Better Wrath of Sparta Campaign

[mauiaw]

This mod adds various new mechanics, some inspired by Age of Charlemagne and Thrones of Britannia, to the Wrath of Sparta DLC, making for a more challenging and strategic campaign.

• Population: A slightly simplified version of the People of Rome 2 mod, with population numbers adjusted for the campaign. Many of the units available to the Greek factions are drawn from the upper classes and you will have to be careful of depleting these populations.
• Recruitment: As recruitment is limited by population in addition to upkeep, all units will be available from the start. The building which used to unlock units now provides a larger garrison.
• War Weariness: Whilst you are at war with other factions war weariness will increase. A higher war weariness leads to reduction in public order across your provinces. War weariness can be reduced by winning battles or signing peace treaties, but losing battles will greatly increase war weariness.
• Movement: Naval units can move much further (except for transports), increasing the effectiveness of naval harassment in the Aegean. Additionally, the victorious force after a battle loses all movement points. This means that you cannot chase down the losing army and annihilate them (and the AI cannot do the same to you). Overall, this makes battles less decisive and leads to a greater number of armies on the campaign map. (Stopping movement may cause a desync in multiplayer campaigns - I will see if I can fix this).
• Supply: A limited supply system whereby your land armies on your own territories will gain supply and on un-owned land territories lose supply. Once army supply goes to zero the army will start suffering attrition.
• Rebellion: Provinces can now rebel before public order reaches -100. The lower the public order, the greater the chance that it will rebel. This leads to a more unpredictable campaign.
• Cultural Affinity: As the strength of Persia increases relative to the Greeks the Greeks gain diplomatic bonuses with each other. The stronger persia becomes the greater the cultural affinity you will share with your fellow Greek factions.
• Omens: Every season brings a new omen with effects that will make you think about whether you ought to wait for better omens before you start towards your next target.
• Agents: fewer agents and reduced capacity to damage your armies.

My hope is that all these mechanics combine to make for a much more thoughtful campaign, that forces the player to take make difficult strategical choices and discourages an all-out-war play-style.

Here are some of the pop-ups you will be met with on your first turn:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Download

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xS...DbSRL8iCbj69e6

To run the mod, download this file to your rome 2 data folder and select "better_WOS_mod" in the mod manager. You may also need to enable out of date mods.

Steam Link

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfil.../?id=912897675

Credits:

Greeks At War/Hellenika team: This mod obviously takes a lot of inspiration from the Hellenika mod.
Magnar: For his amazing People of Rome mod
R2TW team: For their modding tools
DEI team: For the agent nerf

[mauiaw]

I've added the download link to the OP

[juve]

Great idea about war weariness! Is it compatible with Hellenica mod?
If not, is it possible to make a submod with war weariness special for Hellenica?

[mauiaw]

I think Hellenika have their own version of war weariness. Public order is affected by the number of neighboring factions who you are at war/peace with, there is also some negative effects to keeping your army on enemy territory for a long period of time.

I found it was difficult to keep track of all these effects and so I simplified things a bit, I find simple is best. In this mod war weariness is a single number that ticks up each turn if you are at war. It increases by a lot when you lose battles but decreases when you win battles or sign a peace treaty. There are about 8 levels of war weariness that have increasing negatives to public order. I could try to make a war weariness submod but I don't know how to make this compatible with another mod that uses scripts (since script files are usually all referenced from the scripting.lua file). If anyone would like to use the script though, feel free to implement it in your own mods - I haven't commented the code though!

[mauiaw]

I played a campaign as Boiotia before I updated this mod after the recent patch and (not to blow my own trumpet) it was one of the best total war campaigns I had ever played. I thought the new politics system actually worked well within WOS and the extra mechanics this mod introduces conspired to make the campaign really feel like a struggle of survival. By 100 turns in I had only managed to gain about 5 extra regions above my starting province, I had briefly occupied others but failed to hold on to them. I often had to rely on my allies to help defend what I had struggled to take and Sparta was a far stronger faction than I.

I have decided to add new features to the mod, inspired partly by thrones of Britannia. The changes and new version are in the OP.

I have since played a campaign with Athens and I found it much easier, still not sure how to increase the difficulty here

[alhoon]

Awesome.

[Nizam]

%100 reason for play wrath campaign thx mate

[The Despondent Mind]

How much of these features are applied on the AI?

[mauiaw]

The AI is effected by the agent, rebellion, movement and recruitment changes. It is never going to be able to understand new scripted mechanics; until the AI is improved, the best way to increase difficulty is to handicap the player.