fortydayweekend

Yeah, you know the game is addictive when the sun is coming up and you're still playing... :-)

That said, it's definitely got a few annoying quirks. Luckily though there are ways to work around most of them!

I had this too, in DosBox - try rolling your mouse to the top/left side of the screen if the bottom/right are inaccessible. It might "reset" it.

Or even better try running straight out of windows. When you get an error message on loading just hit "ignore" - (it just can't find a second mouse port which doesn't matter for single player).

Yeah, the default settings suck. I usually set everything to be equal priority - that way it won't try heaving grain halfway across the map to a Mill when there's starving Donkeys and Pigs right next door. You can then tweak this if you want to, or just turn buildings on and off instead.

The other trick is to have a storehouse near your buildings that need the raw materials, to catch the overflow. So the excess grain and ore goes into the storehouse, and then when it's needed it's just a short hop to the smelter or mill or whatever. The raw materials (mines/farms) can be a long way from the storehouse, but the manufacturing buildings should be as close as possible.

Make sure that the other storehouses/HQ are set to "not accept" the raw goods. If you've got one "city center" with a storehouse and all of your industry around it, the distribution will be very efficient. On huge maps you might need two centers.

The other key is to have enough surplus - if you're always on 0-10 grain or coal then new stuff will be sent to empty buildings clear across the map. If your buildings are always stocked then new stuff will go to the storehouse - i.e. in the direction you want it.

The AI is actually very good at distributing stuff as long as you get your layout right. If it's not working then you're doing something wrong :-)

Also check for bottlenecks on roads - if there's more than one good waiting to be picked up at any flag, add more roads. There's no such thing as too many roads.

Yeah, I agree - most of the missions you don't need to actually conquer anyone for territory, and you end up with just fighting at the end. And when you outgun everyone else by 3-1 it's a foregone conclusion...

You might want to try editing the World Campaign missions - make a new folder called "WORLDS" in the main game folder, copy over the maps from DATA\MAPS2 and change the extensions to .SWD. Then you can open them with the editor. Add some extra starting positions closer to your own, and maybe adjust the resources.

It should be roughly 50/50 for the elite vs. elite. Your generals should eat enemy privates for breakfast. And if your privates are fighting enemy generals, you're doing it wrong ;-)

Or you could just set one storehouse to "not accept" beer and weapons - it will send all the ones it has to the other storehouse. One at a time, yep, but quicker than reproducing everything :-)

I'm not sure what happened there - I've never tried shipping coal to industry an island.

That's probably the problem - more than one harbour per island screws things up completely. Also I read somewhere that you shouldn't connect islands by roads if there's also harbour connection.

There's so many little things that can go wrong with expeditions and islands, it's the most annoying part of the game to learn. But if you get it right it will work fine. You have to plan a bit more carefully - do you want the Armory etc on the island, or back on the mainland? And what goods do you set the Harbours to accept or not accept.

I hadn't noticed that - but I usually call all the geologists to a new hill anyway :-) They prospect the whole hill and I "build" a mine on every spot I want one eventually. But I don't connect them all with roads - just one or two or whatever I want right now. When a mine runs out I delete it and connect up a new one. That way you don't have to prospect a hill more than once or twice.

Using coins on a single soldier is expensive! Ideally you should only be giving coins to soldiers in full watchtowers and fortresses... barracks and guardhouses should be immediately set to "not accept" coins.

Why? A single soldier will take 5 coins to go from private to general. But 9 soldiers in a fortress will take 12 coins to ALL become generals. So you get roughly four times as many generals from the same amount of gold.

Yeah, you basically want to tell your soldiers where to go, but there's no simple commands for "go here". But there are ways to move them where you want them using the sliders.

First up, training - you want to fill towers and fortresses with privates so you can send them gold, then you want those generals to head back into storage. Assuming you know what each slider means by now, choose "Weak Defenders" and "Max # of soldiers" in all three locations. All your buildings should fill up. Set your towers to accept coins and let them upgrade.

When they're done, choose "Min # of soldiers" in all three. All your buildings should keep 1 soldier and the rest will head back to storage. Repeat as many times as you like to train up as many generals as you can/want.

Secondly, you can now change to "Strong Defenders" and max out the "border" occupancy rate - this will send your new generals off to the front.

Another trick is when you've taken over a bunch of enemy buildings and they've all got 1 of your generals sitting in them uselessly. You want to keep the building but you want your general back for attack.

Make sure your border occupancy slider is on maximum and change to "Weak Defenders". Then connect the newly-conquered building(s) by road (and set to not accept coins). Privates will march out of storage and fill up your new conquests. This means when you attack you'll get the general back out.

Basically you'll need to do a fair bit of adjusting to get the results you want - but there is a way to do everything you want. As long as you have enough soldiers of course...

And yeah they do walk all the way back to storage before going out to new locations. So - build a storehouse close to your front line before an attack, and be patient... or if you've got enough soldiers open another front so you can be attacking in one direction while the other is waiting for reinforcements.

Yeah, the AI sucks at attacking, defending, training soldiers, and doesn't build nearly enough catapults considering how genocidal the human players are.

They do a reasonably good job of building an efficient settlement though.

The only way to adjust the difficulty is with resources... so if you want to make a mission or map more difficult you can use the editor and maybe give the AI more easy gold.

I also like your idea of having to use conquered land - so maybe adding some extra computer players blocking access to iron and farmland would work to give that effect.

Some of the World Campaign missions are pretty cool - Africa is huge and a real challenge in terms of organisation. If you do the WORLDS/copy/rename thing you can play them as individual maps.