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About this mod
Permission was asked for and now given, hooray, all credit goes to TW for the original scenes and Leandrojas for his edits, the additional walls and what not. This is for version 1.5 of his siege mod, which adds ladders and extra walls to the siege scenes. El Arte De La Guerra, which can be found here. http://forums.taleworlds.com/ind
- Permissions and credits
Permission was asked for and now given, hooray, all credit goes to TW for the original scenes and Leandrojas for his edits, the additional walls and what not. This is for version 1.5 of his siege mod, which adds ladders and extra walls to the siege scenes. El Arte De La Guerra, which can be found here. http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,127728.0.html
And here, the submod siege forum. http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,132920.0.html
Again, all credit goes to him.
My changes are as follows..
Bug fixing pass for all siege scenes, editing the AI mesh, placing limiters, moving spawn points, etc, in the attempt to address the AI's horrible performance or complete lack in many of the sieges. Several of the city siege scenes have been reverted to vanilla and edited from there, as they were either completely broken and the AI was next to nonfunctional, or looked unfinished and performed poorly. To my memory, Dhirim, Suno, and one of the Sarranid towns had this roll back. The sarranid town was completely broken, Suno featured an additional well with a gatehouse into an empty courtyard and 4 ladders, no other gatehouse was in this courtyard to provide access to the town. This made so little sense to me that I could not stand it, besides the AI's wacky performance in the courtyard, so I reverted to default and edited the wall to provide better access. Removing a ladder and replacing it with a ramp, that lead up to a destroyed section of wall rather than complete, effectively changing the choke of an attacking army from 2 men attacking at a time up to 4. Dhirim was reverted because it seemed incomplete, and had a broken spawn point for the defender.
All scenes had their spawn points moved to more logical locations, and archers have been horse whipped severely into staying ON the wall and not hanging off the side, if you see any archers monkeying around off the sides of walls whip them immediately then report it as a bug. If they don't fall off and get stuck somewhere then it shouldn't be too much of a worry beyond that.
IF IN ANY OF THESE SCENES YOU ENCOUNTER BUGS STILL, SUCH AS THE AI GETTING STUCK OR BEHAVING STRANGELY, PLEASE POST IT HERE. I intend to do a few more, versions I guess, to address a few things that cropped up and anything I might have missed. This is, again, a bug fixing PASS, not all bugs are squashed but you should be able to get through a siege hopefully without the AI completely breaking on you.
As always, BACK UP YOUR ORIGINALS BEFORE YOU EVER OVERWRITE ANYTHING. It's a real pain if you, for what ever reason, need to roll back, and you didn't leave anything to roll back to!
Er, I suppose I should do install instructions? The professionals do that don't they...
1.) MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR SceneObj folder.
2.) Extract the SceneObj folder to your mod of choice that uses El Arte De La Guerra siege mod
3.) Play, and hopefully not encounter bugs.
UPDATE 1
Various bugfixes to the castles and towns, fixing them as I encountered them. Adding AI limiters here and there, removing obstructions that caused troops to get stuck, and slight tweaking of AI mesh in a few scenes. Less bugs than before, but not bug free. :hammer:
UPDATE 2
Encountered a few problems and made some changes to Grunwalder castle, the original castle as you may have noticed was one of the worst to siege, unbelievably easy to defend, no matter how many ladders there were the incline was so steep that most if not all attackers are shot off the ladders before reaching the narrow slits to actually begin attacking. I attempted a revision of this by completely redirecting the attack through the gate, the castle interior has a naturally defensible incline so I thought I'd go for something different, rather than the usual siege ladder crunch. The attacking force will find the gate open and are forced to charge up the steep incline facing missile fire from the walls, a staircase allowing early access to that wall has since been removed to make the attack a bit harder. Defending reinforcements spawn at the very top, where the keep door is, so infantry forces will be able to move down to a good defensive position and any spawning archers will actually be useful since they start in a good firing position. The attack is still rather daunting but it is a far cry better than the vanilla in my opinion.
