RS2.6\RSIII questions & answers

[SimpleCourage47]

WHy not jump directly to Rome 2 Total war Or Attila Total War ?

My understanding would be the limitations on modding Rome II and Attila and the amount of effort it would take both in terms of time, effort and a sizeable team (not sure how big the RS team is these days ?) to implement these limited options you have with the newer total war games.

[ur-Lord Tedric]

You can indeed uncheck the 'Time Limit', but my advice is not to...

Firstly because the time limit makes the attacker at least work for his relatively easy victory - he has to get in their, take casualties and have a hard time. Given unlimited time (and that he can bring ever more troops to the battle if he had that time) and siege assaults are made far too easy.

Secondly is something I have found over the years - that there are occasions when a Siege Battle (particularly as a defender) just will not end. This particularly occurs when the enemy just won't attack. Your tiny force (which would win the battle, or at least get the draw) has to then try and defeat the much larger army. Without the timer you are faced with risking everything, or aborting the battle - which then means you lose when you should win and keep the settlement!

[Alavaria]

Thankfully you can actually decide on a battle-by-battle basis if you want the timer on or not

[The_Athenian]

To clarify, yes you can turn off the battle time limit. But this is different then the victory timer in the a city battle.

When you capture the town square a separate countdown begins. It means that every single city battle is the same: 1, Break through a gate. 2. march to the center of the city.

So that is ok for attacking, but while defending you shouldn't need to pointlessly defend the middle of the city. You have a small force of soldiers facing overwhelming odds, and you should be able to move them around the city as you see fit. Fighting to the last man. Defending the town square over and over again can get quite repetitive.

So I just wanted to see if it was possible to turn off that as a victory. Capturing the center. And making the point of city battle to kill every last defender.

When I played this way on the Dues Lo Vault mod for Med 2, I was surprised by how such a simple change could so radically improve the game, each city battle became completely different and interesting.

[dvk901]

Unfortunately, M2TW is just that little bit more advanced than RTW....even to the point where you can play a Custom Battle as the defender of a settlement, whereas in RTW you cannot (AFAIK).
And you are correct, the time that starts when you hold the square and no other enemy units are present is totally different from the 'Battle Timer'. I wish there was a way around all this...but alas, there is not.

[Darth Bane1]

Hey dvk, the RTR team has released a new beta for their actual mod. They've made an interesting change. They changed population to man power, which grows slower for you and the AI too. Also the amount of units you can recruit is lower than normal. Population control works very well, but I think that population growth is still too high. Then comes the squalor, which also gets too high even with the best avaible health buildings. Maybe you can ask them how they made this change and put it in RSIII? That could also reduce the massive stacks in late game.

[Alavaria]

Health leads to population growth which leads to ... more squalor.

[ur-Lord Tedric]

Health leads to population growth which leads to ... more squalor.

It's such a travesty that the world's politicians don't seem to get that....................................................................................

[Darth Bane1]

Hm, maybe that was the wrong word. I meant the "cleaning"-chain starting with wells that go up to aqaeducts. They reduce squalor, but not enough. And I have to clarify that I always use the population control chain and not the opposite, only if a settlement is small and needs to be build up quickly, then I change it to pop-control. But even with those population grows to fast for my liking and also squalor. For example: Sparta always ends up with 100% squalor and its population is growing very slow or has no growth at all. That's why I came up with this idea. It's not only about population, but in the long run about that the AI and you can field so many armies.

[dvk901]

Hey dvk, the RTR team has released a new beta for their actual mod. They've made an interesting change. They changed population to man power, which grows slower for you and the AI too. Also the amount of units you can recruit is lower than normal. Population control works very well, but I think that population growth is still too high. Then comes the squalor, which also gets too high even with the best avaible health buildings. Maybe you can ask them how they made this change and put it in RSIII? That could also reduce the massive stacks in late game.

I can only guess that they did this with a script routine...as there is no other setting in RTW that would let you do that. Still, I have learned a couple interesting things from this 'conversation'. First off, I really don't care about population control all that much....that may sound mean, but hear me out. Any attempt we made in RS2 to put reigns on population grow that weren't 'player controlled' (and for the AI, that meant the population growth buildings, because the AI loves more population), resulted in population 'stripped' settlements. Not for the player of course, but for the AI. Whether you play 0 or 1 turn campaigns, the INHERENT love of the AI is more people. It is hard-coded into the game. Give them more people, they will make more armies. Give them less people, they will STILL make more armies and strip settlements of people....and if you play on Huge settings, it's even worse.

