Influence and confidence: how does it work? Hard coded limits?

[Paltmull]

I asked this over at the Org, but didn't get any replies. Since that forum has unfortunately become quite underpopulated I'll try and post the same thing here:

First I want to say a big thank you for this beautiful game! I was a big EB I fan back in the days and have only recently gotten into playing EB II.

I have been asking and searching around a bit but haven't found any good answers to the questions I'm about to ask.

RTW's system of command/influence/management for FMs was very intuitive and useful; command was good for battles, influence for public order and management for economy. In M2TW it's a complete mess. No one seems sure what all the effects of especially chivalry/dread and piety actually are.

In EBII, as far as I understand, dread has been removed, chivalry replaced by confidence and piety by influence. Are confidence and influence just rebrands of chivalry and piety, i.e. do they have the same effects but with new names, or can you redefine what effects they have? I suspect it is the former. But if not, wouldn't it make more sense to use the old "management" rather than confidence? According to its description confidence seems to be about unit morale which should make it kind of redundant since command already does that (among other things). And from my short EBII experience and general M2TW experience I find that FMs don't seem to affect economy much.

[Genghis Skahn]

Influence--affects culture conversion speed
Confidence--increases troop morale

[Roma_Victrix]

Influence--affects culture conversion speed

I'm starting to doubt this a little. I have several KH generals who are maxed out in terms of influence, yet after placing them in certain settlements, they hardly seem to move the needle at all in terms of cultural conversion and getting a settlement above 50% Hellenistic polities (I'd like to build some more more "Supervised Hellenic Administrations" in several places). Should I pack all of those family members into the same settlement? Does that help? Or is it just the governor who matters? What other factors help in speeding up this process? What infrastructure should I focus on building? Academies? I already have tons of those.

[Paltmull]

Thanks! Is that all influence does? No public order boost?

[Genghis Skahn]

Thanks! Is that all influence does? No public order boost?

No, sadly. I rather thought the command/management/influence style of RTW was best...But CA thought differently for M2TW(for some reason.............)

[Hummer]

Check your FM's traits. There are tons of traits that effect public order. Tons

[Genghis Skahn]

Check your FM's traits. There are tons of traits that effect public order. Tons

When you actually count, there is indeed a great many traits in EBII, yet both when you play the game(especially certain factions) and investigate the EDCT, it is clear that there is a great deal of room for improvement in terms of traits as well. Especially for "barbarian" and Steppe factions. Many factions still don't even have FH and FL traits. I would not say that there are tons of public order traits--that depends on the faction. The Romans, Carthaginians(recently) and Hellenisitic factions have a bunch, but many other factions are in need of traits.

[Poppis]

Confidence(Chivalry) seems to only give +1 morale. Or at least that's what all the ingame tooltips say for traits that increase chivalry. To be honest I'm not even sure what chivalry gave in vanilla MTW2. I've heard all kinds of stuff like it giving population growth/public order and faction leaders chivalry increasing genereals loyalty. No idea where these would be modded though.

Also Influence does increase public order, but not directly. Instead influence reduces religious unrest(civil unrest). This reduction is bigger in regions with lower religion %.

[War lord]

In Medieval 2 Chivalry gave Morale bonuses, while Dread damaged the enemy Morale. So Confidence probably gives a stacking morale boost still, as I imagine it's hardcoded.

[z3n]

There is a plaxe in the descr campaign db which allows you to flag the type of system you want to use, although I have forgotten the specifics.

[Ngugi]

For generals/governors:
Higher piety ["influence"] always reduce corruption which increases income (thus it decides who is governor), but can otherwise have two different settings (don't know which EB2 uses):
One setting mean that a governor with higher piety increases religious unrest, from the precense of other religions than the faction's own.
The alternative setting decreases religious unrest on the same ground, if the province has other religion other than your own.
Edit: it do not affect conversion.

See: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...ive-piety-mode

[Poppis]

In descr_campaign_db there are these two modifiers:

<governor_conversion_rate_offset float="0.0005"/>
<governor_conversion_rate_modifier float="0.0005"/>

So it might be that it's not Influence that affects conversion but simply having a governor. Also the conversion speed seems pretty low(although I have no idea how close that is to vanilla settings). Also there are other factors like "founding conversion", "owner conversion" and "neighbour normalise" that also affect the conversion so it's pretty much impossible to test governors conversion effect in a normal game.

[Jervaj]

I actually had felt the difference from cities with high influence governors to little to no influence ones. May have been a diference but while with low influence the boosts to culture seem really slow or unexistantant I do feel a constant culture bump with the high influence ones, may only work well when your culture is low though.