The Xenophon Effect

[Solo1906]

Can any one help me with this?

I remember a long time ago while playing a campaign in vanilla I was marching my hoplites through a very arid part of the map - in fact the same area and path -only in reverse - of Xenophons 10,000 retreat when I lost a percentage of my men due to what appeared to be exposure of some kind. What was affect that caused this to happen? It can really piss you off but it was very realistic and I just never looked into it before until now. It really stung because they were reinforcements. I like this kind of a wicked twist to game - in a strange way.

Any help?

[Cymera]

I've never had that happen, but its quite interesting!

[Solo1906]

I have not had it happen since installing updates and mods. I noticed that there is a food stat in export_descr_unit - maybe that used to be enabled some how and I had guys starving or something. I have been trying to find it to re-vive it again.

[Balikedes]

I think EB has something like this...you might want to try their forum.

[Kara Kolyo]

Could it be from some natural disaster like flood or earthquake. There is some problem with them and are disabled in XGM, but i think that DBH said that in Alexander they are fixed.

[Unknown Soldier]

Yeah I was playing Alex the other day and a storm wiped out 25% of an army stack and about 15% of my fleet. Nasty! These guys were what I had spent all my money on to reinforce the expedition to Persia. I cheated reloaded and moved them to a different location before hitting end turn.

[RedFox]

If you stick around the Arabian deserts for too long, you'll start to loose men from dehydration - it was already present in RTW 1.0..
Experienced it when I was building outposts across the whole of Arabia, lost quite a lot of men.

[DimeBagHo]

If you stick around the Arabian deserts for too long, you'll start to loose men from dehydration - it was already present in RTW 1.0...

Nice. Never seen that myself. It would be nice if we could make it more severe - but I've never seen anything in the files relating to it.

[Solo1906]

Could that weird food stat in export_descr_unit have something to do with this? I am trying to see if we can tweek this - something similar should happen to non-regional units in snow as well.

[DimeBagHo]

The stat_food line was originally supposed to be used for a supply system - but CA dropped the idea early in development and now it does nothing (as far as anyone can tell).

The stat_heat line might be worth looking at though.

[Solo1906]

Is this something that has to be activated in text files then? If so, anybody know where?

[RedFox]

DimeBagHo:
If you want to make the results more severe, you can edit descr_climates.txt
Just Ctrl+F for sandy_desert and change the value from 4 to 6/8, which should pretty much make the effect very noticeable.

It should also have an effect on fatigue, if you have it enabled, that's when the stat_heat comes to play.

[Zarax]

Hmm, I wonder what would happen if you put similar values all over the map... maybe we could emulate desertion and diseases that way...

[RedFox]

Would be a nice thing for the arctic regions though , but I doubt desertion and diseases would be a good thing to emulate with the heat values. It is best just to increase the amount of plagues, or leave it be.

[Zarax]

If I had time I'd research on it...

[Dom9127]

This idea seems very interesting if it was implemeted it would be absoultey ace! The effect it has on faituge would not matter that much as it is turned off by default.

[CaesarVincens]

It would be ace, except for those who turn fatigue on.

[Zarax]

There can be workarounds for fatigue...

[RedFox]

Zarax: Maybe if you set stat_heat to a negative amount, your troops will tire slower?
I'll try it out and see what the effects are.

Edit: Doesn't seem to really have an effect - the only thing would be that it removes the fatigue caused by hot climates.

[Lusted]

I was so intrigued by the possibility of attrition in the desert that i decided to test it in Medieval II Total War. In descr_climates.txt, i set heat to 8 for sandy_desert, and set the stat_heat value for all Egyptian units to 5. 11 turns into a campaign with some units just stood out in the desert, they have suffered attrition.

So there is attrition in deserts in Rome and Medieval II, if a unit has a high stat_heat value and is the desert for a long time.