Campaign pace?

[Zarax]

What do you think about the current XGM campaign pace?

Is it too slow, too fast or do you think is fine?

[Sammur-amat]

Overall less population and maybe settlements one lvl down at the begining... should giv' the desired pace...

[Kara Kolyo]

i rarely play long campaigns, always something new to try, it's ok for my taste. please don't speed it up though

[DimeBagHo]

The problem with reducing populations and growth rates is that you often wind up with 400 pop cities turning out low level units. Personally I prefer a faster start against better armed opponents.

I've been working on some civil war scripts. The good news is that they work. The bad news is that to complete them I need a list of map locations for all 199 settlements. That will take a me a while, but once it is done I'll be able to use it to generate scripts for several different purposes - including (maybe) a scripted marius reform.

[Zarax]

Actually I was thinking more about reducing AI economical bonuses, that should help with the general pace and give a slower start...

[DimeBagHo]

That's an easy mod for people to do themselves if they want to. I might even be able to make it an installer option.

[iamphet]

Why not make all the options to be chosen in runtime? Something like a set of SFX archives which will extract required txt files and launch RomeTW.exe?

[DimeBagHo]

iamphet: I think that over-writing files every time the game starts would make life difficult for people who mod XGM themseves, and probably cause more support problems as well.

[Locky]

iamphet: I think that over-writing files every time the game starts would make life difficult for people who mod XGM themseves, and probably cause more support problems as well.

RTR, manged to get the reforms to occur around 170/50 odd BCE, as long as you don't cheat and disband a whole pile of troops into your Italian cities to increase growth.

Personally it think combat should be slowed down a litte more, nowhere to the effect of RTR. But just so you can plan out your battle line better, and actually use flanking manevours, alot.

[DimeBagHo]

RTR, manged to get the reforms to occur around 170/50 odd BCE, as long as you don't cheat and disband a whole pile of troops into your Italian cities to increase growth.

That would have been under the 1.2(?) patch. It had different requirements. There's no way you could do that with the current requirements and not get population stripping with the AI factions.

[Locky]

That would have been under the 1.2(?) patch. It had different requirements. There's no way you could do that with the current requirements and not get population stripping with the AI factions.

I'm talking about RTR PE. Which uses 1.5

[DimeBagHo]

I'm talking about RTR PE. Which uses 1.5

If they managed to get that working for the AI factions then that is quite an achievement.

Here's the basic problem. A city that starts with 4000 pop and has a steady growth rate of 2% will reach a population of 24000 in just under 100 turns (i.e. 230 BC). Sounds good? But that assumes no recruiting at all. Now 2% is of 4000 is 80 men so if the unit size is normal (40-60), and we recruit one unit per turn, we get an effective growth rate of 0.5-1%, which would still be fine. But for large units (80-120) we get -0.5% to 0%, and for huge (160-240) we get -2% to -4% growth.

In other words, a growth rate that produces slow steady growth with normal unit size, produces empty cities on large or huge unit sizes. The only way around this is to make everyone play with the same unit size.

To make matters worse, while recruiting 80 men per turn means an effective growth rate of 0% at a size of 4000, it means a growth rate of 1 percent for a population of 8000, and a growth rate of 1.5% at for a population of 16,000. In other words, recruitment has a declining effect on growth as the city size increases. If you set growth rates high enough to ensure you get some growth when cities are in the 2000-5000 starting range, then you get lots of growth when those cities get larger.

Of course there are some things you can do to slow things down. You can cut back the money supply so that the AI recruits fewer units. That reduces the risk of population stripping, but it also means facing AI factions with fewer troops, lower quality troops, and less developed cities. I could also tweak buildings so that growth from large to huge city size takes longer, but then large cities which suffer extermination will never recover.

Bottom line: The development rate in XGM is intentionally set to be fast, and it could be slowed down a bit without causing serious problems. But there is no getting around the sensitivity of growth rates to unit sizes.

[Arkayne]

I think the campaign pace could be slowed marginally as far as growth of cities and new units is concerned. In my last game as the Greek City States, Rome was churning out post-Marian units as early as 220 B.C. Although it was challenging and fun to beat back the Romans from Illyria, I missed fighting those pre-Marian units. Overall, I guess I would recommend slowing the game pace by about 20% based on my personal experiences. I think that adjusting the game pace as an installation option is an excellent idea (different paces for different players) if it could be done.

[Zarax]

Well, population stripping occurs now because AI is getting way too much money and so recruits like crazy from every town...
Some AI support is well and good but in this case it's nearing the infamous 0 turn effect...

[Zarax]

Have you tried cutting building costs only?

[DimeBagHo]

Yep. The problem is that the AI doesn't employ a lot of strategy. The player can get away with having a few good stacks in the right places. The AI can't, so without more money the AI doesn't recruit enough troops, expands slowly, and and gets beaten by the player easily.

As I said the number of troops the AI recruits won't help much with the timing of the Marius reforms anyway. If you reduce growth rates you are still going to get population stripping with higher unit sizes, unless you cut recruiting back to the point where the AI is totally crippled.

[Zarax]

Is there no way that marius can be set back to a date?

[Sammur-amat]

Is there no way that marius can be set back to a date?

i think that they are triggered after random number of turns when huge city with hidden resource italy emerge... ..and not so manageble to control.. :hmmm:

[swhunter]

HI
As long as the game is fareplayed with all factions with a little boast to rome!
As going along with history. Haveing better units is a plus instead of waiting forever before you attack!
but i do enjoy seeing the progress of other factons and dealing with the times.

[DimeBagHo]

I can do that if I disable the Marius event and simulate the reforms with a script. Unfortunately that is harder to do now than it was in earlier versions of RTW. You used to be able to make recruitment conditional on the existence of a building, but that doesn't work anymore, so I would have to come up with some other method.