something like this. or not. 1 and 2 are cheesy.

1:Layered felt
2:Layered linen
3:Layered and stuffed
4:Outer torso panzer(panzarium=30+ layers of linen tightly sewn. Will stop a 160-pound arrow.)
5:Jacks

All in all, the armour groups are strange. Plate armour is not really a seperate technolgical development from maille - instead the "transitional period" shows more and more plate covering maille until parts of the maille is removed and finally, in the final full plate versions, removed(this happens after 1453 though). And cloth armour is something you often wear under plate or maille. Well well.

EF

 

[unmerged(15623)]

I agree that other armour groups are a bit trickier. I guess we could pull out 5 types of mail out of our asses if we make a difference between riveted and butted ones. Two types of shirts, two types of hauberks and one full suit.

Brigandine, plate reinforced mail and full plate would belong to the plate tree at least... But with this setup the eastern armours (lamellar) would be exculded... And it really is silly you could start researching mail (or Brigandine) off the bat.


Actually, the best way of dealing with the heavy armour trees, IMO, would be making one to a "Eastern heavy armour" and other to a "Western heavy armour". For sake of simplcity, lets say that catholics research the western ones and everyone else eastern ones.

So basically, the western advances will only spread to catholic provinces and only rulers whose capital is catholic could research them. Could such a change be implmented?

The western heavy armour tree would then naturally be;

1) Mail hauberk

2) Full suit of mail

3) Brigandine

4) Plate reinforced mail

5) Full plate (yeah right)

As for the eastern ones... I don't really know. Do we start off with mail as well? How extensively did Byzantines and Arabs use it? Or do we just fill the tree with five different types of lamellar?

 

[FinnN]

I agree completely on the naming of the tech trees - there's a lot of things which seem to have been grabbed from fantasy or from iron/bronze age advances. This is very jarring for anyone with even a little knowledge of the period. Coming up with a full set of replacements though I'd imagine will be fairly tricky as I guess it will need to cover not just Western Europe but also the Middle Eastern and Mongol tech trees.

 

[Galleblære]

or you could start wondering if their main source was Jan Guillou....

EF

Ouch!

 

[Endre Fodstad]

I agree completely on the naming of the tech trees - there's a lot of things which seem to have been grabbed from fantasy or from iron/bronze age advances. This is very jarring for anyone with even a little knowledge of the period. Coming up with a full set of replacements though I'd imagine will be fairly tricky as I guess it will need to cover not just Western Europe but also the Middle Eastern and Mongol tech trees.

Which are the same as the western ones. This is less of a problem, however, as the game is meant to be about the christian dynasties, not middle eastern or mongol dynasties.

The problem with the tech trees is that as of now, I doubt they'll ever be changed because they can't be without messing up the game. Thus we will have an armour tech group for that is the limit for archers and light infantry, one for the knights and heavy infantry, and one for the rest. We need to work around this problem to be able to create a more historical tech tree. I fully agree that armour should only be one tech tree, but that's not how its going to work.

And Galleblære, I calls'em as I sees'em. Whale biologist.

EF

 

[unmerged(15623)]

Thus we will have an armour tech group for that is the limit for archers and light infantry, one for the knights and heavy infantry, and one for the rest.

Even though I have my doubts that the devs are willing to change the exact nature of tech trees (ie. whether it's an armour or a weapon) or restrict tech groups by religion/culture (as I suggested), altering who and how do the advances benefit is really easy to mod. Anyone can do it with a text editor. So in this department is up to how much devs are willing to change the game in this respect.

Of course, the whole tech name transmorphing project (that is, TNT project ) could first be made into a mod, and if no problems appear it could further be included in the vanilla game.

 

[Arilou]

(which is why leather armour is almost nonexistent in historical sources and finds - unless used as a support or linking material for other materials).

This is of course outside the time-period, but GIIA used an elkskin leather cuirass, mostly because he couldn't wear metal because of an old polish wound...

 

[unmerged(6777)]

I'm going to throw a few comments in here since I have probably been more involved with the advances than anyone else (with the possible exception of one of the programmers who I've been working very closely with over the past few months to script all of this). Note that my comments are directed to people who wish to tinker with these files for the purposes of putting a proposal to the developers to have something incorporated into a future official DEM. You are, of course, completely free to do whatever you like for your own entertainment or for unofficial group projects - which is why Paradox continues to make these files open source since it is felt that this makes for happier customers.

