Rio's VGR: Ultimate Apocalypse: WIP, 0.01 Released!

[Massive_attack]

UPDATE: New release! (0.01) - See the bottom of this post for the download!


The goal of ultimate apocalypse is to make public a home-brew modification for my favorite IB mod. I make this set of tweaks for almost every total war game I play, and as I prepared to start a fresh ERE campaign in VGR, I decided I might make it into a fully fledged free mod project.

The main crux of this mod will be to create an arcade-like experience in VGR while not removing any of its complexity or cheapening its mechanics. It is intended to provide for fast fluid and chaotic campaign games ratcheted 'up to eleven' and change the traditional campaign experience to feel new and fresh. In terms of battlefield mechanics, this modification will have only slight changes, mostly to enable either slightly longer or shorter battles, based on feedback recieved in this thread (see below).

The primary change ultimate apocalypse will have will be as follows: Every single unit will have zero army upkeep; recruitment costs will be raised to be twice OR three times their present values in exchange. Recruitment time will be overhauled to favor a pseudo zero turn recruitment system whereby certain units of lower quality will be able to be mass-produced whilst regular professional units will take increasingly high periods of time in turns to produce. Unit hitpoints *may* be raised generally to 2; in cases where unit HP met or exceeded the value of two, individual consideration will be made as to whether the value will be raised in accordance. Battlefield morale will be overall made more manageable, with more units providing inspirational buffs to fellow soldiers. Forts, if unable to be constructed, will be buildable barring any serious script related issues. Unit sizes will be increased, favoring levy and professional units, whilst largely leaving elites 'as-is'.

Functionally this will mean that your RTW campaign's greatest expense has been wiped away, and now the primary currency of the day is time; valuable units are paid in turns to recruit; turns which may be being spent by your enemies building massive stacks. It will hopefully encourage the use of levies as delay forces built in bulk and exported to frontier garrisons (in emulation of a limitanei system) while more elite Comitatenses units take time to nurture (a first cohort would probably take 3-4 turns to make on its own; basic comitatenses would take zero turns, but more elite options, like palatina or Immunes, will take between 1-3). All turns-per-year modes will be playable on the first release, future releases may be in favor of 4tpy.

Certain factions will have unique characteristics which will help define them to players. Goths, for instance, will likely have zero turn recruitment for all of their infantry, partly because I love age of Empires, and partly because having traits like these will make replaying Ultimate Apocalypse fun.

This is intended as a sort of ridiculous 'hollywood' version of VGR; not for the faint of heart, or the weak-machined.

Known problems with this formula:
*Garrisons are now highly positive, as they cost nothing and are powerful defensive assets. Players will actually be rewarded for making elite troops garrisons. To prevent this, siege engines might be greatly buffed, and the public order bonus from garrisons nerfed across the board, meaning that rebellions will remain an important element to a WRE/ERE run; possibly even more-so; if this is a popular concept, rebellions will be re-examined and made considerably more dangerous and frequent, and distance to capitol penalties may be increased, if possible. Garrison scripts, if present in VGR, may also need to be either removed to prevent AIs abusing it against themselves, or improved/added, to give players a better challenge with many more military resources at hand.

*Large empires benefit hugely, especially factions like the ERE, and the Sassanids. Hopefully this will be balanced by making smaller factions have better units available for zero turn recruitment than their larger competitors, allowing them to survive. Buffs may be given to barbarians over larger faction rosters to compensate.

*VGR is built on the idea of massive army upkeep. Future versions may need to significantly tone down the economic bonuses offered by Rio's mod. Money will be in vast supply regardless

*Related to the above, with so much money the player will suffer from huge corruption. This isnt much of a problem in my mind, but some may find it distasteful.

*The main attraction of the horde mechanic is lost. Hordes are now much weaker. Hopefully a series of barbarian buffs, horde buffs, and script buffs will soften the blow here, but it is true; horde factions *MUST* settle as soon as humanly possible to prevent immediate death. If possible, in much later versions a horde resurrection script could be implemented to give dead factions a second chance based on various conditions. I am a poor scripter, though.

*With so many more armies FM's will be spread thin. If VGR does not already have recruit-able generals, I will swiftly implement them to squash this.

*Wide borders will become nightmarish to defend. This is actually intentional and wont be changed. Roman players especially will be damn well required to establish systems of forts for both frontier and interior armies. This is a feature I am very excited for! Hopefully it will also make roman games more interesting as well.

