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Hey Quinn, could you share with us your ideas about the social and economic changes in 4.0 (the replacing of the barracks line of buildings, the different possibilities for developing a province, etc.)?
I believe with large enough audience you could pick us up for useful ideas.
On a separate note, it might also be a good idea to release a beta version of the changes(compatible with 3.3.4), since that would change a lot the game balance and could use more extensive testing.
That's not a bad idea. It certainly will change things a great deal, so new balancing will be required.Quote:
Originally Posted by Iskandar
Here are my ideas so far for the buildings:
The barracks line will stay more or less as is. I think it's well-balanced now, and takes long enough to build.
The stables line will be collapsed into the barracks line.
The practice field line will remain in existence primarily because I want to make the siege engineer a little difficult to acquire. The practice field will be extremely easy and cheap to build, though. (1 turn.)
I was initially going to try to circumvent the building browser bug, in which having multiple buildings required to build a unit causes a CTD. However, I don't think that's possible to do while implementing the "building as substitute for hidden resource" proposal, and I value that more than I value ending the building browser bug. I'm really looking forward to having the extra room to specialize units.
Here are my socio-economic ideas:
AFAIK, no culture from that time period ever specialized in _both_ horse archers/heavy knights (e.g., cataphracts) and heavy infantry. There simply aren't enough metal resources. At least until you get well into the Middle Ages, when I guess the metal got cheap enough that they could afford to equip armoured infantry, too.
Therefore, I'd like to consider limiting a faction to producing either the cavalry units or the infantry units in each region. This would make expansion more strategic.
The more I think about this, the more I'm not sure it's worth it. I was originally going to suggest a set of five cultures (desert/nomad, feudal, city-state, republic, urban feudal), but I think those are reasonably well dealt with by the current AOR system.
What do you all think?
Although I am always looking for making things more challenging one thing that I never lose sight of is the sheer number of battles one fights in a campaign and the number of hours it takes to complete a campaign.
That's a lot of gameplay and although we love the historical aspect from a gameplay perspective some things that keep you interested are
1) A new threat from the AI in an area that's been peaceful for some time while you have been busy on other fronts
This is already taken care of. The AI is quite good at this already, if you neglect an area it seems to attack if possible.
2) Access to new units later on either through expansion into new AOR or new difficult-to-acquire buildings
Anything that reduces the number of units you have at your disposal increases the boredom element - you know how they behave, you know what they can do and you stop discovering. Sometimes in pursuit of realism modders forget this progressive element. Also the vanilla TW method of giving you everything at once also removes the progressive element. A balance between realism and giving the player a nice variety of units with different capabilities is really nice. Some cheap units that are very useful like funditores and some high cost elite sturdy units and some high cost units that are not so good because your faction does not specialise in that type of unit etc.
The only time this doesn't apply is when playing horse archer cultures, I will never, ever get bored of fielding all cavalry armies. So many nice strategies like hit and run to wear down big stacks and forcing a sally. Nursing your troops the whole time so they develop their experience.
3) New enemies as you expand
This is already taken care of.
Happy New Year!:)
I think the wealth/economic specialization of a single region(vs nation-wide specialization) does not determine the type of its troops.Quote:
Originally Posted by Quinn Inuit
In all barbaric or non-centralized civilized factions, you see the nobility of a nation providing its elite army units and the people's masses - the simpler, more "fodder for the onslaught" soldiers - be it infantry or cavalry.
The celts have the keltoi ambacti and heavy cavalry vs. their more mundane, lighter equipped infantry and cavalry units.
Dacians and germans should also go somewhere along these lines, although I confess I have not researched them yet.
The Sarmatians/Skythians/Parthians have their amazing heavy cavalry vs. their light horse archers. Parthians, I think, later recruited local infantry(from the conquered provinces), but which was of no elite status.
Armenians have their best cavalry, wich was iron-clad and heavy almost as a true cataphracts, come from their highest nobility. The lesser nobility provided lighter javelin(/archer?) cavalry, with the levy form simple people rarely called and being regular infantry.
