Total War Blog

Hello there, and welcome to the first in a series of blogs that will be about some of the big mods out there for the Total War series. This blog is about the Retrofit Mod.

Less than 2 days after Kingdoms was released, this rather interesting mod made by Unspoken Knight appeared. The Retrofit Mod retrofits many Medieval II: Kingdoms features into Medieval II: Total War. This enables you to play the Grand Campaign using the Kingdoms .exe and get Kingdoms features such as boiling oil and controllable reinforcements.

You can download the Retrofit Mod from here:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=1581 

The mod requires Kingdoms to be installed to work, and the feature list for the mod is:

- Hotseat Campaigns.
- Control AI Reinforcements.
- Boiling Oil.
- 4 Additional custom battle maps (Backwoods, Borderlands, Forts, Trenches).
- Unit rebalancing.
- AI Unit Recruitment tweaks.
- Campaign AI Tweaks.
- Miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements.
- Installer: The mod is packaged with an easy-to-use installer for computers with a valid installation of M2TW: Kingdoms.

The mod has one of the best installers I’ve personally seen for a mod and so is very easy to install. It also has a variety of ways it can be run:

- Start menu shortcut
- Quicklaunch icon
- Desktop icon
- M2TW game launcher (English)
- Batch file located in: [M2TW Path]\mods\retrofit\medieval2_retrofit.bat

Because the mod installs to its own folder it also will not affect your game installation at all.

The rapid release of this mod just goes to show the talent there is in the Total War modding community.

In this blog I’m also going to elaborate on two features seen in Kingdoms, as I’ve seen a few forum threads about them.

First up is the Controllable Reinforcements feature. Many people seem to be unaware that you can not only set the stance for reinforcing armies, but you can also order them where to go. You can do this by simply having the reinforcing army selected by clicking on the card for it, and then right click anywhere on the battle map and they will head there. This combined with the different stances allows you a lot of control over your reinforcements.

Next is boiling oil. Some people are unsure how you activate it. All you need to do is have a unit on a wall section next to the gate on a settlement with stone walls or higher, or if you’re playing the Britannia campaign the permanent stone forts as well. This will then show a little flag above the middle of the gate to represent the fact that boiling oil is active on that gate. And any enemies who attack the game might end up feeling a bit warm.

That’s all for this entry, there’ll be more mod blogs coming up shortly so stay tuned! If you know of a mod you’d like to see previewed drop an email to me at jack@creative-assembly.co.uk