Hi, I'm back

[Quinn Inuit]

I apologize for my unannounced absence. I should have come in here and posted on a regular basis, at least, even if I wasn't going to be doing much. I didn't intend to be away for more than a couple of weeks, but life intervened and then I felt it would be hard to come back here and face up...and each day, it got just a little harder.

I see that things have gone along quite well in my absence--I was expecting a ghost town around here, to be honest. What have I missed, and is there any forum moderation work that needs to be done?

[AqD]

wb again!

[despot_of_rhodes]

Great to have you back, Quinn!
We´ve been missing you.

[Heptagenia]

yes! you are back

[Carac Caratacus]

Hello Quinn, i'm caca(i got named that and it fits, and makes me smile) and new here.

I've been enjoying the ExRM mod very much and if you are back to carry on with it, i'd be happy to help out. I've dug around the files quite a bit already and really like what ExRM has aimed to do. I'm re-installing it currently and was about to re-mod in some changes i made to the Briton faction and have posted aload of stuff over recent weeks about the mod and modding it, making lots of errors on the way and then working out what had gone wrong(install issues were the first big hurdle). It's a great mod and i look forward to it getting finished

[Pat89]

Hello Quinn, i'm caca(i got named that and it fits, and makes me smile) and new here.

Hehe - sorry for that

[Carac Caratacus]

@ PatricianS - really it's a great name, it perefectly fits my too long forum name and i'll proudly be 'caca' for ease fo use. thank you for saving me coming up with some shorthand

@ Antonov - Well yes for a strict historical replay(EU2 does something like that), still i like surprises sometimes, just for the fun I think it must use some form of randomisation ontop of those numbers, as war isn't always a certanty. For example as briton your relationship with germany isnt good, and true as soon as i managed to get a holding in mainland europe, the germans bought an army and declared war. Still after crushing that army quite heavily they sued for peace(it cost them 9000 gold!) and since then we have had about 30 years of peace, traded and he isn't stuffing huge armies in his bordering towns(dangerous game that!). So those stats i talked about dont always mean one thing, so maybe it's not a problem, just something i was wandering about having had a look at that file.

Well, they used to be recruitment buildings, but I decided to streamline everything into a single building. The main RTR team is doing that, and from what I can tell it seems to be a modding best practice at this point.

Is the aim of this to free up some space for adding different building types? I really like the concept of the Auxilia and how it limits/slows down troop building to better reflect historical accuracy. Would it be possible to say keep the need for stables+ranges+seige workshops and combine it with the Auxilia system? I've looked at the files that handle the Auxilia and it looks complicated already, would it be too complicated to add the requirements back in for these buildings, ontop of the Auxilia system? So not only would you need say the stables to recruit horse units, but also take into account if you are in a home province or a conquered one that also needs the transition period represented by the Auxilia system? I think i like the idea of the extra cost to the player to do this also. Anyway just another thing i'm thinking about having started to play this excellent mod.

Yes, I'm almost positive you can add squalor reductions, but you can't reduce it below 0.

Careful about doing that, though. You do _not_ want excessive population growth.

Ok well i went into 'export_building_descriptions.txt' and couldn't get it to work, in that if i used the same form as given to the characters for reduction of squalor, it wouldn't recognise 'squalor_bonus bonus -1' etc, so i'm sure how to do that, so do you have any suggestions i could try out?
I think what i'm looking for is maybe to remove the health bonus for these buildings and just use them to reduce squalor, so hopefuly it wont change the balance(instead of adding +1 on the top line it takes -1 from the bottom in effect) and will just make more sense to me Growth gets capped eventualy by what level of farming you can build, so that also should mean it shouldn't drasticaly change anything? Although for sure not going below 0 in squalor may be a problem! so if i can make a building reduce squalor i'll test it out and see how it goes - if it crashes then i'll see what i can do to stop that or leave it as is

For the record, you're not alone in liking the Brits. The founder of this mod (Candelarius) is a huge Anglophile. I love them, too, but mostly for debugging purposes.

Unfortunately, I really do think they need to go, at least as their own faction. If we do a Gallic superfaction, they'll probably be the mainstay of it.

