Scots never take Inverness because the steam version of the game is broken. CA merged kingdoms into the base game on Steam a few years back but never reclibrated the AI. Kingdoms uses a different autoresolve algorithm that takes walls into account much more than the original game did. Problem is the AI in the grand campaign doesn't know this and sends underpowered armies to besiege settlements and more often than not fails. You can turn off the new autoresolve in the game files and the AI expands properly after that.
You should offer a mod which contains stuff like this and the diplomacy bug fix, basically fixing as much as stuff as possible without really changing the game.
Having watched so many medieval history videos in the past couple of years it didn't look out of place for a unit of full-plate knights to close with the pikemen and have-to, but I agree that your end result was pretty much how I feel pikes should fit into Medieval 2 TW gameplay-wise. Thank you for your guides, I will be picking bits from them when I eventually play another campaign! Offie
Cheers! yeah it feels more correct to me. Pikes have huge inherent weaknesses to missiles and flanking so I think it is fair for them to hold off the charge of swordsmen.
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH have you tried to see how this works with a flank or rear charge against the pikeman? if the pikeman cannot physically use their secondary, wouldnt they just wheel around after the initial charge and likewise slaughter their opponents by using their pikes? invalidating their main weakness too?
Captain: -All right lads, you're all to attach your swords so I'm taking 'em until you learn how to properly win fights. Pikemen: -But Siiiiir.... :( Captain: -No buts soldier, now use your pike as God will's it.
Do let me know what other little fixes you are hoping to find! We will be making use of these pikes in our Papal Campaign! 2:40 Halt, Attack! Tower Project's Solution 3:58 Modding the unit files 5:13 Modding unit density, spacing and ranks 7:06 Testing... 8:22 The best solution (only pikes) 9:34 Success!
Pikes work against pretty much any unit without a shield as the game was balanced around this. Shielded heavy infantry like DFK are the problem not pikes. Send DEK on a frontal assault against pikes in guard mode, pikes win every time.
I think that if you put them on guard mode that also fixes their behaviour. Adding fire by rank to gun units as an ability instead of only doing it when in skirmish mode would be neat
I recently found a video by by Kenry Kuo 'Medieval II: Total war (improved pikemen efficiency without removing swords)' suggested a pretty interesting fix where you don’t need to make pikes OP by removing their swords. I wondered if you would like to try it. Seems to work for him: 1. Find the "export_descr_unit.txt" in your "data" folder. 2. Find pikemen units and change the entry "formation" from "square, phalanx" to "phalanx, square". For example, change the "formation 0.8, 1.8, 2.4, 2.4, 4, square, phalanx" to "formation 0.8, 1.8, 2.4, 2.4, 4, phalanx, square" 3. Save and exit, done. Remember to make your game read the files first or the changes will not be applied.
After watching this I have now made piles completely broken as they all no longer have a secondary weapon. Highland pikemen can defeat English dismounted knights with ease in a 1v1 which is how pikes always should be
I tried the remove sec weapons fix and god, this makes pikes into a uber tier unit, they melt everything in a 1v1, and can even be used in walls, for anyone that wants to try this fix, be very careful about the removal of seconary weapons.
The solution I've seen mods use is to lower the stats of each pike unit to a more balanced state. Not the best solution as pikes on paper end up looking trash but it is a solution.
@@Luke-tt3dt Pikes were never OP in RTW. You had to flank them or whittle them with missiles, that worked perfectly. The sole problem with phalangite syntagmas in RTW was that they could magically turn and wheel around while still keeping the spears leveled, when in reality they should have to raise them, re-orient, then drop them again, all while taking casualties.
To anyone worrying about the balance of such an extreme change, this still balances quite well. Pikes are still extremely vulnerable to archer fire, and flanking with cav will still melt them. This isn't an issue of making a decent unit op but more a situation of making a useless unit viable. The whole point of pike units is to decimate anything that approaches from the front, and disabling their secondary sword achieves this perfectly. They are a one-trick pony; they should at least be able to do their one thing.
I’ve played multiple PvP games and pikes win me half of them. You see, pikes have one job: stop enemy cavalry so they don’t slaughter your heavy infantry and archers. In my old clan (GEN) we have this top player, none of us could beet him. One day I manage to bring a new formation using pikes and with it I slaughter him. Pikes are strong if you know how to use them, especially on multiplayer, against the IA you can do whatever you want and win anyway.
hell the fck no, with no stats changes and secondary weapons gone they are so op, its why all mods lower their damage to like half, bcs of their insane attack speed, either dmg or att spd or both have to go down, flanking doesnt work that well, and archers cant be their only weakness
Pikes historically suffer from poor mobility and missiles. So it transfers to game anyway. You can get shot or flanked since pikes take 3 business days to change formation.
This makes pike units too OP for their price. Even the most basic pike units that cities can pump out with minimal recruiting cost can win against even the most heavily armored infantries from the late era (as has been demonstrated by this video as well). Even considering pike units' weakness against archers they're too powerful for their price. Once I remove their secondary weapons, I really don't need to recruit any other types of infantries in MW2. My archers can deal with enemy archers anyway. This is why although I've Known this tweak for many years, was reluctant to use it. I guess I could remove pike units' secondary weapon, and then also increase their unit price to be comparable to their respective era's heavy infantry units. Certainly hurts the immersion, but I do agree this is better than an entire class of pike unit being more or less useless unless in very limited situations, like guarding castle gates.
You could also tweak their pike stats in that file, making them have an effect of halting the enemy but not outright roflstomping. Although, I think this is pretty realistic, there’s a reason most European armies by 16th century were 90% pike and shot. Dutch, Spanish, HRE, and the list goes on. Real life knights would probably last longer but then again charging into pikes with a one handed sword which was a side arm would be equivalent to a modern army advancing on entrenched machineguns with nothing but pistols. Knights never fought like that.
If they ever remaster Medieval 2 they need to do more than a graphical update. They actually have to rework the coding of many of their problem units. Make it so entire Pikemen formations no longer swap out their pike to their sidearm once the enemy gets past the first row pike head. Instead make it more like RTW where its only the particular first rank pikeman swaps to his sword this allows the pikemen in ranks behind him to move up and use their pikes. Also they need to fix the animation of two handed and halberd units so they no longer get stuck on animation loops that causes them get flinched out by sword and board units. Sword and board units especially the dismounted feudal knights need to get toned down so they no longer dominate heavily armoured elite two handed units they should be losing to.
Pikes do work in this game, the issue is that when the game launched it had a bug where the shield stat was the only stopping missile attacks not melee. Basically the entire game is balance around this bug. They fixed the bug but never rebalanced the game. Attack values across the board are too low to deal with most infantry. This really effects pikes as they can't do enough damage to shielded units to keep them at bay and their formation ends up collapsing. Pikes work as intended against 2 handed units like DEK and Norse axemen.
If shield would not stop melee attacks every single unit would melt against Dismounted English, Portugeese and Noble Knights. I dont see any balance in there.
I disagree. You can get pikes to work, but it requires significant micro that is basically absurd given the unit should work better and do what they're intended to without you having to micro the heck out of them. The problem is quite simple, they move to swords too quickly, and when one unit has moved to sword, they all follow suit like a virus, despite that those in the rear can still use the pikes.
@@TemenosL yes but this issue of the dropping of the pikes is because the defense stat is to high of the sword and shield units. The whole melee balance of the game is balanced around a shield defense of 0. That's why you get wierdness like dismounted gothic knights getting destroyed by dismounted feudal knights.
@stephenjones9840 This is an interesting point. Do you know how the shields should be debuffed or attack values rebalanced to fix this? Do you have more info on this? I'd be curious to know.
