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QuickStart

Greatly accelerates the early parts of the game and makes it less random. If you want to jump straight into the strategic parts without worrying about the AI dying to deer before the game even starts then this is the mod for you!

Many players likes the chaotic ragtag feel of starting a new game, this mod isn't for them.

This mod significantly helps co-op play, since unmodded if you lose your main guy it will take around 20-50 turns to get him back, basically ending the game for you. With this mod that wont happen, you can quickly get back on track and start helping your friend again as long as you don't lose your starting area!

Speeding up the early game also greatly balances the different picks since the biggest difference is just how much resources the different leaders starts with. Now everyone starts on a roughly equal footing making many of the previous very hard to play leaders now become a breeze.

A nice side effect is that these bonuses benefits the AI way more than humans, as they suicide themselves and their commanders so much. So lower difficulty AI gets much harder than before, so you don't have to play against the enemy spam you see on higher difficulties and instead fight smaller more interesting armies.

The mod doesn't change anything else, you just get more commander offers and start with higher income and a defender. All unit stats stays the same etc. The income buff was chosen to roughly make capitols provide around 20% of the maps resources, like in dominions. You still lack money until you cap more sites, it just corresponds to everyone, you and the AI, having a perfect first 20 turns and then starts from there.

Rough Changes:

* Starting income for everyone increased by 24 gold and 12 trade. I tested around a bit and this is enough to get you going but far from enough to do all the things you want, so going around and capturing the map still matters a lot.

* Everyone starts with a decently strong defender. This unit is strong enough to easily beat 20 soldiers in an open field battle, but will probably lose to 50, meaning it will easily die to dedicated armies. You want to protect this unit at all cost and not rely too much on it to fight since it gives the gold and trade mentioned above, lose your starting site and you lose all those resources.

* Wizard recruits now show up about 4 times as often as before. This helps you spend those extra starting resources and lets you easier field more armies or bounce back from setbacks. Extra helpful for co-op play where you don't want to reload just because someone screwed up and for the AI who screws up all the time.

* Everyone gets the generic wizard recruits as if they had several libraries. You would get this normally as a part of capturing territory, libraries still increases the rate but this way you still get some even if you don't find any libraries. This greatly expands what you can do with your armies, and make AI armies become more diverse threats since they now contain more kinds of magic backup.