[REL] Historically plausible development minimod (in hibernation now)

[yukishiro1]

10/7/2014: Mod is in hibernation at this point. The recruitment changes were adopted into the main mod, which is great. At some point I may get around to reviving the mod as a diplomacy-focused attempt to achieve the same basic results, but for now it's on hold as I'm just too busy at work.




1/22/2014

Updated mod to work fully with .7 version of DeI. Hopefully I didn't miss any table entries. I am pretty sure I got them all, let me know if you run into any issues. Direct download links will be updated tomorrow if possible. For now steam versions are all updated.

1/2/2014 update:

Couple of tweaks to diplomacy system should hopefully make the AI a bit more willing to offer you peace without making it also agree to your peace requests no matter what.

Tweaks to recruitment system: 1 bonus recruitment slot added to capital of each faction. This gets the early game going a little quicker and makes single-region factions slightly more capable of holding their own.

Increased cash supply of minor factions as well, again to make them a little more capable of fielding decent-sized armies.

Tweaked building system: The AI is much more likely to create military buildings now and much less likely to create provinces full of nothing but temples. To make this work, I had to change the way main barracks buildings work for non-barbarian factions. Now, instead of costing public order, they cost food instead. In return, they give modest BONUSES to public order and cultural conversion, to simulate the cultural assimilation and public order provided by having a military training center in a given region. After all, the army was probably Rome's single greatest cultural assimilator. These bonuses are small, and don't radically change the way the player plays the game, but they do cause the AI to build these buildings instead of only building temples.

Several tweaks to diplomatic penalties in the East designed to cause the Seleucids' rebel satrapies to fight among themselves rather than all allying up into one big bloc. This benefits Parthia and Baktria by giving them ways to expand without having to kill eachother.


EXPLANATION:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I have been doing a lot of testing lately aimed at finding a set of parameters which produce more plausible historical empire growth. Anyone who has played Rome 2 for any length of time will be familiar with the way that most historically powerful factions end up getting wiped out by minor factions due to bad balancing. My aim is NOT to make history happen in Rome 2 exactly how it happened in the real world - instead, it is to try to create historically plausible empire growth in Rome 2.

To give a very concrete example:

I'm not trying to make Rome win the Punic wars every single time. Carthage could plausibly have won either of the first two Punic wars, and history could have turned out very differently if it had. That possibility is what makes Rome 2 interesting.

What I DON'T like about Rome 2 is that typically the Punic Wars end in 260, not because Rome is victorious, but because Garamantia takes Africa from Carthage. That sort of thing is simply not plausible, and I aim to stop it happening the vast majority of games.

DOWNLOAD & INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS: Use steam, I don't have time to keep the downloaded versions updated. If someone else wants to pull the stuff off steam and upload them in this thread, that's fine by me.




INSTALLATION:

Put the version you want in the data folder, like any other mod. FOR NOW YOU MUST USE THE UNOFFICIAL MOD MANAGER AND USE IT TO LOAD THIS MINIMOD ABOVE DEI IN THE PRIORITY CHAIN OR IT WON'T DO ANYTHING>


NOTE: This is balanced for normal campaign difficulty. None of the handicaps I have added are different based on difficulty level, but I'm not sure if it would work properly with the various vanilla handicaps that get applied to the AI as you turn up the difficulty level. They may well knock the balance off, leading to ahistorical results. For example, on legendary AI factions get such a large bonus to public order that their regions basically never rebel, which makes it much easier for them to quickly expand militarily. This would probably mean large factions would be less successful at capturing back regions they have lost.