The Successor states, after the diminishing of the macedon/greek veterans started recruiting local phalangites, the elite ones being drawn form the greek colonists and with the nobility(greek and/or local) providing the heavy cavalry(hetairoi and in the case of the Seleucids - cataphracts).
Bactria is a little more complicated, being a true amalgamation of greek colonists and local nobility, plus the HAs, which came from their northern nomad neighbours, IIRC.
Then we come to the non-centralized greek city states, where the nobility, read the wealthiest citizens, formed the elite infantry corps.
With Carthage of the Barcids being something in-between, there come the Romans at last, which started like the greek city states, but went on to recruit professional heavy infantry army, with the cavalry support being drawn form the auxulia.
Leaving the last three aside for the moment, what we can recruit form a conquered province should depend on how we deal with the local nobility and the masses.
There is the choice of physically annahilating the existing aristocracy and replacing it with your own, slowly integrating them into your empire(so first they fight in their own way, but then they adopt your style) or giving them large autonomy. Each of these gives different progression of recruitable units. Then, the levy form the masses could also present a choice between training them as your own regular troops or in their previous warfare style.
This shifts the economical focus form region specialization to taxation (with the above choices resulting in different taxation and happiness levels).
Being completely realsitical, we'd have to allow for the situation where a nation conquers another, replaces its culture and is in turn conquered. But since this would impose extreme difficulties on implementation , I suppose we'd have to stick to the AOR system, where a region is intrinsically sarmatian/armenian/greek, etc.
TIC had an interesting approach to all this. Basically, they allowed a new region to either be accepted as client kingdom (AOR units, higher taxation bonus, IIRC) or to be developed as your own, say, punic colony if you play Carthage (for whch you had to destroy a building like "land of the keltoi" or "greek colony", which normally gives happiness bonus and I suppose represents symbolically the AOR type of the region). So all military production was handled by a single building tree, which also provided different taxation and happiness bonuses.
Judging by the FOE preview number 3 which featured the roman administrative system and the fact that TIC was more action-oriented I believe they will expand upon this system in FOE.
I think it would be sensible to do something similar in ExRm with regard to the above mentioned nobility vs. masses concept.
To separate projectile infantry/cavalry form the normal military building tree is kind of unnnatural though.Quote:
Originally Posted by Quinn Inuit
I think it's logical that siegecraft be tied to the level of craftsmanship in a province - so perhaps allow for a single siege engineer building and bind its availability to a level of blacksmith and/or markets(preferably non-reachable for barbaric factions)?
I'm not quite sure I understand this correctly. Could you elaborate?Quote:
Originally Posted by Quinn Inuit
p.s. I think the thread title misrepresents the topic. Perhaps I should've called it AOR recruitment system for 4.0 or something like that.
EDIT:
I think what I suggest deals exactly with this aspect of the game.Quote:
2) Access to new units later on either through expansion into new AOR or new difficult-to-acquire buildings
EDIT:
On a separate note, can someone provide me with a good link for reading about culture/religion? I still don't know, for example, whether these are two different features, or religion from BI is used to represent culture in mods; there was also some mention that only three out of seven religions work with happiness bonuses; etc., etc. I'm reading Dol Guldur's guide on creating a new culture, but I'm still a little bit confused.
Happy New Year to you guys, too!
St. Naf, I understand your post as far as it goes, but I'm not sure how it relates to the topic at hand. Are you saying we should be careful about limiting the number of units available to a faction?
Good point.Quote:
Originally Posted by Iskandar
This seems like a good way to approach the problem. Method #2 strikes me as what is currently simulated by the Aux. system.Quote:
Originally Posted by Iskandar
Agreed. There's a limit to what we can simulate here.Quote:
Originally Posted by Iskandar
The cat seems determined to prevent me from completing this post.Quote:
Originally Posted by Iskandar
ok, got a hand free
That's probably better than trying to implement a social system. I mean, we could do a similar thing with social systems, but it breaks down in multi-conquest situations. 5+ such buildings would be silly.
