Discussions on RS Mechanics
To address a couple things people have talked about, yes, RTW really puts a lot of limitations on what you can do about economy, armies, nations protecting themselves, etc. But many of the things I've done in RS are based on my OWN observations of problems in RTW that were\are present in most mods.......and my methods also, are based on a balance of what can be accomplished, or at least go a long way toward accomplishing what I want, without damaging gameplay?
For example, you can do a ton of things in RTW with scripts. But you see, I am an IT person and a software analyist.....my job was to observe how computers behave and fix issues that made them essentially useless. In the business world, time is money; so a slow, sluggish computer that makes you wait an inordinate amount of time to do even a simple task is going to piss people off and decrease productivity. Scripts, by their nature, because they are DOS\TEXT based commands are very slow and inefficient. The software world is binary...1's and 0's.....machine code...much faster, compiled into executables that 'fly' because they are written for a modern computer...not a Commadore 64. So I've worked with scripts enough to know that you can have the fastest computer on earth, and it will STILL have a hard time processing that old text based stuff that it sees as a foreign object.
So in my opinion, scripts may well let me accomplish a whole bunch of stuff I'd like to do in this mod......but would the degraded playability be worth it. I don't believe so. Thus, I am not a fan of scripts.
So how do you do things in a mod to change it's behavior without using scripts. Well, first of all, you observe. One of my observations in most all mods I've seen is that when you play, you may have a hard time in the beginning, but you reach a point where you've become so powerful that no one can any longer stand up to you. It's a 'tip-over' point that is evident in most 'strategy' games...where you know you're going to win because you've got so much money and so much STUFF that nothing can stop you.
Now I can't alter RTW's code, but I can affect that 'tip-over' point by making at least the 'economy' based on things other than what they were before. By putting a lot of emphasis on you making money as a player in your own 'home' territories, I affect the 'tip-over' for two reasons. First, because I place at least some impediment on you..a restraint....because your finances are based in the areas where you started. Secondly, I give you an advantage for the same reason. As an AI faction expands, it loses money...or more correctly must spend a lot to maintain the expansion. It has a ton of armies because it can support them....but not a lot of money because it's trying to maintain it's empire like you are.
Now you come along and attack this faction. You start taking it's territories away. You relieve it of it's expensive armies. You pound it back towards it's 'home'. In the normal RTW mod, what happens is that you handcuff the AI faction because you are taking huge chucks out of it's economy. (You may have noticed in most other mods that the more you expand, the more money you make. That is not so in RS...at least the goal is to NOT make it so.) But in RS, as you pound an AI faction back towards it's home, you are actually INCREASING it's income. Army maintenance drops. Costly and often unproductive regions are removed from it. In the only way I could think of, you are actually making them stronger economically. So at least it gives them a better chance, and 'delays' the tip-over' point a lot......because if you're not careful, that faction can recover and come at you again!
Anyway, this is why RS has an AOR based 'home' economy. And as I get it adjusted better and better...it will be harder and harder.
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Originally Posted by Octavius-Augustus
). BUT as much as it improves gameplay, its actually not very historically accurate. It were in fact those distant colonies which paid Romes enormous expenses...Rome drained them dry and that was economically (by many opinions) the main reason of its decline, exploiting provinces instead of developing them properly, which finally meant thered been a certian point, when there was nothing more to take and there was almost impossible to expand more, having enemies at the border, fixing the legions there. Rome shaped into perfection the slavery system, but in such conditions he slowly start to fail, breaking slowly into feudalism. Nevertheless, Rome have never been as stupid as the European union - they didnt bring grain from Egypt to Rome, just to send it back to feed egyptian legions
