Slashing income.

[Cope]

As we are all aware the politics system in Rome II is atrocious - this being despite the fact CA proudly remarked that it was working as intended. This means that there is no late game challenge whatsoever and playing becomes more of a chore than anything else.

Since modders, evidently, cannot substantial alter the way the political system works, I think that they ought to be attempting to make the late game more challenging in other ways. The only way I can see that being possible is to reduce the income of the player. In my last game of Divide et Impera, I ended with over one million talents and an income of forty thousand per turn. This makes the game way too easy, and I might add that I had had far too much money for the game to be a challenge since the early mid-game. I feel as though I should be struggling for money as much at the start of the game as I am at the end: this would make things interesting and keep my attention. At the moment I don't care about my armies, navies, the buildings I have, and the mistakes I make because I can always buy my way out of any trouble.

What can be done about this? Can income be effectively modded?

Clearly some form of scaling mechanic is required, and even though I am no mathematician, I can see that that would be no easy feat to implement. By scaling what I mean is that wealth growth should not simply just get exponentially larger with all the land you take - it NEEDS to be balanced properly otherwise the game is way to easy. The only practical way I can think of doing this would be to have an 'Empire maintenance' bill at the end of each turn which deducts money for Empire maintenance. It would represent a percentage of your total income and it would increase/decrease depending on the size of your Empire.

I'm not sure if this would be possible, but it would be very nice.

[sgsandor]

There is a sub mod for this out there, here and the forums. You ll need the other mod manager and not the steam one. I will agree late game has a lack of depth due to no real political system, or family tree (fingers still crossed for a patch or dlc that does this). I disagree that slashing income is the best way to impose challenge on the late game. If you have too much money give it away to allies or factions you no longer wish to fight as gifts to quell any lingering resentment. I go with the maxim "better to have it and not need it, then not have it at all"

[zonks40]

I've found the best way to increase the mid to late game challenge is to give the AI factions a bonus of about 7000 to their income, they always end up fielding high tier units, and obviously high tier buildings.

[Cope]

There is a sub mod for this out there, here and the forums. You ll need the other mod manager and not the steam one. I will agree late game has a lack of depth due to no real political system, or family tree (fingers still crossed for a patch or dlc that does this). I disagree that slashing income is the best way to impose challenge on the late game. If you have too much money give it away to allies or factions you no longer wish to fight as gifts to quell any lingering resentment. I go with the maxim "better to have it and not need it, then not have it at all"

I do not think that slashing income is the only, or indeed the best way to improve the late game, I just think that as far as modding goes - since it appears impossible to adequately alter the political system at this stage - that it would be the easiest and most practical method by which the end game could become challenging.

Simply giving what excess wealth I have away would be missing the whole point of the problem. Giving away money is not challenging in of itself. It does not make me have to think about my economic and or logistical decisions. It is just mindlessly surrendering gold to create an artificial difficulty for myself. It is tending to the symptom rather than the cause as it were. This is not to mention the fact that it would break what little immersion there is on the campaign map.

You are correct that it is better to have it and not need it than not to have it at all, though again I think this misses the point of what I was saying. I want it to be much harder to have wealth in the first place so that when you do acquire it feels like an achievement rather than an inevitability.

I've found the best way to increase the mid to late game challenge is to give the AI factions a bonus of about 7000 to their income, they always end up fielding high tier units, and obviously high tier buildings.

This is fine, though I have always found that simply buffing the AI is inferior to handicapping the player. This is because it makes the AI the focus instead of the player and since AI's are well known for their idiocy this can be a problem. Moreover I find that when the AI's 'cheating' is obvious (for instance a one settlement minor faction having 5 stacks of elite troops) it acts more as an irritant than anything else. As I said, scaling back the player trumps buffing the AI any day in my opinion.

[sgsandor]

This is were you and I may differ in play style; I always find the wealth I have earned especially after those lean hungry years is an reward for good planning and satisfying. I agree padding the AI with money is a poor sub for late game challenge, but we do what we can to make it challenging for ourselves. BTW how many turns do you play using 4tpy (how long do you play a campaign)? I ask because i like to stretch out the campaign

[SDM]

The mechanic for this already exists in the form of corruption. Just mod the corruption rate up dramatically and mentally substitute in "administration/corruption/garrisons/etc".

