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Thread: General Thoughts

  1. #1

    Default General Thoughts

    I have a bunch of thoughts about this mod that don't have a single unifying theme. I'll start posting them as I think of them. Maybe this can be my SPQR log and maybe someone might find useful info even though this sub forum seems dead. I first played this mod more than a decade ago, it's strange coming back after all this time.

    -The mod is supposed to be hard but even with house rules and garrison script, it's going pretty easily for me so far because I do precise planning for the first few turns and the benefits snowball. Once the initial elephant and Spartans armies were defeated, I've yet to find a tough battle. I've added my own new house rule to try to make it harder which is no city assaults are allowed. Starving cities out should slow things down. Of course, there's nothing I can do if a relieving army attacks and all of the enemy die which would give me the city the next turn.
    -I no longer assault but if you do, you can hire mercenaries just before the assault, let them take the brunt of the causalities, then disband them after. Another mercenary use is to disband them for the population to rapidly grow a city. The prohibitive aspect of mercenaries are the high upkeep, these methods make upkeep irrelevant.
    -Greek and Gaul sword auxilia and spear auxilia are recruitable both pre Marius and post Marius. The same goes for Spanish spear auxilia. Focusing first on taking cities that can recruit these provide 2 benefits. 1. it eases the Marius transition, 2. it gives you a ton of time to gain experience on these units.
    -Halicarnassus is logistically difficult to take early but you can send a diplomat via ship to bribe it once your economy is up and running. The 20% faster build is well worth trying to get ASAP. The cost is in the 80k range but can vary widely depending on garrison. As a side note, you start picking up bad character traits when you end turn over 150k. Vanilla was 50k.
    -Corinth also gets some priority to be taken because the public order bonus from the wonder is wonderful. That said, you'll already be in position to take it if you're trying to get Greece early anyway for the auxilia. Also, early Corinth isn't nearly as important as it is in vanilla. In vanilla, if you don't take it early, the Brutii will.
    -Mining is by far the best source of income. This threw me because I was used trade income being the most important in vanilla. In this mod, some cities can't trade at all and some are limited to where port upgrades add zero income. Tax is second best.
    -This is speculative but a late game difficulty is AI built huge cities. You have no way to build over certain final buildings and erase the culture penalty. Therefore, it makes sense to target Egypt last. The pyramid wonder will reduce culture penalty for Egyptian cities.
    -If you're not rushing, try to avoid battles whenever possible. Even if you're invading a region and see several stacks, it's often a good idea to not attack them and siege the city and let the AI decide if they want to fight. The reasoning is that this mod has 0 turn recruitment, therefore, the limit to the AI army is upkeep. Killing AI armies will only temporarily reduce their numbers. The only way to permanently reduce AI armies is to reduce their income.
    -If the creator still monitors this forum, house rule question: I see that you're not allowed to assassinate generals but are you allowed to sabotage?
    -Despite the design of the mod, it's very possible to rush even adhering to strict house rules and using garrison script. One method is to attack armies just outside of cities, if you kill all of them, you can immediately take the city with no siege. Regular siege assaults won't slow you down either if you use mercenaries to prevent main army casualties.
    -This is mentioned in other threads but it's useful to know if you didn't and didn't search. Garrison script doesn't take effect immediately after you siege, it has to be activated the prior turn. This is a problem because the mod is prone to crashing requiring loads but such is life. Also, the script occasionally bugs and sets the year to 260. You can either reload or run the script again to fix this.
    -A full pre marian legion costs 8,490 to raise and 2,990 to upkeep. This is assuming slingers instead of archers. This will vary by a negligible amount depending on general bodyguard size. If you're looking at the numbers yourself, if it doesn't add up, it's because 100 of the number is counted as wages from the general. A lone governor will then cost you 300 a turn to upkeep.

    A general RTW idea that provides benefits in all RTW. This benefit is so strong it would justify it's own thread. Even if army is out of movement, the ship they are on can continue to move if you select the ships. You can also transfer an out of movement army by having a another ship join the ships the army is on, then moving the original ships out of the fleet. In this way, you can set up a relay of ships, a pony express type of idea. With this method, if you had enough ships in your network, you could move an army from Norway to Egypt in the same turn.

  2. #2

    Default Re: General Thoughts

    I was hoping I could edit the OP. That way I wouldn't have to keep making new posts. Anyway, updates.
    -The Toletum bull warrior stack was a tough fight for my pre marian legion.
    -IDK if this is an SPQR issue or RTW issue. An enemy army with elephants immediately attacked my stone wall city. The elephants committed suicide on the gates. I'm pretty sure I remember even in vanilla, you weren't allowed to instant assault stone walls with elephants but that was as the player. Maybe the AI is allowed to be stupid.

  3. #3

    Default Re: General Thoughts

    Some minor things I noticed.
    -On the strategy map, the mine icon on Halicarnassus is halfway on top of the city, it looks ugly.
    -One of my generals picked up a priest of Neptune ancillary. This might be an error since command at sea does nothing for a general.

  4. #4

    Default Re: General Thoughts

    -Question about the 20 turn legion replenishment house rule. Does the count start when the legion is trained or when first blood is drawn? Also, can you time it so the legion returns just at turn 20 or do you have to wait for turn 20 to start marching back?
    -A thought on general deaths. The javelins do help but they still die frequently when in AI reinforcement armies. They also die very very easily in autobattle, I know house rules say autobattles are no good but they are useful to preserve one's sanity. I'm less than 50 turns in and I run into multiple full stack battles a turn. I can only afford to play the key battles myself or the game will move forward at a snails pace. You lose way more men and kill way less in autobattle so I see no reason they would be unfair. Having default skirmish mode might help in reinforcement battles. As for auto battle, the small general's bodyguard size seems to be the reason they die easily. A way to reduce that could be for the bodyguard to be a weaker unit, say equities or roman cavalry, but slightly bigger. This also nerfs the faction leader and heir nicely. The smaller bodyguard doesn't scale as much for them, they have almost full cavalry unit sized super units. Then again, the creator might want general deaths to be more frequent as a penalty for auto battle.