1.5.3
Minor fix as reported, moved the archer spawn point in ergellon castle.
***
I've blown the dust off of M&B and recently started up a new full game, I planned originally to stick with my own mod setup and just catch bugs as I play, but thanks to the new patch my 1.134 setup is now rife with problems. Stores not working properly, textures not loading, blah blah. Since Open Source Warband comp hasn't been updated for 1.143, (the setup I use as a base for my own game), I've decided to give Floris another go. Huge headache ensuing of having to change everything to fit my tastes, I will eventually get around to playing again and catching scene bugs. I've already caught a few, and will update this listing once I've finished another campaign.
**
Scratch that, just installed a separate copy with 1.134, and have been busy conquering away and running into far too many bugs :oops:. Far too many oversights, far too many zombie AI's wandering off things. Going to have to be more thorough with the AI limiters this time around, as I conquer Calradia again I'll be fixing as I go along so I can't say when I'll update this listing but it ought to be soon. I've already fixed a few things, such as troops getting stuck behind barrels in Yalen, and a weird stair scene prop being too steep to actually use. :-? I'll definitely take more time than before with AI limiters, and keep troops restricted to the narrow channels they're supposed to follow, since while it might be fun to see them fall off of a ledge, if they don't die the AI can go zombie and just stand there and do nothing for the rest of the battle.
1.5.4
A swath of fixes across several of the castles, I fixed it as I hit it, ai limiter here, ai mesh tweak there, etc.
The biggest changes to be listed are ones made to Shariz and Jameyyed castle. On Shariz I changed one of the inner towers to be a tower gate, so the city actually looks like you could enter that way if a siege wasn't going on, I also added access to one of the rooftops inside the city and placed an archer spawn point there, moving it from a location where it wasn't as effective. Jameyyed remained mostly the same game play wise, there was an issue with the tower gate being tricky for the AI to clear on its own, so I added a small causeway between one of the inner platforms and this tower to an open door. Jameyyed changed the most visually, a section of wall has been added to the upper cliff to make the castle 'look' more defensible. The cliff into which the castle is built looked to be an easy way to get in from above, perhaps not for a large army but for smaller units, so a wall was added extended out from the upper keep to secure this approach.
As partially mentioned above a few minor fixes here and there, AI limiters mostly to block the AI from falling into positions it can get stuck, or restricting movement to a proper path.
I intend to apply a much more aggressive AI limitation going forward as I play test, with a focus on giving the AI water wings, essentially, in places it is guaranteed to traverse. Now, if the player makes some follow orders and drags his army around the battlements in different directions it can't be guaranteed that something bad wont happen. Also there are still ways I'm finding that the player can deliberately or otherwise get themselves stuck, and am trying to fix these as I encounter them.
In the future I hope to more drastically edit or even revamp completely the scenes of my own accord, I'll make a note to leave in 'original' versions in the download before I make major revisions. Off the top of my head, I really want to change the way some of the siege attacks work to make them more interesting, crunching at ladders is a bit stale to me. One idea I have is for the attacking force to sweep the wall clean from end to end, rather than mount it and then descend into the city. Obviously the wall section would be much wider in this situation, and I imagine it being a fight from tower to tower to clear the archer points that can fire down upon the wall itself (as they should). Further I wish to make some of the cities more visually distinctive, or depicting of their surroundings. For example, rhodok cities, specifically Yalen, are essentially clones of each other, and I personally think Yalen would be much more interesting if it depicted the cliff upon which it appears to rest. Further still are ideas to apply the culture of the originally owning faction to the defense style of a city or castle, focusing on maximizing that cultures traditional advantage. Now, you might think all walls with towers are good for archers, but many of the scenes have an obvious bias towards one type of unit or another. Some are exceptional for the use of ranged units, providing many crossfire points or good long lasting fields of fire. Others have an infantry focus where archer support is restricted by ease of access to the walls or the particular design of the castle/city. Massing infantry in an archer castle, and vice versa will spell defeat for the defender.