I think the developers would be fairly open to changing the nomenclature as long as the basic game principles remain as they are. Namely:

• No tech is restricted by culture/region/area/religion.etc. It is admissible to incorporate preferences by culture - i.e. a modifier can be scripted into an event that gives certain cultures/regions/religions a favourable (or unfavourable) modifier for a given tech. Example: you can't prohibit anyone from researching longbos, but you might give a hefty bonus to Welsh culture researching it to simulate that culture's historical pre-eminence with that weapon.
  
  
• No cross-tech restrictions are implemented - i.e there is a very defeinite reluctance to implement a tech tree a la Civ where you can't research tech Y without having researched tech X from a different branch. The only restrictions allowable are that to research level 2 in a branch, level 1 must be known; to research level 3 you must know level 2, etc... The consession to this is that to build a province improvement you might require certain techs from different branches (e.g. most religious structures).
  
  
• It should be virtually impossible for anyone to research or obtain (through spread) the entire tech tree. It is desired that by end game you could have level 3 across the board in a realm, that you could have some level 4 techs, and only a small handful of level 5 techs. DO NOT forget that spread plays a significant role in tech development and that you can gain technologies that are researched by someone else without researching it yourself. In particular, your vassals (or if you're a vassal, your fellow landholders) will make an important contribution to your realm's overall technology during the course of a 400-year game. Be very careful about changing this pattern since it is very high on the developer's design criteria.
  
  
• Along similar lines to the above point, if you start adding tons of modifiers to the advances_discovery or advances_spread events, please remember to adjust the MTTH values for each event appropriately so that the expected net modifier for the average "player" (human or AI) remains roughly what it is right now - particularly for Christian and Orthodox players since those are the ones that could be human controlled.
  
  
• The basic effects of each advance should not be changed. "Chickens" is a good example - and I'd point out here that there seems to be an error in the config file that is causing it not to display the description of this "tech". The
  "chickens" text should read something to the effect that "yes, chickens have been known since prehistoric ties, but this is the first time that the size of the 'herd' on a local basis exceded the local requirement and the sale of chickens and their products became an 'industry' that generated provincial revenue". So feel free to change the advance name to "chicken industry" or whatever (as long as it fits within the alloted display space) but don't make any significant changes to the effect of having it - namely a small percentage increase in the wealth of the province that has the advance.
  
  
• In a similar vein, be careful not to make technology play too vital a role in the success or failure of a game. CK is about dynasties and empires, not discovering that magical technology path that guarantees a victory every time. Keep the advance effects fairly modest so that at very most they could earn a "best supporting actor" nomination in the OscAARs, not a "best actor" or "best director" or "best producer"...
  
  
• Since it is intended that players can not play muslim or pagan characters, it is also a design intent that there be an imbalance between starting muslim-christian tech levels. Regardless of the historical truth (or lack thereof) of such an imbalance, it is the game balance intentions that should take precedence. To a degree, the tech imbalance is there to help the AI present a challenge to the player so do not seek to narrow this gap too much at present since your suggestion will almost certainly be rejected by the developers. There is ongoing work on the AI, however, so as that part improves it is probable that the developers will be more open to suggestions that narrow the tech gap.
  
  
• When you're intensely involved in those files sometimes it's hard to remember this, but please try to keep in mind that the AI has only limited resources allocated to it as far as deciding on which techs to pursue next. This is really a repetition of the previous caveat to avoid situations where a human player can gain an unfair advantage over the AI by being smarter in selecting his/her path through the advances.
  
  
• One of the great things about Paradox games is that they leave many files open to the player to mod. If you don't like something, change it. If you want to add stuff, in most cases you can do so. But the down sides are as follows:
  1. The game must compile those files when it loads, so if you add 100,000 lines of event script, you will be causing a major slow-down in load times.
  2. The game has to keep all of that extra stuff in memory, so if you add vast amounts of script you will inflict a performance hit on the game. Try to avoid too many "special" cases unless they are warranted.
  3. The game must calculate and test all of those triggers and conditions many thousands of times per cycle (i.e. each time it runs them it must do so for every character or every province) so this is yet another reason to avoid making large numbers of very minor triggers or conditions since it will result in a performance hit.
  4. And of course there's the old issue of introducing bugs. I can tell you from experience that you should avoid devoting hours of time scripting a bunch of nifty similar events without first testing a few of them to make sure that they work as designed.

I hope the above is helpful, and remember that "it's a game, not a simulation" (unless you're scripting a simulation for your own personal enjoyment).

 

[unmerged(824)]

I don't have the game yet, but I see the Tech names posted in the FAQ. section and I agree with E. F.'s point, and would be greatly interested in an alternate, more historically accurate, list of names. I'm looking forward to seeing E.F's suggestions.

