Useless Assessor Trait/Tax Settings

[Wheem]

If you're like me, you get irritated with the frequency that your Governors pick up the Useless Assessor Trait. The only way to really prevent it, is to keep your taxes set to High or Very High, which is quite frustrating when you want to promote city growth. In actuality, it seems to make the "High" tax rate the real "Normal" one, unless you want your tax income to take a nosedive, as each of your governors falls farther and farther into corruption/ineptitude (the final "rank" of this trait is Tax Farmer, a 30% decrease in tax revenue, youch!) Note: It might also be possible to avoid this trait by having your governors not end their turn in a city while having 100% of their movement points left. However, it's slightly tedious to move every governor a short distance every turn, only to move him back into the city on the same turn. I also cannot confirm that this even works, as it just seems silly and I never tried it myself.

However, I didnt have nearly so much problem with this trait once I started playing a little of the Barbarian Invasion expansion. It still happens, just not nearly as often, and the answer is simple; the chance of it triggering is less than 1/3 of that in regular RTW. So, I made a very minor edit to a single file in my standard RTW game, which will make the trigger identical to that of the BI trigger, which, in my opinion, is far more realistic. I cannot count the times I've had Useless Assessors after only a couple turns on Normal or Low taxes, in RTW.

You can (easily) make this edit yourself. Simply open the export_descr_character_traits file (found in the Data folder of your Rome Total War directory) with Notepad. Search for "governing19" and change the "Chance 15" value to "Chance 4"

Optionally, you may comment out the original value, and add the new one on a seperate line (in case you decide to go back to the original and dont want to forget what it was). For example, that section of my file now looks like:

Trigger governing19
WhenToTest GovernorBuildingCompleted

Condition GovernorLoyaltyLevel > loyalty_disillusioned
and GovernorTaxLevel < tax_high

; Affects BadTaxman 1 Chance 15
Affects BadTaxman 1 Chance 4

[Kaidonni]

Be careful. Once your bank account hits the 50,000+ denarii mark, there is a chance of family members picking up corruption traits from that, too. In RTW at least. Think it's lower in BI.