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.

Lands to Conquer replaces the tutorial and Grand Campaign and instead provides the player with a choice of six campaigns. There are the Early, High and Late Era campaigns that are based on the Grand Campaign map from the Medieval II: Total War and start in 1080, 1210 and 1320 respectively. There are also three regional campaigns based on the Hundred Years War, Italian City States and Reconquista, each with their own unique maps focusing on different parts of Europe.

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

Features

The Campaigns

• The modification features an Early, Late and High Era campaign, each based on the original Grand Campaign map. They each have separate starting dates, starting in 1080, 1210 and 1321 respectively. The factions in each campaign have different starting territories, alliances and military entanglements. Settlement names also vary from Era to Era.
• The modification also features three regional campaigns:
  • Hundred Years War (1337 - 1450) campaign which focuses on England, France and Scotland. The player must, in order to win, hold 20 provinces and is allowed 75 turns to do so. This campaign is designed to be fast-paced and challenging.

• • Reconquista (1146 - 1280) campaign focusing on Spain and the warfare involved between Europeans and the Moors. This campaign is designed with a greater emphasis on religion and longer time-frame in mind. It features the factions of Spain, Portugal and the Moors.

• • Italian City States (1280 - 1450) campaign focuses on Italy featuring the factions of Venice, Milane, the Holy Roman Empire, Sicily, Hungary and the Papal States. It is designed to be the longest campaign, with the Holy Roman Empire being the clear superpower at the beginning of the campaign.

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