Hmmm...

[Caesar Augustus]

Hi All,

I've just come fresh from my campaign (you can check my progress which is up to date-ish in the how's your campaign going thread). I've basically secured the entire Italian peninsula, and taken Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily. My treasury stands at 120,000 denarii and my income is 15,000 if not more per turn and I'm constantly building in my settlements and I have no need for an army larger than what I currently have (3 just over half stacks).

The problem I bring is threefold:

1) This was very easy, once I took a couple of hints from around the forum. I'm playing on H/M (I dislike the idea of the AI getting an artificial bonus in battle), from what I understand, the VH campaign difficulty doesn't work. Am I doing something wrong for it to be so easy to get where I am on the campaign map? I was expecting rather more of a challenge (NO CRITICISM INTENDED).

2) My family members are all coming of age with awful traits (wildly extravagant, gourmand, gourmet of life). I understand that you'd get a couple of Epicures each generation, but this is taking the mick a bit right? Every governor I've left in a settlement is developing worse and worse traits, and their management skills are plummeting. How can I raise a decent family without all these bad traits? It's almost making me want to start a new campaign. I know it probably sounds dumb, but I don't like having bad family members. I recently killed several "bad eggs" in one battle because I didn't think that they could redeem themselves.

3) Money. I don't want this much. I don't see any point in raising an army to sit and do nothing with. At least not until I hit the Marian Reform and can at least justify it by telling myself that they're garrisoning the region and being useful, on the basis that the legions became more permanent units around then. I also think the amount of money I have may be linked to my family problems.

Any suggestions folks?

[Quinn Inuit]

Yeah, I dislike giving the AI a battlemap bonus, too. I spent a long time balancing those units, darnit!

I'm pretty sure VH campaign bonus works...someone reliable told me, but I forget who. Pannonian, maybe?

Rome's one of the easier factions if you're balancing evenly. They're just well-situated, and they have great troops. If you want a vicious challenge as Rome, I recommend Imperator II. That's optimized solely to give Rome a crazy challenge.

Now I'm going to toot my own horn a little. I've done a lot to reduce the amount of money that's flowing around in the ExRM (nerfing sea trade, moving provinces around, heavily increasing upkeeps, etc.). I don't like playing games with lots of full stacks floating around, so I've done my best to minimize that. As far as traits go, my collaborator Jamey really did a lot of work reducing the likelihood that bad traits will snowball. (>50k denarii also cause problems)

As far as challenge, I do believe the ExRM is tougher than normal RTRPE. That's hard to quantify, though, so YMMV. If nothing else, you'll get better balanced armies (again, something I worked really hard on).


It occurs to me that I may come off as excessively negative to RTRPE in this forum sometimes, so I'd like to comment on that. RTRPE was a great step forward and the result of a lot of work by a lot of people (and a little work by me...my first modding was fixing the 276 B.C. bug during development. It's not a lot, but I'm proud. ). Bear in mind, though, that it hasn't really been developed much since then. The additional releases have been mostly bugfixes, as I understand it. It was conceived more as a platform from which to develop other mods, which is why it hasn't been altered more. The goal was to present as close a match to the RTR6G experience as possible using the fully patched 1.5/1.6 engines, and I think it does an admirable job at that. It's just that we know a lot more about modding now than we did then (look at the changelog on the EDU guide thread--it's remarkable what we're still learning about the game), and it's now possible to create even better and more realistic mods. RTRPE is a great base for that, but as far as gameplay goes remember that it hasn't been substantially updated for a long, long time.

[Sir_Crashalot]

Sup mate, I'll try to answer your questions as well as I can

1. The game is easy because we are all veteran players. Nothing we can do about it, because if the modders make the game too hard, it turns the new players away. Several posts suggested playing historically as a way of artificially increasing the challenge, which I find pretty fun.

Personally I have wiped out 3 full stacks in the same battle (Macedonian, 2 are reinforcements) and came out with 80% of my men alive, which is of course nearly impossible to actually do in real life.

2. Your kids are morons because you are so rich. If you have 50000 in the bank, at the end of every turn the game rolls the vice dice, and there is a chance that ur kids become corrupt, if you have 100000 the dice is rolled twice, and 3 times if you have 150000. Therefore you have to spend your money if you want some decent governors.

3. Two ways to address this, one is to build several fleets, as each corvus quinquarume (spelling?) eats up 400 gold a turn or something like that. When i was at your stage of the game I had 4 fleets of 6 CQs, and used them to blockage Carthage into a ceasefire (took about 30 turns of blockading every one of their ports ><).

Second way is to edit the codes to increase the corruption threshold, if you want instructions on how to do this I would be happy to help, so is almost everyone else here.