@@LibertarianGearhead I would reduce the melee defence stat by about 3 points on any shield units with a 6 shield stat (adjust accordingly for units with a 3 or 4 shield stat) shield of all shield units (incl cav) in the game and potentially consider boosting the melee attack of non shield units by 1 or 2.
the real issue is simply that the range at which they switch to secondary is too long, so they drop their pikes too early I wonder if that can be edited somehow and retain the short sword when the pikes are penetrated
They also do not switch back to pikes quickly enough. All of this worked fine in RTW. Pikemen were dangerous in the direction they were pointing, as they should be, but also didn't generally kill SUPER-fast, as they shouldn't, but flanks and rear were very vulnerable and they had to pull secondary weapons to defend themselves.
Maybe its better if their damage is reduced by 1 point and they have no swords. because real humans wouldnt charge directly at a pike formation from the front so it makes sense for them to deal slightly less damage, and have a bit more defence to pin down the enemy in their place
have you tried to see how this works with a flank or rear charge against the pikeman? if the pikeman cannot physically use their secondary, wouldnt they just wheel around after the initial charge and likewise slaughter their opponents by using their pikes? invalidating their main weakness too?
@@lolasdm6959 If they are in a non moving square and trained as such, sure, but a line of pikemen are vulnerable to the sides and back. ask the romans, or even the french during the italian wars when pikes where pinned at the front by other pikes. If they had a sheildtron like staric formation I would agree, but if they are in a normal formation, id say the backs and sides are pretty vulnerable.
@@midshipman8654 Pike squares are not static....... They can charge....... Mecadonian phalanxes and the Greek hoplite formations were the most powerful on the charge, unlike depicted in video games and many other popular media. Look at battle descriptions of the Boeotian war... The Thebans broke the Spartans with a charge. Look at the second Mecadonian war, the Roman Hastati were decimated by the Mecadonian charge, the Sarissa often punch right into their light shields. Greeks had bronze shields for this reason. If you look at the Brungundian wars, a couple Swiss pikes usually destory anything infront of them, by charging. This is why the sheildtron is the weakest of all polearm formations and never took off. It's static.... Mobile warfare is always king. One of the reasons why Alexander's armies fared better than the Successor kingdoms against the Romans was that they wear significantly lighter armor, and thus were less mobile. The Romans would have struggled way more against Alexander's men because competent commanders understand the importance of flexibility. Also pike squares aren't homogeous formations, they are a composite formation including shorter polearms like poleaxes, helberds, sword and buckler, etc. Usually work together with archers, crossbowmen and gunners so they practically can fight anything except artillery. Well this is mediveal 2 not rome total war so if pikes aren't flankable it would actually make sense. The game is very limited in depictions of realistic warfare. Like if you know about napleonic war history, the horse archers empolyed by Russia were poorly trained and usually do no damage because they were disorganized and shoot arrows in an arch.... Actual trained military shoot straight, otherwise you can't hurt people. But in total war, you kill people with arching shots lmao. Or that most formations espeacially in mediveal times were mixed. But it's not something the game can even depict.
@@lolasdm6959 pretty sure alexanders pikes had spearmen at either side because the pikes where unwieldy. they could advance fine, push through pretty much anything, but they were susceptible to envelopment and flanking if given the chance. Thats how the romans won out.
Great fix to add in the game. An issue I found though, is when they are on walls, they'd still be this deadly lmao. Kinda makes it unrealistic in that situation (how they'd still be able to use long spears on narrow walls), but I guess it makes it more challenging to do sieges.
I suggest make your formation wider only three ranks deep since the 4th rank is useless as hell, your main problem was units on your formation's flanks since they charged at a wider formation :)
The stainless steel mod basically makes them one of the most busted factions to play. they get heavy pikem for basic city units. sure their range options suck outside of noble archers but who cares when you can laugh off charges in the narrow streets?
I know it's a long time since you worked on this, but I really appreciate this tutorial. This what I did to balance it a bit to stop the pikemen being terminators with pokey sticks haha. First I halved their attack (rounding up if originally it was an odd number) Then I added a line: move_speed_mod: 0.70 to reduce their speed (Be careful with this one, it needs to go between the attribute and formation line. Additionally it only works for kingdoms.exe) This meant that in many examples, while the pikemen were formidable from the front they a) didn't kill the enemy so quickly but did hold them and B) could be easily out maneuvered. Plus in a siege where I had 3 crossbow men and one spearmen unit, I was able to hold off four pikemen sufficiently. I did win when I controlled the pikemen in the previous battle I mentioned, but I won by the skin of my teeth and mostly due to AI stupidity which is a lot harder to fix. Four Armoured swordsmen defending struggled more in a siege (They would definitely lose attacking), but I think that's a small price to pay for this great fix with actually making pikemen and interesting unit to play with. Plus it actually makes Scotland's USP an actual USP rather than a sick joke for any anyone who plays them. 😂
Wait, has no one ever tried putting them in guard mode? Bc when you do, they go into this real cool looking formation of three lines of pikes down, and so long as they aren’t hit at the flanks, it is effective against units of similar value. And to get them to push into the enemy with pikes down, you simply take them out of guard mode and they’ll do it themselves. This is in the base game btw.
Guard mode is good against charges, but they don't attack with the pikes the way the do in normal mode. It also doesn't stop them from abandoning pikes to draw swords, so it doesn't really solve the problem.
@@SocratesOnFire7 it does for me, idk what to tell you. On my end, doing what he says to do just doesn’t work for me, and doing what he says not to do does work :/
Guard + spear wall basically makes them create a barrier, not fight. It's great against resisting cavalry, but pikes should be able to go on the offensive without touching defensive stance.
There's actually a much easier way of making Pikemen viable without backspace+attack or modding the game. What you do is to take two units of pikes which you place one behind another. Their lines should be in ranks of 2-4, that way the pikes of one unit will overlap and attack at the same time as the pikes of a first unit. Once the pikemen are placed like this they should be grouped together to keep the formation. A bit of micromanagement is necessary with this tactic, but it really allows pikes to shine and punch above their own weight. In order to keep the pikemen attacking with their pikes, it'll be necessary to take them in and out of spearwall, then ordering them to attack. Doing this, the pikemen will keep attacking with their pikes rather than their swords and will have a great morale impact. Using this tactic, enemy units - effectively having two units attacking it them the same time - will rout MUCH faster. These very large blocks of pikemen will also, as they're effectively two units in one, do tons of more damage. In terms of cost, it's pretty easy to get pikemen to take out units that are very mch so more expensive. Because you've got a unit that's also covering another's back, I theorise that pikemen deployed like this also have much higher morale as a consequence. The biggest downside to all of this though is that you can't really have very many blocks of pikemen in your army. As you're using two units to create one unit, it's very easy to have pikemen taking up the absolute brunt of your army. As pikemen employed like this are really, REALLY good it's not necessarily something that will make you lose. It can, however, be quite risky as it might preclude you from getting a lot of other units. A good way of mitigating this is having maybe 2-3 blocks of pikemen backed up by Feudal Knights or better melee units. Pikemen don't have any shields in medieval 2 so they're more easily damaged by archers. Best way to counteract this is to cover your pikemen with light cav or archers/gunners of your own. Pikemen can also be a bit janky on the attack, when order to attack and marching to their opponant the "company" of pikemen will usually break formation and approach as two blocks instead of one. This can be avoided by clicking in front of or behind the enemy unit when marching toward it, if your pikes are within charging distance of the enemy and ordered to attack they'll keep the formation. All of this is based on my own experience using this tactic, as well as this post that I got the tactic from: medieval2.heavengames.com/m2tw/strategy/battle/steelandpike/
Good stuff! Now the real question is... How to fix GUNS in medieval 2. Clunkiest things you will find, if only the units bothered to fire their weapons in a regular basis...
