Slashing income.

[Cope]

As we are all aware the politics system in Rome II is atrocious - this being despite the fact CA proudly remarked that it was working as intended. This means that there is no late game challenge whatsoever and playing becomes more of a chore than anything else.

Since modders, evidently, cannot substantial alter the way the political system works, I think that they ought to be attempting to make the late game more challenging in other ways. The only way I can see that being possible is to reduce the income of the player. In my last game of Divide et Impera, I ended with over one million talents and an income of forty thousand per turn. This makes the game way too easy, and I might add that I had had far too much money for the game to be a challenge since the early mid-game. I feel as though I should be struggling for money as much at the start of the game as I am at the end: this would make things interesting and keep my attention. At the moment I don't care about my armies, navies, the buildings I have, and the mistakes I make because I can always buy my way out of any trouble.

What can be done about this? Can income be effectively modded?

Clearly some form of scaling mechanic is required, and even though I am no mathematician, I can see that that would be no easy feat to implement. By scaling what I mean is that wealth growth should not simply just get exponentially larger with all the land you take - it NEEDS to be balanced properly otherwise the game is way to easy. The only practical way I can think of doing this would be to have an 'Empire maintenance' bill at the end of each turn which deducts money for Empire maintenance. It would represent a percentage of your total income and it would increase/decrease depending on the size of your Empire.

I'm not sure if this would be possible, but it would be very nice.

[sgsandor]

There is a sub mod for this out there, here and the forums. You ll need the other mod manager and not the steam one. I will agree late game has a lack of depth due to no real political system, or family tree (fingers still crossed for a patch or dlc that does this). I disagree that slashing income is the best way to impose challenge on the late game. If you have too much money give it away to allies or factions you no longer wish to fight as gifts to quell any lingering resentment. I go with the maxim "better to have it and not need it, then not have it at all"

[Cope]

There is a sub mod for this out there, here and the forums. You ll need the other mod manager and not the steam one. I will agree late game has a lack of depth due to no real political system, or family tree (fingers still crossed for a patch or dlc that does this). I disagree that slashing income is the best way to impose challenge on the late game. If you have too much money give it away to allies or factions you no longer wish to fight as gifts to quell any lingering resentment. I go with the maxim "better to have it and not need it, then not have it at all"

I do not think that slashing income is the only, or indeed the best way to improve the late game, I just think that as far as modding goes - since it appears impossible to adequately alter the political system at this stage - that it would be the easiest and most practical method by which the end game could become challenging.

Simply giving what excess wealth I have away would be missing the whole point of the problem. Giving away money is not challenging in of itself. It does not make me have to think about my economic and or logistical decisions. It is just mindlessly surrendering gold to create an artificial difficulty for myself. It is tending to the symptom rather than the cause as it were. This is not to mention the fact that it would break what little immersion there is on the campaign map.

You are correct that it is better to have it and not need it than not to have it at all, though again I think this misses the point of what I was saying. I want it to be much harder to have wealth in the first place so that when you do acquire it feels like an achievement rather than an inevitability.

I've found the best way to increase the mid to late game challenge is to give the AI factions a bonus of about 7000 to their income, they always end up fielding high tier units, and obviously high tier buildings.

This is fine, though I have always found that simply buffing the AI is inferior to handicapping the player. This is because it makes the AI the focus instead of the player and since AI's are well known for their idiocy this can be a problem. Moreover I find that when the AI's 'cheating' is obvious (for instance a one settlement minor faction having 5 stacks of elite troops) it acts more as an irritant than anything else. As I said, scaling back the player trumps buffing the AI any day in my opinion.

[zonks40]

I've found the best way to increase the mid to late game challenge is to give the AI factions a bonus of about 7000 to their income, they always end up fielding high tier units, and obviously high tier buildings.

[sgsandor]

This is were you and I may differ in play style; I always find the wealth I have earned especially after those lean hungry years is an reward for good planning and satisfying. I agree padding the AI with money is a poor sub for late game challenge, but we do what we can to make it challenging for ourselves. BTW how many turns do you play using 4tpy (how long do you play a campaign)? I ask because i like to stretch out the campaign

[SDM]

The mechanic for this already exists in the form of corruption. Just mod the corruption rate up dramatically and mentally substitute in "administration/corruption/garrisons/etc".

I did that for my personal mod and it works fairly well imo.

[SDM]

If you're interested in modding corruption. The values are stored in the campaign variables in the db files. It's the tax efficiency regions and tax efficiency results variables. The exact function is out of your control but you can set the minimum, middle, and maximum number of regions and the efficiency that the function will hit for each of those numbers. So in vanilla, tax_efficiency_regions_minimum is 3 and tax_efficiency_result_minimum_reduction is 5, this means at 3 regions you hit 5% corruption.

[BunnyPoopCereal]

If you're interested in modding corruption. The values are stored in the campaign variables in the db files. It's the tax efficiency regions and tax efficiency results variables. The exact function is out of your control but you can set the minimum, middle, and maximum number of regions and the efficiency that the function will hit for each of those numbers. So in vanilla, tax_efficiency_regions_minimum is 3 and tax_efficiency_result_minimum_reduction is 5, this means at 3 regions you hit 5% corruption.