End rant, another update should come as soon after this one as I make it through a campaign.
* 2/9/2012
Just noticed the change Leandrojas made to his forum! Heh, guess this is the official version now, so I changed the name. I'm thinking of releasing another update either today or tomorrow, after I finish one more city overhaul. Feedback from those cities would be helpful for future cities. I also have an idea for Sarranid cities now, and others going forward; since the "fight in the city streets" portion of a siege battle is rather limited, and how much happens there depends entirely upon which mod you're playing, I've decided to include part of that city street battle in some of the designs for future cities. For instance, Sarranid cities are very naturally defensible because of the buildings they use, and how the cities have been constructed. If you walk through some of the sarranid cities you can see, narrow corridors, flat roof buildings, tall stairs, this gave me the idea to make the battle design for some of these cities an urban one.
To toss out an idea right now, let's take Bariyye, one of two ways, the city is breached the normal way with ladders or belfry and then the fight moves into the streets, or perhaps the side of the city on the oasis itself is not fortified with a wall for fear of polluting the waters, or there was no good foundation for a large wall, etc. In the latter case there could be smaller walls instead, houses used as archer positions, make-shift fortifications, that sort of thing. Once this outer defense is breached the fight moves into the city, consisting of fights to clear roof tops of skirmishers and clashes between infantry in narrow streets and alleyways. The defenders can further improve the defensibility of the city by blocking off certain paths with rubble and other barriers, funneling attackers into a prepared killing zone.
This urban battle idea is really just a template for other cities to use, to mix things up and make battles more varied across factions. While I don't imagine every faction having an urban battle, since not all will be able to make good use of this defense, it still exists as a possibility, for Nords and Sarranids perhaps more than others.
While I would like to change Khudan next and have the Vaegir faction 'finished', I haven't gotten any inspiration for it and now that I looked at it again there isn't anything inherently wrong with it. Siege plays well, archers are effective, just fine.
1.5.5
Releasing ahead of schedule...
A few things, this next update has fixes and tweaks across all cities and castles, I hit odd behavior here and there, corrected some oversights, fixed some of my own AI meshes (I've learned a lot about making them properly since I first started), and all that creaminess.
Secondly, I've included the 3 overhauled cities in an separate folder, you can try them out or keep the bug fixed versions of Leandrojas.
Lastly, I started an attempt to completely overhaul Yalen, which I will do eventually, I had to scrap this attempt because the design wasn't panning out like I'd planned. While I still like the original idea of making Yalen into a great cliff city, I need to figure out a way to make this work with the limitations of the scene props, though having only recently discovered that you can STRETCH props to any size to fit your needs, it may be easier on the second go.
One final note, I might not change every single city in the end, as I was panning over Sargoth and playing with the scene props to fish for ideas, I realized "If it isn't broken, don't fix it", so unless a city is performing poorly or there is a more 'epic' design I have dreamed up, I probably wont change it. There are a few things I can think of changing on Sargoth, adding an inner gate for instance so it looks like a normally operating city, but other than that the siege is fine. Another city I don't imagine myself changing is Shariz, the city looks good, and is extremely defensible.
I'm still going to have a look over Khergit cities and try to imagine some ways to clean them up or make them more interesting, as well as trying out the urban battle idea, but for now, there you go.
In case you haven't noticed, by the way, the previews for the overhauled scenes are in the comments below.
2/18/2012
Alright, hit the wall again and I think I'm fed up. 1.5.5 will likely be the last update for the foreseeable future, it's a good one, went through quite a few of the cities and castles while I played and corrected things. Recently updated to 1.143 with the new NMC and had just about everything break. It was to be expected, spent a good amount of time this week putting things back the way they were, but the brick wall has come. Good ol PBOD seems to have gotten worse, red walls of error messages, game comes down from 60fps to a near standstill, some AI meshes are acting completely broken where they weren't before, the list goes on and on. Likely I'll just go back to my 1.134 installation if I ever feel like playing, but that's 20 steps back and I've exhausted the desire to mess with this for the time being. I'm loathe to even try to bug fix a single scene at this point, if something crops up, I wouldn't be able to tell what was causing it if I stuck with 1.143. So, if there's something serious reported that's a real detriment to game play in the pack, then I'll load up 1.134 and see if I can recreate it, else, happy sailing chaps, the shores of Skyrim look appealing.