Guns are crazily powerful as they ignore all shields and defence skill. The issue is the weird firing mechanics and skirmish mode which cause chaos. That is certainly something that needs fixing.
*UPDATE* Good news! I tested this on the Rome Remaster last night and it 100% works As this game uses the same file system as Rome and Rome Remastered, would this work in those games? I'm tired of cavalry just straight up beating my spearmen
Great video! Maybe I’ll try it out for myself. Could you possibly do a video on Gothic Knights? Pixelated Apollo did a video a number of years back proving that both Mounted and Dismounted Gothic Knights had a 2-handed sword glitch. Is that fixable with modding?
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH Thank you kind sir. Just an update: I play a mod called "Total Vanilla Beyond". It basically adds alot of the Kingdoms expansion units and mechanics to the Vanilla campaign. I did a custom battle, HRE mounted and dismounted Gothic Knights vs French mounted and dismounted Chivalric Knights, some of the best units in the game. The Gothic Knights won, as they are supposed to. I think the glitch was fixed in Kingdoms but not base Vanilla, like when Pixelated Apollo made his video on this. Here is the video if you want to see for yourself: th-cam.com/video/J5NxBzWKdmY/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=PixelatedApollo
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH Update: beautiful modding, works like a charm. Changed all pikemen units, even the militias. Interestingly I didn't change Swiss Guards because the files say they wield axes, not spears/pikes. I'm not sure historically if two-handed axemen have to hold a formation like pikemen, or use their axes more like swords. This could go for halberds too.
It's not so much a glitch more that their stats suck compared to DFK, DCK etc. Game had a bug which caused shields to be ignored, they patched it but never rebalanced the game. So pretty much any unit without a shield sucks.
You do a cracking impression of an American! Jokes aside, I've been hooked playing as Spain and I didn't even know this was a thing. One thing I've always found interesting about medieval 2 is that I knew this game had a ton of bugs, but the sheer amount and the amount of gameplay mechanics affected were way higher than i ever expected.
tried it and it makes the pikes unbalanced in my opinion especially so in the BOTET mod (suffers from the same problem in vanilla), is it better to try tweaking the unit values and secondary weapon values or just tweak the unit's stats?
The solution in this video is the best, if you dont like the fact that the pikes just munch through people that easily you can reduce their damage. Seems like Creative assembly at that moment overcompensated them for their clunky secondary weapon swapping with increased damage. Some pikes are insane like the Swiss pikemen with such high attack value. I have seen units losing all their models inn seconds vs Tercio Pikemen with this fix. Only way to make combat slower is reduce the damage of pikes at least by half. Third age mod and submods use a lot of Pikement in many factions and they balanced them by giving them 3-7 damage instead of the vanilla 9-14 damage. They are still crazy strong but at least they wont kill everything in seconds now, specially armoured troops. Then AI loves to make the suicide command in Med2, where you tell your troops to walk up to the enemy formation, good if you are fighting crap iunits, but terrible vs Pikes.
Hey, at least they're still better than Empire: Total War pikemen, who are outright disallowed from attacking with the polearm under any circumstance. IF a horse doesn't run onto the pike, it can't attack.
Doing this and modifying the projectile file so that arrows and bolts have a maximum angle of 45 degrees are essential IMO to make the game good. It doesn't really make pikes that OP. Either you leave them on guard mode, in which case, while they will beat anything that charges them from the front, it will take forever, as they will very rarely play the attack animation, instead just holding their 3 rank formation and not letting the enemy get close. Or, you turn off guard mode and send them forward, in which case they will probably win, but will take pretty significant casualties against good melee infantry as they slip past the pike points. Basically, pikes tend to have pretty low attack and defence stats, meaning it usually takes them a while to kill anything that isn't cavalry. Oh, and they'll get wrecked by missiles.
Hi , i tried with changing all pike sec to no, no, no, no, no same as you, but they are still pulling their swords, do anyone how this can be? im using steam version, i have unpacked files according to instructions from unpacking video.
but if you used no swords, only pikes, then any cavalry flanking them will get slaughtered due to the ... uh... middle staff of the pikes ... and the fact that they keep the spear_bonus
They really need to do some major recoding for many problem units if they ever want to remaster medieval 2 and make it good. The game needs more than just up scaled graphics
One small question I have, since the video is recent enough: where the heck do I find the file on my mac? I have been looking for it forever and can’t find the one about unit stats
Mac versions of the game are different I believe and I'm afraid I know little of the differences from my own experiences. Total War Centre, Steam or (maybe even) Reddit should have some more information on how the files differ for MAC. Good luck!
Hi, great job ! does this fix works with dlcs as well ? i was playing americas and my pike militia didn't use its pikes... i alredy checked the unit_descr file and the only read flag. am i missing something ?
How do these landsknechts do on the walls though? Since that is where all pikes start with their swords out. Depending on how the unit reacts to having enemy soldiers within their ranks this could be even more overpowered (multiple spears hitting any soldiers climbing over the ramparts) or be a disaster (the pikes dying instantly with their low defence).
I don't know about vanilla, but I have seen some mods (many of which use this pike "fix") in which the pike units can be very effective on walls. They seem to be better positioned not directly in front of the enemy towers/ladders, but rather next to them so the enemy is all facing them from one direction. They can hold very well like that.
@@blakeprocter5818 Yeah pike are op on walls with the deleted secondary weapon. I tried to 1vs1 pikemen, feudal knight on a wall, they melted my brave knights
A very good point! Pikes on the walls are brutal and especially so if as defender you can mobilise in the right spot. In theory the battles become about being mobile and out foxing the pikes on the walls. If as an attacker you get your pikes on the walls then it's an even game. Certainly changes the dynamic but realistically, there's no reason why you wouldn't use pikes on the walls.
And I guess you could make the secondary weapon a shorter spear but then that comes back to the original problem on the battlefield. I tend to avoid wall battles or try to out manoeuvre when attacking in a siege so I guess for me I am pretty happy with the compromise. That may not be the case for others. Especially if you are competitive battlers.
Hey, I tried this applying it to every unit that can perform the Phalanx action - but it seems that pikemen still switch to their swords? Thy thoughts?
I did everything like in the video,but pikemen still use sword and suck...Even when I changed weapon on another pike or copied "strat sec" from troops,using only one weapon - it all didn't work.
Have you fixed the preference file as I did in my basic modding video (linked the description)? Medieval II will essentially revert files back to the original version until you make a couple changes in there. That may be what it is.
Is there a way to get 3 rows of pikes? maybe this is the best solution bec in rome 2 they have this 3 rows and the cheapest pikes can easily hold against the best unit
i think your talking about how to get the first 3 rows of pikemen to lift their pikes, instead of just the front row right? all you have to do is click the defend stance or hold your ground stance, whatever its called... To Nerd is to Human probably thought u want your pikemen to automaticaly start in 3 rows instead of 8
I have done according to what is shown in the video but Tercio Pikemen still always switches to the secondary weapon every time, is this only can work with Landsknecht? Or do you need also issue attack order to make them stay using their Pike?
you need to mod every pikemen entry, here he only mod the landschknecht, if you want to have this results with a tercio you need to mod the tercio entry, also, don't forget to make a backup.
Great video! I’m just wondering how I can make this work across all version of total war? For example I was playing the Crusade and Teutonic version of the game and the changes don’t work on those ones. It’s only works on the original Med2
Good point! Each of the Kingdom expansions have their own version of the export_descr_unit file so you need to go into the mods folder and then open whichever DLC you want to edit. From there (assuming you have unpacked the files) it is the same as in the video here!