Well i will be sad to see them go, but i'll probably be upto speed by then(i hope!) to add them back in my version. I wouldn't call me an anglophile exactly, as historicaly i'm a pro-brit pre-anglosaxon invasion So an Albionphile maybe? Prydainphile? there are a few older names i could go with

Hmmm, interesting point about the resources on the island. If you like, send me the list in descr_strat and I'll add it in. I agree that it needs to be wealthier to reflect its strategic importance from back then (I mean, there's a reason the Romans had what, 10% of their army stationed there?).

yeah currently it is very poor. But historicaly speaking and looking at what is there resource wise now, i'm thinking of something like this:

moving the tin resource so it sits graphicaly in cornwall(famous pre-historic tin mines), rather than the borders of current day wales/england.
Move the lead from the 'northern english' to the south, as there was a large roman leadworks somehwere in one of the home counties(hampshire?)

Add some gold to south wales(there were a few roman gold mines all along the road it built) somewhere.

Add copper to Tara/Eire/Ireland(again pre-historicaly known across europe as an exporter of copper(there was also a pretty big copper mine in wales, but gold was historicaly why the romans went to wales).

Add pottery to 'northern england', to replace the lost 'lead' - and briton did produce it's own pots(the 'beaker people' etc).

Add timber to scotland area. now i would like to make it so each area has two resources and the south(Calleva) has three, but we dont have a 'porridge' resource.... maybe a 'slave' shackel?

And as Briton was heavily forrested until the mid-late iron ages we could always use timber as a second resource, say in Eire(Tara)?

So in summery it looks like this:

[Calleva]: Iron/Lead/Textiles
[Isca]:Gold/Tin(moved to 'cornwall' area)
[Cuniento]: Pottery/Timber
[Dalriada]:Timber/Slaves
[Tara]:Copper/Timber

Interesting. Do the fortification strength changes affect autocalc'd battles or normal ones? If the latter, what's the change? Stronger walls, stronger arrows, or...?

Not sure how it affects autocalc'd battles(not sure how to tell really?), but yes it you definately notice the difference in the actual seige's you control yourself.

'descr_walls.txt' - I added around 100-150 to the base of each gateway rating(full_health xxx). 'ExRM\Data\descrbuilding\battle' - dbb eastern/greek etc txt file i also made sure all those reflected the same stats, as currently they dont. e.g 'roman' has a wall str of 500 and the same wall in 'egyptian' is just 40. I might have changed the numbers a little to further increase wall values to better reflect the 'gateway' changes i had made in 'descr_walls.txt'(basically to make a wall stronger than the gate/entrance).
I also noticed some numbers for things called 'town_wall_joiner' and such like that all have a value of '10' which i changed to '100', but i cant tel if that really makes any difference or if it should.

Having made these changes(and they need a little more testing out and adjusting i suspect) i definately see a difference in the amount of time it takes a battering ram to get through a wall/gateway, so i take more casulaties in doing so, from arrows/boiling oil etc. It makes walls a bit more usefull imho, and i'm debating wether to futher increase these values on say the big stone walled cities etc, as they could last a very long time under seige and provide a real deterent to attack. needs playing with.

Also, I would consider doing what Caligula Caesar has done with the starting positions out there. That will slow down Parthian and Bactrian early expansion a bit.

I've promised CC i'd take a look at his new mod once i had played a bit more with ExRM, to get to know it more(infact i had not even played vanilla rome until getting the anthology pack for this mod!). But i'm interested to see what he has done, i think he admitted to me it is very hard to stop certain factions just running away with it. But from my experiments of further boosting finances and armies of the faction around the Selucids i have slowed them down, and in my current game too much as Pontus(whom i gave a very veteran+well armed army to, but didn't increase it's military numbers) have swept the Selucids aside by about 250BC - so i need to go back and adjust all those changes i made in descr_strat.txt to fine tune the balance of power a bit more in that area.

There's no randomization ATM, but you could theoretically use a script and the randomness generator to start the occasional conflict.

