Posted on 07/10/10 @ 04:33 PM
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Stronghold 2 |
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Les Grand Châteaux de l'intelligence Artificielle
First, I must thank HicRic and LordBritian of Stronghold Knights for their great and triumphant success creating an .aic file editor that even Firefly links to. Without them, none of this would be possible. Get the editor here.
I also would like to thank Ouly of SHH for his indispensable tinkering. Together we figured out through tedious trial and error, much of how the game reacts to changes made in the .aic files. See this thread here to learn about .aic files.
Here are new castle layouts for every Lord in the game. Every AI Lord gets at least two new castles. The redesigned plans are meant to make the estates run more efficiently and increase overall defense (especially versus Laddermen). There are 37 new files. Only one is an original Firefly layout, the Queen's castle has had the Engineers Guild placement fixed and thicker walls. Three designs have been used for more than one lord, but that still leaves 33 new castles! These will install leaving many of the original AI castles, but overwriting a few.
All of the tiniest default castles have also been replaced, there are five of them. Four tiny_stone.aic defaults for use when there is not enough space to develop a normal design from a Lord and an additional smallest possible castle, keep_only_stone.aic, for if the four tiny defaults will not fit. As with the original files, the tiny_stone defaults do not have a Mercenary Tent, except for the first two, so some lords that depend on mercenaries will be weak. Additionally omitted from the keep_only.aic file is the Lords Kitchen, as in the original file.
The original tiny_stone defaults had defensive problems, such as stairs from the outside leading up to the top of the walls. These problems have been corrected. Great Britain is now a somewhat playable map.
Some lords develop very slowly early in Freeman games because of poor Royal Foods available. I have given almost all the lords Dovecotes, those free standing birdhouses that produce one Honor per month. You will need to accumulate Honor quickly early on in order to keep up. The improved efficiency of these layouts means the AI builds troops faster also. The King will even attack with his feeble army, ever seen that in a Kingmaker? All in all, with these files the game is more challenging. Hope you find them enjoyable.
-Doomsword
Known bugs:
Sometimes the game will rotate an entire layout to fit, this will mess with the moats and sometimes they will not fill in perfectly. As long as they were still blocking laddermen it will have to be alright.
Sometimes when the design gets turned the troop gathering points are off and some archers might gather below a Keep or tower instead of on it. Can't win 'em all I suppose.
Oil Engineers. When you start off at the top rank in a Kingmaker game, oil engineers can become trapped in hovels as they are recruited. At lower rank levels the villagers usually make it at least part of the way to the campfire before they are made into troops.
Buildings built in the way. On small estates sometime the AI will build in the way of the castle plan. Not much can be done except switch some lords starting estates around or start from a higher rank so they build faster.
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Installation:
Open the folder 'Firefly Studios/Stronghold 2' and make a back-up copy of the folder 'castles'. Download the zipfile and un-zip to 'Firefly Studios/Stronghold 2/castles. Answer 'Yes to All' when it alerts you that you will be overwriting files. Done.
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Any comments, thoughts or suggestions on these castles are welcome below. General how-to questions belong in the .aic thread in the Foums. |