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH hummm....I’m having a little bit of a difficulty unpacking the kingdoms mods (I’m not sure I’m doing it right) I’ve put the “unpack_teutonic.bat” and the “unpacker” into the tools files and then tried to unpack from there. But doesn’t seem to work.
I just downloaded Stainless Steel mod and the pikes are broken. How do i fix it? The pikemen just raise their pikes and only lowers them when in melee so they take lots of damage when charged.
That depends on if the mod uses the base files or has its own version of a file. Best check if SS has the file you are changing (in this case it almost certainly will) - if it does then you can change the original version fine but if SS doesn't have its own version then when you play SS it would revert back to the original. Hope that makes sense.
I'm not an online player so I'm not sure how it works exactly. Presumably it is possible as the game reads the files from somewhere, whether it would be the host's files or both that would need to match I really don't know. Perhaps a little online battle research is needed!
I'm kind of confused...I did the txt edit exactly like you did and applied it to all the pikemen, saved the txt...and my idiot pikemen STILL draw their short swords and line up to die. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, I'd really loved to play the Scots.
It sounds like you need to edit the preference file. Here's my guide for that. th-cam.com/video/CyIfPqoxvj8/w-d-xo.html It can be fiddly but you should find solves the problem. As for the scots. They are really badly affected by this bug sadly. Well worth a new playthrough once this is enacted. :)
They do hold a bit better but units kill virtually nobody when in guard mode. Guard mode is simply designed to hold a position for as long as possible.
Medieval 2 was the _nefred_ version??? How bad was it in Rome then? Even without the micro-management, you can put down 2 stretched out lines behind each other. 1st takes the brunt force of the charge and switches to side-arms, while 2nd line keeps their pikes down and slowly pushes the enemy back until the 1st line has enough breathing room to pick up their pikes again. For holes in the city wall it is the same, but with 4 units in a 𝕍 formation. Completely OP!
It didn’t seem to work for pike militia. Does it only work for specific pike units such as Spanish Tercios? Edit: I tried editing it and it didn’t work, so I might have done something wrong Edit 2: Can weapon upgrades override their removal?
What I dont get is. The coding was done right in rome total war 1. Somehow they forgot how to do it and did not bother to study how it was done in rtw1.
@@balintnemes6774compared to spearmen, feudal foot knights yes! and they should be, during this time period everyone started using pikes and nothing could withstand the march of pike formations in melee combat in the game you can counter them easily with archer since they usually have low armor and no shields of course, and you can flank them with cavalry, even light cavalry will rek them with a flank charge
Ok, wow, great. So I would only need to change EVERY. SINGLE. PIKE unit in the game for it to work like this, but that's not my primary complaint, balance is a problem now. You just destroyed a full late game unit that costs waaay more + with bigger upkeep with some cheap pikes...
For whatever reason this fix didn’t work for me unfortunately. I love playing as Scotland because of the several different pike units. I applied this to all the Scottish pikemen, and they still switch to swords. Seems strange since the modified file lists no weapon for their secondary, yet they still switch.
@@efsanemuhendis So, I think I figured it out, (th-cam.com/video/CyIfPqoxvj8/w-d-xo.html) follow the guide he posted here then it works, believe me I had the same issue
![Unlocking Cut Content - Recruitable generals, mounted longbows & wagons [How to Guide - Medieval II]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/O02BMiN00LQ/mqdefault.jpg)
![Unlocking Cut Content - Recruitable generals, mounted longbows & wagons [How to Guide - Medieval II]](/img/tr.png)
You Foooool! With this that Scottish rabble might finally be able to take Inverness before the game ends! ;)
😂 'might'
Scots never take Inverness because the steam version of the game is broken. CA merged kingdoms into the base game on Steam a few years back but never reclibrated the AI. Kingdoms uses a different autoresolve algorithm that takes walls into account much more than the original game did. Problem is the AI in the grand campaign doesn't know this and sends underpowered armies to besiege settlements and more often than not fails. You can turn off the new autoresolve in the game files and the AI expands properly after that.
@@stephenjones9840 so you're saying I should import some files from the disks?
@@stephenjones9840 You Clearly Haven't Seen The Fix For That This Man (The One That Made The Video) Made.
Lol you're the best 👍😂
EXCELLENT. I have needed this tutorial for 15 years!
Happy to help!
Haha same. Just reinstalled and fixed the bugs. Cheers!
You should offer a mod which contains stuff like this and the diplomacy bug fix, basically fixing as much as stuff as possible without really changing the game.
+1
@@slendertroll92 +2
+3
@@zigua +4
+5
Oh the glorious phallanx. How we have missed you!
They are beautiful.
Having watched so many medieval history videos in the past couple of years it didn't look out of place for a unit of full-plate knights to close with the pikemen and have-to, but I agree that your end result was pretty much how I feel pikes should fit into Medieval 2 TW gameplay-wise. Thank you for your guides, I will be picking bits from them when I eventually play another campaign! Offie
Cheers! yeah it feels more correct to me. Pikes have huge inherent weaknesses to missiles and flanking so I think it is fair for them to hold off the charge of swordsmen.
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH have you tried to see how this works with a flank or rear charge against the pikeman? if the pikeman cannot physically use their secondary, wouldnt they just wheel around after the initial charge and likewise slaughter their opponents by using their pikes? invalidating their main weakness too?
Captain: -All right lads, you're all to attach your swords so I'm taking 'em until you learn how to properly win fights.
Pikemen: -But Siiiiir.... :(
Captain: -No buts soldier, now use your pike as God will's it.
Spot on!
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH wait so do they become useless should they be flanked?
@@tylerwhaley4872 they were useless to begin with. All I see is improvements.
@@Volucrum what
Do let me know what other little fixes you are hoping to find! We will be making use of these pikes in our Papal Campaign!
2:40 Halt, Attack! Tower Project's Solution
3:58 Modding the unit files
5:13 Modding unit density, spacing and ranks
7:06 Testing...
8:22 The best solution (only pikes)
9:34 Success!
Cheers for the time stamps! Looking forward to this.
Milan's crossbowmen. Im sorry but these units are so absurdly spammable and good at their role that it seriously causes game ending issues at times.
Pikes work against pretty much any unit without a shield as the game was balanced around this. Shielded heavy infantry like DFK are the problem not pikes. Send DEK on a frontal assault against pikes in guard mode, pikes win every time.
Pikes work if you do a blobb of Pikemen. Sadly AI can't do that.
As a german it’s delightful to hear you try pronouncing Landsknecht
By delightful I assume you mean 'perfect' right!?!
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH of course
In the game files they called "Landschneckt" Who did this mess😅
Landsknecht - Landschneckt
Muss wohl ein Witzbold gewesen sein
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH You are my hero
Wanted to play the Phalanx and now i can
You are the hero we need in these times.
Danke!
I did something similar four years ago when modding M2TW. This is what I love about these old games; they're so moddable!
I think that if you put them on guard mode that also fixes their behaviour. Adding fire by rank to gun units as an ability instead of only doing it when in skirmish mode would be neat
@Dreymon Green that's intended but they work better they're not supposed to beat Chivalric knights but they trade well.
I recently found a video by by Kenry Kuo 'Medieval II: Total war (improved pikemen efficiency without removing swords)' suggested a pretty interesting fix where you don’t need to make pikes OP by removing their swords. I wondered if you would like to try it. Seems to work for him:
1. Find the "export_descr_unit.txt" in your "data" folder.
2. Find pikemen units and change the entry "formation" from "square, phalanx" to "phalanx, square". For example, change the "formation 0.8, 1.8, 2.4, 2.4, 4, square, phalanx" to "formation 0.8, 1.8, 2.4, 2.4, 4, phalanx, square" 3. Save and exit, done. Remember to make your game read the files first or the changes will not be applied.
