dvk:
I think I like that. Do you mean just the city of Rome itself having population growth issues? It couldn't, for example, reach a huge city until the "reform building" is built. Is that sort of the idea? Presumably, the reform building itself requires a long list of other things like higher-level barracks and army rations, the buildings representing citizenship and/or other political institutions, mid-tier blacksmiths, perhaps also mid-tier aqueducts and/or grain facilities (if those could be moved or a precursor put into a large city slot), etc., all to prevent it from being available too soon. Or perhaps none of the Italian cities could reach a huge level (and the needed improvements which would go with it) until this happens. But I figure the solution to it could be a very involved process in Rome only, so there's not such a huge amount of construction to do all over the place simply to trigger the reforms: other cities would still need proper barracks and other infrastructure to make use of it and recruit the new units, but it could be "centralized" in Rome by making sure it has the most to do (although Rome will need to be fairly well-developed to start with, so I'm not sure what sort of requirements would be a good choice).The way to simulate this may be to make it hard for the Romans to grow population-wise until one of the reform buildings is built, and then apply a faction wide population growth bonus as well in that building.
I'm also thinking I have enough problems with very small towns getting their population up to a reasonable level, especially when the AI has previously mismanaged them all way down to their 400 lower-limits by constantly recruiting from those locations. I hope it wouldn't affect them (at least not too much).
And after that point, I would hope it would be a small faction-wide growth bonus, maybe just half a percent (since that's the smallest possible) or not much more.
But basically, I would like that, assuming it's nothing too crazy.
And I'd also like the AI factions to evolve. If you can make cultural evolution happen in this game, I believe I would literally cry with joy.
Kenny Works:
Why would anyone do that?Try recruiting a Roman legion with in 609 AUC and sending them against a equally large unit of Gauls or Boii with three or four "champion" units with silver armor and weapon/experience bonuses. Your units can have none. Watch what happens.
Well, I think any such changes should be fairly minor. And I'm not claiming you should take inexperienced, unarmored units (or "poorly supplied" ones as I think of it) and fight them against stacks of experienced/armored elites.My point exactly. I think the game is balanced enough as it is.
I really don't think RSII needs to be made any "harder." At some point it will end up being like playing KoJ in Broken Crescent - a mod I love but that creates a terribly frustrating game experience. And there are similar mods out there that just make game unbearably hard or, equally bad, incredibly time consuming. A single game turn lasting four hours??!! Who has time for that?
However, we could (and I think should) adjust AI stats in accordance with the better Roman stats after the reforms. We cannot make new types of units, since we've hit the limit. Hence, an additional point of experience, or another point or two in attack/armor/whatever, is possible, could be a minor change, and it satisfies the need for having a legitimate reason to go through with the reforms. There is not currently much of a point. There ought to be a point to doing it, besides a (perfectly understandable) desire to see fancy names and numbers on the things we're calling "legions" -- that is a superficial reason, and does not in any way reflect why the Romans historically went through the reforms. (They also didn't go through with it because some obscure town in Sicily became very big.) So there is good reason to change the mechanism by which the reforms happen, whatever that change may be. The slightly increased stats for the Romans is hardly justified by their increased costs. And it can't be explained that it is so unreasonably hard prior to this, for any player who managed to get at least many decades into the game in order to trigger the reforms. Anyway, a fairly small increase in AI stats was all I was proposing: it would make the end-game (as judged by unit stats) approximately as hard as the beginning currently is, not make the beginning harder. Nor would it be done just on a whim, to make things harder for the sake of making them harder: the reforms actually happened, and the attempt is to simulate something about them.