[CiusFortius]

There are various trait triggers both positive and negative. You would have probably seen your family members get battle traits after fighting a few battles like scared, or confident commander etc. There are unfortunately negative traits as well. The worst ones are triggered when you have too much money in your treasury. From what I recall there are 3 levels though. having more than 50000 denari in the bank at the end of a turn means that all governors in a settlement have a chance of getting a negative trait. if you have over 100 000 or 150 000 then they can get the worse version of that trait. For this reason its a good idea to keep your treasury bellow 50 000 at all times. Ways to do that are to que buildings in each city as a method of saving. Expensive building like Hippodrome's, Curia's, etc can cost 8000 denari so they are a great way to "store wealth" while reducing the chance of getting negative traits. The other way to do it is to hire men and let the upkeep do the work for you. I know that in some of my older late games when I had a huge empire I would have a full stack of elephants standing around somewhere chewing up money for me to try keep my finances within reason.

The second set of bad traits is triggered by things like staying stagnant, or retreating from battles. If a family member does not move at all in a turn there is a chance he can get traits related to laziness etc. Some people move every governor every turn between cities to avoid this but I find that too much micromanagement. I can live with those few traits, but the one's related to having the big bank balance are terrible so try to avoid those by staying under 50K if you can. I know that some people hate that so much though that they edit the game files to either eliminate those, or at least up the limit significantly. This makes sense as when you are managing 70 settlements only having 50 000 in the bank each turn means you often can't even build all the buildings you want to each turn unless you carefully manage build que's etc. Way too much effort once an empire is big. So instead perhaps just edit the trigger levels to be 150 000, 300 000, and 450 000?

Anyways, good luck. Personally I play Rome on VH/VH exclusively as they are a very strong faction and anything less would make it a cake walk. The VH campaign difficulty bonus of 10 000 extra cash to each other faction each turn is not that big and keeps the small factions competative. In some ways it helps you as it enables the Numidians, Bactrians, Armenian's etc and other minows to be more troublesome to your primary foes for longer. Your troops and superior AI should also make VH battle difficulty the only fair way to play against the AI!

[Caesar Augustus]

Guys,

Thanks very much. It's great to see the community spirit around here

Sir Crashalot - If you could provide some instructions for amending the corruption limits that would be awesome. I had no idea the this was so close to the Sims lol.

My first governors were awesome. They had loads of good management traits, I think this was just because I had it on very high taxes with the public order around the 150% mark. Then, as I didn't need to squeeze my provinces so hard, the tax went down and then my good governors died. I can imagine the younger members of my family would be quite happy hanging out on street corners wearing hoodies and drinking White Lightening, as opposed to my awesome governors from before lol.

Quin, by all means blow your own trumpet re EXRM. I've heard very good things about it round here (not sure if they were all your posts though lol). I'll give it a go, I just want to complete a basic RTRPE campaign first.

I've got my cities building every upgrade I can, it's just that some have built everything and haven't grown yet.

Cius, I'll try restarting with VH campaign difficulty. I won't go for the VH battle difficulty though. I would if it improved the AI, but from what I understand it's just ridiculous bonuses instead.

[yiplong]

spending the excess money is particularly hard in RTR because everything takes more turns to build, especially those outlying provinces where you have to build up colonies.

[Sir_Crashalot]

1. Find the file "export_descr_character_traits", it should be located in the "data" folder of where you installed RTRPR to, which in my case is the following:
C:\Program Files\The Creative Assembly\RTR\Rome - Total Realism\data
2. MAKE A BACK UP
3. Use Ctrl + F to find the following line:

Trigger corruption1
WhenToTest CharacterTurnEnd

Condition EndedInSettlement
and Treasury > 50000

Affects Corrupt 1 Chance 3
Affects Aesthetic 1 Chance 3
Affects ExpensiveTastes 1 Chance 3
Affects Epicurean 1 Chance 3
Affects Embezzler 1 Chance 3

4. Edit at will
5. Repeat for the 100000 and 150000 codes, which are immediately after it.
6. Save changes



I personally suggest doubling the threshold ^^

If you want to be technical, the best way (within reason) to avoid corruption traits is to stay under the corruption limit, keep the city at high taxes (not very high), be constantly building, and don't build the indoor plumbing (really, check the code!), and don't build the theatre line.

[CiusFortius]

Is it possible to change those corruption thresholds mid-campaign or do you have to restart out of curiosity? Because the limits seem to be geared for small maps with few cities. As such I don't mind the limits as they are but would not mind increasing them based on how many cities I have?

I just read through that entire file on triggers and did the same for ancillaries. I never realized that the sewers and theaters did so much damage to family members! I guess in future I will only be building those buildings in settlements I leave ungoverned as I never have enough family members around to govern every city. How does one identify which temple is which? The trigger says for example temple_of_fun but I am not sure how to decide which one that is.

