Brytenwalda: Try to unite Dark Age Britain. An Overhaul based on Radious TW TOB

This overhaul aims to give the player the best possible campaign experience for the TOB era. To do this, I played all the major mods many hours and noted recurring, or not-mentioned problems/ bugs and ways of handling them. The biggest contributions (aside from Rad) are listed on the bottom. The hope is that some day these issue-fixes will continue in the modding community of TOB while others enjoy immersive experiences in Dark Age Britain.

I picked Radious’ TOB as a kind of frame for this mod because the author responds to requests and Radious left much of Vanilla’s eco and campaign alone. This will give players an authentic experience of the Vanilla game without most of its flaws.

Four new, central Features that make TOB & this overhaul worth playing are I) Clever ramping of difficulty to match success, II)Unhappiness and riots/rebels are much more prevalent as in history, III) Corruption is now inescapable as expected in a pre-accounting economy. IV) Lords gain titles, influence and compete (coming feature). All of these add to the early medieval aura of the game.

Good Buildings and effect bundles are the linchpins of a strategy game economy.
The AI has been programmed to spend more on useful construction.
Many building effects are a mix of Radious, Vanilla and revamped buildings. In general, return on investment about 35% larger than Vanilla and the last in the tier buildings deliver special bonuses.
Corruption will chew away at most of this unless you pay careful attention to all the bonuses from buildings, bundles and characters.
Buildings are mostly cheaper in the mod, but hey require more upkeep as they would in any economy based on serf-like labor in a poor security situation.
Buildings that don’t produce some specific goods have upkeep of some kind as it was an age of barter.
After all these factors were added up, the goods or gold output of most buildings are about 20% more than Vanilla before corruption takes it back.
Top-tier buildings produce one or more extra bonuses you will not know about until you have built the preceding level
For example, the top-tier garrison provides a strong cavalry unit instead of another infantry unit which can be useful.

The Round Tower has been replaced by Tower, Signal and Bridge Network (see pic) and now has a main function of increasing movement range rather than providing fame and church income.
Garrisons are historical: quick and cheap to assemble units for defense, but have little ability to slow enemy movement range.

Runestone is now Vikings-only and is a mix of a burial ground, temple and cult field to inspire the most dangerous Viking warriors. I plan to allow players to build them on the grounds of abbeys and monasteries for the reality of it and because Vikings wouldn’t spend 10 years building Christian monastery complexes
Thing has been replaced by a series that goes from Field of gods to Viking Temple. It serves as kind of a law court/moot hill for Vikings
Forges are cheaper and faster to build but provide fewer income bonuses.
All the above are meant to be built in frontier towns where armies will be stationed
Another major change is that all Central City Halls (the primary slot) have added bonuses and larger upkeep. The biggest upgrade goes to the Viking Longphort.
Half of the other buildings have changed effects. Please read them.

While it is fun to play with the "BuildEverything" or "buildmorethings" mods, this is a quick way to mess up the AI build logic. I do not recommend those mods.
The Vanilla creators attempted to create slots for the optimal buildings for each province.
Unfortunately, they gave up early and many cities have limited build options.
I have great increased the number of logical buildings available in cities, but the work will be ongoing.

Radious increased food incomes about 100% over Vanilla.
I started over increased them about 15-25% over Vanilla.
Food will be a struggle in this submod, but that was intended by the devs for many reasons.
Unit food upkeeps have gone up 10% for Hard, 20% for Very Hard and 30% for Legendary to reflect the burden of war on farms and farm manpower.
The food storage buildings have increased utility and all provide slightly increased supplies, replenishment, siege resistance. This includes the granary, arena, tithe barn, souterrain, warehouse and fogou.

I have used my own AI modding experience and studied the best AI mods to include in this mod.
The CAI will build better and be more likely to take aggressive actions vs Vanilla (at least when I play Very hard)

Late game is known for having low food and way too much gold.
A great deal of time has been spent converting building food consumption to gold upkeep in a realistic manner.
Building upkeep is now about 60% gold overall vs 10% in Vanilla. This should free a bit more food for late game armies.

Usurper dilemma and creep is unavoidable and causes greater unhappiness & disloyalty.

On the other side, new building effects are available to counter usurpers and allegiance issues and are more powerful. Moot Hills and the two mints now help with this.

Loyalty will always be an issue with all the cultures and mixed allegiances. However, the game allows one to buy most Lords off. There are more estates to hand out as well.

Character loyalty becomes a major problem at the highest fames levels. However, all characters start with a loyalty of 2 or higher, making new recruitment less of a pain.
You will likely see more usurper revolts, but they are just as easy to put down as in Vanilla.

Siege Machines are 35% stronger and 30% harder to ignite
Boiling Oil: Occurs only once every 4 minutes, making its research have some reward, but not much.
Battles are meant to utilize the enormous TOB siege battle fields. That’s why the separate garrison mod is needed.
Several projectiles have been added and other changes to make sieges more realistic

The most influential mod was "Missiles Reworked" by IG where the main benefit is a new "volley" arrow type that reloads faster and can only fire at a 45^ arch (with less accuracy). This is useful when the archer window to shoot is small is narrow. It also appears to decrease loitering when there are obstructions.

In the pack file, anything that says _rad or rad mostly comes from Radious’ mod. Key balance effects have been given new, separate tables in difficulties and effects junctions to allow novice modders to quickly mod the game to their taste.

Battle Mod -Optional, Recommended
Anno Domini — best Unit Skins for TOB

Missiles Reworked by Independent George
Crucible of Kings has was the landmark TOB mod
Shieldwall taught me how to mod TOB after I spent a month modding it.
My Autoresolve Solution from several years back