Hey guys! I just got an idea, that since in RTW everytime you recruit soldiers it reduces the local population, why not make the population to be the population of military/recruitable persons, instead of the total population of everyone living there?
Sounds simple yes? It would mean several things, to the Seleucid/Hellenistic factions for instance:
- Most cities in the beginning would have minimal number of people (400), because their soldiers are all foreign and there weren't any foreigner in most part of their empires. (their recruitment pool are greeks/macedonians/jews/mercs etc)
- Population growth would be kept at minimum in most cities, except for those where you have proper buildings for military colonists. Even libraries could help, but basic buildings such as farms don't.
- Civil unrest wouldn't be a problem except in warlike regions such as Iberia and Italy. Commoners who don't fight couldn't cause troubles - and they never did.
- Military colonization is a double edged sword - If you actually develop a city to be full of recruitable mercenaries and your own people, and you don't send them to die for glory routinely, they'd grow unhappy with you, and eventually rebel, unless there are enough entertainment buildings (which may also reduce population).
- Economics should not depend on population, or even grow in opposite direction.
The system would also be able to represent the situations I observed:
- The manpower advantage that Romans had - by having much more population than its neighbors.
- The disadvantage that Carthaginians had - by having smaller population, and those with recruitable mercenaries (the Libyan soldiers) are always unhappy and troublesome.
- In Seleucid empire, the ones who rebel are mostly greeks/macedonians, the most oppressed Persians and Babylonians etc remained loyal to the last day.
However, the system could not represent differenct classes of recruitable people - nobles/commoner etc. It wasn't such a big problem though, if cheap peasant units are all removed (they were rarely employeed in 200BC anyway).
What do you guys think?