Help with Total War Stainless Steel Download mod with Steam!!? Where can I download Medieval 2 Total War Stainless Steel Mod 6.0? Stainless Steel 6.
Medieval2 Stainless Steel - where to download? Everything you want to know and more about Stainless Steel can be found on the TWC. Download 6.4 patch and. Stainless Steel version 6.0 by King Kong. See File/Full Details for all the features for those of you who do not kno. Step 1: Get the mods here and the 6.4 patch if you want it.
So this weekend I decided to install the Stainless Steel Mod on LemurLord’s suggestion. I played for about 12 hours in total and thought I’d let you guys know my impressions so far. The only mod I’ve played for M2:TW other than this one is DarthMod, so you may find me comparing the two here.
First off let’s talk installation. Before you get started this mod requires the Kingdoms expansion. The installer is excellent and pretty easy to follow. You need to first download the main mod 6.3 and then install the 6.4 patch . The installation is quite easy if you aren’t like me and realize ahead of time that you have to install 6.3 first.
At the end of install you’ll be asked a few questions about features you want to install. For reference I chose Late Era, didn’t activate any of the “hyper-realism” features, and chose the balanced AI. If you prefer a more aggressive/war hungry AI you can do that, there is also an option for a pacifist AI. I’ve always found that the AI in vanilla breaks alliances too easily, but I also didn’t want to have to be the “bad guy” and always the aggressor so thought the inbetween option would be best.
When I first booted up the mod I was impressed with the splash screens and upon selecting the Grand Campaign nicely surprised by the expanded campaign map and factions. The Kingdom of Jerusalem and Knights Templar have been merged into a faction called the Crusader States and the map now expands much further to the east, well into present day Iran just past the eastern edge of the Caspian Sea, and all the way to the eastern edge of the Persian Gulf further south. The available empires have been renamed and split to their more historic/realistic counterparts – Spain is now split to the Kingdom of Castille and the Kingdom of Aragon. Norway and Denmark vie for control of northern Europe with the Kingdom of Novgorod and Kiev etc. The start date for the late campaign was 1200 with a 400 turn limit. I decided to take it a bit easy and choose the new Norman Kingdom of Sicily and I was off to the races – required to capture Byzantium and Jerusalem and destroy the Aragonians and Byzantines.
(caveat: I haven’t read the patch/mod notes in depth)
Once I got into the game I found that (despite turns still taking forever to complete, even with a blazing fast new rig) the game went much faster than I was used to which was a good thing. I should note that lately I’ve found that I get annoyed by the AI’s glitchiness in the RTS battles so I’ve started auto-resolving a lot more and just dealing with the additional loses it can incur. The music and sound is much improved and the map certainly looks better. Cities like Venice and Byzantium have individual distinct looks to them and your units tend to have more interesting things to “say”.
The customized faction-specific units look great and give a good feel to recruitment, yet they aren’t too cluttered like I found they could be if you’ve used DarthMod. With the AI I selected my alliances actually stayed in tact for extremely long periods of time and required a lot of finagling to provoke your allies into breaking them, which to me was very welcome. This doesn’t mean that you won’t erode your alliances by doing things against their interests, but rather that they stick around long enough for you to patch things up which seemed more realistic to me than the usual fickle AI tendencies of vanilla or Darth.
Units such as merchants, spies, princesses, assassins and priests tend to gain abilities quicker which is something common in most of the mods out there – these units were just too weak versus AI units in vanilla imo. The other nice touch I noticed were the updated historical announcements at the end of turns – having the extra texture and contexts of things that happened historically as you are playing is always great.
Despite my attempts to avoid them, some of the RTS battles are just too important to ignore. Not a chance I was going to let the treacherous Portuguese take Corsica without a serious fight. I had read complaints prior to installing that the unit movement was unrealistically fast, and I’d have to agree. The thing is – I thought it was great! I normally go for realism mods and I’m wondering now if I’ve been heading in the wrong direction all this time. The improved movement speed made the battles much more exciting and it was refreshing to finish a giant battle in less than 45 minutes. Having units actually get into position quickly was nice and having the ability to get units on and off walls was a pinch. This isn’t to say that the combat AI was that much better. I continued to have problems with pathing on and off walls and proper defensive positions. As in all the Total War games though I’ve just come to terms with the fact that there are problems with the AI and I roll with it. Units looked great, textures were improved, I had a helluva time!
To end my long winded mini-review -- capturing Byzantium was fantastically rewarding and I’m about to move on the Fatimid Caliphate and reclaim the Holy Land in name of the Pope. My hold on the former Moorish territories is tenuous with the Portuguese and Aragonians pressuring my western flank and I can’t wait to get home and try and finish it up!
TLDNR: Stainless Steel for M2:TW is fantasic. A huge improvement over vanilla and DarthMod. It brought me back to a classic game and made it 10x as much fun. It’s even made me think I can avoid pre-ordering Shogun now because there is clearly a lot of life left in this game
edit: is there any way to add indents and more than a double-space between paragraphs? sheesh, wall of text.
6 Stainless Steel Tubing