But, there may still be better ways to control squalor....although, to be honest, and historically speaking, squalor was always a problem in ancient large cities, unless great lengths were taken to build sewer systems, etc. It cost a vast amount of money and time, and few large cities ever did it very well.

Anyway, I'll have a look at what RTR did and try to think of ways to reduce squalor.

[Darth Bane1]

Ah okay. That makes sense. Well, lets see what we can do here.

[Alavaria]

Hm, maybe that was the wrong word. I meant the "cleaning"-chain starting with wells that go up to aqaeducts. They reduce squalor, but not enough.

They don't reduce squalor, they add health.

And RS3 lets you just slam your cities with a ton of +growth so the extent quite a lot of settlements should be able to break out to reach 216,000 population.

[tone]

DVK...bear in mind that we put some population replacement into the script every time a unit is recruited for the AI because we were still getting population stripping despite all of this.

[dvk901]

DVK...bear in mind that we put some population replacement into the script every time a unit is recruited for the AI because we were still getting population stripping despite all of this.

Yes...thanks. I recall seeing that in the script.

[Ovidius Empiricus]

I can only guess that they did this with a script routine...as there is no other setting in RTW that would let you do that. Still, I have learned a couple interesting things from this 'conversation'. First off, I really don't care about population control all that much....that may sound mean, but hear me out. Any attempt we made in RS2 to put reigns on population grow that weren't 'player controlled' (and for the AI, that meant the population growth buildings, because the AI loves more population), resulted in population 'stripped' settlements. Not for the player of course, but for the AI. Whether you play 0 or 1 turn campaigns, the INHERENT love of the AI is more people. It is hard-coded into the game. Give them more people, they will make more armies. Give them less people, they will STILL make more armies and strip settlements of people....and if you play on Huge settings, it's even worse.

But, there may still be better ways to control squalor....although, to be honest, and historically speaking, squalor was always a problem in ancient large cities, unless great lengths were taken to build sewer systems, etc. It cost a vast amount of money and time, and few large cities ever did it very well.

Anyway, I'll have a look at what RTR did and try to think of ways to reduce squalor.

(playing 1-turn, huge units, FYI)
The way I would put the problem is that, in these population-stripped settlements, the AI doesn't look ahead or give itself the option to upgrade to size 2, 3, 4, 5... It's just stuck at the smallest size, pumping out lower-quality units, not developing its economy or doing interesting stuff like that. I should point out that I very much like that it's aggressive about recruiting, whether it's 1-turn or 0-turn -- it needs to be or smaller factions certainly won't be competitive against me. (I'm not necessarily recruiting a whole lot, but a large kill/death ratio for me does mean they have to recruit more just to try to keep up.)

I'd like it to be nearly impossible for the AI to make a tier-2 settlement ("large town" or whatever) unavailable due to over-recruitment. So, for each town, you have some starting population with some growth rate, and the most they could recruit in 1-turn is 243/turn on the huge unit settings. That is, pop+(rate*pop) would have to be larger than 243, in order to win this race against the AI's stupidity (perhaps only very slowly). You'd need an incredible growth rate to start with, whenever the population is very small, like 500 for example. I assume you'd prefer not to have some ridiculous 40-50% growth rate at any given time. So, starting all settlement populations at a larger initial value would help you get closer to a more reasonable rate, because 243 (or whatever the max unit size is) is proportionally less with a larger population. I don't know if you can change the sizes when settlements may be upgraded, which would be another way to approach the problem (I think that might be hardcoded...??), but starting with larger populations on the first turn is certainly not going to break the game for anyone. At least I don't know what there could be to complain about.

Still, besides that, the lowest-tier "palace" buildings could afford to have a larger rate, and upgrading to a larger place could slow it down gradually or eliminate the bonus completely. (I don't know how much the AI cares about health/growth bonuses when it's evaluating a building option, but I'd be a little worried it will discount the upgrades which decrease the value.) Squalor takes care of some of the side effects of course, and other buildings can increase/decrease however you see fit. And I figure making very radical or complicated changes may not be up your alley. But I suppose it would be good to at least slow the process down, which you could do if there's just a small 5% or 10% bonus in the tier-1 "palaces" themselves (with no other construction in that province, like markets, wells, etc.) along with a larger initial population. Beyond merely delaying the inevitable, it probably wouldn't happen as much, because of course they're not always recruiting the maximum number of soldiers in every province every turn. So with some testing you might see that a 5% or 10% difference in the rate (only for the tiniest towns) is enough to prevent maybe 50% or even 90% of the instances that are especially problematic, which I'd definitely count as a big success.