Fair warning, this is probably not historically accurate, and will be incredibly demanding for PC's. Make sure you especially have a good single core processor!

[Riothamus]

First, a foreword: this will be a sub-mod for Rio's VGR. It will rely upon the user downloading and installing the Notitia Dignitatum Project and no other submods; in no way do I claim ownership of any part of IB, Rio's VGR, or the author of the N.D.P. Full credit will be given to all of these assets once a workable test version is produced.

The goal of ultimate apocalypse is to make public a home-brew modification for my favorite IB mod. I make this set of tweaks for almost every total war game I play, and as I prepared to start a fresh ERE campaign in VGR, I decided I might make it into a fully fledged free mod project.

The main crux of this mod will be to create an arcade-like experience in VGR while not removing any of its complexity or cheapening its mechanics. It is intended to provide for fast fluid and chaotic campaign games ratcheted 'up to eleven' and change the traditional campaign experience to feel new and fresh. In terms of battlefield mechanics, this modification will have only slight changes, mostly to enable either slightly longer or shorter battles, based on feedback recieved in this thread (see below).

The primary change ultimate apocalypse will have will be as follows: Every single unit will have zero army upkeep; recruitment costs will be raised to be twice OR three times their present values in exchange. Recruitment time will be overhauled to favor a pseudo zero turn recruitment system whereby certain units of lower quality will be able to be mass-produced whilst regular professional units will take increasingly high periods of time in turns to produce. Unit hitpoints *may* be raised generally to 2; in cases where unit HP met or exceeded the value of two, individual consideration will be made as to whether the value will be raised in accordance. Battlefield morale will be overall made more manageable, with more units providing inspirational buffs to fellow soldiers. Forts, if unable to be constructed, will be buildable barring any serious script related issues. Unit sizes will be increased, favoring levy and professional units, whilst largely leaving elites 'as-is'.

Functionally this will mean that your RTW campaign's greatest expense has been wiped away, and now the primary currency of the day is time; valuable units are paid in turns to recruit; turns which may be being spent by your enemies building massive stacks. It will hopefully encourage the use of levies as delay forces built in bulk and exported to frontier garrisons (in emulation of a limitanei system) while more elite Comitatenses units take time to nurture (a first cohort would probably take 3-4 turns to make on its own; basic comitatenses would take zero turns, but more elite options, like palatina or Immunes, will take between 1-3). All turns-per-year modes will be playable on the first release, future releases may be in favor of 4tpy.

Certain factions will have unique characteristics which will help define them to players. Goths, for instance, will likely have zero turn recruitment for all of their infantry, partly because I love age of Empires, and partly because having traits like these will make replaying Ultimate Apocalypse fun.

This is intended as a sort of ridiculous 'hollywood' version of VGR; not for the faint of heart, or the weak-machined.

Known problems with this formula:
*Garrisons are now highly positive, as they cost nothing and are powerful defensive assets. Players will actually be rewarded for making elite troops garrisons. To prevent this, siege engines might be greatly buffed, and the public order bonus from garrisons nerfed across the board, meaning that rebellions will remain an important element to a WRE/ERE run; possibly even more-so; if this is a popular concept, rebellions will be re-examined and made considerably more dangerous and frequent, and distance to capitol penalties may be increased, if possible. Garrison scripts, if present in VGR, may also need to be either removed to prevent AIs abusing it against themselves, or improved/added, to give players a better challenge with many more military resources at hand.

*Large empires benefit hugely, especially factions like the ERE, and the Sassanids. Hopefully this will be balanced by making smaller factions have better units available for zero turn recruitment than their larger competitors, allowing them to survive. Buffs may be given to barbarians over larger faction rosters to compensate.

*VGR is built on the idea of massive army upkeep. Future versions may need to significantly tone down the economic bonuses offered by Rio's mod. Money will be in vast supply regardless

*Related to the above, with so much money the player will suffer from huge corruption. This isnt much of a problem in my mind, but some may find it distasteful.

*The main attraction of the horde mechanic is lost. Hordes are now much weaker. Hopefully a series of barbarian buffs, horde buffs, and script buffs will soften the blow here, but it is true; horde factions *MUST* settle as soon as humanly possible to prevent immediate death. If possible, in much later versions a horde resurrection script could be implemented to give dead factions a second chance based on various conditions. I am a poor scripter, though.

*With so many more armies FM's will be spread thin. If VGR does not already have recruit-able generals, I will swiftly implement them to squash this.

