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Progressively Harder Battles

TWW2 is no longer getting patches or DLC, so my mods are also considered final and will not receive any more updates. Therefore I disabled comments on all of them to avoid constantly getting notifications for the same dumb questions that have been answered a thousand times already. Any comments or announcements I might make in the future will be posted under my collection here:
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1766089433

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AI units get increasingly potent buffs to some of their combat stats based on the rank of their lord, the number of regions the player controls, and/or the current turn number.

The separately configurable stats are Melee Attack, Melee Defence, Weapon Damage, Missile Damage, Charge Bonus, Leadership, Missile Resistance and Ward Save. It is NOT recommended to use all of these at the same time.

The buff strengths for Missile Resistance, Ward Save and Leadership are capped at maximum 50% Ward Save and Missile Resistance and maximum +20 to Leadership.

Every vanilla campaign basically starts with all units fighting with the same balanced combat stats they'd have in a multiplayer battle, and battles are fairly challenging. But with almost every new technology, lord skill, magic item or special faction ability that the player unlocks, his units receive boosts to their stats. Especially with newer DLC factions, these bonuses are completely overpowered, and the AI gets no comparable bonuses. So the longer the campaign goes on, the less challenging the battles become, because even on Hard battle difficulty, that is supposed to give the AI an advantage, an AI unit will actually have worse combat stats than the same unit controlled by the player.

Instead of nerfing the op player bonuses, this mod tries to give the AI similarly op bonuses to level the playing field. So now it might actually be fun to unlock buffs because you really need them to keep up with the AI and continue winning battles.

The mod offers several ways to adjust the added challenge. Settings can be changed at any time during a campaign via the MCT. Move to attack any AI army (or get attacked) to see the buff as an effect applied to the AI army.


The Lord Rank option determines how many levels an AI lord must have gained to get the next level of the buff (e.g. 5 means that every AI army will get level 1 buffs once the lord is level 5, level 2 buffs when they are level 10 etc).

The Region Count option increases the buff for all AI armies once the player has more than x regions.

The Turn Number option increases the buff every x turns, so for example 20 means all AI armies will get (at least) level 1 buff after turn 20, level 3 buff after turn 60 and so on.

The highest value is always used to determine which buff is applied. So with above numbers, if you attack an AI army that has a level 25 lord while you have 8 regions on turn 43, the AI army will get buff level 5 because of its lord's high rank.

If you don't want one of these factors to trigger a buff increase, just pick a very high value. For instance if you pick 300 for the turn number option, AI armies will only get level 1 buffs after turn 300, so effectively never.

But there is another option "Max Buff Level" to set a ceiling on how strong the buffs can get. While the buffs theoretically can go up indefinitely, it may be impossible to win any battles against that because the bonuses the player can get are not unlimited and are usually mostly maxed out by turn 100 or earlier. So the artificial strength progression for the AI should probably stop as well at some point.

The mod can be enabled or disabled at any time. To enable it in an existing campaign, load a save, then open the MCT settings, change any of the options for the mod and finalize the settings. (You can then change it back to the defaults.)