But, as I was saying, they just don't have a chance, if they can't in some way get over the hump of churning out levy clubmen/pikemen/whatever until they simply run out of people, while doing nothing very sophisticated with their economy or infrastructure. They're often cheap units at least, but they are a drain on the economy, becoming more of a weakness than a threatening horde that can go around conquering some new territory. It's certainly a weakness when certain regions (sometimes several neighboring ones) just plain can't recruit because they've all been stripped, not because the faction is out of money or has suffered a bunch of military losses or anything like that. Then those indefensible regions simply get taken away. If however the AI factions can hold on long enough to defend (against each other, not worried about player steamrolling), let their economy develop and open up a more advanced/diverse roster of units, then things could get more interesting. For one thing, the middle- and higher-tier units that make the factions really shine, and makes fighting each of them unique, would be able to play a larger role. They wouldn't just be coming almost exclusively from capital cities which were already well-developed at the start of the game.

[dvk901]

I have found in my recent tests that the way we configured RS2.5\III was 'helpful' to the issue of the AI churning out a lot of low level units...because every faction has at least one city that can do so, but I don't think it was enough. Because the AI recruits on a 'threat' basis...ie, if it's threatened by armies consisting of 'x' quality of units, it will also recruit 'x' quality units. So the AI does fine against the AI, because all AI factions are started in exactly the same situation...one or at most two cities that can recruit high level units, and all the rest low level units. However, the player invariably doesn't think like the AI. The player doesn't just recruit a certain quality of unit to face the AI's level of units......he\she recruits BETTER units wherever and whenever possible, and builds barracks and buildings beneficial to recruitment in order to get the best units as fast as possible....everywhere. This difference then leads to AI factions geared to meeting fellow AI type threats, when all of a sudden the player comes crashing in with much better units, having been prepared long before. The AI has no time in these situations to 'change tactics', because it saw no need to upgrade barracks as quickly.

The result is that the player steamrolls an AI with much low quality units before the AI can adjust. So in my test bed campaign, I changed the AI barracks to three levels, made them cheap, and let the AI recruit all of its units, lowest to highest level, much more quickly. In terms of AI to AI, this made no difference. But in terms of player to AI, it meant getting my rear end kicked in battles where before I may have won easily...or at the least, having a much more difficult time winning, with more casualties. In a 0-turn campaign (which this was), it meant I started facing the AI's best units everywhere, and had to really adjust my tactics in order to win at all. And, I had to spend a lot of money on reinforcements. In a 1-turn campaign, my guess is that battles would be much more evenly matched earlier in the campaign, and you'd be less likely to face armies of low end troops.

In terms of population growth and\or stripping of settlements, as I've noted before, the AI loves population growth, and we provided the AI (and the player) with buildings to help that effort. The AI almost always builds them, and doesn't care about cities with populations of 216,000 people. However, in RSIII, you can't build the population growth buildings all at one level...they go by 'town, large town, and city'. I think it's likely that the population decrease due to unit recruiting by the AI can't be countered quick enough to even ever reach the last two levels in some cases. So it may be advantageous to allow these to all be built at the 'town' level.

[Alavaria]

Because the AI recruits on a 'threat' basis...ie, if it's threatened by armies consisting of 'x' quality of units, it will also recruit 'x' quality units. So the AI does fine against the AI, because all AI factions are started in exactly the same situation...one or at most two cities that can recruit high level units, and all the rest low level units. However, the player invariably doesn't think like the AI. The player doesn't just recruit a certain quality of unit to face the AI's level of units......he\she recruits BETTER units wherever and whenever possible, and builds barracks and buildings beneficial to recruitment in order to get the best units as fast as possible....everywhere. This difference then leads to AI factions geared to meeting fellow AI type threats, when all of a sudden the player comes crashing in with much better units, having been prepared long before. The AI has no time in these situations to 'change tactics', because it saw no need to upgrade barracks as quickly.

The result is that the player steamrolls an AI with much low quality units before the AI can adjust.

That seems odd.. as I tend to come upon factions with max upgraded barracks in every single city capable of having a max upgraded barracks, provided I am not starting right next to them, anyway.

The Silvershield Empire spams all its super elite units to face armies of "basic" Thureophoroi and Scythian Archers...

[Searry]

Does anyone have the legion recruitment map where it shows where you can recruit all the different legions? I would appreciate it greatly.
Never mind I found it. C:\Roma Surrectum\Data\_IMPORTANT_STUFF\AOR_Maps

[mirelicus]

What will be in the next release?

[dvk901]

The next release will just be an updated RSIII that will include a number of small fixes to issues reported. Nothing major.