PACEMAKER: Make your own campaign pace.

Ever find it odd that, no matter how long you play the game, you never seem to get anywhere near, say, death by old age? Or even manage to watch your children fully come of age and live their adult lives as princes and princesses vying to succeed you?

This phenomenon is due to one simple reason: in vanilla, not enough years can reasonably pass in a single campaign to actually experience these things!

Thus, Pacemaker was born. It enables you to control how fast a campaign year passes in a few different, intuitive ways as well as control human aging rates. And, yes, if you're curious, the very same fine-grained control also allows slowing campaign time too. Me, I definitely speed it up. If you're interested in why, read the Motivation section.

Motivation

I have a very extensive modding background with Crusader Kings II. CKII is a grand strategy game in which you not only fight wars and enlarge your powerbase (the usual), but also quite uniquely, your real goal is to forge a dynasty, guiding it through thick and thin over the centuries, hopefully to the greatest heights of medieval power and prestige. Your personal character inevitably dies and is succeeded by his heir, and the cycle repeats. This opens up a whole new level of depth that I will leave to your imagination.

The secret: Bannerlord can do this too!

First, however, it must be reasonably possible to actually live the lives of a couple different characters in succession. The basic mechanics regarding old age, succession, wars for the throne, and so on are already in the game, and with mods like Pacemaker, many more kick-ass medieval mechanics can be brought into the fold as well.

Prerequisites

• (Required) If you don't have it already, you must install the fantastic Mod Configuration Menu.
• (Optional, Recommended) Houses of Calradia solves AI marriage and prevents clan extinction, vanilla problems which are much easier to otherwise encounter if you accelerate the campaign timescale with Pacemaker.
• (Optional, Recommended) In the long run, you'll encounter fewer mod compatibility issues for any mod which uses Harmony -- practically all of them -- if you install the centralized Harmony mod and put it at the very top of your mod list. Harmony comes with Pacemaker by default, but using the centralized version of Harmony in such a manner will ensure that the game is always using the correct version.
  

Main Settings

There are 2 master settings which affect the rate at which campaign time passes: Days Per Season and Time Multiplier. Additionally, the Accelerated Aging Factor is a powerful tool toward a similar end. These 3 settings all work independently and in combination. You're encouraged to employ them all in concert in just the right mix for your personal taste.

If you want worry-free removal from savegames, then you must set Days Per Season to 21 (vanilla) and speed the timescale up in other ways. See the note about it in the following setting description.

Days Per Season

This is the most powerful setting. It controls the number of days in a calendar season, and thus, you can multiply its value by 4 to determine the days/year. Vanilla uses 21 days/season (84 days/year). The Pacemaker default is 7 days/season (28 days/year), although much lower values certainly work fine.

As such a powerful setting, it is also the only one with important caveats:

• Once you start a campaign, your days/season setting is locked-in for the rest of the campaign, so choose wisely. Note that you may still have multiple ongoing campaigns with different settings, and you may still change all other settings mid-campaign.
• If adding the mod to a previously non-Pacemaker save, you're already locked into vanilla's 21 days/season. You may tweak the other settings, however. In this situation, you probably want to check out the Accelerated Aging Factor.
• It redefines time units, and all times stored in the save are in those units. Thus, if you decide to remove Pacemaker from a save that wasn't using vanilla's 21 days/season, the current campaign date and ages, among a bunch of other things, could be radically warped.
  

Time Multiplier

This setting is like a fast-forward mode in some ways. It increases (or decreases) the amount of campaign time which passes per real time, and it naturally affects the frequency of the visual day/night cycle.

However, very much unlike a fast-forward mode, it is very selective about the other elements of the game which are sped up (or slowed down). As the most basic example, parties will move across the map exactly as fast as they would in vanilla no matter what value you choose for the Time Multiplier. In general, Pacemaker maintains vanilla gameplay pace.

At a value of 1x, it's identical to vanilla. Higher than that, and days pass faster. Lower than that, and days are longer. The default value is 1.75x.

Accelerated Aging Factor

The Accelerated Aging Factor allows characters to age faster than actual calendar time. For example, at the default setting of 200%, all characters will age twice as fast. That is, they'll be 2 years older at the end of a full calendar year. If this age vs. calendar inconsistency ruffles your feathers, simply use the minimum setting of 100% -- a 1:1 mapping of age to calendar time -- to disable it.

NOTE: There are actually two versions of this setting, one for children and one for adults. This makes it possible for you to make children grow up faster than adults age, for example.

Calibration Settings

Pacemaker aims to maintain the pace of normal gameplay despite allowing you to significantly affect the timescale of your campaign. As such, it automatically addresses a few key calibration issues related to campaign time. All such calibration can be disabled at your pleasure, and most of it is even further configurable. Since the defaults are pretty much exactly what you want, I'll be brief; it's all explained in the in-game menu as well.

• Year-Scaled Pregnancy Duration Factor: Default is 75% of the configured campaign year length, as it is in reality.
• Adjust In-Progress Pregnancy Due Dates. If you change the pregnancy duration (including using another mod to control it), this feature will automatically adjust all in-progress pregnancies' due dates to match the new setting whenever you load a game.
• Healing Rate Auto-Calibration. Since hero and troop healing rates are a function of campaign time, this setting automatically compensates for whatever your Time Multiplier setting may be.
• Healing Rate Adjustment Factor. If you want to tweak the prior auto-compensation function to heal faster or slower, you can do so here.
• Food Consumption Auto-Calibration. Similarly, party food consumption is a function of campaign time, so this auto-calibrates consumption rates according to your Time Multiplier setting.
  

Issues

Strictly speaking, Pacemaker has no issues. The vanilla game has issues with clan survivability over multiple generations, and Pacemaker, by design, lets you play through multiple generations very easily.

Houses of Calradia solves these vanilla issues. It is highly recommended, not only if you accelerate the timescale with Pacemaker but also in general.

The biggest factor behind vanilla's issues is that TaleWorlds simply did not implement any AI marriage code, although there are other oversights that also should be addressed (especially with mods that tend to kill a lot of AI lords). Again, Houses of Calradia solves these issues.

Final Notes

If you appreciate Pacemaker, then please do remember to endorse it! Additionally, you might be interested in my other mods:

• Houses of Calradia, which solves AI marriage and prevents AI clan extinction. A must-have for Pacemaker users.
• Noble Titles, which adds 4 ranks of gender- and culture-specific titles to rulers and their vassals -- a big bang for your immersion buck.
• QuickStart, which lets you go from 'New Campaign' to being on the map in 1 click -- great for power users, testers, and modders.
  

I am also a member of the BUTR (Bannerlord Unofficial Tools & Resources) Team, and I work primarily on ButterLib and related services within our team's swathe of significant offerings for modders and the community.

As with all of my projects, quality contributions and collaboration are very welcome, but even if you just want to browse the source code for Pacemaker, you may do so via its GitHub repository:

https://github.com/zijistark/Pacemaker