silk road and town militia

[Patronus]

I have a question concerning the silk road, namely why I haven't encountered it yet in my bactrian campaign (for RTR PE). If I am not mistaken, some of the routes of the silk road ran right through the kingdom of bactria, present day Iran and pakistan. So why have I not been experiencing any trade or travel on my roadways. I have conquered the Parthians and took Alexandria and several other central Selecuid cities, but have not seen any increase in my trade. In fact, trade seems to be contributing the least to my economy.

I really do believe that there should be some sort of automatic trade and caravans going on in this area. I know the Indian rebels to the east of me aren't inclined to trade, but still.....Is it possible to include this in the next edition of RTR, or is there a patch for this?


My 2nd point is a suggestion for the upcoming RTR VII. I have noticed that while it is possible to build large walls around your various cities, it seems pointless to do so in some cases because most of your garrisons are quite small and would be quickly over run by an assaulting force. Why not create a recruitable city militia unit of sorts, one that would take zero turns to recruit.

This may seem excessive, but in fact, this is how many cities were defended during the ancient times. When a city came under siege, say a Macedonian one. Yes there would be a call to arms and a standing army would be directed to break the siege, or a new army would be raised and sent to the besieged city. But in the meantime, what prevented the attacking nation from swarming over the walls and through the gates and taking the city. Most of the time, nations maintained very small standing forces, if any, in their cities (their standing armies were usually busy fighting wars off somewhere). What many cities did have were city militias, or levies, who were raised during emergencies to defend the city.


This is how the system should work. Any city, as long as it has been colonized to an acceptable level, should be able to recruit city militia. The actual recruitment process should only take zero turns. In theory a city could recruit an entire stack of city militia for free. But I think there should be a cap, a set number, for how many can be recruited per city. The militia of course will be of poor quality, but at least will give your outnumbered professional troops a little bit of help. Also, to prevent players from recruiting a bunch of city militia and sending them off to war, any city militia unit sent out of the city will suffer a certain amount of casualties each day it is away from its parent city (the same way a plague kills off troops or populations). This would simulate that city militia were meant solely for the defense of their homes and that when they were sent to fight somewhere foreign, began to lose heart and desert. The militias or also automatically disbanded once the siege has been lifted. I know there are militia units of sorts already in the RTR pe, but I think this system would be much more accurate and fun. Let's be honest, if we are maintaining a militia unit for dozens of turns, its not really militia, but a standing army.

This would give you, and hopefully the ai, a much better chance of defending those far away cities with that those tiny garrions. Also, it might be a good idea to be able to reraise certain disbanded units in cities. For example, if you disbanded a veteran pezoi unit in a city, but then needed it all of a sudden, I think that you should be able to recruit it back. After all this is what the Romans and Successor kingdoms did on multiple occasions.


I honestly don't know if any of this is possible to mod. I don't have any experience with modding, so please don't get mad at me if what I have suggested is totally insane and impossible to do. I just wanted to put these suggestions out there.

On a side note....does anyone know how to get the original RTW formations back in the game. I really don't like these new ones; none of them are useful. I know some were intended for the roman player, and I appreciate the attempt at historical accuracy, but it is impossible to realistically fight using the checquered formation with this game engine. I don't want to change the ai's formations, just mine.

[AngryTitusPullo]

Why not create a recruitable city militia unit of sorts, one that would take zero turns to recruit.

The reason this option is not really workable is because then the AI will spam this units (since it's usually cheap) and you (player) will encounter this type on units mostly in battle.

The rest is mostly hardcoded (at least in RTW-BI engine).

There's plan to add scripted garrison (for certain cities) but it's not included in TIC.

[Patronus]

Anyone know why the silk road has not been put in RTR PE?

[Fijj]

It's hardcoded, as LestaT said

[Patronus]

How is something like a silk road hardcoded, but the RTR dev team was able to add the auxiliary building system?

[florin80]

How is something like a silk road hardcoded, but the RTR dev team was able to add the auxiliary building system?