[Sir_Crashalot]

From testing experience the changes take effect immediately, but does not remove the corruption traits that are already there. I suggest restarting the campaign...

BTW its only the highest level public health building (the plumbing one) that results in negative traits, that is because historically the romans used lead for their plumbing, and that is one of the proposed contributers to its eventual decline and fall (and the reasons for the few mad emperors).

There are other files in the same folder that defines what each building is, one of them is the building description, which should tell you what each temple is called in game.

[Caesar Augustus]

1. Find the file "export_descr_character_traits", it should be located in the "data" folder of where you installed RTRPR to, which in my case is the following:
C:\Program Files\The Creative Assembly\RTR\Rome - Total Realism\data
2. MAKE A BACK UP
3. Use Ctrl + F to find the following line:

Trigger corruption1
WhenToTest CharacterTurnEnd

Condition EndedInSettlement
and Treasury > 50000

Affects Corrupt 1 Chance 3
Affects Aesthetic 1 Chance 3
Affects ExpensiveTastes 1 Chance 3
Affects Epicurean 1 Chance 3
Affects Embezzler 1 Chance 3

4. Edit at will
5. Repeat for the 100000 and 150000 codes, which are immediately after it.
6. Save changes



I personally suggest doubling the threshold ^^

If you want to be technical, the best way (within reason) to avoid corruption traits is to stay under the corruption limit, keep the city at high taxes (not very high), be constantly building, and don't build the indoor plumbing (really, check the code!), and don't build the theatre line.

So, it's been a while, but I've finally gotten around to editing the file. I admit, I may have gone unnecessarily far in altering it, and thus may have actually stopped the traits appearing at all. I increased the 1st trigger to 500000, the 2nd trigger to 1000000, the 3rd trigger to 1500000 and the 4 trigger to 2000000.

I have a question about the "Chance" part of the line. I've not messed with it at all, I was just wondering what it does and how it works? ie; does Chance 3 mean that there is a higher chance than Chance 33, or is it the other way around?

[Caesar Augustus]

I'm probably not going to be able to get a decent session in until next week, but if I get a chance I'll edit the file tonight ready to start a new campaign ASAP.

I see the logic in the city plumbing thing, and I also find it rather ironic that it was used for plumbing in Britain until fairly recently as well lol.

Is it possible to edit the triggers for gaining traits and ancillaries when they are tied to buildings?

[Caesar Augustus]

Right, so after those changes, RTR wouldn't even run. By that I mean I clicked to open it, stared at the inital screen (you know, the one with the legal stuff on it with the map in the background) for 30 minutes, then got bored of waiting and closed the program and switched off the PC.

Is this likely to have been caused by the updates I made to the character traits? All I touched were the limits?

[Delvecchio1975]

You can figure that out by trying to restore the previous values. If it returns to functioning, it's your changes that buggered it up

[Caesar Augustus]

I've been meaning to give that a go anyway lol

Would deleting the map.rwm thing have any effect? I know that after some changes you're supposed to delete it to reset the map or something?

EDIT: It's strange though, as all I did was change 4 numbers. Can RTR cope with 7 figure numbers in money? I'm just thinking that could be what's broken it as it might not be possible to reach the limits? I can't remember, and for obvious reasons can't actually check.

[Delvecchio1975]

Not sure - plenty of values have limits on them, but i have no idea on how to check them. Do try to delete the map.rwm thing as often as you want, it sometimes works, and it does no harm deleting it - i think it's automatically regenerated when starting a new game ...

[Caesar Augustus]

Cheers mate. I really do appreciate your advice. Don't worry, I won't start calling you Victoria any time soon lol.

Am I right in thinking it's located in the maps folder?

Btw - I think I recognise your avatar from the BFG?

[Delvecchio1975]

select your RTW folder and do a search for map.rwm, then delete ALL of them.

i have never heard of BFG, what's that? The avatar is my photo, although I recently had to take of my earrings for work.

[Caesar Augustus]

A brief description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_BFG_(film)

Can't actually find any pictures online from the film though.

I'll have a look tonight and try and find them all. If that doesn't work I'll reverse the changes. If not I'll delete the lot and uninstall RTW, then go through the whole process again.

[Caesar Augustus]

Hi Delvecchio,

Just to update you on my situation, I've not been able to make it work again, I think it's probably the 7 digit numbers.

I've reinstalled RTW and BI and then patched them to 1.6 and have downloaded ExRM.

Thanks very much for your help though.

[Delvecchio1975]

Dang.

If it was the 7 digit numbers, you could've tried to make them lower first, no?