Thank You, Awesome Mod, and questions

[HopliteLysander]

Hello All
Some of of these are more gameplay questions than Mod questions but as I am playing the Extended Greek Mod I'm posting here.

First off, my thanks to the architect who built this mod. I am still a newcomer to RTW but as much as I loved it this mod has made the experience even better, it is obvious a great amount of work and attention to detail went into it.

First question, fatigue. I am aware that this mod gives an option to turn off fatigue because the AI would alway run their troops into the ground before they even fought. I wanted to leave fatigue on but I must have checked the wrong box during install because its off. Not a big deal but I am finding it gives my troops an unfair advantage fighting in the desert against Egypt. My heavily armoured greek troops should be exhausted while the lighter Egyptians aren't.

In any case is there a way to turn fatigue back on without re-installing?

Second The Seleucid Empire. They are bad mofo's, unlike in vanilla, which I am glad to see. I've been fighting them for years and years, slaughtering whole stacks of them every turn and taking city after city. (playing H/M) However I haven't even found the outer border of their empire yet, and its like fighting the Hydra, smash one stack and two more come out of the East. Any tips?

Carthage, I allied with them early on, in hopes of keeping Rome in check and I sent them thousands and thousands of gold in support only to have them wiped out by the Carthaginian Rebels. I realize every campaign is different, so does Carthage ever represent a serious player or do they usually get creamed early on like in vanilla version?

RTW didn't have loyalty so I'm not completely sure of how it works. My Crack Spartan General, 10 stars, who rules all of Sicily and has been fighting off the Romans started out with five loyalty symbols...and now he's down to one. How do generals lose loyalty and what are my options, should he just die gloriously at the head of the troops, I'd be sorry to lose him, or is he safe to keep around?

Making Peace. Iwas doing great against the independent Greek cities and Seleucia, until Rome, and then Egypt jumped on me. Now I am slaughtering my way through whole stacks just to take a single province here and there as I am now fighting the three most powerful factions at once. None of my allies want to get involved...I can't really blame them...but is my only hope to keep slogging ahead? Will an AI faction make peace or will I have to exterminate each of them to the last man?

I have more questions but I feel like I've already written a book here so I'll save them for a later post.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Cymera]

#1: find the preferences text file, probably located in "C:\Program Files\Activision\Rome - Total War\xgm\preferences" and find the entry for fatigue, then change it to true or false, based on your taste.

#2:just keep going, the Seleucid empire seems to expand aggressively in the campaign. their borders stretch as far as Pakistan and Afghanistan in my campaign as Roma. their borders are in somewhat of a rectangular pattern, they have many large territories. my advice is to adopt a strategy of aggressive assault or an ancient blitzkrieg. as fun as it is to use siege weapons while attacking, they slow your armies down too much. i recommend making 3-4 full stacks and assaulting the enemies in a vertical position, taking away one strip of the empire at a time.

#3:Carthage could go either way i think, in my campaign (bare in mind i began this before the latest version) Carthage is dominating north western Africa, and is assaulting the romans, if u want help against them, i suggest that you ally yourself with the barbarians.

#4:i have (unfortunately) never paid much attention to loyalty, i just conquer and administrate, so far, about 30-40 years into the campaign, i have not had a single general rebel.

#5: my solution is generally to slaughter all those who do not have the good sense to maintain the peace, but what I've seen work in BI (i needed the east empire off my back as i turned on the barbarians as the western empire) i simply put down a large single payment as well as ceasefire, this usually works, but it can drain the old purse. try luring one of the uber factions into a confrontation with one of your allies, that should send the sparks flying!

hope some of this helps,

Cy.

[swhunter]

In any case is there a way to turn fatigue back on without re-installing?

Yes go to xgm/preferces/preferces/ and delete false for fatigue and add
true. look at the others on that list you will see true and false for events
and the other ect. If your allready in a campaign it wont work unless
you start a new campaign.

On the other other players can tell you.

[HopliteLysander]

Thanks for the feedback. I will definately the some of the suggestions.