 

[unmerged(28046)]

I have to say that even if I dont have the game yet I need to put some perspective on the debate on the technological situation in 1066.

First of all is the period from 1066 what marks the end of the dark ages and the beginning of the mediveal period so Europe and european culture is at the start of the game on the threshold of entering a rediscovery of many technologies know to the roman and greeks, the reconcista in the Iberian was one source of this rediscovering since it gave christians access to long lost manuscripts kept by the arabs.

Second of all you can´t imagen Europe as a modern international system or the kingdoms as modern states since they lack a central burocracy to have full controll of extracting and investing the resources in society. This is what feodalism is all about it was a multilevel governence based on personel bonds.

This also means that because the societies in Europe lacked centralgoverning capabilities and due to the high costs in of travel (both persons, goods and information) the region not only in political and economic terms but also informational was a very disintegrated and diverce place. This means that the level of technology wasnt homogen or evenly spred around europe as a region or diffrent societies.

Forth I would like to point out that even though many technologies were know at the beginning of the year 1000 they mostly wasnt spread to either the broader society or every part of the realm or even the demense. The monestrys were for that reason in many ways isles of higher technological knowledge in a ocean of ignorence.

Fifth I have to say that the aristocratic lords that aquired diffrent technological knowledge most likelly view them as their competative advantage against other powerseeking rent-driven lords or groups in society. This was due to the a very diffrence that both the Byzantine empire and some arab kingdoms was very well organisted with a state structure as we know it, were the state was marked with stronger controll and cohesion.

Finally one might conclude that at the beginning of the game at 1066 europe as a culture or region was by no means technological equal with the arab world. The change in the balance of power between the two diffrent cultural spheres came about with the centralalization of power and the rise of the military-fiscal state wich made it possible to both extract more funds from the society and controll and channel spending. But thats is another story that is told in EUII.

So my advice before youáll start to change anything is to ask yourself is this changes really more historical at 1066 or is the problem the cost in time and space; the rate and spread that is the problem on the techside?

If you want to know more just ask, I would be glad to offer you some tips on books to study...

 

[Endre Fodstad]

Spike.
While I'm sure you have extensive knowledge about medieval technology(something even I don't claim to have, except possibly for the later part of the high middle ages, which I've spent the last ten years of my life recreating in a living history group) I can't agree with all your statements.

Europe in 1066 wasn't quite as primitive as it's cracked up to be, and far more advanced than the CK 1066 scenario indicates. Of course european government in the period was not a modern state-that goes without saying. Of course, neither was the islamic world, or the eastern roman empire, or china. The feudal system is, as has been repeatedly stated, not the way things worked everywhere - feudalism is a modern historical model frequently used on the societies of the european middle ages.

In a great many fields, europe was in fact surprisingly homogenous during the middle ages. An example I am intimately familiar with due to my academic studies, is cloth dyeing. As early as in the scandinavian viking age cloth colored with eastern imports; kermes, armenian and polish cochineal and even asian redwoods, were common among high-status people. Another example would be high medieval scandinavia: the surviving sources describing military equipment would seem to indicate that high medieval norwegians had access to about the same level of armour and equipment as their continental cousins.

Technology for sure was not spread throughout society - but that is also true for every society from the ancient world to the modern era. The 1750s peasant had access to(relatively speaking) just about the same techniques and equipment as a 1350s peasant.

Monastic knowledge was mainly focused(again, broadly) on scholary works and agricultural techniques. While many medieval works were written by clergymen(Theophilus' De Diversibus Artes comes to mind) they were fairly widely spread among the interested; copies belonging to craft guilds or individual craft masters exist from only some 20 years after the presumed date of the DDA's writing.

The Byzantine empire and the arab world's organization contra the european have been vastly overstated; bureaucracies equal to middle eastern systems existed in the 1100s(shown by the massive increase in governmental decrees), and the arab world shows a remarkable lack of ability to keep their state systems together in more than a generation - naturally, since many of them were essentially military dictatorships. Also, it was seldom the governments' job to invent or spread technology.

This is not to say that 1066 europe was more advanced than its neighbours, only that they were not the dirt-grubbing barbarians they are often made out to be. However, the high and late middle ages especially saw the rise and eventual supremacy of european technology; Ibn Khaldun's works from the mid-14th century lament that the egyptian cloth industry has been all but ruined by european clothmakers(primarily Italians, but the north european flemish clothmakers held their own against Italian trade and were in effect at the same level).

What this project is about is mainly to change the tech advance names in CK to be more representative of historical developments. Especially glaring is the weapons and armour sections, that at many point belong in the realm of fantasy. At the outset, the tech imbalance was stressed, but the developers have pointed out that since the game has an emphasis on european aggression a more historical representation would lead to the decimation of the middle eastern states.

