An optimal hotseat campaign

**arythm1a** · April 02, 2018, 06:10 AM

Hello! I am planning to try something different, and start a hotseat campaign where I am controlling every single faction. Thus, most battles will be autorrsolved and I am wondering what difficulty would be the best in order to achieve fair results. I have also read about the various reforms and some of them seem to demand that the battle is initiated by the player. If I play these battles on the battle map, will it count for the reform? And which difficulty is best to ensure fair results here? I also wonder if there are any of the reforms that I will be unable to trigger in a hotseat campaign, thus crippling that faction. Thanks in advance! /Ary

**QuintusSertorius** · April 02, 2018, 06:45 AM

While the hotseat function has been enabled, EBII isn't really designed for it. Virtually every player-oriented event is terminated for a hotseat game, or else it defaults to the AI-only conditions. There's no way we can enable them for hotseat without a fundamental rethink of how they're all coded, and I think you can imagine what the appetite to do that is.

No, auto-calculated battles don't count towards any reform which requires battles to be fought, because there is code exported from the battle engine to campaign engine that only happens when you play it out. However, all those scripts will be terminated as soon as that faction is not the active one anyway. It won't be "crippled", you'll just have the AI-only versions, which are usually date-triggered.

**arythm1a** · April 02, 2018, 08:02 AM

Thanks for all the answers! What are some of the player-specific events that you're talking about? And that means that they all get their reforms, but in different ways? For example, how would Baktria achieve independence in this hypothetical campaign ?

**QuintusSertorius** · April 02, 2018, 11:37 AM

Originally Posted by arythm1a

Thanks for all the answers! What are some of the player-specific events that you're talking about? And that means that they all get their reforms, but in different ways? For example, how would Baktria achieve independence in this hypothetical campaign ?

Same way the AI does - they'd start off independent right away, without having to "earn" it. All of those mechanics would be disabled and their scripts terminated.

**arythm1a** · April 02, 2018, 02:39 PM

Oh, I wasn't even aware they started off that way! Can they still receive missions like normally? And what about reforms, like Carrhage's? Are they all just done on a time-basis, then? Also what were some of the disabled player events that's you mentioned? Sorry for the barrage of questions

**QuintusSertorius** · April 02, 2018, 02:51 PM

Originally Posted by arythm1a

Oh, I wasn't even aware they started off that way! Can they still receive missions like normally? And what about reforms, like Carrhage's? Are they all just done on a time-basis, then? Also what were some of the disabled player events that's you mentioned? Sorry for the barrage of questions

The AI doesn't get missions (all those faction-specific things like independence, reforms and missions are player-only), they're all disabled. Carthage's reform happens on a date basis. Roman reforms are based on a date, not the faction's activities, and so on.

**arythm1a** · April 02, 2018, 03:41 PM

Thanks! Is there somewhere where I can see what missions the different factions get, in order to simulate them (even without rewards)

**parthian8** · April 17, 2018, 04:27 AM

I wouldn't try to put anyone off the idea of trying a hotseat campaign. I have had some of my most enjoyable games playing up to eight factions across the map. It has its advantages. It's true that many features are disabled. But it by no means returns the game to anything like vanilla status. Lots of brilliant innovations still work. And you get to be your own AI, which gives you much greater scope for negating the effects of AI gameplay decisions that one might not personally think quite so brilliant.