  5. #5

    Default Re: General Thoughts

    -Will generals still die if rear charging a phalanx or if fighting and the phalanx turns around? I don't mean spearmen, I mean phalanx with the formation ability. Units have a lot stronger now and are less prone to dying but I remember in vanilla, playing as Carthage, Syracuse militia hopolite would instant kill even full HP elephants which had 12. I could test but I haven't because I don't want to risk generals because of the no save to redo house rule. I do save every turn though because crashes happen frequently. It seems to crash every time I alt tab from the game. Thankfully, I have dual monitors but single monitor users might be out of luck.
    -Regarding no save and no pause, I've played that way on vanilla too. I now have some anecdotal data on the subject. It's my personal experience that my battle performance hasn't noticeably gone down. What has happened though is I'm way more paranoid.
    -An expansion on the earlier general theme. The trick in vanilla is to stack personal security and influence ancillaries on generals. These traits add to bodyguard size. Then raise them to 9 exp and you have a 2HP heavy cav unit that kills everything and auto replenishes.
    -My experimental data is limited but from what I've seen, doctors don't seem to stack. Multiple doctors don't seem reduce casualties more than 1. Maybe other people can chime in with more data.

  6. #6

    Default Re: General Thoughts

    -Do intimidation modifiers stack in battles? It's hard to quantify because multiple factors are at play in battle for morale.

  7. #7

    Default Re: General Thoughts

    -The Roman rebel city on the top left is meant to be left alone right? Or can you take it? I noticed the senate didn't die when they lost Rome. Maybe the rebels stay alive too with no cities.
    -When looking through descr unit. I noticed cataphracts have maces which are worse in every way than the main spear. What's the point of the maces? In vanilla, they were AP but here, the spear is AP too.

  8. #8

    Default Re: General Thoughts

    Good to see people still playing this game and taking the time to write such in detail. I just re-installed SPQR RTW myself and starting a new campaign.

    In response to some of the content in your thread - I don't know how far you went but for me the difficulty is not beating an army/taking a city/conquering a region.
    The difficulty is keep going. It's a big map, people run out of steam (as you say "to preserve one's sanity. I'm less than 50 turns in and I run into multiple full stack battles a turn.").

    Some things you mention in your post are (in my book) outright cheating (such as pony-expressing ships for unlimited movement and to some extent auto-replenish 2 HP cav if you go for it)
    I guess you're not doing it but merely mentioning it but still

    I am also surprised you remember the vanilla mechanics, IIRC this game came out in 2004 -13 years ago- and I only played vanilla for maybe the first year. Perhaps you discovered mods late or perhaps you just enjoyed it?

    I would be interested if you post a thread on your current campaign with screenshots.

  9. #9

    Default Re: General Thoughts

    Quote Originally Posted by themrwho View Post
    I am also surprised you remember the vanilla mechanics, IIRC this game came out in 2004 -13 years ago- and I only played vanilla for maybe the first year. Perhaps you discovered mods late or perhaps you just enjoyed it?
    The OP's reasons might be completely different but personally I think vanilla RTW is very enjoyable if it's the first game of that type you played. For the first few campaigns you are only slightly better than the AI so winning every battle isn't a given and you conquer fairly slowly. It also helps if you also had some natural inclinations towards keeping the game realistic like I did, such as recruiting only small numbers of elites. Then even once the game becomes too easy, it always has that nostalgia factor so you keep coming back to it. If you played similar games before I understand it probably didn't come close. When I got Medieval 2 later, I went looking for mods almost straight away, hardly played the vanilla at all.

  10. #10
    Anthropoid's Avatar Tiro
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    Default Re: General Thoughts

    Hey dudes! I too have come back to RTW and mods after a long time. My fav (only one I played) was Roma Surrectum and I cannot get the damn thing to work with a Steam install.

    Finding a NON-Steam versions seems nearly impossible. I bought a CD version from Amazon and when I plugged it in, it told me it was "published by Valve" and immediately launched Steam!

    Are you playing this mod with a Steam version of RTW?

  11. #11
    Saul Tyre's Avatar Senator
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    Default Re: General Thoughts

    Quote Originally Posted by Anthropoid View Post
    Hey dudes! I too have come back to RTW and mods after a long time. My fav (only one I played) was Roma Surrectum and I cannot get the damn thing to work with a Steam install.

    Finding a NON-Steam versions seems nearly impossible. I bought a CD version from Amazon and when I plugged it in, it told me it was "published by Valve" and immediately launched Steam!

    Are you playing this mod with a Steam version of RTW?
    I PM'd you with an offer laddie

  12. #12

    Default Re: General Thoughts

    His frequent crashes are Hardware issues, SPQR is very stable.

    Its also seems while he is trying to play by house rules, that he likes playing a vanilla style. First post he says its easy here and there etc. Then later asked basic questions of the beginning of the game. lol This means he is a novice to SPQR mechanics. Any mod can be cheated on by little tricks and Blitz tactics. SPQR was designed for my style of play and other who like it.

    The Maces I believe were done to NERF the Cats, they were overpowered. But this is ALL SO LONG AGO that your better off looking up old threads. :-)

    I would recommend only playing this Mod on the Original Discs and on Windows XP, RTW has been known to have problems with other Newer OS and Steam. Unless you highly PC knowledgeable I suggest buying an old Copy on Ebay.
    Lt_1956
    Creator of SPQR:Total War mod since 2004

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