rome testfolder h/h BI.exe

[algorath]

Gameplay:
Every faction does quite well, none are dead yet, great balance.
Macedon keeps coming to middle italy over land, basically they attack the settlement which is closest to their territory (cannae and such). Apparently their soldiers get seasick easily

Pics:
Mostly bugs and things that seem strange to me^^

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[tone]

Settlements will always go to automanage after the rebellions - both the Italian one and the big Dictator rebellion later on. It's the only way that it could be achieved. I'll take a look at those map glitches later.

[dvk901]

Gameplay:
Every faction does quite well, none are dead yet, great balance.
Macedon keeps coming to middle italy over land, basically they attack the settlement which is closest to their territory (cannae and such). Apparently their soldiers get seasick easily

Pics:
Mostly bugs and things that seem strange to me^^

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I fixed the problem on Sardinia...but the little blue artifacts are escaping me.

[tone]

I can deal with those.

[algorath]

update
Gameplay: Every faction doing well except seleucids (which is kinda standard) and sparta (which i smashed and "forced" peace upon, see pic )

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And some mapbugs:

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[tone]

Thanks, all really useful stuff.
Some questions:
1) How's the gameplay?
2) How easy to get as far as you've got? Looks like the Marian reforms came too early?
3) How are things comapred with before?
4) Economy too easy?
5) Enemy stacks - too many / too few?

Some of the traits are still purposefully unhidden - i.e. the senatorial counters and conquest counters as these are new and may still need debugging.

[algorath]

1) Gameplay is great. However, Roman Rebels arent attacked by other factions, why is that?
2) Easy enough, without fighting any battles myself, it took me about 3-4 hourse so far.
Marian reforms, most of my towns are automanaged and so arkagasomething (that town in sizily) got a little ahead of itself building the palace...
3) well, good
4) I think its pretty well balanced, usually i have some 50k per turn, i spend about half myself and ai uses whatever is left for construction (i only manage rome, arretium, athens and carthage atm myself)
5) Not sure. When looking at the map there´s so many full stacks and they stick together, forming huge armies (look at palestine for example). Then again i dont get the joy of having such armadas at my doorstep. The Averni once sent 3 stacks in a row to fend of my siege at mediolanum, that was fun

[algorath]

update rev. 1364
Bugs:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Gameplay: I like the Avernian attitude, they give me no rest atm, sending stack after stack to retake northern italy. Included some pics of ai Capitals for financial comparison. Macedon and Scythia may soon bite the dust

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[dvk901]

update rev. 1364
Bugs:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Gameplay: I like the Avernian attitude, they give me no rest atm, sending stack after stack to retake northern italy. Included some pics of ai Capitals for financial comparison. Macedon and Scythia may soon bite the dust

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Citizenship, Annex and Client state are all options because it's more historical. At first, I was going to make the latter two a prerequisite, but the Romans often simply conquered a region, made it a province, and eventually offered citizenship. It was never 'annexed' or was a client state.

Conqueror of Makedonia is a hidden trait that's only showing for test purposes. In order to become the Conqueror of Greece, one of the settlements you MUST take is Makedonia.

The adoption process, is well, weird. RTW does that on it's own.

I moved the lumber resource near Carthage in a recent update.

[tone]

hmmmm...something just doesn't feel quite right here. Maybe it's the fact you can autoresolve all your battles and automanage all your settlements and still make progress like that? TBH, I think we need to make the economy harder in order to force the player to take a more active role, which they'll generally do better than the AI.

What you haven't shown us is battle outcomes on autoresolve - it'd be interesting to see those.

[algorath]

I purposefully (is that a word?^^) autoresolve battles in order to get to the Rebellion. Once your army and its general have a certain level of elite, they are pretty much unbeatable no matter what the odds. I´ll post some results the next time. Any other wishes?

[tone]

I figured that's probably why you were doing that.

Once your army and its general have a certain level of elite, they are pretty much unbeatable no matter what the odds.

Is that because of the stats or because you can always bring more units to the field or because of all the temple bonuses? if the last then I think we need to cut them.

[algorath]

I dont really know how i could find out what traits and ancilliaries do that...
Look at the army of lucius africanus for example (first gameplay pic last post). I levied that army in Rome conquering Sardinia, all of africa and am now in spain with that same troops without reinforcing depleted units.

Another thing that helps is putting mercenaries right next to your general (see pic again) because the first ~5 units in the army suffer the most casualties and are easily replaceabel for the next battle. That way i lose only some 20-40 legionaries (depending on size of enemy army) per fight. However units gain experience even if they dont lose any men (or only a few). That way your legion is elite after 5-10 battles

[dvk901]

I think I'm going to make some further economic 'cuts'. The problem I have been aware of since we fixed all the non-functional traits is that many of them give tax, management, and trade bonuses that seem to zoom to the top levels of the particular trait level way too fast. Also, this tends to defeat the 'economic zones' concept because they are given to characters everywhere, regardless of where they are. So it has kind of upset the apple cart. So I will make some adjustments there in a non-save-game-breaking way.

Also, I'm not particularly happy with all the temple armor, morale whatever bonuses. I have always believed these to be 'gamey' and gained without battle experience. Armor bonuses, IMHO, should be limited to things that actually affect armor and it's production...like smiths and weapons resources.

[tone]

Agreed.....maybe apart from a big pantheon of Vulcan or Mars that could maybe give 1+morale or something.....you could maybe leave the bonuses for the other factions in this Rome campaign though.

[algorath]

maybe making the smiths more expensive (much more) and more building time would help. 4th and 5th vulcan temple are as its now useless.

Here´s 2 battles for you, i´ve an other 10 battles or so, should i post them here as pics or maybe upload them as rar?

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Some more mapbugs coming later

[tone]

were these all autoresolve?

[algorath]

were these all autoresolve?

yes, i doubt a victory as flawless as these could be won by humans
u want me to upload more battles?

some mapbugs in spain:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[algorath]

Gameplay:
Scythia being the 1st nation to be destroyed. Seleucids may follow soon.
Carthage is now limited to pollentia, wont destroy them though

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bugs, rev1368
Some (mostly somewhat hidden resources) may not be worth mentioning but i´ll leave that to you two:

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[tone]

Brilliant - thanks for this.

This just shows where the borders are:



I'm surprised about ships not getting through the Hellespont. I'll check. The Carthaginian army issue is that I need to shift the spawning coordinates a little in the script.