*Wide borders will become nightmarish to defend. This is actually intentional and wont be changed. Roman players especially will be damn well required to establish systems of forts for both frontier and interior armies. This is a feature I am very excited for! Hopefully it will also make roman games more interesting as well.

TL;DR: this is the big American cheeseburger of mods. It is not really historically accurate, its flashy, and it will burn down many a good honest laptop. Sounds like fun, right?

What are your thoughts? Would you like to see this get a release here?

Hi Massive_attack. Very, very interesting and I'm happy you want to continuing the work on the mod! I do have one more slight upgrade on this mod but only minor and nothing in comparison to your changes. Looking forward to see your results. Any questions to pertaining to economic, political, military functions or anything else in the mod please don't hesitate to message me. Best of luck to your endeavor! Rio

[Massive_attack]

Rio, you're the best! Thanks for making such a sturdy foundation and a wonderful contribution to the TWC community.

Do any of the proposed features rub you the wrong way? You know more about VGR than I /ever/ will, and there could be something big that I havent considered here. For instance, perhaps theres a big economy/corruption script that I should look at, or a garrison script set up in a certain way? I admit I am coming from a position of relative ignorance with regards to VGR.

+rep, by the way, you dont get enough of it.

[Massive_attack]

Current release plans:

V 0.1: The core mod. What this will look like is across the board every recruitment time will be reduced by one turn (1 turn recruit units will become 0's), all prices will be increased x3 for all units, all unit upkeep will be removed.

V 0.2: Recruitment times will be tweaked based on *player input* - if no players comment it will be assumed that the present system is perfect. Recruitment costs will be re-evaluated on a per-faction basis to ensure that there is some logical consistency to costs (for instance, all mounted units should probably cost more than basic levies, etc), morale will be examined and generally improved across the board.

V 0.3: Recruit-able generals, if not added yet, will promptly be added to all factions, ideally using existing generals bodyguard units to avoid having to remove pre-existing units.

V0.4: At this stage, campaign map things will be considered. The costs of forts will likely be raised, garrison scripts will be considered, corruption and the spawning of rebels will be examined and possibly changed.

V0.5: general polish, including faction unique bonuses.

v0.6: Balancing: Horde factions will be improved in both stats and on the strat map to hopefully survive. If possible, horde AI will be edited to promote settling asap. Corruption mechanics will hopefully limit economic prosperity, but without the negative traits that would otherwise sabotage charachters. Rebellions will be considered as a means of making larger factions more difficult to play to try and prevent snow-balling. Some of VGR's building bonuses *may* be removed or changed from economic bonuses to law bonuses.

0.7: Boldly assuming this project gets this far, possibly some new apocalypse related traits will get added to represent the glory and the horror of true total war. Certain UI elements may be touched up.

0.8: Bugfixing and polish

0.9: Final adjustments.

1.0: The final 'perfect' version of ultimate apocalypse, fully realized and hopefully error free.

[Joar]

Looks very interesting indeed!

[Massive_attack]

Thanks Joar, that means a lot!

First release out the door. This is quite rough and NEEEDS fine tuning for balance. I implore everyone to point out:

-Units that cost more/less than they should
-Units that should take more turns to recruit

[Massive_attack]

After giving this a a whirl for a few turns, I can definately say that I will need to look at ways to use up money. One may well be to double building costs, and further increase unit recruitment costs. Individual fine tuning of costs for units is also desperately needed. At present there is no reason to recruit many types of soldiers because they cost the same as a superior soldier. That is my next immediate goal to solve, although at present things will work fine so long as you play under strict house rules, raising only homogeneous forces (limitanei vs comitatenses vs palatina, that sort of thing). Later on I could see about perhaps implementing script events like in SS perhaps, to give players more things to throw cash at, with soft-bonuses.

One idea I had for a roman faction bonus is the ability to build full legions pre-equipped and geared up. Players would do this by training a 'prima cohort' and once it finishes (the cohort would take roughly the equivalent turns to make the stack, minus one or two, and the full cost, at a slight discount) a full sized legion would promptly spawn in/around the city to be commanded. Barbarian factions might be able to make similar specialized horde armies, likely of generally lower quality but at greater discounts (or perhaps in a much shorter period of time but for considerably more money)

Trouble is, I dont know how to script. But it could be nice, especially if said spawned armies were historically accurate. Raising legions as the romans would be a great deal more convenient, that's for sure. The obvious problem is that custom built player legions would not be able to have a prima cohort present unless the player was okay with spawning a load more troops.