AI expansion - VBM mod.

[vavaboom]

Hi there!

After years of playing Rome, I've been sick of the same AI patterns emerging (Egypt, Romans dominating, Carthage, Seleucids and Gauls losing before the campaign has even begun etc) so I found and installed the VBM mod after hearing about it on these forums.

The Vanilla Balance Mod - found -here- tries to address some of the "inherent bias" found in the imperial campaign. There are many things I like about the mod, and some I dislike, but what it highlights is the broken AI when it comes to using ships. For example, it gives Carthage a new province on Corsica (the island north of Caralis), and because they are not scripted in any way to move troops off this island, they build stacks upon stacks there and NEVER move them.

Rhodes and Salamis are other examples of the AI's inability to use navies unless set on some seemingly pre-determined path. In a game where the Seleucids took over the entire map (that's right! Well, NEARLY the entire map) they couldn't reach Salamis, or Rhodes, even though the egyptians (who still held Salamis) would regularly try to invade from it.

In pure Vanilla, you will often see the Brutii expand and then stop short of Asia minor, expanding north instead as they are flummoxed by a little stretch of water. Also I don't think I saw the Scipii ever go into Spain after they were done with NA. The mod addresses these problems by adding land bridges, which is great and let's some unexpected factions gain more territory (Thrace, for example).

IN SHORT: Is there any mod out there that improves the AI's ability to use ships and invading forces? I crave to see a more varied and suprising campaign map, VBM does a good job, but it's unstable and changes some things that I do not like (having improved bodyguards for all factions from turn 1, rather than tie them to the Marius reforms)

Also are there any mods that initiate the Roman civil war (when you are a non-Roman faction) as they are destined to take over the entire map, especially post-Marian. Having them rip each other apart would be thoroughly entertaining.

[vavaboom]

An update - I decided to remove the mod as some of its features annoyed me too much. However, after uninstalling the mod (using the tool provided) the game crashed to desktop whenever trying to load or start a new campagin / custom battle. Figuring the uninstaller hadn't got rid of all the content in the data folder (some batch files of the mod didn't work and I had to merge them into the data folder manually) and this was causing the ctd, I manually deleted the files I introduced. Still no joy.. after this I uninstalled / reinstalled the whole game (eras edition) to get a new data file.

That didn't work either. After this, I uninstalled, deleted all save games (they're in the hidden AppData folder) and directories related to total war, restarted, reinstalled and it worked. Back to a fresh campaign screen with only the 3 Roman factions available. Start a new game, play a few turns, it works! Quit the game. Start it back up, suddenly all the unlockable factions are unlocked again and it instantly crashes to desktop AGAIN. After uninstalling / reinstalling yet again, the same thing happened, letting me in once with the 3 roman factions, then suddenly they're all unlocked and it starts crashing again. I checked the Descr_strat file and it's unchanged, and there's no other copy of it on the compure (recycle bin etc) so I've no idea why this is happening.

[Kylan271]

Some mods alter many things,to be safe have you manually deleted the whole CA folder and removed the registry files also? You will get a clean game that way when you install. Remove the files via your unistall default program-via your PC's control panel perhaps first?

[vavaboom]

Thanks for the registry suggestion! (probably a basic thing but I always forget about the registry!) I've done searches for "Rome" and "Total War" in the reg and deleted what came up, I'm not sure there'll be anything else to find.