Doesn't seem to work for me
How do i make the game read the files first
@@mandiocatostada3859 In medieval2.preference (which should be in the same folder as the .exe), add
[io]
file_first = true
to the end of the file.
@@derkylos thank you
@@derkylos Add to what? There is only 2 BAT files
Pokey pokey, stabby stabby
Knife goes in, guts come out.
After watching this I have now made piles completely broken as they all no longer have a secondary weapon. Highland pikemen can defeat English dismounted knights with ease in a 1v1 which is how pikes always should be
Creative assembly was just trying to give the Brits a chance
@@Volucrum they had their chance it’s a Scottish world now
Well, not ! Pikes generally cant pierce plate armor , they are good for keeping distance , not killing heavyknights
@@behemottor I tested it out as long as what their fighting is in front of the pikes they win every time
@@olivemalteser 😆
I tried the remove sec weapons fix and god, this makes pikes into a uber tier unit, they melt everything in a 1v1, and can even be used in walls, for anyone that wants to try this fix, be very careful about the removal of seconary weapons.
The solution I've seen mods use is to lower the stats of each pike unit to a more balanced state. Not the best solution as pikes on paper end up looking trash but it is a solution.
So basically just as overpowered as phalanxes were in Rome, except that now they also use their pikes on walls too
@@Luke-tt3dt Pikes were never OP in RTW. You had to flank them or whittle them with missiles, that worked perfectly. The sole problem with phalangite syntagmas in RTW was that they could magically turn and wheel around while still keeping the spears leveled, when in reality they should have to raise them, re-orient, then drop them again, all while taking casualties.
I can’t get it to work unfortunately
Yah same here. Are you using steam?@@cesarmillan5657
To anyone worrying about the balance of such an extreme change, this still balances quite well. Pikes are still extremely vulnerable to archer fire, and flanking with cav will still melt them. This isn't an issue of making a decent unit op but more a situation of making a useless unit viable. The whole point of pike units is to decimate anything that approaches from the front, and disabling their secondary sword achieves this perfectly. They are a one-trick pony; they should at least be able to do their one thing.
I’ve played multiple PvP games and pikes win me half of them. You see, pikes have one job: stop enemy cavalry so they don’t slaughter your heavy infantry and archers. In my old clan (GEN) we have this top player, none of us could beet him. One day I manage to bring a new formation using pikes and with it I slaughter him. Pikes are strong if you know how to use them, especially on multiplayer, against the IA you can do whatever you want and win anyway.
hell the fck no, with no stats changes and secondary weapons gone they are so op, its why all mods lower their damage to like half, bcs of their insane attack speed, either dmg or att spd or both have to go down, flanking doesnt work that well, and archers cant be their only weakness
@@Noximillien-LHorloger if you stack them with heavy infantry they are super strong. No need for mods in my opinion.
Pikes historically suffer from poor mobility and missiles. So it transfers to game anyway. You can get shot or flanked since pikes take 3 business days to change formation.
This makes pike units too OP for their price. Even the most basic pike units that cities can pump out with minimal recruiting cost can win against even the most heavily armored infantries from the late era (as has been demonstrated by this video as well). Even considering pike units' weakness against archers they're too powerful for their price. Once I remove their secondary weapons, I really don't need to recruit any other types of infantries in MW2. My archers can deal with enemy archers anyway. This is why although I've Known this tweak for many years, was reluctant to use it.
I guess I could remove pike units' secondary weapon, and then also increase their unit price to be comparable to their respective era's heavy infantry units. Certainly hurts the immersion, but I do agree this is better than an entire class of pike unit being more or less useless unless in very limited situations, like guarding castle gates.
You could also tweak their pike stats in that file, making them have an effect of halting the enemy but not outright roflstomping. Although, I think this is pretty realistic, there’s a reason most European armies by 16th century were 90% pike and shot. Dutch, Spanish, HRE, and the list goes on. Real life knights would probably last longer but then again charging into pikes with a one handed sword which was a side arm would be equivalent to a modern army advancing on entrenched machineguns with nothing but pistols. Knights never fought like that.
It's almost like that's the historical basis for pike and shot warfare 🤔
If they ever remaster Medieval 2 they need to do more than a graphical update. They actually have to rework the coding of many of their problem units. Make it so entire Pikemen formations no longer swap out their pike to their sidearm once the enemy gets past the first row pike head. Instead make it more like RTW where its only the particular first rank pikeman swaps to his sword this allows the pikemen in ranks behind him to move up and use their pikes.
Also they need to fix the animation of two handed and halberd units so they no longer get stuck on animation loops that causes them get flinched out by sword and board units.
Sword and board units especially the dismounted feudal knights need to get toned down so they no longer dominate heavily armoured elite two handed units they should be losing to.
thanks this is alot more historical and it will actally makes pikes feared
Absolutely!
That's amazing, that also makes them that much more terrifying to face
Teach us how to fix the two handed bug
Pikes do work in this game, the issue is that when the game launched it had a bug where the shield stat was the only stopping missile attacks not melee. Basically the entire game is balance around this bug. They fixed the bug but never rebalanced the game. Attack values across the board are too low to deal with most infantry. This really effects pikes as they can't do enough damage to shielded units to keep them at bay and their formation ends up collapsing. Pikes work as intended against 2 handed units like DEK and Norse axemen.
If shield would not stop melee attacks every single unit would melt against Dismounted English, Portugeese and Noble Knights. I dont see any balance in there.
I disagree. You can get pikes to work, but it requires significant micro that is basically absurd given the unit should work better and do what they're intended to without you having to micro the heck out of them. The problem is quite simple, they move to swords too quickly, and when one unit has moved to sword, they all follow suit like a virus, despite that those in the rear can still use the pikes.
@@TemenosL yes but this issue of the dropping of the pikes is because the defense stat is to high of the sword and shield units. The whole melee balance of the game is balanced around a shield defense of 0. That's why you get wierdness like dismounted gothic knights getting destroyed by dismounted feudal knights.
@stephenjones9840 This is an interesting point. Do you know how the shields should be debuffed or attack values rebalanced to fix this? Do you have more info on this? I'd be curious to know.
@@LibertarianGearhead I would reduce the melee defence stat by about 3 points on any shield units with a 6 shield stat (adjust accordingly for units with a 3 or 4 shield stat) shield of all shield units (incl cav) in the game and potentially consider boosting the melee attack of non shield units by 1 or 2.
the real issue is simply that the range at which they switch to secondary is too long, so they drop their pikes too early
I wonder if that can be edited somehow and retain the short sword when the pikes are penetrated
They also do not switch back to pikes quickly enough. All of this worked fine in RTW. Pikemen were dangerous in the direction they were pointing, as they should be, but also didn't generally kill SUPER-fast, as they shouldn't, but flanks and rear were very vulnerable and they had to pull secondary weapons to defend themselves.
Maybe its better if their damage is reduced by 1 point and they have no swords. because real humans wouldnt charge directly at a pike formation from the front so it makes sense for them to deal slightly less damage, and have a bit more defence to pin down the enemy in their place
@@bernard3303Horses are nearer to dont do It that humans.
have you tried to see how this works with a flank or rear charge against the pikeman? if the pikeman cannot physically use their secondary, wouldnt they just wheel around after the initial charge and likewise slaughter their opponents by using their pikes? invalidating their main weakness too?
yeah pike squares existed that's why they were way superior to phalanxes, they aren't weak on the flanks.
@@lolasdm6959 If they are in a non moving square and trained as such, sure, but a line of pikemen are vulnerable to the sides and back. ask the romans, or even the french during the italian wars when pikes where pinned at the front by other pikes.
