Concerning the Suebi & Lugii... they need to be put down.
All right, so I'm playing with both limited recruitment and the conquest PO mods, and overall, the experience is very positive. In general, as I stated in the other thread, expansion is much slower, and factions generally stay put and fight longer wars - with the constant exception of the suebi and Lugii.
This is the world 48 turns into the game:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0p8e8n2va6...8-16_00002.jpg
As you can see here, these mods seem to do just about nothing to those two factions. I will admit that I have tweaked the PO mod to my liking, as you can see here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8z6k6uo7oyvno8y/PON.jpg
Now, as you can see, there are still massive penalties to taking any settlement whatsoever, and I can see this working. The AI gets lots and lots of rebellions, and every now and then, I see a faction reappear because of that - so the mod is working completely as intended. Combined with the limited recruitment mod, this really does slow the AI down, and I like that. I think I've found a nice balance with the PO mod, but who knows. Someone might have found a better value balance than me - regardless; it works as intended.
But as you can see from the first picture, it seems this has little to no effect on the Suebi and Lugii. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for other factions expanding, I don't mind getting into a fight with another empire, but I would like for that to be after I've actually established one myself, or something like that. Right now, I've not even gotten out of Italy, exactly because I've had to fight Syracuse, rebels in Magna Graecia and try to take over Genua as well as try to hold it down. So you see, it would, as far as I am aware, have been quite a fight for me to expand further than I have. I simply would not have the army or money for it, since some of my army would be forced to stay in the newly conquered territories in order to keep them, and if I should have the military for it, I would not have money to build up - I would basically be doing what the Lugii appear to be doing; steamrolling everything in their way, not caring about building or maintaining or anything. Again, this is 48 turns into the game, year 261 or something there about, and the Lugii have already conquered ALL of Eastern Europe, into the Balkans.
Right after I installed the no fog of war submod, I tried to hit end turn - the turn before, the Lugii had just taken Delminium. On the next turn, the Lugii declared war, for no reason other than just having become neighbors with them it seems, on the Ardeiai and I think the Breuci (might have been another faction, but it was also in the Balkan area). At the same time, the Suebi have just declared war on Raetia and the Helvetii (you know, those two barbarian alps factions just north of Mediolanum) - also, to make things even more absurd, the Suebi and Lugii are of course best friends, and as such (with the diplomatic mechanics of R2) they could never go to war against each other.
To make things more absurd, it appears that the Lugii in particular really are just rolling along, not caring about what they take - half their settlements are about to go rebel, because they've just conquered them and then left just as quick as they came. Some of their armies are starving, and they have slave rebellions a few places too, so as far as I can see, their empire will collapse eventually on its own, simply because the Lugii just steamroll.
I'm not a great modder or anything, so I wouldn't know where to start, but the Suebi and Lugii absolutely need to be stopped. As far as I can understand on the forum in general, this appears to be the picture most players see in their games - always the Suebi and Lugii growing ridiculously huge, absurdly early on in the game.
I've heard that the dev team are looking into these factions for v1.0, and you really, really need to do so - this has to stop. Nerf the Suebi and Lugii, in whatever manner possible, stats, persona, diplomatic startout, whatever - but for Christ's sake, nerf them. This is ridiculous.
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Originally Posted by zonabalona
but i think the balancing in 1.0 may adress this. It would be good if the difficulty settings would define the AI, on very hard every faction should be as them (at least the expansionist/warlike factions), but on normal they should take a chill pill, and slow down with that honest plunderin'.
