Mide High Cross Legitimacy Fix
A small balance/viability fix for Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA.
What it does
This mod makes Mide's existing High Cross buildings contribute to the Gaelic Legitimacy mechanic:
High Cross I: +5 Legitimacy
High Cross II: +10 Legitimacy
That is the only intended gameplay change. The mod does not change Mide's income, food, research rate, public order, recruitment, unit replenishment, unit stats, building costs, or the number of High Cross levels.
Why this exists
Mide is the only playable native Irish Gaelic faction in the grand campaign. Dyflin is also based in Ireland, but represents a Norse/Viking kingdom rather than a native Irish polity.
For an Irish player who wants to play a native Irish campaign, Mide's vanilla Legitimacy mechanic can become extremely frustrating once Ireland has been unified and the campaign moves beyond the island. The renewable sources of Legitimacy become much harder to sustain, while Legitimacy can continue to decline during war. In practice this can push an otherwise successful Mide campaign towards repeated political instability/civil war unless the player deliberately farms or manipulates raiding and other mechanics simply to keep Legitimacy alive.
Circenn, the Scottish Gaelic playable faction, does not have the same problem to the same degree because its campaign script contains an additional renewable building-based source of Legitimacy from Souterrains.
What is different in vanilla?
Creative Assembly's Circenn campaign script explicitly scans owned major settlements at the start of Circenn's turn and awards building Legitimacy based on Souterrain level:
Souterrain I = 5
Souterrain II = 10
Souterrain III = 15
It stores the previous total and applies only the difference, so upgrading a building grants the additional amount, while losing a settlement/building removes its contribution.
Mide's equivalent Gaelic campaign script contains no corresponding High Cross building check and no "Buildings" factor in its Legitimacy breakdown.
This mod ports that same style of scripted calculation to Mide's existing two-level High Cross chain. It does not simply add free Legitimacy every turn.
How it works
At the beginning of each Mide turn, the mod checks Mide-owned major settlements:
High Cross I contributes 5 to the current building-Legitimacy total.
High Cross II contributes 10.
The current total is compared with the stored total from the previous turn. Only the difference is applied to Mide's Legitimacy.
Examples:
Build High Cross I: 0 -> 5, so +5 Legitimacy.
Upgrade I to II: 5 -> 10, so +5 additional Legitimacy.
Lose a settlement containing High Cross II: 10 -> 0, so -10 Legitimacy.
Keep exactly the same buildings for another turn: no additional Legitimacy is awarded.
The contribution is also exposed as a Buildings factor in Mide's Legitimacy breakdown, matching Circenn's implementation.
Existing saves
The mod can be enabled on an existing Mide campaign.
The building calculation runs at the start of Mide's turn, so after enabling the mod you may need to end the current turn once before your existing High Crosses are detected. On the first calculation, existing High Crosses are recognised and their current total is applied, subject to the game's normal Legitimacy cap.
Installation
Copy:
mide_high_cross_legitimacy_fix.pack
into your Thrones of Britannia data folder, normally:
...\Steam\steamapps\common\Total War Saga THRONES OF BRITANNIA\data\
Then enable mide_high_cross_legitimacy_fix in the Total War launcher/mod manager.
Compatibility
This mod overrides:
campaigns/vik_attila/vik_culture_mechanics_gaelic.lua
It may therefore conflict with other mods that replace or substantially edit Mide's/Gaelic campaign-mechanics script. Mods that only change units, graphics, battle balance, or unrelated DB tables should generally be unaffected.
Design philosophy
This is intended as a legitimacy-only balance/viability fix, not a cheat mod or faction overhaul. It leaves the vanilla two-level High Cross chain intact and adds only the missing renewable building-based Legitimacy path.
I have deliberately avoided claiming this was definitively a developer bug; we cannot know the original design intent. What can be observed directly is that vanilla Circenn contains a scripted building-Legitimacy calculation and vanilla Mide does not.
Credits
Creative Assembly / SEGA — Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA and the original campaign scripts/mechanics.
Community investigation/mod — created after comparing the vanilla Mide and Circenn Gaelic legitimacy implementations and reproducing Circenn's building-delta approach for Mide's High Crosses.
No affiliation with or endorsement by Creative Assembly or SEGA is implied.