If they had a sheildtron like staric formation I would agree, but if they are in a normal formation, id say the backs and sides are pretty vulnerable.
@@midshipman8654 Pike squares are not static....... They can charge.......
Mecadonian phalanxes and the Greek hoplite formations were the most powerful on the charge, unlike depicted in video games and many other popular media.
Look at battle descriptions of the Boeotian war... The Thebans broke the Spartans with a charge.
Look at the second Mecadonian war, the Roman Hastati were decimated by the Mecadonian charge, the Sarissa often punch right into their light shields. Greeks had bronze shields for this reason.
If you look at the Brungundian wars, a couple Swiss pikes usually destory anything infront of them, by charging.
This is why the sheildtron is the weakest of all polearm formations and never took off. It's static.... Mobile warfare is always king.
One of the reasons why Alexander's armies fared better than the Successor kingdoms against the Romans was that they wear significantly lighter armor, and thus were less mobile. The Romans would have struggled way more against Alexander's men because competent commanders understand the importance of flexibility.
Also pike squares aren't homogeous formations, they are a composite formation including shorter polearms like poleaxes, helberds, sword and buckler, etc. Usually work together with archers, crossbowmen and gunners so they practically can fight anything except artillery.
Well this is mediveal 2 not rome total war so if pikes aren't flankable it would actually make sense. The game is very limited in depictions of realistic warfare. Like if you know about napleonic war history, the horse archers empolyed by Russia were poorly trained and usually do no damage because they were disorganized and shoot arrows in an arch.... Actual trained military shoot straight, otherwise you can't hurt people. But in total war, you kill people with arching shots lmao. Or that most formations espeacially in mediveal times were mixed. But it's not something the game can even depict.
@@lolasdm6959 pretty sure alexanders pikes had spearmen at either side because the pikes where unwieldy. they could advance fine, push through pretty much anything, but they were susceptible to envelopment and flanking if given the chance.
Thats how the romans won out.
Great fix to add in the game. An issue I found though, is when they are on walls, they'd still be this deadly lmao. Kinda makes it unrealistic in that situation (how they'd still be able to use long spears on narrow walls), but I guess it makes it more challenging to do sieges.
I wouldn't see why you wouldn't be able to use a spear on the wall. The spearmen are doing it.
spikes were used on walls
I suggest make your formation wider only three ranks deep since the 4th rank is useless as hell, your main problem was units on your formation's flanks since they charged at a wider formation :)
Imo its better to have 4 ranks however as when someone dies he gets replaced by someone from the back rows
Take away their swords and they actually work? God damn
It is a beautiful thing!
that would really make the scottish mean. And make billmen actually an acceptable purchase!
Absolutely! Love billmen. Well the game is hard on Scotland as their best troops were so cruelly underpowered.
The stainless steel mod basically makes them one of the most busted factions to play. they get heavy pikem for basic city units. sure their range options suck outside of noble archers but who cares when you can laugh off charges in the narrow streets?
I came here from Tower Projects video, some left a comment about lowering secondary weapon numbers and I'm all for it.
I know it's a long time since you worked on this, but I really appreciate this tutorial. This what I did to balance it a bit to stop the pikemen being terminators with pokey sticks haha.
First I halved their attack (rounding up if originally it was an odd number)
Then I added a line: move_speed_mod: 0.70 to reduce their speed (Be careful with this one, it needs to go between the attribute and formation line. Additionally it only works for kingdoms.exe)
This meant that in many examples, while the pikemen were formidable from the front they a) didn't kill the enemy so quickly but did hold them and B) could be easily out maneuvered. Plus in a siege where I had 3 crossbow men and one spearmen unit, I was able to hold off four pikemen sufficiently. I did win when I controlled the pikemen in the previous battle I mentioned, but I won by the skin of my teeth and mostly due to AI stupidity which is a lot harder to fix.
Four Armoured swordsmen defending struggled more in a siege (They would definitely lose attacking), but I think that's a small price to pay for this great fix with actually making pikemen and interesting unit to play with. Plus it actually makes Scotland's USP an actual USP rather than a sick joke for any anyone who plays them. 😂
Wait, has no one ever tried putting them in guard mode? Bc when you do, they go into this real cool looking formation of three lines of pikes down, and so long as they aren’t hit at the flanks, it is effective against units of similar value. And to get them to push into the enemy with pikes down, you simply take them out of guard mode and they’ll do it themselves. This is in the base game btw.
Guard mode is good against charges, but they don't attack with the pikes the way the do in normal mode. It also doesn't stop them from abandoning pikes to draw swords, so it doesn't really solve the problem.
@@SocratesOnFire7 it does for me, idk what to tell you. On my end, doing what he says to do just doesn’t work for me, and doing what he says not to do does work :/
Pikes don’t keep thrusting like they did in Rome 1; it’s two stabs at best and they switch to swords-even if overlapped with another unit.
Guard + spear wall basically makes them create a barrier, not fight. It's great against resisting cavalry, but pikes should be able to go on the offensive without touching defensive stance.
There's actually a much easier way of making Pikemen viable without backspace+attack or modding the game.
What you do is to take two units of pikes which you place one behind another. Their lines should be in ranks of 2-4, that way the pikes of one unit will overlap and attack at the same time as the pikes of a first unit. Once the pikemen are placed like this they should be grouped together to keep the formation. A bit of micromanagement is necessary with this tactic, but it really allows pikes to shine and punch above their own weight. In order to keep the pikemen attacking with their pikes, it'll be necessary to take them in and out of spearwall, then ordering them to attack. Doing this, the pikemen will keep attacking with their pikes rather than their swords and will have a great morale impact.
Using this tactic, enemy units - effectively having two units attacking it them the same time - will rout MUCH faster. These very large blocks of pikemen will also, as they're effectively two units in one, do tons of more damage. In terms of cost, it's pretty easy to get pikemen to take out units that are very mch so more expensive. Because you've got a unit that's also covering another's back, I theorise that pikemen deployed like this also have much higher morale as a consequence.
The biggest downside to all of this though is that you can't really have very many blocks of pikemen in your army. As you're using two units to create one unit, it's very easy to have pikemen taking up the absolute brunt of your army. As pikemen employed like this are really, REALLY good it's not necessarily something that will make you lose. It can, however, be quite risky as it might preclude you from getting a lot of other units. A good way of mitigating this is having maybe 2-3 blocks of pikemen backed up by Feudal Knights or better melee units. Pikemen don't have any shields in medieval 2 so they're more easily damaged by archers. Best way to counteract this is to cover your pikemen with light cav or archers/gunners of your own.
Pikemen can also be a bit janky on the attack, when order to attack and marching to their opponant the "company" of pikemen will usually break formation and approach as two blocks instead of one. This can be avoided by clicking in front of or behind the enemy unit when marching toward it, if your pikes are within charging distance of the enemy and ordered to attack they'll keep the formation.
All of this is based on my own experience using this tactic, as well as this post that I got the tactic from: medieval2.heavengames.com/m2tw/strategy/battle/steelandpike/
Good stuff! Now the real question is... How to fix GUNS in medieval 2. Clunkiest things you will find, if only the units bothered to fire their weapons in a regular basis...
Guns are crazily powerful as they ignore all shields and defence skill. The issue is the weird firing mechanics and skirmish mode which cause chaos. That is certainly something that needs fixing.
guns are awesome! literally, a guns only army can do suprisingly well vs heavy opponents
Make sure skirmish is always enabled on your firearms. They will shoot.
@@trolltalwar basically, deleting starting_not_skirmish?
