Lands to Conquer

Overview

Lands to Conquer is a modification for Medieval II: Total War that focuses mainly on improving and balancing gameplay.

The modification utilises features from Kingdoms: boiling oil, controllable reinforcements and unit balances are all included in Lands to Conquer. The modification also takes advantage of several new possibilities that are able to be modified in the expansion. It also features improved campaign and battle AI.

While it uses the Kingdoms .exe, it does not modify the Kingdoms campaign.

Features

The big feature in Lands to Conquer is of course it's campaigns. It gets rid of the tutorial and Grand Campaigns from Medieval II: Total War, and instead replaces them with 6 others.

The Early, High and Late Era campaigns based on the Grand Campaign map from Medieval II: Total War are copied from the system in the original Medieval Total War. These provide campaigns starting in 1080, 1210 and 1320 respectively.

There are also The Hundred Years War, Italian City States and Reconquista campaigns featuring blown up parts of the Grand Campaign map. These regional campaigns feature more focused and diverse gameplay, and each one plays out differently and so compliment the campaigns based on the Grand Campaign map.

The Campaigns

• Early, Late and High Era campaigns set on the Grand Campaign map. All start at different dates: Early 1080, High 1210, Late 1321. The factions in each campaign have different territories, different alliances and wars at the start. Settlement names also vary from Era to Era.
• Hundred Years War (1337 - 1450) : map featuring England, France and Scotland on an enlarged map focusing on that area. In this campaign it's all about war, and the gameplay of the campaign will be quite fast paced and a challenge to complete on Very Hard. There is little use for diplomacy in this campaign as all the factions hate each other. Finances are also quite tight. So you should have only a few stacks going around fighting battles and assaulting castles because of your low finances, and they will be assaulting probably because you'll be a bit pushed to meet the victory conditions near the end. The campaign is just 75 turns long to take 20 provinces. But it works well, and you can as always play beyond the end date. This campaign will be especially tough as the English, and easiest as the French.
• Reconquista (1146 - 1280) : Has Spain, Moors and Portugal on a blown up map of Spain. This campaign will last longer than the HYW campaign, and you'll have to take fewer provinces so will be slower paced. But there will be more emphasis on religion. With the increased effect of religious unrest in LTC, and this campaign focusing on the wars between the Christians and Moors in Iberia, use of priests/imans to convert the populations in provinces could be key to victory, otherwise the religious unrest could seriously hamper you. The 3 factions in it also have very similar fighting styles with good skirmishing light infantry and cavalry and a core of heavy cavalry and infantry. Once again with the factions not getting on very well with one another diplomacy will not be much use.
• Italian City States (1280 - 1450) : Venice, Milan, HRE, Sicily, Hungary and Papal States(unplayable) fight it out on an enlarged Italy map. The campaign with the most factions and least provinces, it is also the longest. There will be a clear cut superpower at the start, the HRE, but they will be disliked by the Pope so won't have things all their way. The smaller nations(Venice, Milan, Hungary) will be too weak at first to take on the HRE so getting in the Popes good books and using diplomacy well will help them towards victory. In the south Sicily will be large but weak, and will have to pass through Papal lands if it marches up mainland Italy. There will be more emphasis on city troops as those are the Italian factions specialities, and on diplomacy at first and conquest later.

Battle Map

• Improved ai coupled with a completely redone unit balance results in more challenging battles, and battles that feel more like the ones in the original Medieval: Total War.
• Terrain and weather also play more importance in battles.
• Boiling oil.

Campaign AI

• Stronger alliances, and allies which help each other more. This results in alliance blocs forming which also change over the course of the game.
• More logical changes to faction standings. So you and the AI will no longer always end up terrible and untrustworthy.
• More logical diplomacy, so it is now a more useful tool in the campaign.
• Rarer Catholic - Islamic alliances.
• Better AI sense of survivability. AI factions are more likely to want peace/vassal if being beaten/beaten badly.
• Better AI garrisoning settlements, and use of forces to guard it's borders.
• More aggressive AI v Independent Factions(eg the rebels from vanilla), so the AI expands much better early on and so the AI can create powerful nations.
• Better AI invasions. It will now build up more before attacking, and attack with more stacks, and stacks which have more units in them.
• Catholic factions less likely to attack each other, but still plenty of wars going on to give that Total War and Medieval experience.

Campaign Map

• Campaign is 1.5 years per turn and so is longer than normal M2TW, and population growth, income and building times/costs have been changed in line with this.
• Increased effect of religious unrest, corruption and other factors mean that religion is more important and taking care of your characters.
• The difference between cities and castles has been more emphasised by increasing the number of recruitment slots in castles and free upkeep slots in cities, making cities make more money but buildings in cities more expensive, and troop producing buildings in castles are cheaper.
• Guilds have been chaged so there is more variety in the Guilds you get offered, and the bonuses they give.
• Fight more diversly named independent factions who replace the rebels.link
• More historical province names to add more depth to the map.
• Teutonic order family system implemented for Holy Roman Empire and Venice.
• Forts which can have 2 units free of upkeep and cost more but are not permanent.
• New event messages when a faction gets a new leader.

Graphics

• 37 new loading screens, a new splash screen and menu background.
• New faction selection maps and radar maps all campaigns.
• Castle models from Britannia campaign added for Catholic and Orthodox factions.
• Interface from Crusades campaign given to Muslim factions.
• Menu text brightened a bit to make it stand out more on the new background.
• Several new grass textures from Kingdoms added to mod.
• Flags no longer bounce when unit selected.

Credits

Taken from mod installer.

A big thanks to the following modders who helped with the mod:

• Wilddog - for making all the maps for me, a truly amazing mapper.
• Jason Turnbull aka Palamedes - for his great help with unit rebalancing.
• Unspoken Crusader - for use of parts of his Custom Campaigns and Retrofit mods.
• Garnier - with his help providing info from Medieval Total War.
• CavalryCmdr - from Total War Heaven for his excellent campaign AI info thread.
• alpaca - for his help with my scripting questions.
• joerd9 - for help with some historical info.
• lawngnome - for helping with the edits to unit recruitment and settlement mechanics.

A big thanks to DrJambo, Klink, Quark, delra and others who helped me to improve the mod with their suggestions and discussions.

Another big thanks to the fans of the mod who through their feedback helped me to constantly refine the mod to make it the best it can be.

Thanks to Wikipedia for some of the historical info.

And of course huge credit to The Creative Assembly for making the Total War series.

External Links

Lands to Conquer at TWC