Loyalty

[DimeBagHo]

Zarax is working on adding loyalty to XGM. It will probably be a while before this gets released, but it might be worthwhile to start thinking about which factions should be shadowed etc. As I understand it the game can only handle two shadowing factions, and things get complicated if you use the Slaves/Rebels as a shadowing faction.

Ok, will download and let you know in a couple days... I'm gonna just make the romans shadowed by senate for now and see how it goes... If things work out well I might ask you to release XGM4 as unified rome campaign using the two roman factions as rebels... I'm finding a lot of defection stories in the period (like ptolemaic generals defecting to the seleucids prior to raphia) and things could get tense BI style...

Having one Roman faction showdowed by a second Roman faction makes good historical sense. Among the Greek factions Seleucids/Ptolemies might make sense. Greek Cities/Macedon might make sense as well. One problem with both combinations is that those pairs share relatively few units, so armies that cross over would mostly vanish. Macedon/Seleucid would work best from that point of view, but it would not be very historical for the time period (it would work fine if the game started right after Alexander's death, but not in 270 BC). Macedon/Thrace would work.

We could, I think, have the GCS shadow all the other Greek factions. Or another, more complicated, possibility is to convert a spare Roman faction into a Greek rebel faction and have it shadow one or more Greek factions.

Seleucids/Parthia and Carthage/Numidia are possibilities, although the loyalty mechanism doesn't quite fit the historical conflicts between those factions.

[zodmaner]

I like the idea to convert spare Roman faction into a Greek rebel and then have it shadow other greek factions.

This new faction don't need to have a complete set of unit for itself, just common units from all GSC, Macedon and other greek factions should do it. That should make this easier to convert (or not? )

I think having GSC shadow all other faction might make them too powerful, gameplay wise, and might land them into a war when they are unprepare.

[Zarax]

This is my first test setup, didn't see this thread before...

romans, shadowed_by romans_senate (also useful to emulate the civil war in the unified rome campaign)

macedon, shadowed_by slave

egypt, shadowed_by seleucid (historically showed by events around Raphia)

seleucid, shadowed_by slave (might change this into Parthia)

carthage, shadowed_by slave 

parthia, shadowed_by slave (maybe change this into shadowing seleucid?)

pontus, shadowed_by slave

gauls, shadowed_by slave

germans, shadowed_by slave

britons, shadowed_by slave

armenia, shadowed_by slave (might change this into pontus if someone tells me it has any historical accuracy)

dacia, shadowing thrace (just for testing purposes)

greek_cities, shadowed_by slave (might change this into macedon)

numidia, shadowed_by slave (might change this into carthage)

scythia, shadowed_by slave

spain, shadowed_by slave (might change to carthage or gaul)

thrace, shadowed_by dacia (just for testing purposes)

I'm trying this with no loyalty traits, don't really know if it's enough to trigger any faction change... I would like pointers from anyone with experience, even at the org the topic isn't that researched...

EDIT:
Some useful info:

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...ht=shadowed_by

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...ht=shadowed_by

[DimeBagHo]

Zarax: From reading those two threads it appeared that there could only be two shadowing factions, and that it would not work well to have the slaves as a shadowing faction. If you have more than two shadowing factions you get a CTD when a third faction is destroyed. If you make the slaves a shadowing faction then when one of the shadowed factions is destroyed all of the slave cities will convert to that faction.

I suspect there will also be problems with making the Senate a shadowing faction. Won't that mean that the Senate and the shadowed Roman factions will be at war from the start?

[Zarax]

Yes, the main problem is that there is little research on the problem, so that there are unanswered questions like: what happens if a faction is shadowed by another but that other faction has not the shadowing attribute?

EDIT: Met the first CTD during pontus turn, will have to tweak things...

EDIT2: Looks like the loyalty system is much more limited than I hoped, it will be hard to get good results but still it's fun to see the odd settlement defecting at times...

I'm oriented to use these couplings for now:

Seleucid - Parthia
GCS - Macedon
Thrace - Dacia
Pontus - Armenia

Might also add iberia - numidia but at the risk of looking odd because historically numidians were the ones to take the bad side...

By keeping an unified Rome settings it would also be possible to have:

Romans - Republican/Late rebels
Carthage - Mercenary uprising

By killing one or more factions (numidia, britons and maybe schytians could be good candidates, I've never seen the former and the latter doing anything useful) we could also add:

Ptolemies - Lybian rebels
Gauls - Averni

Your ideas are welcome, let me know if there can be better couplings...

[DimeBagHo]

It looks like I mis-understood one of the limitations mentioned in the Loyalty threads. I thought you could only have two shadowing factions, but from what Lusted said it sounds like one faction can not shadow more than two factions, but you can have more than two shadowing factions. Is this correct?