The post i made to Antonov might cover this. I was just interested in how those numbers actualy related to what the AI decided to do re diplomacy, but certainly if we can make it more realistic/interesting then i'm in favour with playing around here.

Cool, good luck. I'll try to answer what I can.

Thank you Again i'll just say i really like what Candlearius, yourself and others have done with ExRM. I'm a big fan of CivIV and it kind of feels like ExRM is to RomeTW as Fall From Heaven II is to CivIV in terms of mod goodness. It just needs finishing off and polishing up, and i'm happy to help where i can

Oh and a question(of course!) - why cant i build mines as briton? I can as Iberians(and they have the same cap level on buildings). And if i want to build better weapon+armed troops(as briton or other 'barb' faction) could i do it if i capture a city with a 'foundry'? even if i cant build one myself?

[Quinn Inuit]

Hi, guys! It's good to see you again, too.

Caca: Welcome (belatedly)! Making all of those errors is the best way to learn the rules fast. Good luck with it. What kind of changes are you planning?

[Carac Caratacus]

well i know stuff like the practise range etc hasn't been fully utilized due to probably the auxilia system, so it's trying to find a new use? I've just added an recruit_experience 1 level boost to each of those buildings just to see if it makes me want to build them again, but i'm sure they could become more fully featured somehow.

I was also interested in finding out if it is possible to add reduction of squalor to buildings? I see they add healthiness, but i'm not sure if that reduces squalor or not(maybe over a longtime?). I'm using Rome as an example as it has massive squalor levels and it would seem 'neater' to have the sewers/aquaducts reduce squalor(like the character bonus, but for a building) maybe? If they do that anyway, but over a longtime, then it's fine as is.

I'll probably remain one of the few fans of keeping the Briton faction, true we didnt do much expansion of our own historicaly and seemed content to stay on our island, but well Rome certainly knew about briton and came here for a reason(mostly to plunder it's wealth, and because it could). So to that end i'm looking at adding a few resources to the impoverished island; gold in south wales(a big reason for the roman roads into that region), copper in Ireland(ireland exported copper all across europe during pre-roman times and after), that should do, maybe some cheap stuff like timber for scotland area? Plus of course rome suffered a famous defeat here with the boudicca uprising - so i think we deserve our spot in this roman world. But i know it seems likely ExRM will develope without the woad painted people, and thats fine, i can always mod them back in

having played a few games with a few factions(Rome/Gaul/Briton/Greeks) I think an element of balancing what factions we have already is possibly a good idea. In my game i've increased fortification strength(3 files seemed to handle that) to make walls a bit more usefull(atleast you will loose some troops when attacking a walled town now). I've also increased the armour and experience of some of the troops of the factions near to the Selucids to further try to slow down their eventual dominance, starting cash levels have been increased for some of these factions also(not much) and I've reduced troops+starting cash for the Selucids. They will still probably be top faction after about 30 turns, but they are not way ahead of everyone now. Still this kind of stuff needs lots of play testing to be sure.

playing as the Romans i can really appriciate what ExRM has done - and i only played a few quick games(not finished) of default RomeTW and can already see the extra depth it adds. Still i think quite a bit more can be done.

Actualy one thing i have noticed is that there appears to not be much randomisation in terms of faction relations? so pretty much all games can end up feeling the same, with the same people at war etc. I have found an area where this is handled with generic 600(at war),200(okish) stats etc but was wandering if some random element can be added to this diplomatic model?

Anyway it's all new to me, although i have modded and help mod stuff before, and i'll just take it slowly and time permitting(thats the big issue) try stuff out and will probably post annoying mod related questions from time to time

[Quinn Inuit]

well i know stuff like the practise range etc hasn't been fully utilized due to probably the auxilia system, so it's trying to find a new use? I've just added an recruit_experience 1 level boost to each of those buildings just to see if it makes me want to build them again, but i'm sure they could become more fully featured somehow.

Well, they used to be recruitment buildings, but I decided to streamline everything into a single building. The main RTR team is doing that, and from what I can tell it seems to be a modding best practice at this point.