As I`ve already replied in your other thread on this matter(in the RTRPE sub-forum) :

You can`t build silk roads with Bactria because the building doesn`t have that ownership in EDB. It only has eastern culture and parthia. And bactria(thrace in game files) is of greek culture. That`s the technicall explanation. I don`t know why the decission to restrict it to armenia, pontus and parthia was taken.
I very much doubt anyone can remember why it was decided to be like this since RTRPE hasn`t change anything of this sort. It`s most likely like that since RTR 6 Gold was out if not earlier.

[Darkarbiter]

Anyone know why the silk road has not been put in RTR PE?

Lots of work scripting wise... may not work too well. As well as giving advantage to player AI doesn't have (which makes things arbitrary). I mean if the AI doesn't use it... then it will either give an advantage to the player and make things imbalanced. Or people will balance the AI with it meaning the player is at a disadvantage if they don't use it.

Do it in a basic way is full of gameplay problems (and realism/immersion). There are an infinite number of situations that would need to be simulated and lots of triggers to make to get it to work properly. From a modders perspective it's probably either going to turn out crap or be a whole lot of work and get scrapped.

Chances are it's only gonna be a money thing anyway. So as I said it's either gonna be a whole lot of work and ruin balance (and therefore gameplay AND immersion) or be a whole lot of work.

@ G the great "the silk road was buildable in RTW/M2tw" well... that was basicly a trade building that could be built anywhere by certain factions arbitrarily named the silk road.

A garrison script however I shouldn't be excessively hard (although it's still pretty big) and has been done by a lot of m2tw mods. I'm kind of against it for gameplay reasons though. However I'm sure it's on the agenda for the RTR 7 team (as suggested above). It's probably one of the few things that I'm for for gameplay reasons (along with 2hp units... can't think of any other things).

My personal definition of arbitrary: Something that has been choson by the people in question that is generally concidered stupid or unecassary that is likely to be very different depending on who your talking to and is why those type of things are generally avoided. E.g. including music you like in a mod just because you like it.

[Pompeius Magnus]

I would support the idea of a garrison script. That makes sense.

But a unit like "city militia" should not be integrated because it is not very historical. The romans never had a unit like that in the time of the early and mid republic.

[khshayathiya]

What LestaT mentioned as hardcoded is probably the inexorable urge of the AI to recruit massive armies of cheap units. At some point, I had introduced in my own game a unit, "Colonists", designed to facilitate population transfer - cheap, 0 turns to recruit, massive numbers. Guess what I was up against ever since? Swarms of Colonists, wave after wave of walking meat.

The silk road can obviously be included (and probably should, for the Bactrians, Parthians, Seleukids and Ptolemaics, factions that actively encouraged the trade with the Far East - India and even China). That, at least, is what I have in mind to propose for VII. The rest of the team will decide.

[G_the_Great]

:hmmm:

Garrison troops could be implemented with VERY high upkeep costs (or possibly no movement values) to stop the AI spamming them however:
You would need a few troop types for each faction for use as garrisons ie basic skirmishers, spears, slingers/archers, swords etc.
But
There are a limited number of unit slots available to be placed in RTR.
Which means
Some existing troops would have to be removed to make this feasible, so this probably won't happen.

However it occurs to me that it is possible to use scripts to generate troops.
This means that when a city is besieged you could possibly use scripts to generate a few units which would be a garrison (and place conditions on their numbers and types relating to the size and population of the city, size of the defences and such) out of existing units, and use the same script to get rid of the units afterwards. There could also be a population penalty for the city if they die or something.

However I have no idea if this is at all possible due to my complete cluelessness with RTR scripts of any shape or size.

Possibly one of the developers or another more knowledgeable person could give a clearer indication of what is possible.

Slightly more on topic, I though that the silk road was a building which was built in certain areas by the eastern factions.

How is something like a silk road hardcoded, but the RTR dev team was able to add the auxiliary building system?

The auxilia (or more correctly Area Of Recruitment) is the result of very complex and ingenious descriptions for the buildings function which were completely changeable in the desc_building.txt file, however it does look hideous.
I admit to complete ignorance about the silk road and hope others here are less so.