That's pretty low imo

[Cope]

This is were you and I may differ in play style; I always find the wealth I have earned especially after those lean hungry years is an reward for good planning and satisfying. I agree padding the AI with money is a poor sub for late game challenge, but we do what we can to make it challenging for ourselves. BTW how many turns do you play using 4tpy (how long do you play a campaign)? I ask because i like to stretch out the campaign

I play 4 turns per year (I think that's standard for this mod anyway now) and I play till the end. I think a lot of it depends on what faction you start with and how the AI responds. I've played on legendary mode where the AI will never attack me which just makes the whole game really easy, but even so, once you have a whole province the cash just starts to flow in. It's about making it as challenging throughout the game as it is at the start when playing as a minor faction which has limited money at the beginning. I think we can all agree that once you've gotten over the initial bumps the graph of the game in terms of wealth and land would be an at almost perfect 45 degree angle.

As far as the corruption goes, I agree and you are right that I could mod it myself to make it more difficult - but then again I could just mod troop upkeep to be ridiculously high for the same effect. What I was hoping for is a more comprehensive mechanic to alter income vs territory held. It's basically been the same in every total war game that in the end you are so rich it doesn't even matter, regardless of civil wars or whatever. No one can stop you if you have thousands upon thousands of coin because you can simply out source them the whole time.

This I believe is because CA have never implemented a system which will correctly limit the spending power of the player. In Rome II the lack of such a system is more noticeable than it has been in other Total War games. After about 75 turns auto pilot is on for the rest of the game for me.

[Petrucci]

Well maybe some of us are not masochist and don't like fighting enemy highest tier troops with levies. I found this game pretty challenging even on normal. You can't loot enemy settlements or slaves will give you a lot of headache, once you start expanding corruption kicks in pretty hard, silly limitation on champions and spies and so on. And it doesn't matter how good AI is, once you get super heavy cav you need 4 units to defeat whole army.

[zonks40]

This is fine, though I have always found that simply buffing the AI is inferior to handicapping the player. This is because it makes the AI the focus instead of the player and since AI's are well known for their idiocy this can be a problem. Moreover I find that when the AI's 'cheating' is obvious (for instance a one settlement minor faction having 5 stacks of elite troops) it acts more as an irritant than anything else. As I said, scaling back the player trumps buffing the AI any day in my opinion.

It doesn't actually work like that, in the DB you can increase the factions income directly, there is also another part where you can increase the income of the culture that the faction belongs to, this covers both the major & minor factions of that culture.
So if I give both a bonus of 3000 to the culture and 3000 to the faction, then the main factions of the game will get a bonus of 6000, the minor factions 3000, which obviously solves the problem of major factions being chewed by "insignificant tribe"

Further more I play with 40 unit armies so I don't get the army spam, What I end up with is fewer battles, but battles that are more epic, the AI also seem to have higher tier troops at mid game, and tier 3 buildings.
And really, what is the difference between the player having 3000 less than the AI, or the AI having 3000 more?

[Cope]

Further more I play with 40 unit armies so I don't get the army spam, What I end up with is fewer battles, but battles that are more epic, the AI also seem to have higher tier troops at mid game, and tier 3 buildings.
And really, what is the difference between the player having 3000 less than the AI, or the AI having 3000 more?

Over the course of a game I'd say about 750,000 gold.

[zonks40]

Over the course of a game I'd say about 750,000 gold.

So you would prefer the payer have 750,000 less instead of the AI having 750,000 more? the margin will be the same, the AI can play much better with the extra funds so it's a more difficult game, if you haven't tried it yourself, then really, you have no idea.

[Cope]

So you would prefer the payer have 750,000 less instead of the AI having 750,000 more? the margin will be the same, the AI can play much better with the extra funds so it's a more difficult game, if you haven't tried it yourself, then really, you have no idea.

Of course I've tried it myself. The AI does not 'play better with extra funds', it plays better when it has money than those around it.

Since you asked, the difference between the AI having more and the player having less is the focus of the game. Handicapping the player is always more successful than overpowering an AI in my view.

[zonks40]

Of course I've tried it myself. The AI does not 'play better with extra funds', it plays better when it has money than those around it.

Well if you have tried it as you claim, then you must be able to mod, so why don't you slash your income in your own game, instead of coming here trying to get the DEI team to change it for the whole community?

40 unit cards?? :O How do you play with that???

You first acquire ESF, then you start your new campaign, or use an existing if you wish, save it, exit the game, open the save with ESF and go to.


Compressed_Data / Campaign_Env / Campaign_Model.


The 9th and 10th line down should be 20 and 20, the first is number of Units in an army, the second is number of ships in a navy.


Change them to what you want, I usually just change army to 40, load up your save and your armies cap will now be 40 units.
This works with both single player and multiplayer campaigns,

[Addario]

Further more I play with 40 unit armies so I don't get the army spam, What I end up with is fewer battles, but battles that are more epic, the AI also seem to have higher tier troops at mid game, and tier 3 buildings.
And really, what is the difference between the player having 3000 less than the AI, or the AI having 3000 more?

40 unit cards?? :O How do you play with that???


Also they are working on redoing politics They said so in the official forums, that they had listen to us and were trying to work something out.

[Alu10]

increasing the corruption you get for a bigger empire would be a way to make this

[Dresden]

I would not be adverse to increasing the corruption mechanic for the player.

[Epic28]

40 units per army is not moddable into a pack file anyways, so don't worry about your favorite mod adopting the idea.

[zonks40]

40 units per army is not moddable into a pack file anyways, so don't worry about your favorite mod adopting the idea.

Agreed, the only way modders were able to do it in the past was to have a launcher with a saved game for each playable faction pre-made with 40 units switched on, and considering the size of saved games it would be several hundred MB's alone.
Also, if you had read the thread, not once have I suggested DEI adopting 40 units, but twice said the opposite, the dude had started a discussion about increasing mid-late game difficulty, I posted what I have done to achieve this and he has done nothing but attack it the whole thread.