And here, the submod siege forum. http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,132920.0.html
Again, all credit goes to him.
My changes are as follows..
Bug fixing pass for all siege scenes, editing the AI mesh, placing limiters, moving spawn points, etc, in the attempt to address the AI's horrible performance or complete lack in many of the sieges. Several of the city siege scenes have been reverted to vanilla and edited from there, as they were either completely broken and the AI was next to nonfunctional, or looked unfinished and performed poorly. To my memory, Dhirim, Suno, and one of the Sarranid towns had this roll back. The sarranid town was completely broken, Suno featured an additional well with a gatehouse into an empty courtyard and 4 ladders, no other gatehouse was in this courtyard to provide access to the town. This made so little sense to me that I could not stand it, besides the AI's wacky performance in the courtyard, so I reverted to default and edited the wall to provide better access. Removing a ladder and replacing it with a ramp, that lead up to a destroyed section of wall rather than complete, effectively changing the choke of an attacking army from 2 men attacking at a time up to 4. Dhirim was reverted because it seemed incomplete, and had a broken spawn point for the defender.
All scenes had their spawn points moved to more logical locations, and archers have been horse whipped severely into staying ON the wall and not hanging off the side, if you see any archers monkeying around off the sides of walls whip them immediately then report it as a bug. If they don't fall off and get stuck somewhere then it shouldn't be too much of a worry beyond that.
IF IN ANY OF THESE SCENES YOU ENCOUNTER BUGS STILL, SUCH AS THE AI GETTING STUCK OR BEHAVING STRANGELY, PLEASE POST IT HERE. I intend to do a few more, versions I guess, to address a few things that cropped up and anything I might have missed. This is, again, a bug fixing PASS, not all bugs are squashed but you should be able to get through a siege hopefully without the AI completely breaking on you.
As always, BACK UP YOUR ORIGINALS BEFORE YOU EVER OVERWRITE ANYTHING. It's a real pain if you, for what ever reason, need to roll back, and you didn't leave anything to roll back to!
Er, I suppose I should do install instructions? The professionals do that don't they...
1.) MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR SceneObj folder.
2.) Extract the SceneObj folder to your mod of choice that uses El Arte De La Guerra siege mod
3.) Play, and hopefully not encounter bugs.
UPDATE 1
Various bugfixes to the castles and towns, fixing them as I encountered them. Adding AI limiters here and there, removing obstructions that caused troops to get stuck, and slight tweaking of AI mesh in a few scenes. Less bugs than before, but not bug free. :hammer:
UPDATE 2
Encountered a few problems and made some changes to Grunwalder castle, the original castle as you may have noticed was one of the worst to siege, unbelievably easy to defend, no matter how many ladders there were the incline was so steep that most if not all attackers are shot off the ladders before reaching the narrow slits to actually begin attacking. I attempted a revision of this by completely redirecting the attack through the gate, the castle interior has a naturally defensible incline so I thought I'd go for something different, rather than the usual siege ladder crunch. The attacking force will find the gate open and are forced to charge up the steep incline facing missile fire from the walls, a staircase allowing early access to that wall has since been removed to make the attack a bit harder. Defending reinforcements spawn at the very top, where the keep door is, so infantry forces will be able to move down to a good defensive position and any spawning archers will actually be useful since they start in a good firing position. The attack is still rather daunting but it is a far cry better than the vanilla in my opinion.
1.5.3
Minor fix as reported, moved the archer spawn point in ergellon castle.