[/SPOILER]


Summary of changes:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

• Recruitment system changed: Instead of getting a fixed number of recruitment slots per province, no matter how many regions you own, you are now given one recruitment slot per region owned. For example, if you own 3 regions of a province, you get 3 recruitment slots; if you only own one, you only get 1 slot. EXCEPTION: Rome gets 2 recruitment slots per MAJOR city. Update: ALL FACTIONS also get one additional slot in their capital region. Thus, single-region factions get 2 slots.
• Various faction-specific boosts to recruitment slots in home provinces and/or income. For example, Rome has a 4 unit recruitment bonus in Italia only, and a 4000 gold income bonus, allowing it to quickly pump out large armies from its Italian heartlands.
• Various faction-specific upkeep penalties - these are mainly for african and arabian factions, to make it substantially harder for them to become the superpowers they typically become. Sparta and Athens also have large upkeep penalties to reflect the history of their status in 272, except in their respective mod versions.
• Factions with access to levy pikemen can recruit them from major cities in addition to military buildings - this is to help the Seleucids, who otherwise show a baffling tendency to tear down their barracks buildings to build temples instead, resulting in armies full of axemen fighting their satrapies who field much more hellenistic armies than the Seleucids themselves!
• Major food boosts for all AI factions - this is because after extensive testing I have found the large AI empires simply cannot balance their food AT ALL and that even giving them up to +40 food sometimes resulted in them starving to death if they lost a province or two. The bonuses for extra food top out at +15 to replenishment and +5 to growth anyhow (a level achieved at +20 bonus food), so it's not as if giving AI factions 60 food really gives much of a boost. But it does stop the complete overnight collapse of vast empires.

These parameters seem to produce historically plausible outcomes until at least the year 222, i.e. for 200 turns. I am pretty happy with this - 200 turns is more than long enough for the player to become involved in the balance of power among the great factions and therefore to influence how history will turn out his or herself. I am not sure how much more can really be done. I've run several sims now, and they all seem to break down about around the 200 turn mark. Producing historically plausible results more than 200 turns out will probably require more invasive modding techniques such as AI scripting.


To-do list:

• Rename faction traits - right now I'm using borrowed traits from various factions, so it looks like junk on the faction selection screen.
• Try to find some way to stop allied factions from taking back cities - for example, in this sim, Rome captures Carthage in the 240s only for Carthage to be recaptured - but by Carthage's ally Libya, not by Carthage itself. I am not sure there is anything I can do about this. It will probably take AI scripting at the very least. But it's annoying. Same thing happens with Egypt and Sparta in the 230s.
• Work on barbarian factions a bit - I haven't even touched these really, focusing so far on the heart of the Classical world instead.
• Find a way to set specific AI faction handicaps so that only the AI gets them, and not the player if they choose that faction, thus avoiding the need for multiple mod versions.

[lesterthenerd]

Will use when del comes out for 8.1

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk

[kyler721]

Definitely something that should be incorporated into this mod. Love that so many major factions have survived that long!

[Ivan_Moscavich]

Will use when del comes out for 8.1

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk

Exactly this. This is a massively helpful change considering how bad major nations/states fail against all these little countries. I also really like the way you've handled recruitment slots.

[yukishiro1]

What I have found to be so helpful about the recruitment slot changes is they allow for wars where the lines of battle fluctuate back and forth. In normal Rome 2 I have found that the faction that begins losing a war almost always continues losing it. With the recruitment (and food) changes, I have found factions are much better at recovering lost possessions and then even going on the offensive. You see this throughout those screenshots for the Seleucids, who recover lands taken from them by Parthava and Armenia multiple times. You also see it with the Carthage+Libya alliance, which loses Carthage but then retakes it, and with Rome, which loses Rome itself to the Insubres but by the end of the sim has not only retaken Rome but also gone back on the offensive and captured all of the Insubres' lands, expanding further north in the process than I have ever seen it do before.

[Rafkos]

With the recruitment (and food) changes, I have found factions are much better at recovering lost possessions and then even going on the offensive.

Great! I hope we'll see it in the near future (maybe in 0.6 update).

[Master Necromancer]

Very, very nice! I love how the factions spread.

[Cope]

what you need to do to make this kind of thing work is stop the AI making so many alliances. It pisses me off when half the world is at war with the other half. The AI should keep to itself more often than not in terms of alliance creation.

[yukishiro1]

It works pretty well as is.

I agree the huge alliances and never-ending world wars are not ideal, but fixing that sort of AI behavior requires AI tweaks I'm not competent to undertake. If someone can find a way to fix the AI so it works correctly that's certainly preferable to my approach. But I think my approach is also vastly preferable to what we have now, which is a game where almost all the major factions are destroyed within 100 turns in most games by historically insignificant minor factions.