I'll post a suggestion for tech name changes next week. Note that this is only meant as an initial suggestion - I'm not omniscient and will without doubt provide some less-than-perfect suggestions.

 

[unmerged(6777)]

I'll also point out a few more things.

1. Tech spread is still undergoing some modest refinements in development. I spent most of the last two days tweaking the spread file, adjusting mtth values and adding in some new modifiers that should cause technology to spread a little faster for the Europeans. This will be further tweaked at time goes on and more data sets are available - I run about 1000 tests after each tweak and then review the spread data to determine whether the results are WAD.

2. Reminder: it is a game design decision to intentionally handicap Europeans vs Muslims at the start of the game. This is for play/balance reasons, not historical ones. Call the advances by any name you like but, as I said in a pervious post, the developers will be extremely reluctant to change their effects due to hardcoded portions of the program that use them and for game balance reasons. That doesn't mean changes to values won't be looked at, but that the case you make to the developers to induce them to consider implementing them must be based almost entirely on game play and game balance. Arguing history with them - which they love, by the way - will not result in a change unless it's cosmetic.

3. Right now, there is a small issue with the way the game engine uses the mtth value and the eway it intermeshes with the dynamic polling system. This produces actual mean values that are different from the actual intent (higher). The fix is something that is being worked on very hard in development right now, but it is extremely tricky since it impacts a great deal on performance - which I think we all would agree is already very close to the playability borderline and couldn't withstand a significant increase in processor load until other optimizations are worked out and implemented.

4. Don't forget that it is also a game design decision that it should be virtually impossible for a player to accumulate all of the tech advances during the course of the game. Any suggestions/proposals to change the discovery or spread scripting to make this possible would be rejected by the developers as far as inclusion in an official release version goes...though of course they've left the source files open so you can do anything you like to altering it to improve your own entertainment.

I think that it's important to understand that Paradox seems (in my opinion as a member - not based on inside knowledge) to have made a significant shift in its game design philosophy towards less historically accurate modeling and towards improving the entertainment value and replayability of their games. You don't have to read many threads to find Johan being quoted as saying "it's a game, not a simulation" and this philosophy runs right to the very depths of the design of this game. CK, while having the cosmetic appearance of being historical, is really a game designed to provide a huge amount of entertainment and to be as replayable as possible. Where possible, historical data is used for scenario starting positions (characters, political set up, CoAs, etc.) and for the nomenclature of game tools (armour, weapons, etc.) but it is pretty obvious as one delves more and more deeply into it that at no time will the developers allow the game to become a slave of real life history. In fact, if you look really closely you will discover that CK is really an entirely new game engine, a huge departure from Paradox's previous releases.

Undoubtedly this will be a disappointment to some players who would prefer a more scripted simulation of European history that runs closer to an EU2 sort of model. Personally, I applaud Johan & Co. for making such a brave decision because I think that from a sheer game play point of view it will result (after a bit more patching/tweaking) in an even more entertaining game than they have heretofore made. Regardless, to lose sight of this philosophy is to lose sight of what the game is intended to be.

So...

Yes, historically the advances tree seems pretty strange in many places and I can point to hundreds of historical examples that would paint those errors in huge red felt-tipped marker. However from a play/balance point to view the mechanics of them works quite well at the moment and needs only relatively minor tweaking. If you can improve the "window dressing" aspect of them then I am 100% for it and will only to happy to pitch the changes to the developers for you. Odds are that they would be delighted to implement it. I could not do the same for anything other than very, very minor changes to the mechanics and/or function of the advances and, even if I did, they would likely be rejected.

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but I thought I should point that out...and of course my comments are only valid if you intend to make a proposal to the developers that you hope to see included in a future DEM. As always, Paradox would be delighted to see you having fun with their games and modding them to your own personal tastes.

 

[C.N.]

4. Don't forget that it is also a game design decision that it should be virtually impossible for a player to accumulate all of the tech advances during the course of the game.

Unless it is a multiplayer game and allied neighbouring human players make deals to specialize the research. 11 players would mean that each pick a research area and reasearch only it, and then hope that the spread takes care of the rest. If they are lucky they would be able to get all the techs.

 

[unmerged(6777)]

Unless it is a multiplayer game and allied neighbouring human players make deals to specialize the research. 11 players would mean that each pick a research area and reasearch only it, and then hope that the spread takes care of the rest. If they are lucky they would be able to get all the techs.

Agreed...but only barely and I doubt that the developers would object to that one.