A few more quick questions. My older cities on the Greek Mainland and in Asia Minor are huge moneymakers with several bringing in 2-3 thousand a turn. However new cities almost always run a deficit, sometimes a large one. Syracuse is costing me 2600 a turn all on its own, even though I remember it being a huge source of income in RTW. I know that distance is obviously a factor, but most of these are big coastal cities with a family member as governor. I'm doing ok now, but I am nowhere near the 70 provinces i need, and at this rate I am going to go broke long before i reach 50.

So are there any tricks to making captured cities more profitable?

On a related note Pella, in Macedon, keeps getting the plague. It will have it for a few years, and then almost as soon as its gone it comes back. it never spreads, as the only people I have there are a few units of spearman (poor bastards!) No family members or agents, and I've built all the sewer's and what not that i can. Not a huge deal but Pella was making 3000 a turn and now it barely breaks even.

Thanks!

[Zarax]

Cities are not loosing money, they just happen to be populous so a bigger share of your military expenses is redirected to them...

[Cymera]

for Syracuse, try gaining trade rights to all of the powers surrounding the city, then you will find, that it can bring in HUGE trade income. with the romans, the city brings in an average of 4000, and with an excellent harvest, 5000. this is one of the biggest money makers in my empire, since many of the central Italian cities are sooo populated that they cost me between 2-3 thousand. I'm only @ 255 BCE.

as far as the plague goes, an enemy agent with the plague might be in ur city, train a spy and see. if not then stock up on "health" buildings, and quarantine the city.

and the easiest way of making cities profitable is enslavement, it reduces the population, which in turn allows it to make more profit from buildings.

Roma Invictus,

Cy

[HopliteLysander]

Thanks for all the tips guys!

The New Greek Empire is now free of plague, witha healthy cash flow and with its enimies in retreat on all fronts. My Spartan general, Antigonas The Conqueror just died. Inconvenient as he was about to lead a sally to free his besieged army. It may be for the best though. due to envy of his brother, who was made faction hier when their father died (a tragic sarrissa accident on turn 5) he was beginning to question his loyalty to the Greek Cities.

The Romans are contained in Italy, but its a complicated situation. They have the plague, which is good, but I don't want to attack a plagued city. Also the Reforms just took place, so they are going to be harder to fight the longer i wait. Phyrrus is still encamped in Italy, I was hoping he and Rome would fight it out at some point and then I could move in to clean up but they seem to have a live and let live philosophy with each other.

The Seleucids are in full retreat, and in addition to pummeling Egypt I'm funding the Ptolemic rebels to stir up trouble.

I just plain love this mod, when I think I've seen all it has some new feature pops up.

One question, I followed the modding directions in the readme file to change the skin on the armoured Phalangites back to the vanilla version of armoured Hoplites (love those corinthian helmets) I just cut and pasted the text in and when I tried to start the game I got an
"error, couldn't find data/models_unit/textures/unit_greek_elite_hoplite_greek" I looked in the folder indicated and sure enough couldn't find it in there. My modding skills are novice at best so I may have screwed it up somehow.

I've got XMG 4_1_21

Thanks for the help

[RedFox]

You acctually have to change a few game files for it to take effect, I made a vanilla-xgm mix of the Armoured Phalangites, with the Trireme shield and fancy armour, only bug though is that sometimes the transparency on the helmet fails. (maybe I left a clone of it?).

I waited several turns before making any action, at first I just quickly captured all the nearby Macedonian and Greek Rebel cities, slowly expanding.
The result is much more challenging battles, I love battling two full stack post-marius Roman armies at a time, it's extremely challenging as they almost NEVER assault the middle, so I have to deploy 2 or 3 phalangites in the middle, a load of Hypaspists on the flanks, with another row of phalangites directly behind them, I also have a few cretan archers and some cav, including onagers to counter the roman artillery (rarely see an army without an onager..). They dont want to ever attack the phalanx in front, so I let the phalangites to cut through the Hypaspists to kill off the more experienced troops (as the romans have a bad habit of ripping any hypaspist with less than 5xp into pieces).
Iberia dominates most of the world, they make very easy targets though, extremely low morale, weak armour, though powerful charge. Seleucids aint that great once they lost Antioch, the main producer of their elite units.

For once though I'd like the AI to not be such a betraying bastard on VH/VH