I did that for my personal mod and it works fairly well imo.

[SDM]

If you're interested in modding corruption. The values are stored in the campaign variables in the db files. It's the tax efficiency regions and tax efficiency results variables. The exact function is out of your control but you can set the minimum, middle, and maximum number of regions and the efficiency that the function will hit for each of those numbers. So in vanilla, tax_efficiency_regions_minimum is 3 and tax_efficiency_result_minimum_reduction is 5, this means at 3 regions you hit 5% corruption.

[Cope]

This is were you and I may differ in play style; I always find the wealth I have earned especially after those lean hungry years is an reward for good planning and satisfying. I agree padding the AI with money is a poor sub for late game challenge, but we do what we can to make it challenging for ourselves. BTW how many turns do you play using 4tpy (how long do you play a campaign)? I ask because i like to stretch out the campaign

I play 4 turns per year (I think that's standard for this mod anyway now) and I play till the end. I think a lot of it depends on what faction you start with and how the AI responds. I've played on legendary mode where the AI will never attack me which just makes the whole game really easy, but even so, once you have a whole province the cash just starts to flow in. It's about making it as challenging throughout the game as it is at the start when playing as a minor faction which has limited money at the beginning. I think we can all agree that once you've gotten over the initial bumps the graph of the game in terms of wealth and land would be an at almost perfect 45 degree angle.

As far as the corruption goes, I agree and you are right that I could mod it myself to make it more difficult - but then again I could just mod troop upkeep to be ridiculously high for the same effect. What I was hoping for is a more comprehensive mechanic to alter income vs territory held. It's basically been the same in every total war game that in the end you are so rich it doesn't even matter, regardless of civil wars or whatever. No one can stop you if you have thousands upon thousands of coin because you can simply out source them the whole time.

This I believe is because CA have never implemented a system which will correctly limit the spending power of the player. In Rome II the lack of such a system is more noticeable than it has been in other Total War games. After about 75 turns auto pilot is on for the rest of the game for me.

[BunnyPoopCereal]

If you're interested in modding corruption. The values are stored in the campaign variables in the db files. It's the tax efficiency regions and tax efficiency results variables. The exact function is out of your control but you can set the minimum, middle, and maximum number of regions and the efficiency that the function will hit for each of those numbers. So in vanilla, tax_efficiency_regions_minimum is 3 and tax_efficiency_result_minimum_reduction is 5, this means at 3 regions you hit 5% corruption.

That's pretty low imo

[Petrucci]

Well maybe some of us are not masochist and don't like fighting enemy highest tier troops with levies. I found this game pretty challenging even on normal. You can't loot enemy settlements or slaves will give you a lot of headache, once you start expanding corruption kicks in pretty hard, silly limitation on champions and spies and so on. And it doesn't matter how good AI is, once you get super heavy cav you need 4 units to defeat whole army.

[zonks40]

This is fine, though I have always found that simply buffing the AI is inferior to handicapping the player. This is because it makes the AI the focus instead of the player and since AI's are well known for their idiocy this can be a problem. Moreover I find that when the AI's 'cheating' is obvious (for instance a one settlement minor faction having 5 stacks of elite troops) it acts more as an irritant than anything else. As I said, scaling back the player trumps buffing the AI any day in my opinion.

It doesn't actually work like that, in the DB you can increase the factions income directly, there is also another part where you can increase the income of the culture that the faction belongs to, this covers both the major & minor factions of that culture.
So if I give both a bonus of 3000 to the culture and 3000 to the faction, then the main factions of the game will get a bonus of 6000, the minor factions 3000, which obviously solves the problem of major factions being chewed by "insignificant tribe"

Further more I play with 40 unit armies so I don't get the army spam, What I end up with is fewer battles, but battles that are more epic, the AI also seem to have higher tier troops at mid game, and tier 3 buildings.
And really, what is the difference between the player having 3000 less than the AI, or the AI having 3000 more?