I would like to have loyalty for the GCS. I think the ideal set-up would actually be to have a new unplayable Greek faction, something like the "Independent Greek Cities". Converting the Britons into a rebel barbarian faction would make sense - they have almost been eliminated from the game now, and it would be a relatively easy change to make.

[Zarax]

Well, that would be basically my independent cities faction idea, where you have a bunch of the stronger independent city states (like siracuse, pergamum, terentum, halicarnassus and a few others) that play as a faction while being basically playing each on its own due to distance...

EDIT: I attached a small file for those who wants to help beta testing loyalty changes, can you provide the instructions to add the icons DBH?

[DimeBagHo]

The icons are already there (or should be, I haven't tested them). If they are not showing up it is probably something to do with the loyalty traits. I'll have a play around with that and see what happens.

*Edit* OK, there is nothing wrong with the traits, although they might need some tweaking. What you need to do is run the XGM-BI installer.

Kleomenes looks like a solid citizen, but you might need to keep an eye on some of the other sub-faction leaders.

[Zarax]

Well, the loyalty system also needs an extra trait applied to the characters on the map, otherwise they will appear like that... I simply added loyalty values to the existing traits so I don't expect it to be 100% working but it's more to check for CTDs...

EDIT: Any new character will appear with the right loyalty settings and I think that characters without the loyaltystarter trait will not defect so your first generation family memembers won't abandon you even if they show no loyalty...

[DimeBagHo]

Yep, obviously some work will have to be done getting things balanced, and I will have to take a look at adding "offices" as well. I am embarrassed to admit this, but although I own BI I have never actually played a BI campaign. Too busy working on XGM. Can someone tell me how offices work in BI (1) Can more than one character have the same office? (2) When a character with an office dies, what happens to the office, does it immediately go to another character, or does it just disappear?

*Edit* nevermind, I think I see how things work from the triggers in the BI ancillaries file.

[Zarax]

Well, offices were treated as unique ancillaries usually, but I never delved into the system (I played BI quite few times, after a while my main interest was porting the features to RTW) as it didn't work that well...
Maybe you could give an unique ancillary to important cities tied to the higher government palaces so that they can be like "king of sparta", "tyrant of messana" and things like that...

[Kara Kolyo]

i haven't played BI much but romans had huge problem with loyalty- general winning 2-3 battles was almost certain candidat for rebelling. so please see if you can do something that it would be harder to become rogue. BI just made it realy hard to get command stars but it was quite unrealistic- after 2-3 heroic victories general was stil confident commander? and he singlehandedly crushed all the vandal hordes????!

[Zarax]

Well, this is quite different, as BI starts with big empires and has many more anti loyalty traits...

[DimeBagHo]

Kara Kolyo: I probably will make it a little harder in to get command stars, but it won't be anything like that.

Zarax: Exactly what I had in mind - offices to represent sub-faction leadership.

Another problem occured to me. As I understand it, when a shadowed faction is destroyed, the shadowing faction turns into the shadowed faction? Is that correct? In which case if the GCS defeat Macedon they will turn into the Macedonian faction. Which would be a weird result in most cases.

*edit* I've noticed that this crashes pretty reliably if I play the Britons (when the game starts, or first turn).

[Zarax]

I don't know about it, unfortunately I never managed to finish a campaign without CTD so I cannot really tell anything... I need some external testing help, maybe we could post a beta topic?

EDIT: First turn? Have you tried with the BI exe?

[DimeBagHo]

Looks like I screwed up something myself. Everything is working OK again.

[Zarax]

Ok, I think there are a few trait related issues I didn't manage to catch yet, good luck in testing...

[DimeBagHo]

I have changed the files a bit: (1) Filled in some missing trait details; (2) Added starting loyalty; (3) Cut the shadowed/shadowing factions back to just Macedon/GCS to focus testing; (4) Dropped the naval invasion stuff because it was complicating testing (although it did produce some amusing results).

On my first test with the GCS everything ran fine until I crushed Macedon. That produced a CTD. *Edit* I got the same result when I played as Britain and just watched the GCS crush Macedon. I wonder if this is because they have some units that are not shared.

[Zarax]

You might want to try adding one or both of these lines then:

dead_until_resurrected
re_emergent

BTW, if the problem is just the units I don't think it should be too hard to add the faction ownership in EDU, without EDB anyways they won't be able to do much with the scraps...

[DimeBagHo]

Adding re_emergent to the GCS didn't help. Adding both lines caused a CTD when the campaign was starting (probably becaue the GCS is not supposed to be dead).