Faster Battles, Army Spam, & Garrisons

[sturnado]

Hello all - I know a very little bit about modding Rome I, and I'd like to discuss a few thoughts I had. (For example, I know how to edit unit stats or change faction names/colors, stuff like that).



Faster Battles:

I don't see much in the way of thoughts on how to speed up battles. In RSII, battles take way too long - it's not that they're difficult, victory is almost always a sure bet, but nothing ever seems to route. I'll have an enemy force getting hit on all sides, and even their levy troops won't break quickly. This not only makes things tedious, it also isn't particularly historically accurate from what I know of warfare at the time.

What are some ways this could be addressed? I know of a submod for the DEI mod for Rome II that alters combat in very interesting ways, I'm assuming by using some scripting. It makes morale highly dependent upon fatigue, for example, and also upon the number of troops that have been lost by that particular unit. One unintended side effect of this method is, when you have an army that has some injured units, and it enters battle, all the injured units start off with a reduced morale from the get-go.

I don't know anything about scripting, but I was wondering what your thoughts would be on reducing unit morale across the board, reducing the defense skill across the board, or some methods to increase lethality of all units across the board. Ultimately, I'm thinking reducing the battle time to about 10 - 15 minutes per battle would be much more reasonable than the 30 - 45 minutes it currently takes.



Garrisons:

Is there a way to reduce the garrisons added by RSII? Not eliminate them entirely, but reduce them so that I don't start besieging a city only to, one turn later, be facing a numerically superior army of elite infantry that magically appeared out of thin air. Another method I thought of was to specifically script the types of units created automatically by the garrison. For example, instead of 15 units of PCP-injected giant barbarian ax murdering lunatics covered in woad appearing, you could instead have 6 units of levy infantry (dependent upon that faction), 4 units of the cheapest archers, 4 units of light skirmishers, etc. Something more along the lines of how I would imagine a city militia would appear during this time period.



Endless Army Spam:

I play on 1 turn campaigns as, in my experience, 0 turn campaigns are endless battles from start to finish. I love fighting the battles in this series, and I always have ever since I first stumbled upon Shogun I when I was a kid, but endless 30 - 45 minute battles isn't enjoyable, it's just tedious.

No matter what faction I play, it seems I always wind up fending off stack after stack after stack of enemy armies, which I'm forced to fight manually since auto-resolve is dicey at best, and before I know it I've spent 5 hours to go through as many turns in the game.

What type of effect would doubling the upkeep of every unit in the game have? Would the AI go completely bonkers? What are some other ways to prevent the army spam?



Thanks for your time, everyone.

[Saul Tyre]

Sturnado, there is a submod in the subforum made by Tone for "faster battles" and if you go to the mod Interface/RSII preferences/RSII parameters you can change to less garrison or no garrison, hope this helps you