***
I've blown the dust off of M&B and recently started up a new full game, I planned originally to stick with my own mod setup and just catch bugs as I play, but thanks to the new patch my 1.134 setup is now rife with problems. Stores not working properly, textures not loading, blah blah. Since Open Source Warband comp hasn't been updated for 1.143, (the setup I use as a base for my own game), I've decided to give Floris another go. Huge headache ensuing of having to change everything to fit my tastes, I will eventually get around to playing again and catching scene bugs. I've already caught a few, and will update this listing once I've finished another campaign.
**
Scratch that, just installed a separate copy with 1.134, and have been busy conquering away and running into far too many bugs :oops:. Far too many oversights, far too many zombie AI's wandering off things. Going to have to be more thorough with the AI limiters this time around, as I conquer Calradia again I'll be fixing as I go along so I can't say when I'll update this listing but it ought to be soon. I've already fixed a few things, such as troops getting stuck behind barrels in Yalen, and a weird stair scene prop being too steep to actually use. :-? I'll definitely take more time than before with AI limiters, and keep troops restricted to the narrow channels they're supposed to follow, since while it might be fun to see them fall off of a ledge, if they don't die the AI can go zombie and just stand there and do nothing for the rest of the battle.
1.5.4
A swath of fixes across several of the castles, I fixed it as I hit it, ai limiter here, ai mesh tweak there, etc.
The biggest changes to be listed are ones made to Shariz and Jameyyed castle. On Shariz I changed one of the inner towers to be a tower gate, so the city actually looks like you could enter that way if a siege wasn't going on, I also added access to one of the rooftops inside the city and placed an archer spawn point there, moving it from a location where it wasn't as effective. Jameyyed remained mostly the same game play wise, there was an issue with the tower gate being tricky for the AI to clear on its own, so I added a small causeway between one of the inner platforms and this tower to an open door. Jameyyed changed the most visually, a section of wall has been added to the upper cliff to make the castle 'look' more defensible. The cliff into which the castle is built looked to be an easy way to get in from above, perhaps not for a large army but for smaller units, so a wall was added extended out from the upper keep to secure this approach.
As partially mentioned above a few minor fixes here and there, AI limiters mostly to block the AI from falling into positions it can get stuck, or restricting movement to a proper path.
I intend to apply a much more aggressive AI limitation going forward as I play test, with a focus on giving the AI water wings, essentially, in places it is guaranteed to traverse. Now, if the player makes some follow orders and drags his army around the battlements in different directions it can't be guaranteed that something bad wont happen. Also there are still ways I'm finding that the player can deliberately or otherwise get themselves stuck, and am trying to fix these as I encounter them.
In the future I hope to more drastically edit or even revamp completely the scenes of my own accord, I'll make a note to leave in 'original' versions in the download before I make major revisions. Off the top of my head, I really want to change the way some of the siege attacks work to make them more interesting, crunching at ladders is a bit stale to me. One idea I have is for the attacking force to sweep the wall clean from end to end, rather than mount it and then descend into the city. Obviously the wall section would be much wider in this situation, and I imagine it being a fight from tower to tower to clear the archer points that can fire down upon the wall itself (as they should). Further I wish to make some of the cities more visually distinctive, or depicting of their surroundings. For example, rhodok cities, specifically Yalen, are essentially clones of each other, and I personally think Yalen would be much more interesting if it depicted the cliff upon which it appears to rest. Further still are ideas to apply the culture of the originally owning faction to the defense style of a city or castle, focusing on maximizing that cultures traditional advantage. Now, you might think all walls with towers are good for archers, but many of the scenes have an obvious bias towards one type of unit or another. Some are exceptional for the use of ranged units, providing many crossfire points or good long lasting fields of fire. Others have an infantry focus where archer support is restricted by ease of access to the walls or the particular design of the castle/city. Massing infantry in an archer castle, and vice versa will spell defeat for the defender.
End rant, another update should come as soon after this one as I make it through a campaign.