@@hakurou8960 why you telling me tell the op
*UPDATE* Good news! I tested this on the Rome Remaster last night and it 100% works
As this game uses the same file system as Rome and Rome Remastered, would this work in those games? I'm tired of cavalry just straight up beating my spearmen
Great video! Maybe I’ll try it out for myself. Could you possibly do a video on Gothic Knights? Pixelated Apollo did a video a number of years back proving that both Mounted and Dismounted Gothic Knights had a 2-handed sword glitch. Is that fixable with modding?
I will have to look into that issue as I don't know much about it myself. Certainly if I find a way of solving it then I will make a video on it.
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH Thank you kind sir. Just an update: I play a mod called "Total Vanilla Beyond". It basically adds alot of the Kingdoms expansion units and mechanics to the Vanilla campaign. I did a custom battle, HRE mounted and dismounted Gothic Knights vs French mounted and dismounted Chivalric Knights, some of the best units in the game. The Gothic Knights won, as they are supposed to. I think the glitch was fixed in Kingdoms but not base Vanilla, like when Pixelated Apollo made his video on this. Here is the video if you want to see for yourself: th-cam.com/video/J5NxBzWKdmY/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=PixelatedApollo
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH Update: beautiful modding, works like a charm. Changed all pikemen units, even the militias. Interestingly I didn't change Swiss Guards because the files say they wield axes, not spears/pikes. I'm not sure historically if two-handed axemen have to hold a formation like pikemen, or use their axes more like swords. This could go for halberds too.
It's not so much a glitch more that their stats suck compared to DFK, DCK etc. Game had a bug which caused shields to be ignored, they patched it but never rebalanced the game. So pretty much any unit without a shield sucks.
@@stephenjones9840 You’re right but they fixed it in Kingdoms. It’s just the vanilla campaign that seems to have this problem.
You do a cracking impression of an American! Jokes aside, I've been hooked playing as Spain and I didn't even know this was a thing. One thing I've always found interesting about medieval 2 is that I knew this game had a ton of bugs, but the sheer amount and the amount of gameplay mechanics affected were way higher than i ever expected.
Help! the fix not give solutions, my pike units are using the swords ):
11:22 lol that poor French general. He got stabbed like 80 times by that pikeman
tried it and it makes the pikes unbalanced in my opinion especially so in the BOTET mod (suffers from the same problem in vanilla), is it better to try tweaking the unit values and secondary weapon values or just tweak the unit's stats?
The solution in this video is the best, if you dont like the fact that the pikes just munch through people that easily you can reduce their damage. Seems like Creative assembly at that moment overcompensated them for their clunky secondary weapon swapping with increased damage. Some pikes are insane like the Swiss pikemen with such high attack value. I have seen units losing all their models inn seconds vs Tercio Pikemen with this fix. Only way to make combat slower is reduce the damage of pikes at least by half. Third age mod and submods use a lot of Pikement in many factions and they balanced them by giving them 3-7 damage instead of the vanilla 9-14 damage. They are still crazy strong but at least they wont kill everything in seconds now, specially armoured troops. Then AI loves to make the suicide command in Med2, where you tell your troops to walk up to the enemy formation, good if you are fighting crap iunits, but terrible vs Pikes.
"Landschneckt Pikemen"
"Landschneckt"
"schneckt"
O_o
"Mmm, no. No no no." the most British modding solution possible
Did you ever consider fixing the two handed weapon bug, friend?
How do you fix 2-handed weapons being too slow to attack and constantly staggered?
Turning on guard mode also helps
So you do that on every pikeman ?? (same as you do musketeer one on arqbusiers etc ... ?? )
Would you ever consider making a overhaul of quality of life changes for vanilla such as this one?
Hey, at least they're still better than Empire: Total War pikemen, who are outright disallowed from attacking with the polearm under any circumstance. IF a horse doesn't run onto the pike, it can't attack.
Doing this and modifying the projectile file so that arrows and bolts have a maximum angle of 45 degrees are essential IMO to make the game good.
It doesn't really make pikes that OP. Either you leave them on guard mode, in which case, while they will beat anything that charges them from the front, it will take forever, as they will very rarely play the attack animation, instead just holding their 3 rank formation and not letting the enemy get close. Or, you turn off guard mode and send them forward, in which case they will probably win, but will take pretty significant casualties against good melee infantry as they slip past the pike points.
Basically, pikes tend to have pretty low attack and defence stats, meaning it usually takes them a while to kill anything that isn't cavalry.
Oh, and they'll get wrecked by missiles.
I dont understand why CA doesnt hire this guy for much better playable Total War and leaving us a lovely game but tons of errors and bugs.
We all love a janky buggy version of our favourite game 😅
Simple. They do not give a shite 😂
Hi , i tried with changing all pike sec to no, no, no, no, no same as you, but they are still pulling their swords, do anyone how this can be? im using steam version, i have unpacked files according to instructions from unpacking video.
I also have the same problem have you managed to find a way ?
this is a reason why jannissary was so strong. no swords so they keep fighting with their longarms
but if you used no swords, only pikes, then any cavalry flanking them will get slaughtered due to the ... uh... middle staff of the pikes ... and the fact that they keep the spear_bonus
I did everything as explained in the video, but when I enter the game the pikemen still have swords and their pikes break😢
Me too
Did you solve this problem? Please tell me
Yup same here
it works perfectly. I only disabled the secondary weapon didn't even change the formation things and now pikemen can destroy any unit on a 1v1
Perfecto! :D
I like your solution better. Thank you!!
its kinda accurate because i believe pikemen are just peadents with pikes
They really need to do some major recoding for many problem units if they ever want to remaster medieval 2 and make it good. The game needs more than just up scaled graphics
One small question I have, since the video is recent enough: where the heck do I find the file on my mac? I have been looking for it forever and can’t find the one about unit stats
Mac versions of the game are different I believe and I'm afraid I know little of the differences from my own experiences. Total War Centre, Steam or (maybe even) Reddit should have some more information on how the files differ for MAC. Good luck!
Hi, great job ! does this fix works with dlcs as well ? i was playing americas and my pike militia didn't use its pikes... i alredy checked the unit_descr file and the only read flag. am i missing something ?
But what about 2 handed units like gothic knights or heavy janissary inf. ?
I've planned to get to them at some point :)
wow awesome tutorial thanks man
Thank you for the comment! :)
What happens when the modded pikemen get up on a wall though? Are they never able to switch to their swords at all, and do pikes work on castle walls?
if you removed the sword, the pikeman uses the pike on the wall, which makes it an uber tier unit for defending them
Could you do a video like this one, but with the two handed units?
I shall! It's on the list, just not sure when right now!
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH Still waiting
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH I hope this will fix :)
Loved the vid.
Danke!
Fantastic! Thank you, TNH!
Glad you enjoyed it!
How do these landsknechts do on the walls though? Since that is where all pikes start with their swords out.
Depending on how the unit reacts to having enemy soldiers within their ranks this could be even more overpowered (multiple spears hitting any soldiers climbing over the ramparts) or be a disaster (the pikes dying instantly with their low defence).
I don't know about vanilla, but I have seen some mods (many of which use this pike "fix") in which the pike units can be very effective on walls. They seem to be better positioned not directly in front of the enemy towers/ladders, but rather next to them so the enemy is all facing them from one direction. They can hold very well like that.
@@blakeprocter5818 Yeah pike are op on walls with the deleted secondary weapon. I tried to 1vs1 pikemen, feudal knight on a wall, they melted my brave knights
A very good point! Pikes on the walls are brutal and especially so if as defender you can mobilise in the right spot.
In theory the battles become about being mobile and out foxing the pikes on the walls. If as an attacker you get your pikes on the walls then it's an even game. Certainly changes the dynamic but realistically, there's no reason why you wouldn't use pikes on the walls.