I was also interested in finding out if it is possible to add reduction of squalor to buildings? I see they add healthiness, but i'm not sure if that reduces squalor or not(maybe over a longtime?). I'm using Rome as an example as it has massive squalor levels and it would seem 'neater' to have the sewers/aquaducts reduce squalor(like the character bonus, but for a building) maybe? If they do that anyway, but over a longtime, then it's fine as is.

Yes, I'm almost positive you can add squalor reductions, but you can't reduce it below 0.

Careful about doing that, though. You do _not_ want excessive population growth.

I'll probably remain one of the few fans of keeping the Briton faction, true we didnt do much expansion of our own historicaly and seemed content to stay on our island, but well Rome certainly knew about briton and came here for a reason(mostly to plunder it's wealth, and because it could). So to that end i'm looking at adding a few resources to the impoverished island; gold in south wales(a big reason for the roman roads into that region), copper in Ireland(ireland exported copper all across europe during pre-roman times and after), that should do, maybe some cheap stuff like timber for scotland area? Plus of course rome suffered a famous defeat here with the boudicca uprising - so i think we deserve our spot in this roman world. But i know it seems likely ExRM will develope without the woad painted people, and thats fine, i can always mod them back in

For the record, you're not alone in liking the Brits. The founder of this mod (Candelarius) is a huge Anglophile. I love them, too, but mostly for debugging purposes.

Unfortunately, I really do think they need to go, at least as their own faction. If we do a Gallic superfaction, they'll probably be the mainstay of it.

Hmmm, interesting point about the resources on the island. If you like, send me the list in descr_strat and I'll add it in. I agree that it needs to be wealthier to reflect its strategic importance from back then (I mean, there's a reason the Romans had what, 10% of their army stationed there?).

having played a few games with a few factions(Rome/Gaul/Briton/Greeks) I think an element of balancing what factions we have already is possibly a good idea. In my game i've increased fortification strength(3 files seemed to handle that) to make walls a bit more usefull(atleast you will loose some troops when attacking a walled town now). I've also increased the armour and experience of some of the troops of the factions near to the Selucids to further try to slow down their eventual dominance, starting cash levels have been increased for some of these factions also(not much) and I've reduced troops+starting cash for the Selucids. They will still probably be top faction after about 30 turns, but they are not way ahead of everyone now. Still this kind of stuff needs lots of play testing to be sure.

Interesting. Do the fortification strength changes affect autocalc'd battles or normal ones? If the latter, what's the change? Stronger walls, stronger arrows, or...?

Also, I would consider doing what Caligula Caesar has done with the starting positions out there. That will slow down Parthian and Bactrian early expansion a bit.

playing as the Romans i can really appriciate what ExRM has done - and i only played a few quick games(not finished) of default RomeTW and can already see the extra depth it adds. Still i think quite a bit more can be done.

Actualy one thing i have noticed is that there appears to not be much randomisation in terms of faction relations? so pretty much all games can end up feeling the same, with the same people at war etc. I have found an area where this is handled with generic 600(at war),200(okish) stats etc but was wandering if some random element can be added to this diplomatic model?

There's no randomization ATM, but you could theoretically use a script and the randomness generator to start the occasional conflict.

Anyway it's all new to me, although i have modded and help mod stuff before, and i'll just take it slowly and time permitting(thats the big issue) try stuff out and will probably post annoying mod related questions from time to time

Cool, good luck. I'll try to answer what I can.

[Irenaeus]

Welcome back Quinn!

Careful about doing that, though. You do _not_ want excessive population growth.

Forgive my ignorance, but why is this? The times I've ran into difficulties with population growth (e.g. RTW and BI with their bugged grain resource) is due to squalor going off the chart, but surely reducing the squalor with buildings would stop this happening?

[Carac Caratacus]

hello Irenaeus, i think the problem might be that if you give say the sewer improvement a -1 squalor and the town has no squalor rating(as some of the smaller towns dont) it might cause an error/ctd as squalor can not be less than zero. something like that, so once i work out how to do it, it will need some testing to see if it is worthwhile making a 'fix' for((maybe some catch script to never let it alter squalor below zero?) - if not just adding 'happy hearts' with these buildings may still be the safest way to go. But i know Rome having such high squallor, even after adding aquaducts etc is slightly annoying - maybe the romans were just more filthy than they pretended?

