However, this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that Norway is the best naval power of the six factions in the campaign, so Norway starts out in a fairly easily defensible position overall. That said, they're easily within the reach of the other factions' navies. As a result, Norway doesn't share a border with anyone other than Scotland. The faction's default capital is Castle Town, which is a castle situated on the island just west of the English settlement of Carlisle, and north of the Welsh capital, Caernarvon. Norway begins with control of a number of the islands along the Northwestern coasts of the British mainland and its northernmost region. Norway is one of the five playable factions of the "Britannia" campaign of Medieval II: Total War: Kingdoms. The map highlighting Norwegian territory from Brittania's faction selection screen. Scotland is Norway's first obvious target for expansion, however it may be in their best interest to assault the east coast of England or Northern Ireland, as the factions in these regions will surely be distracted with their own war efforts.Įxcellent shock infantry who wield powerful two handed weapons. While King Haakon remains in Norway, dealing with issues at home, he has placed his son, Magnus Haakonsson, in charge of the war effort in Brittania.Īs the Norwegian people look to establish a foothold on the British mainland, they may choose to adopt their traditional naval raiding approach of surprising and sacking poorly defended settlements, before returning to the ocean as quickly as they appeared. Norway has used its considerable naval power to control the Isle of Man and Orkney Islands for many decades now and has only recently shown interest in establishing a greater presence on the Scottish mainland. Some factions have script for settlements that don't belong to them at start of campaign.Norwegian faction emblem as depicted in Medieval II: Total War: Kingdoms Once it triggers for a settlement there's 10 turn timer before it can trigger again. Once I generated a list of which faction would spawn what kind of units where, it was actually decent. I'm not convinced this is a great idea - I hated it when I didn't know where garrisons are going to happen and how big.
That allows player to really easily destroy all factions.Īs AI isn't really fixable, to counter that, a lot of mods add garrison script which spawn a lot of troops when garrison is besieged. Unlike later Total War games, Medieval 2 settlements have no automatic garrison, and AI often leaves them with minimal defences. On any difficulty levels, if it goes into severe enough debt, it gets a lot of money to get it out of debt.
I never liked that part of the game, and I wished they toned it down.ĪI gets a lot of free money on hard and very hard. Pope is as bitchy as ever, and due to a lot fewer rebels, he's going to be excommunicating people left and right a lot more than in vanilla. On the other hand, a lot of castle units get free upkeep as long as they're castle garrison. Units provided by buildings are a lot different - high tier building no longer allow recruitment of low tier units, possibly to help AI or to clean up the UI.Ĭastles are massively nerfed because base castle buildings no longer provide any recruitment options, and you actually need to build stables and barracks (which also build really slowly). There are a lot fewer rebel settlements, and they tend to have a lot bigger garrison, so you can't just grab enormous areas of land without any opposition during your first few turns.
Medieval 2 is very easy for experienced player, so the mod does a few things to make it more difficult. Hanseatic League and potential Lithuania conversion events from Teutonic campaign are in the game. The mod brings in extra units from Kingdoms campaign, like Mangonel, which is the only pre-gunpowder artillery unit worth using in battles.įorts are now permanent stone buildings, and cost a lot more money.
The idea behind Kingdoms Grand Campaign Mod is taking content from minicampaigns from Kingdoms expansion pack, and integrating them into one big campaign.Ĭampaign map is adjusted somewhat, and in addition to vanilla factions, you get: One of the great things about it is abundance of mods, and this post is about one such mod. Medieval 2, released back in 2006, was the peak of Total War series.