* 2/9/2012
Just noticed the change Leandrojas made to his forum! Heh, guess this is the official version now, so I changed the name. I'm thinking of releasing another update either today or tomorrow, after I finish one more city overhaul. Feedback from those cities would be helpful for future cities. I also have an idea for Sarranid cities now, and others going forward; since the "fight in the city streets" portion of a siege battle is rather limited, and how much happens there depends entirely upon which mod you're playing, I've decided to include part of that city street battle in some of the designs for future cities. For instance, Sarranid cities are very naturally defensible because of the buildings they use, and how the cities have been constructed. If you walk through some of the sarranid cities you can see, narrow corridors, flat roof buildings, tall stairs, this gave me the idea to make the battle design for some of these cities an urban one.
To toss out an idea right now, let's take Bariyye, one of two ways, the city is breached the normal way with ladders or belfry and then the fight moves into the streets, or perhaps the side of the city on the oasis itself is not fortified with a wall for fear of polluting the waters, or there was no good foundation for a large wall, etc. In the latter case there could be smaller walls instead, houses used as archer positions, make-shift fortifications, that sort of thing. Once this outer defense is breached the fight moves into the city, consisting of fights to clear roof tops of skirmishers and clashes between infantry in narrow streets and alleyways. The defenders can further improve the defensibility of the city by blocking off certain paths with rubble and other barriers, funneling attackers into a prepared killing zone.
This urban battle idea is really just a template for other cities to use, to mix things up and make battles more varied across factions. While I don't imagine every faction having an urban battle, since not all will be able to make good use of this defense, it still exists as a possibility, for Nords and Sarranids perhaps more than others.
While I would like to change Khudan next and have the Vaegir faction 'finished', I haven't gotten any inspiration for it and now that I looked at it again there isn't anything inherently wrong with it. Siege plays well, archers are effective, just fine.
1.5.5
Releasing ahead of schedule...
A few things, this next update has fixes and tweaks across all cities and castles, I hit odd behavior here and there, corrected some oversights, fixed some of my own AI meshes (I've learned a lot about making them properly since I first started), and all that creaminess.
Secondly, I've included the 3 overhauled cities in an separate folder, you can try them out or keep the bug fixed versions of Leandrojas.
Lastly, I started an attempt to completely overhaul Yalen, which I will do eventually, I had to scrap this attempt because the design wasn't panning out like I'd planned. While I still like the original idea of making Yalen into a great cliff city, I need to figure out a way to make this work with the limitations of the scene props, though having only recently discovered that you can STRETCH props to any size to fit your needs, it may be easier on the second go.
One final note, I might not change every single city in the end, as I was panning over Sargoth and playing with the scene props to fish for ideas, I realized "If it isn't broken, don't fix it", so unless a city is performing poorly or there is a more 'epic' design I have dreamed up, I probably wont change it. There are a few things I can think of changing on Sargoth, adding an inner gate for instance so it looks like a normally operating city, but other than that the siege is fine. Another city I don't imagine myself changing is Shariz, the city looks good, and is extremely defensible.
I'm still going to have a look over Khergit cities and try to imagine some ways to clean them up or make them more interesting, as well as trying out the urban battle idea, but for now, there you go.
In case you haven't noticed, by the way, the previews for the overhauled scenes are in the comments below.
2/18/2012
Alright, hit the wall again and I think I'm fed up. 1.5.5 will likely be the last update for the foreseeable future, it's a good one, went through quite a few of the cities and castles while I played and corrected things. Recently updated to 1.143 with the new NMC and had just about everything break. It was to be expected, spent a good amount of time this week putting things back the way they were, but the brick wall has come. Good ol PBOD seems to have gotten worse, red walls of error messages, game comes down from 60fps to a near standstill, some AI meshes are acting completely broken where they weren't before, the list goes on and on. Likely I'll just go back to my 1.134 installation if I ever feel like playing, but that's 20 steps back and I've exhausted the desire to mess with this for the time being. I'm loathe to even try to bug fix a single scene at this point, if something crops up, I wouldn't be able to tell what was causing it if I stuck with 1.143. So, if there's something serious reported that's a real detriment to game play in the pack, then I'll load up 1.134 and see if I can recreate it, else, happy sailing chaps, the shores of Skyrim look appealing.