[Antonov]

If I could, I would eliminate all randomness whatsoever and have every faction go to war and stop battling with other factions only at the historical times

[Caligula Caesar]

Actuyally, its because having less squalor allows for a higher population growth rate. Of course, the easy solution is to cut the growth rate by 0.5, though I'm not sure if that actually works as it is meant to.

[Wien1938]

(Waves to Quinn from a distance!)
Welcome back. Real life has advantages certainly...(yay for jobs!) Been sorely tempted by Europa Barbarum (sp?), which is very nice. I like their system of large provinces, it makes matters slower for the AI and the player.

[Quinn Inuit]

Hey, good to see you again!

By larger provinces, do you mean that they have fewer, bigger ones, or that it takes longer to cross the island of Corsica on their map than it does on ours?

Any other ideas you'd recommend stealing from them?

[Caligula Caesar]

I have heard the fact that I reduced the size of Parthia and Bactria mentioned several times. This was done for several reasons:

a) Bactria is too powerful otherwise and Parthia normally too weak

b) Parthia should start a bit to the north of Parthia in Dahae(a)

c) Bactria hadn't revolted yet, so it shouldn't exactly be a superpower yet

Anyway, I am quite satisfied with the results. Bactria generally doesn't go crazy for quite a while. It generally manages to capture the northern provinces, but the Steppe Tribes are more of a presence and normally repell them and sometimes even capture a province off them. India is not easy for them to capture either. Parthia now invades Hyrcania and Parthia, and then is often halted. But it manages to build up its army and often captures Aria, Drangiana and parts of Media before it seems to run out of steam (no clue why). But that is better than before.

[Quinn Inuit]

That sounds like a really good set-up. Do you think Parthia runs out of steam because of the impoverished areas it captures early on?

[pannonian]

That sounds like a really good set-up. Do you think Parthia runs out of steam because of the impoverished areas it captures early on?

There's no easy route into the west for the Parthians to make hay while the Seleucids are falling apart, and Bactria is too strong in the east. Bactria comes up against a similar barrier when it's conquered everything in the east, as it doesn't get enough impetus to push into Armenia, while Mesopotamia is geographically blocked off from the east for the AI. From Mesopotamia into the mountains is possible for the AI, but not the other way round.

[Carac Caratacus]

I'm finding it quite interesting seeing the overall patterns of AI rises to dominance, and trying to work out why some do better than others in the magnitudes they do

Interestingly Germany seemed to have 'stalled' in my game, it still had a big dangerous stack that it just sat in one province, even after we went to war; it didnt move! Maybe it's wars in the east against the Samartians broke it's will?

Numedia went crazy, wiped carthage out and has just finished of Iberia and is now at war with me in southern gaul. Hordes of poorly equiped 'moors' are dashing themselves agianst my slowly dwindling veteran stack. Fun

@ Quinn, where's the best place to post files then? bug thread?

In terms of many of the things i talked about they are just ideas that have occured to me, and like with the squalor thing, maybe not worth doing in context of the problems it could introduce. Infact in terms of squalor being a good control on large populations i think it should be left as is, with the sewers/aquaducts etc simply adding a 'heart' to the top line to controll or boost that against the negatives of the lower line. It works.

And again with the Auxilia vs specific building type for weapons/units, i can understand that. Call To Power II had similar problems when it came to the AI knowing how to build a decent army. Why this cant simply be put in a priority list i just dont know?(so at certain stages of population/developement of a town the AI uses different 'build lists' to ensure it will be able to carry on a decent war). it seems simple to solve, but many, many strat games can't do it well, so there must be a fundemental problem here?

hmmm any chance to make buildings only required for the human so the AI only needs Auxilia type buildings, but the human player needs both to get the full mix of troop types? I'm thinking that extra costs for the player is generaly always good as a rule of thumb, as it helps out the AI. just an idea