[Epic28]

Good stuff Yuki +rep.

What in the hell happened with Sparta somehow invading the entire Nile River region??

[Rafkos]

What in the hell happened with Sparta somehow invading the entire Nile River region

It's some kind of irony, because even if they conquer Bactria (which contains several important trade routes from India and China) they still can't trade with anyone

[Selea]

Good changes!

This is definitely something to consider to be added to the main mod.

It is always wonderful to see the creation of users, especially when they are so good as to be worthy of an inclusion in the main part of DeI.

[Anonter]

I definitely agree these changes would be amazing to see them in the main mod! keep at it yuki +rep!

[yukishiro1]

Sparta is another example of the allied power phenomenon.

Sparta is allied with Egypt in that game. Egypt lost a few regions to Meroe, Sparta entered the war on Egypt's side and proceeded to "kill steal" Egypt's old provinces. Because they are allied, Egypt has no way to get those provinces back.

Same thing happened with Libya owning Carthage. Libya and Carthage are military allies, so when Rome briefly took Carthage and Libya took it back, Carthage ended up with no chance to get back its capital.

This is something I am still looking at to see if there's some way to fix it.

The main issue with including the mod in the main DeI is that without seperate versions for each major faction, the bonuses end up being a bit over the top if the player is playing the faction. For example, 5 extra recruitment slots and 5000 bonus income for a player playing Rome makes the game a lot easier than it probably should be. Unless someone smarter than me can figure out how to set faction-specific AI-only handicaps, I think the best option may be to offer a selection of minimod versions customized to the faction the player wants to play.

For example, if the player wanted to play as Rome, there could be a version of the minimod that includes all the changes EXCEPT the 5 extra recruitment slots and 5000 bonus income for Rome. Then there would be similar versions for Carthage, the Seleucids, Macedon, Parthia, and Sparta, as well as a generic version including all the boosts for people who didn't want to play as any of those factions. It is a little bit cumbersome, but much less cumbersome than having 7 different verisons of the whole mod.

That said, the non-faction-specific changes like the generic recruitment changes, the reduced income for minor factions, greater upkeep costs for all african and arabian factions, and the agent construction delay removal could easily be included in the main DeI mod if the creators want to.

[AlCord]

Nice change list and nice to see the development over the years. If it's going to make in DeI, I wouldn't be disappointed

[Epic28]

Sparta is another example of the allied power phenomenon.

Sparta is allied with Egypt in that game. Egypt lost a few regions to Meroe, Sparta entered the war on Egypt's side and proceeded to "kill steal" Egypt's old provinces. Because they are allied, Egypt has no way to get those provinces back.

Same thing happened with Libya owning Carthage. Libya and Carthage are military allies, so when Rome briefly took Carthage and Libya took it back, Carthage ended up with no chance to get back its capital.

This is something I am still looking at to see if there's some way to fix it.

Cancel the starting alliances with those factions? It is possible just to keep them starting with non aggression pacts and maybe trade agreements towards one another (minus Egypt & Sparta due to Sparta's lack of a port)? This would keep it so they are friendly (enough) with one another but at least won't be so forced as to not reclaim homeland territory previously lost due to the high alliance diplomacy relation.

Something just tells me that Carthage wouldn't just sit idle to seeing their capital city in the hands of a client state.

The whole Libya and Nova Carthago situation with Carthage is just stupid anyways....

[Black9]

Can you make your changes available for download? This looks fantastic.

[yukishiro1]

Sparta doesn't start allied with Egypt anyhow. That happened somewhere down the line, probably in the 250s if memory serves.

I have been back and forth with Dresden in PMs about maybe removing the ability of Libya to be resurrected in DeI, since it doesn't even exist to begin with. That would solve the specific problem of Libya taking Carthage's lands as a military ally, because Libya wouldn't exist any more.

[yukishiro1]

Can you make your changes available for download? This looks fantastic.

Is that link not working? I am a noob when it comes to file hosting, just picked out a random site that popped up on google.

If it does work, put it in the data folder and then use the mod manager available for download on this site to load it up above DeI and it should work fine. With patch 7, at least.

[stupar123]

I'll be sure to use your gret minimod