Viking Conquest and the Total War Viking Invasion Mod

[Philippe]

Shortly before release I got a good price on the Mount & Blade Viking mod and pulled the trigger, even though I didn't expect it to be playable for a while.

When the game was first released I played around with it for a little bit.  My two general observations about the game were that it was somewhat buggy (no surprise) and that the villages were disturbingly regular in groundplan.  Almost as if a mad surveyor had made sure that every wattle and daub hut was perfectly aligned to the one next to it so that the streets were perfectly straight with lots of right angles at the intersections.  Anyone who has ever excavated a pre-modern village knows that this just doesn't happen, even when the town-planners (if there were any) were trying to set everything up in a nice Hellenistic grid plan.  Surveying equipment just wasn't that good back then.

After playing around with it for a while I decided to give my two other TaleWorlds games another go.  I've always loved Fire and Sword, and I was surprised at how well basic Warband plays.  But what I couldn't help but noticing was what is probably a fundamental weakness of these games:  if you come up with a decent-sized party and just turn them loose at the start of each battle, they almost always do a better job of defeating your opponents than you could yourself by using tactics.  Now it's possible that part of the problem is that I'm a lousy tactician,  but it's not much fun fighting all of those battles knowing you would get better results by doing practically nothing.

This is a problem that won't go away, but if the core game is enough fun, if I'm getting enough of an early medieval fix, I can live with it.  Viking Conquest 1.3 is currently in Beta, and I'm hoping that by the time 1.6 rolls around (next fall?), the game will be worth playing.  In the meantime I have a huge backlog to work through and mods to make,  so I'll let the Herman Hums of the world bang their heads against the Brytenwalda mod team.

But I still need my Viking fix.

A year or two ago, when I was still on my old computer, I tried two Total War mods, one for Arthur and one for Viking Invasion.  The Arthurian mod was ok, but much to my surprise I didn't love it.  There were a few tiny glitches in the Viking Invasion mod, possibly the result of playing it on an under-powered Windows XP machine, and I suspect I rushed past it in my eagerness to get to the Arthurian mod.  But echoes of it still haunt me, and what I recall is that it did a pretty good job of delivering what Viking Conquest doesn't quite deliver at the moment.  Or at least that is my hazy impression.

So I would like to find out if my memory is playing tricks on me.

Which means re-installing Total War, patching it up, and then applying the mod.

[And the subtext to all of this is that if I give Viking Invasion another try, I should do the same for Europa Barbarorum II, but that's another story].

I can probably put my hands on my Rome: Total War Gold cd if I have to, and I have a vague recollection about what needs to be done to patch it.  But I also seem to have picked up the Steam Version somewhere along the way, which raises a somewhat interesting question. 

Does anybody here know if it is possible to apply the Viking Invasion mod to the Steam version of Total War I ? 

My Steam version of Battle Academy already has my unpublished flag mod in it, so I know enough never to verify game file integriy of something that hasn't been modded through the workshop (which I have no idea how to use).  What I can't remember is whether I can point the Viking Invasion mod to wherever I want to when I'm installing it.  If I can, it would be a lot easier to install it on top of the Steam version than the unpatched regular version.

What's lurking in the background is what put me off of downloading games for several years.

Many years ago I downloaded the Alexander expansion, probably from whoever was Sega's or Creative Assembly's munchkin at the time.  I hated the game and didn't spend much time playing it.  A few years later I found out that whatever Rome Total War mod I happened to be looking at then worked better if the Alexander AI was layered over the Rome engine before installing the mod.  When I went back and tried to get the Alexander expansion download to work, no joy.  I've since picked up the Gamersgate version, which seems to give me access to the Steam and non-Steam versions of the expansion, and if I ever try a Rome I mod that needs it or them again, I'll have a shot at using it.

So anyway, back to the original question.

Does anybody know if the Viking Invasion II mod works with the Steam version of Rome I (or Rome Barbarian Invasion, whichever you're supposed to install).

[Gusington]

Try the Steam workshop...the mod may be available there.

[Philippe]

In case anyone else was wondering about this, I installed the Steam version of Rome and the Viking Invasion mod (with the Dominion of Britain submod) and it didn't install correctly and wouldn't run. After a couple of tries I unistalled it and resorted to my cd version.  My heart was in my mouth because at first I thought the problem might be my computer, but it wasn't.  The cd version installed smoothly albeit slowly, accepted the mod installation without any fuss, and seems to be running without any problems.

[Grim.Reaper]

I have owned Warband for awhile and with the Viking DLC released over the holiday, I finally tried to play it again in anticipation of buying it.  But for some reason, just like in the past, this is one of those games that givess me motion sickness when playing.  I can play a bunch of other games like this, but for some reason this game makes me want to throw up.  Its a shame since I really wanted to play it.

[ArizonaTank]

I have owned Warband for awhile and with the Viking DLC released over the holiday, I finally tried to play it again in anticipation of buying it.  But for some reason, just like in the past, this is one of those games that givess me motion sickness when playing.  I can play a bunch of other games like this, but for some reason this game makes me want to throw up.  Its a shame since I really wanted to play it.

The battle maps are a little on the strange side.  The way the trees wave in the wind...could make me sick as well.

Still there are some improvements in the DLC that I like.  For example, heavy troops not being able to run fast or far.  Makes those skirmishers more valuable.