Excellent suggestion. Does anyone have any issues with that? If not, that's going in the next version.Quote:
Originally Posted by Iskandar
Phone just buzzed--got the other hand free.
Basically, I'm going to create 8 additional L1 town squares on that tree and individualize them to a region (one might be the Aetolian League Agora or something). Then, I'll use those to replace hidden resources that exist in only one place and aren't used as a NOT by anything. That'll let me do a lot more unit specialization.Quote:
Originally Posted by Iskandar
Ok, I'll fix that in a bit.Quote:
Originally Posted by Iskandar
Religion from BI is used to represent culture in Caldarium's Culture Shock mod. Only the first three of seven possible religions can have a happiness effect. Culture is something built into the game since the first RTW. I'm not quite sure how it works, as I haven't messed with it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Iskandar
OK, so I'll start laying out some ideas and let's improve on them. Also, I do not know how much space there is left for adding new building trees, so Quinn, you'd have to say what's doable.
Except in the case of Carthage, Rome and the Greek Cities, it seems reasonable to tie the elite AOR units to the aristocracy and the regular AOR units to the mass of the people.
The first question is whether we want to treat these separately or do not distinguish between them (i.e. single building line), like in TIC.
If we do distinguish, we should have a building (or a building tree) that represents the level of national integration of the province. It should influence happiness, AOR vs. national regular units recruitment and perhaps tax bonuses, although I'm not sure of the progression of the last.
Usually conquered people had a beef with its conqueror only when its nobility was alive and kicking or there was religion involved. The happiness bonuses concerning the first one will be taken care by the nobility building tree; the ones concerning the second situation might be dealt with by losing the bonuses from the old national building when the player demolishes it (naturally, different national integration buildings should be exclusive).
The administration buildings (you know, when the town expands) are not good candidates for this, since they cannot be destroyed.
As I already mentioned, there are three possibilities for dealing with the aristocracy - physical annihilation and replacement, gradual integration or granting a degree of autonomy. The corresponding buildings should influence happiness bonuses, AOR vs. national elite unit recruitment and tax bonuses.
I imagine the autonomy line proceeding like this:
taxes: high -> normal
happiness: low -> better but lower than normal
units: AOR constant
integration:
taxes: high -> normal
happiness: low -> normal (or even high?)
units: AOR -> national
annihilation/replacement:
taxes: low-> normal
happiness: low -> normal in fast progression
units: none -> national (fast progression?)
These are just off the top of my head, without consulting sources extensively.
This would mean 3 mutually exclusive building trees which might be too much or impossible to implement. In that case I'd suggest merging the integration and replacement line with perhaps only the final tier exchanging AOR for national units.
It might be also a good idea for the autonomies to have shorter construction time - perhaps then the AI would be encouraged to build them more often (and hove more domestic problems, hihi:wicked:)
There is also the question whether we allow for situation where the people are integrated into the new empire, but the aristocracy is autonomous and fights in their old style? Can anyone provide examples supporting or contradicting that?
If all this is too complicated we can go down a path similar to TIC:
two-tier "national integration" building tree , and an integration vs. autonomy military building tree. The first level of the national integration would determine the type of military building tree available, the second will be the one with huge happiness bonus and long construction time.
Roman and Carthaginian aristocracy restricted themselves with time to the commanding posts of the army, so assigning a specific unit might be controversial. Perhaps equites (and triarii?) and punic cavalry (and/or sacred band infantry?) ?
Greek Cities "aristocracy" should lead to elite hoplites, I think.
Epirus can be treated as the Successor states , having their chaonians and molossians, but Pergamum? What do we have on the unit roster? They were a strange bird - democratic but with a king with absolute power who almost never used it...
Well that's for now. Personally I'd like having separate trees for the "masses" and the nobility, if it is doable.