[Cope]

Further more I play with 40 unit armies so I don't get the army spam, What I end up with is fewer battles, but battles that are more epic, the AI also seem to have higher tier troops at mid game, and tier 3 buildings.
And really, what is the difference between the player having 3000 less than the AI, or the AI having 3000 more?

Over the course of a game I'd say about 750,000 gold.

[zonks40]

Over the course of a game I'd say about 750,000 gold.

So you would prefer the payer have 750,000 less instead of the AI having 750,000 more? the margin will be the same, the AI can play much better with the extra funds so it's a more difficult game, if you haven't tried it yourself, then really, you have no idea.

[Cope]

So you would prefer the payer have 750,000 less instead of the AI having 750,000 more? the margin will be the same, the AI can play much better with the extra funds so it's a more difficult game, if you haven't tried it yourself, then really, you have no idea.

Of course I've tried it myself. The AI does not 'play better with extra funds', it plays better when it has money than those around it.

Since you asked, the difference between the AI having more and the player having less is the focus of the game. Handicapping the player is always more successful than overpowering an AI in my view.

[Addario]

Further more I play with 40 unit armies so I don't get the army spam, What I end up with is fewer battles, but battles that are more epic, the AI also seem to have higher tier troops at mid game, and tier 3 buildings.
And really, what is the difference between the player having 3000 less than the AI, or the AI having 3000 more?

40 unit cards?? :O How do you play with that???


Also they are working on redoing politics They said so in the official forums, that they had listen to us and were trying to work something out.

[zonks40]

Of course I've tried it myself. The AI does not 'play better with extra funds', it plays better when it has money than those around it.

Well if you have tried it as you claim, then you must be able to mod, so why don't you slash your income in your own game, instead of coming here trying to get the DEI team to change it for the whole community?

40 unit cards?? :O How do you play with that???

You first acquire ESF, then you start your new campaign, or use an existing if you wish, save it, exit the game, open the save with ESF and go to.


Compressed_Data / Campaign_Env / Campaign_Model.


The 9th and 10th line down should be 20 and 20, the first is number of Units in an army, the second is number of ships in a navy.


Change them to what you want, I usually just change army to 40, load up your save and your armies cap will now be 40 units.
This works with both single player and multiplayer campaigns,

[Addario]

Well if you have tried it as you claim, then you must be able to mod, so why don't you slash your income in your own game, instead of coming here trying to get the DEI team to change it for the whole community?



You first acquire ESF, then you start your new campaign, or use an existing if you wish, save it, exit the game, open the save with ESF and go to.


Compressed_Data / Campaign_Env / Campaign_Model.


The 9th and 10th line down should be 20 and 20, the first is number of Units in an army, the second is number of ships in a navy.


Change them to what you want, I usually just change army to 40, load up your save and your armies cap will now be 40 units.
This works with both single player and multiplayer campaigns,

Oh, nice! Thanks buddy +rep

[Cope]

Well if you have tried it as you claim, then you must be able to mod, so why don't you slash your income in your own game, instead of coming here trying to get the DEI team to change it for the whole community?

I did not mean I had tried those values specifically - I meant that I, like most other people have played games where the AI and various culture groups have been given financial buffs depending upon the game difficulty and/or preference of the modder. Ergo I have seen the effects of financially buffing the AI on plenty of occasions.

Also the reason I'm here is to try and offer potential solutions for the very easy and boring late game, which as I already remarked, is ed because CA didn't bother to finish the politics system and allowed the player to have inordinate sums of money from a relatively early on in the game. My question was, what, if anything can be done about this?

[zonks40]

I did not mean I had tried those values specifically - I meant that I, like most other people have played games where the AI and various culture groups have been given financial buffs depending upon the game difficulty and/or preference of the modder. Ergo I have seen the effects of financially buffing the AI on plenty of occasions.

Also the reason I'm here is to try and offer potential solutions for the very easy and boring late game, which as I already remarked, is ed because CA didn't bother to finish the politics system and allowed the player to have inordinate sums of money from a relatively early on in the game. My question was, what, if anything can be done about this?

