1-Turn Recruitment Version

[cherryfunk]

dvk, tone, here's a thread for discussing the 1-turn version and giving feedback.

For our initial tests, I suggest the following modifications for 1-turn:

Economy -- dvk, I think you mentioned that you have a way to quickly make large-scale economic changes. I think a decrease of about 25% in income should be a good starting point for a tighter 1-turn economy, can we do that?

Recruitment -- I'd like to see a four-tier recruitment system, if possible. I know tone has a means of rapidly making changes to the EDU without going through each unit by hand, so hopefully we can find definitions for these unit tiers that allow him to quickly tweak the EDU:

• Tier 1: Levies (0-turn recruitment) This is the biggest question mark -- would the AI over-recruit low quality units if they're recruited in 0-turns? I'd like to at least try this out and see if it can work, because it would offer up the option of raising a defensive army quickly in emergencies.
  
  • The trick of course is how we define 'levy' troops. I would suggest they be the lowest quality infantry, with only a few available per faction. Some factions, like Rome, might have no levy units. No missile units and no cavalry units would be considered levies, with the possible exception of lowest quality horsemen for Sarmatia and Parthia. These units should be the absolute worst of the lot in quality.

• Tier 2: Normal Units (1-turn recruitment) 95% of all units would fall into this category.

• Tier 3: Elite Units (2-turn recruitment) Elite infantry and cavalry would take 2 turns to recruit. Elite would be the very best troops of each faction, for example Celtic Champions, Successor Silver Shields, Companion Horse and Triarii.

• Tier 4: Rare/Special Units (3-turn recruitment) This is another experimental tier -- if 3-turn recruitment means the AI doesn't recruit them, then we'll have to forgo this level, but I'd like to try it. This would be for very rare units that took an exceptionally long time to raise, train or (in the case of ships and siege weapons) build.
  
  • Rare units would include: Elephants, the best naval units, and the best siege weapons. There might be other units as well that fit into this category but they would be selected on a hand-picked basis.

With these initial changes, I think we'll have the foundation for a good 1-turn version of RS2 that we can begin testing and balancing...

[tone]

Once I'm back from holiday I can do a 1 turn set of stats very easily. I'll also fiddle a little with recruitment and upkeep costs (increase) so that not too much economy changing is required.

[cherryfunk]

tone, I've been researching the best 1-turn mods to get a feel for their recruitment costs -- obviously this is an important part of achieving the right campaign balance. And of course the ratio of upkeep to recruitment is crucial, i.e. how much it costs to maintain a unit for a turn vs. the cost to recruit it in the first place.

These are the ratios of upkeep to recruitment for some of the best mods:

EB: 0.25 for all units.
SPQR: Ranges from 0.3 to 0.6 (I couldn't detect a pattern as to why maintenance of some units cost more than others)
XGM: 0.5 for all units
VI2: 0.33 for all units
BC: 0.4 to 0.5

The easiest solution would be to simply pick a basic ratio and apply it to all units. XGM and VI2 do this, and both are top-notch mods.

But it occurs to me that it might be possible to use the cost structure to 'nudge' the AI (and even the player) towards more accurate army composition. For example the Cimbri could maintain larger armies if their upkeep was slightly lower than other factions, or the Celts might recruit fewer archers if archer upkeep was higher for Celtic factions, etc.

I know you have it set up so that you can make EDU changes relatively easily, but I'm unclear on how 'granular' the changes could be. Can you change the unit cost structure for a single faction, for example? Or for a specific type of unit, like archers or cavalry? The more targeted the changes you can make, the more we might try to achieve with the unit cost structure.

[dvk901]

Though not 'impossible', Cherry, because all factions do have 'specific' units, it would be impossible to differentiate units that are shared....and there are a lot of them. Although I think the Cimbri have a few more specific units than other factions.

[cherryfunk]

Good point.

Perhaps we could use a 'global' system that applies to all factions then. Some unit types would cost more to maintain (say, elite units), while levies would cost less?

A possible system would be something like this:

LEVY UPKEEP/RECRUITMENT COST RATIO: 0.25 [Applies to levy/militia units]
STANDARD COST RATIO: 0.33 [Applies to most troops]
ELITE COST RATIO: 0.4 [Applies to any noble/elite units]

[Mulattothrasher]

I have noticed that on 1 turn, what I play 90% of the time testing stuff, the A.I. expands way too fast, virtually on par with 0-turn and they still crank out stacks at a very high rate. I think that the economy is great, as my cash is level with my armies adn my own expansion.

Between 0 and 1 turn, theres not a huge difference in the overall expansion, except how long it take to recruit a unit. I'd estimate that within 20-30 years (AUC), theres little, if any, Free Peoples regions left on the map. I was at 550 AUC and Ireland and Tavion (Galatia) were the only free Free Peoples regions, save 2 areas in the steppes.

Perhaps its all tied to ALX.exe, but these are my personal observations

[tone]

tone, I've been researching the best 1-turn mods to get a feel for their recruitment costs -- obviously this is an important part of achieving the right campaign balance. And of course the ratio of upkeep to recruitment is crucial, i.e. how much it costs to maintain a unit for a turn vs. the cost to recruit it in the first place.

These are the ratios of upkeep to recruitment for some of the best mods:

EB: 0.25 for all units.
SPQR: Ranges from 0.3 to 0.6 (I couldn't detect a pattern as to why maintenance of some units cost more than others)
XGM: 0.5 for all units
VI2: 0.33 for all units
BC: 0.4 to 0.5

The easiest solution would be to simply pick a basic ratio and apply it to all units. XGM and VI2 do this, and both are top-notch mods.

But it occurs to me that it might be possible to use the cost structure to 'nudge' the AI (and even the player) towards more accurate army composition. For example the Cimbri could maintain larger armies if their upkeep was slightly lower than other factions, or the Celts might recruit fewer archers if archer upkeep was higher for Celtic factions, etc.

I know you have it set up so that you can make EDU changes relatively easily, but I'm unclear on how 'granular' the changes could be. Can you change the unit cost structure for a single faction, for example? Or for a specific type of unit, like archers or cavalry? The more targeted the changes you can make, the more we might try to achieve with the unit cost structure.

Basically I've pretty much done this with unit cost rather than unit maintenance. I've got a little table that allows multiplication of unit costs depending on "culture" (seeing that so many units are shared across factions) and unit type:

Cultures:
african
"barbarian" -mainly Dacian
Celtic
Eastern
Germanic
Greek
Roman
Spanish
Steppe

unit types:
Skirmishers
Light inf
Heavy inf
Foot archers
Light cav
Heavy cav
Horse archers
"Default"

• Tier 2: Normal Units (1-turn recruitment) 95% of all units would fall into this category.

• Tier 3: Elite Units (2-turn recruitment) Elite infantry and cavalry would take 2 turns to recruit. Elite would be the very best troops of each faction, for example Celtic Champions, Successor Silver Shields, Companion Horse and Triarii.

This is pretty much what's in place now, I think.

Maintenance is currently:

(100 + (unit_cost/2.1))^0.9

The reason I added the exponential in there was on the basis that elite units already cost more than regular/levy units and that some maintenace costs like food and so on would be not that different for regular and elite so the relative cost for maintenance comes down.

In fact, recruitment costs have an exponential factor in there too, so that there is a slight bias towards elite units.

@MT - basically for 1 turn recruitment, the costs need to increase otherwise money is likely to be way too much