Gameplay commentary II
Awright, I think I've found the right mix of house rules for a great gameplay challenge and historically accurate conditions of conquest. It's 1098, I'm playing the Byzantines and I'm having a blast! The turks are giving me hell, my economy is strained to the absolute maximum to support the war effort, and the Holy Roman Empire is matching my developments, constituting a considerable future challenge for domination.
These are my house rules, they may appear harsh but they have some very interesting effects on how the game develops. Details of this follow.
1. No assaulting walls without pre-made siege engines, e.g. catapults, trebuchets. Assaulting with rams and ladders is simply way too easy to be anywhere near what can be considered realistic; when you can assault a fortress using a battering ram and some ladders and equal numbers of troops, something is badly wrong. Too bad to prohibit this game feature totally, but I really see no other solution to creating realistic siege conditions.
2. Projected Treasury Total must always be positive. This is to stop you from taking advantage of a large initial army, and to reflect the fact that your troops, some of whom are mercenaries, will need regurlar pay or desert. This rule will force you to think ahead if you take several armies to the field.
3. Disband all levied units at first opportunity. This fine feature of The Sicilian Vespers mod gives the AI a much-needed helping hand in resisting sieges. As a human being with a functioning brain, you should have no need for free-upkeep units to keep your AI opponents at bay.
4. No priests. The process of converting a populace to another religion should take several decades, sometimes centuries. Not using priests will force you to build churches to slowly convert the population, and in the meantime you'll have to deal with religious unrest the hard way.
5. All siege engines except ballistae are treated as immobile units after positioning on the battle map. With their current movement rate, their tactical use in sieges as well as in pitched battles is unrealistic. Fighting street battles with catapults or bombards is great fun, but has little to do with reality. Most siege engines like catapults and trebuchets were assembled on site, and were bolted to the ground, not mounted on wheeled carriages.
6. One spy only. Training a spy to get a 90% chance of successfully entering a city doesn't take that long, and an army of spies will quickly overwhelm the AI.
7. One general per army. The mighty, regenerating bodyguards will completely unbalance the game if combined into a single devastating heavy cavalry army. You want heavy cavalry - recruit them.
I've played the Byzantine Empire with these rules up until 1098 now, and the AI is finally kicking back for real. Luckily, I've been able to secure my Balkan borders with alliances, made a truce with Sicily(I start the campaign in a two-front war against Sicily and the Turks), and have been able to concentrate all my war effort on the Turks. At the start of the campaign I was barely able to support a single full-stack of peltastai and archers in the field, with skeleton forces garrisoning my empire. After protacted, heavily contested sieges, Smyrna and Sinope were liberated, each one involving multiple stacks of armies attacking my besieging army. Capturing these two small castles took me a full twenty turns, and during that time there was a real war going on, with several enemy sieges to defeat, reinforcement armies to push through, and a level of tactical and strategic considerations never before achieved. If you know you have to maintain a siege for 7 turns, terrain and access to reinforcements by sea or land become critical issues.
Back in the Byzantine heartland, any number of heretics and rebel armies become an immediate cause for concern, forcing me to build churches instead of farms and trade buildings, and forcing me to make active use of city garrisons. Since my economy cannot support more than a limited number of field armies, every siege, every field campaign becomes a strategic gamble, instead of a headlong blitz. The real break against the Turks only came when the Pope declared a crusade on their capital Antioch. This gave me the opportunity to besiege Icunium with relative ease, setting the stage for a serious decline in Turkish fighting power.
For the time being, what worries me in terms of gameplay is the level of city growth I'm able to develop. Population growth rates like 4-5% per turn is massive and nowhere near historical growth levels, but if the AI keeps pace all is well, as this will simply reflect a growing economy. I think a major slowdown in city development would create a more long-term balanced mod, I would suggest at least twice the build times and twice the price of most city upgrades. Or maybe just a huge big increase in cost, forcing the player to choose between war or developmet. As of 1098, I'm able to build in all cities, support two full stacks of fielded armies and a modest navy. I fear once my trebuchets are going into action cities will fall every year, and large garrisons will not be a problem with such a robust economy in the back.
Is there a chance for civil war once an emperor/king dies? This would really inject a nice historical limitation to imperial expansion. It could be argued that Rome herself fell due to civil strife more than anything else, could this possibly be modded by low-loyalty characters going rebel upon the death of the head of state?
By the way, does anyone know if the Osman Beliyki name of the faction refers to the Ottoman Empire? If I remember correctly, after the battle of Manzikert in 1074 Anatolia should be dominated by Seljuk turks, the Ottoman Empire was founded much later.
I invite you to comment on any of the above, the major point of this post really is to show you guys how much pleasure I've derived from playing this mod. Way to go!
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Originally Posted by Trygvasson