That's fine, I'm open to anything that will improve the game, all I did was to present what I have done for myself and my head to head opponent, and for us it has worked quite well, and I believe it's because we play with the 40 unit armies, if we were to try it with the standard 20 unit armies The AI would be spamming stacks.

The way the AI handles spending is what I believe is hampering their ability to compete with the player, I've had nobody tell me this, it's just what I figured out for myself, it's all based on a % that is set by CA/modder, if the modder sets the BASIC_SPENDING_BIAS_RECRUITMENT_ARMY to 0.4, then 40% of the income is allocated to recruitment, and perhaps 30% to building, and 10% agents, 10% navy and 10% diplomacy.

So if the AI is making 2000 per turn, then 800 is allocated to units, 600 to building, 200 to each Agents, navy and diplomacy, and if they cannot afford the chosen purchase, they save the money for the next turn.
As you can see your not going to get much for that, and once they have an army of noobs, their economy will pretty much stagnate from upkeep costs, and this is why I believe that the mid game AI still has low tier units and buildings, making the mid to late game easier and boring, and cutting the players income will not change this behavior at all.

P.S the above is purely conjecture, if it's not how it works please enlighten me, it could be that the 0.4/40% is the chance to recruit units

[Cope]

That's fine, I'm open to anything that will improve the game, all I did was to present what I have done for myself and my head to head opponent, and for us it has worked quite well, and I believe it's because we play with the 40 unit armies, if we were to try it with the standard 20 unit armies The AI would be spamming stacks.

The way the AI handles spending is what I believe is hampering their ability to compete with the player, I've had nobody tell me this, it's just what I figured out for myself, it's all based on a % that is set by CA/modder, if the modder sets the BASIC_SPENDING_BIAS_RECRUITMENT_ARMY to 0.4, then 40% of the income is allocated to recruitment, and perhaps 30% to building, and 10% agents, 10% navy and 10% diplomacy.

So if the AI is making 2000 per turn, then 800 is allocated to units, 600 to building, 200 to each Agents, navy and diplomacy, and if they cannot afford the chosen purchase, they save the money for the next turn.
As you can see your not going to get much for that, and once they have an army of noobs, their economy will pretty much stagnate from upkeep costs, and this is why I believe that the mid game AI still has low tier units and buildings, making the mid to late game easier and boring, and cutting the players income will not change this behavior at all.

P.S the above is purely conjecture, if it's not how it works please enlighten me, it could be that the 0.4/40% is the chance to recruit units

Naturally, improving the AI and its spending tendencies will always make the game harder for the player. However, I'll reiterate, cutting player income puts the choice emphasis more on the player than it does on the AI. This makes for a more interesting game in my view. This point aside, I think many people would agree that in its current state, it is far to easy to get money in Rome II. Once you have 6 or 7 settlements with some decent upgrades the rest of the game will be a cake walk usually, regardless of how much money the AI has. This is because if everyone has so much money that building stuff ceases to be a major concern, the player will always win. If the AI has 1,000,000 gold and I have 250,000 it makes no difference; I will still win because both myself and the AI will have more than enough to build full stacks and get decent upgraded units etc. In other words, both the AI and the player getting to the point where money is no object to either - regardless of whether the AI has three or four times more - the player will always win. This is why simply giving the AI more money -whilst helpful - is not really the answer in the late game.

If however, we took the same monetary difference but scaled it down, the game would be much harder. If the player had 8 thousand and the AI 32 thousand, the difference in real terms is vastly more important than if the player had 250k and the AI 1,000,000 despite the fact that the percentage difference is the same. This is obvious because everything is relative to the cost of building armies, navies, structures etc.

As to your point about 40 stacks - and Ill point out now that I've not actually tried this in Rome II though I have of course played full stack combined arms battles with reinforcements - my concerns would be the following:
1. Lag. Too many units on the battlefield will obviously create a lot of lag. This is presumably why CA kept it down to 20 in the first place for standard 1v1 battles.
2. The battle UI for 40 units is massive and always in the way.