And I guess you could make the secondary weapon a shorter spear but then that comes back to the original problem on the battlefield. I tend to avoid wall battles or try to out manoeuvre when attacking in a siege so I guess for me I am pretty happy with the compromise. That may not be the case for others. Especially if you are competitive battlers.
I wonder if that is the reason pikes couldn't attack walls in vanilla empire tw 🤔
Hey, I tried this applying it to every unit that can perform the Phalanx action - but it seems that pikemen still switch to their swords? Thy thoughts?
This is also happening to me, I did everything as his Modding video said, but the problem persisted
I did everything like in the video,but pikemen still use sword and suck...Even when I changed weapon on another pike or copied "strat sec" from troops,using only one weapon - it all didn't work.
Have you fixed the preference file as I did in my basic modding video (linked the description)? Medieval II will essentially revert files back to the original version until you make a couple changes in there. That may be what it is.
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH Thank you very much! I should have watched that video first!
Is there a way to get 3 rows of pikes? maybe this is the best solution bec in rome 2 they have this 3 rows and the cheapest pikes can easily hold against the best unit
Yeahhh. On the 'formation' row in the file it has the number 8. That refers to the default number of ranks. Change that around to 3. 6:18
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH why would 3 rows fight when the number was 8 before and now 3? i dont get it ^^
i think your talking about how to get the first 3 rows of pikemen to lift their pikes, instead of just the front row right? all you have to do is click the defend stance or hold your ground stance, whatever its called... To Nerd is to Human probably thought u want your pikemen to automaticaly start in 3 rows instead of 8
Need help i did same but they still using swords...
I would like to find the game mechanichs fixed, such as, when I get pikemen, other factions keep bringing crappy units from previous century.
It needs a change to the ai patterns as well as maybe some mechanic which replaces the crappy units with new ones
I have done according to what is shown in the video but Tercio Pikemen still always switches to the secondary weapon every time, is this only can work with Landsknecht? Or do you need also issue attack order to make them stay using their Pike?
you need to mod every pikemen entry, here he only mod the landschknecht, if you want to have this results with a tercio you need to mod the tercio entry, also, don't forget to make a backup.
I did this and my pikement still pull swords. What happened?
Great video!
I’m just wondering how I can make this work across all version of total war? For example I was playing the Crusade and Teutonic version of the game and the changes don’t work on those ones. It’s only works on the original Med2
Good point! Each of the Kingdom expansions have their own version of the export_descr_unit file so you need to go into the mods folder and then open whichever DLC you want to edit. From there (assuming you have unpacked the files) it is the same as in the video here!
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH hummm....I’m having a little bit of a difficulty unpacking the kingdoms mods (I’m not sure I’m doing it right) I’ve put the “unpack_teutonic.bat” and the “unpacker” into the tools files and then tried to unpack from there. But doesn’t seem to work.
Excellent! Are halbreds similar?
halberds are weird. Their second weapon are spears... I assume it is meant to be the same weapon used differently. Not sure though! Will look into it.
I can confirm that the pike fix also works for halberds.
I just downloaded Stainless Steel mod and the pikes are broken. How do i fix it? The pikemen just raise their pikes and only lowers them when in melee so they take lots of damage when charged.
Should be much the same choice of fixes except you'd need to find the equivalent file inside the stainless steel mod folder
Are file changes like this going to mess up my stainless steel mod?
That depends on if the mod uses the base files or has its own version of a file. Best check if SS has the file you are changing (in this case it almost certainly will) - if it does then you can change the original version fine but if SS doesn't have its own version then when you play SS it would revert back to the original. Hope that makes sense.
I love that the AI doesn't even see a reason to send the second unit into the battle, as one is enough to defeat two pike units😂
But does removing their secondary weapons work in online battles?
I'm not an online player so I'm not sure how it works exactly. Presumably it is possible as the game reads the files from somewhere, whether it would be the host's files or both that would need to match I really don't know. Perhaps a little online battle research is needed!
@@ToNerdistoHumanTNH if that would work you can make a secret overpowered unit like peasants with a unit of 1000
You both need to have the same checksum i think
So you need both the edited files
I'm kind of confused...I did the txt edit exactly like you did and applied it to all the pikemen, saved the txt...and my idiot pikemen STILL draw their short swords and line up to die. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, I'd really loved to play the Scots.
It sounds like you need to edit the preference file. Here's my guide for that. th-cam.com/video/CyIfPqoxvj8/w-d-xo.html
It can be fiddly but you should find solves the problem.
As for the scots. They are really badly affected by this bug sadly. Well worth a new playthrough once this is enacted. :)
still not working for me am ding everything correct
I have not "export_descr_unit" in my data file. Any can helpme?
Sometimes files appear in your virtual folders...
Amazing! Do you have a file available to download that implements this change for each pike unit?
Do this also exist for empire total war?
Can I change the description unit when my descr_strat is broken for some reason?
They work much better if you turn guard mode on
They do hold a bit better but units kill virtually nobody when in guard mode. Guard mode is simply designed to hold a position for as long as possible.
Medieval 2 was the _nefred_ version??? How bad was it in Rome then?
Even without the micro-management, you can put down 2 stretched out lines behind each other. 1st takes the brunt force of the charge and switches to side-arms, while 2nd line keeps their pikes down and slowly pushes the enemy back until the 1st line has enough breathing room to pick up their pikes again. For holes in the city wall it is the same, but with 4 units in a 𝕍 formation. Completely OP!
It didn’t seem to work for pike militia. Does it only work for specific pike units such as Spanish Tercios?
Edit: I tried editing it and it didn’t work, so I might have done something wrong
Edit 2: Can weapon upgrades override their removal?
What I dont get is. The coding was done right in rome total war 1. Somehow they forgot how to do it and did not bother to study how it was done in rtw1.
Its quite tedious to go through all pike units and fix them. Any chance for a link to an improved file? I'm lazy
I have the improved file but I'm too lazy to upload it
@@misterdoctor8234 In the end I also did it, but now find all pike units a little too strong.
@@balintnemes6774 as they should be, they were too strong in history
@@grimreaper492 too strong for their cost and upkeep.
@@balintnemes6774compared to spearmen, feudal foot knights yes! and they should be, during this time period everyone started using pikes and nothing could withstand the march of pike formations in melee combat
in the game you can counter them easily with archer since they usually have low armor and no shields of course, and you can flank them with cavalry, even light cavalry will rek them with a flank charge
How could I do it on the expansions?
Ok, wow, great. So I would only need to change EVERY. SINGLE. PIKE unit in the game for it to work like this, but that's not my primary complaint, balance is a problem now. You just destroyed a full late game unit that costs waaay more + with bigger upkeep with some cheap pikes...
so do I take the swords from every pikemen in the game (do this for every faction of pikemen)?
The video to unpack the files isn't in the description
You can do this for pikewall halberds as well
Is there any way to do the same editing in the mobile game?
Will this affect normal pikemen? They also have short swords. And if I do this, Can I still play multiplayer?
For whatever reason this fix didn’t work for me unfortunately. I love playing as Scotland because of the several different pike units. I applied this to all the Scottish pikemen, and they still switch to swords. Seems strange since the modified file lists no weapon for their secondary, yet they still switch.
exactly same goes for me. have you managed to find a solution ?
@@efsanemuhendis So, I think I figured it out, (th-cam.com/video/CyIfPqoxvj8/w-d-xo.html) follow the guide he posted here then it works, believe me I had the same issue
there is a file to download with everything already change ??? all pikes working ?
Has anybody tried recruiting mercs in barracks instead of hiring them? I did it in RTW but haven’t tried in M2
How to mod DLCs??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????'
There should be a folder called mods. Inside there you should find the 4 dlc folders.