Garrison script questions/suggestions

[King Ramses]

For the most part, I like the way EB2 handles the Garrison script, far more so than any other mod for Total War.

I found that Roma Surrectum's system was just tedious, why should every settlement be a grueling siege in which the enemy gets a full stack every turn when historically, vast areas including many settlements and sometimes entire nations capitulated en masse after individual pivotal battles (a certain empire conquered astonishingly quickly by a certain general springs to mind). Don't even get me started on Third Age's every-peasant-in-the-city-is-suddenly-a-highly-trained-guard-of-elite-knights silliness.

So for by and large I think EB2's system that only affects capitals/important cities is a very reasonable balance between gameplay and realism, especially given that most of the units spawned are very low-tier levies, but I still have a couple of things that I think should be addressed if possible, and if not for a workaround to be established.

Firstly and most importantly, is there a way to turn it off? I just laid siege to a city in Iberia, planning to starve out the defenders, and realised a couple of turns later that it now had a full stack in it. I was put off and withdrew, but from a role-playing perspective pretty pleased. The Areuakoi are being more stubborn than they have any right to be given that their entire army is crushed but they still don't even entertain the notion of peace, so it made perfect sense that they would have a large force left to fend me off with. So the next turn they marched out of the city and I won a heroic victory against their slightly larger but weaker force. I was ready to just walk into the city which now only had one or two units defending it. It doesn't make sense for a city of a nation that should be crippled to be an endless fountain of armies, so if I could just turn it off temporarily, I could I roleplay marching into the settlement, which can no longer realistically offer meaningful resistance, without feeling like I'm cheating.

Other than that, I have a couple of suggestions that may or may not be possible to code in. I know that you can't give the units 0 campaign movement, but would any or all of these conditions be possible to impose on the script?

- For the script to only fire if the number of units in the settlement is less than a certain number. The script is supposed to make up for the AI not protecting its cities, but it often happens when the AI happens to actually have a garrison in the settlement. Obviously it's not a full army because it's all that a nation can muster after all its armies have been crushed, but that isn't down to AI incompetence, that's just down to losing a war.

- For the script to only fire once per siege, it appears to just fire every turn that a settlement is under siege, which means that you have a scenario in which a city can basically produce full stacks indefinitely and you won't ever be able to take it without a long and needlessly costly battle, or lift the siege and let the enemy get a free stack which can be used outside of city defense.

- If neither of those are possible, for many or most of the spawned units to a be a new generic unit of poorly organised citizenry including old men and even a few women and children who have been given crude weapons or grabbed knives from their homes. They would, needless to say, be mostly useless in combat unless used decisively or in great numbers, with poor morale and low stats. That would accurately simulate a nation being on its last legs with nobody but the general population to defend their homes, and negate the ability of a faction to use the armies offensively, given they are hardly a match for a trained army. Case in point, about 80-90% of the combatants involved at the Battle of Carthage were just the cities inhabitants.

[Kull]

From the v2.3 changelog:

- Update to major/minor city unrest - guaranteed the first time, 25% chance of occurring on every subsequent attempt.
- Reduced unrest from major/minor city script to 25%/10%

[QuintusSertorius]

For the most part, I like the way EB2 handles the Garrison script, far more so than any other mod for Total War.

I found that Roma Surrectum's system was just tedious, why should every settlement be a grueling siege in which the enemy gets a full stack every turn when historically, vast areas including many settlements and sometimes entire nations capitulated en masse after individual pivotal battles (a certain empire conquered astonishingly quickly by a certain general springs to mind). Don't even get me started on Third Age's every-peasant-in-the-city-is-suddenly-a-highly-trained-guard-of-elite-knights silliness.

So for by and large I think EB2's system that only affects capitals/important cities is a very reasonable balance between gameplay and realism, especially given that most of the units spawned are very low-tier levies, but I still have a couple of things that I think should be addressed if possible, and if not for a workaround to be established.

Firstly and most importantly, is there a way to turn it off? I just laid siege to a city in Iberia, planning to starve out the defenders, and realised a couple of turns later that it now had a full stack in it. I was put off and withdrew, but from a role-playing perspective pretty pleased. The Areuakoi are being more stubborn than they have any right to be given that their entire army is crushed but they still don't even entertain the notion of peace, so it made perfect sense that they would have a large force left to fend me off with. So the next turn they marched out of the city and I won a heroic victory against their slightly larger but weaker force. I was ready to just walk into the city which now only had one or two units defending it. It doesn't make sense for a city of a nation that should be crippled to be an endless fountain of armies, so if I could just turn it off temporarily, I could I roleplay marching into the settlement, which can no longer realistically offer meaningful resistance, without feeling like I'm cheating.

The only way to turn it off is to delete that section of the script.

Other than that, I have a couple of suggestions that may or may not be possible to code in. I know that you can't give the units 0 campaign movement, but would any or all of these conditions be possible to impose on the script?

- For the script to only fire if the number of units in the settlement is less than a certain number. The script is supposed to make up for the AI not protecting its cities, but it often happens when the AI happens to actually have a garrison in the settlement. Obviously it's not a full army because it's all that a nation can muster after all its armies have been crushed, but that isn't down to AI incompetence, that's just down to losing a war.

Not possible. There is no way to count how many units are present in a garrison.

- For the script to only fire once per siege, it appears to just fire every turn that a settlement is under siege, which means that you have a scenario in which a city can basically produce full stacks indefinitely and you won't ever be able to take it without a long and needlessly costly battle, or lift the siege and let the enemy get a free stack which can be used outside of city defense.

It doesn't fire every turn, it fires once every 10 turns the settlement is besieged.

However, looking at that section of the script for Sekeiza, there's an error in the "cooldown" section, which means that one does fire every turn, which isn't intended. That'll be fixed in 2.3.

If you want to fix it yourself in the meantime (will require a new campaign), search for Nemantia_spawn in the script and replace with Sekeiza_spawn.

- If neither of those are possible, for many or most of the spawned units to a be a new generic unit of poorly organised citizenry including old men and even a few women and children who have been given crude weapons or grabbed knives from their homes. They would, needless to say, be mostly useless in combat unless used decisively or in great numbers, with poor morale and low stats. That would accurately simulate a nation being on its last legs with nobody but the general population to defend their homes, and negate the ability of a faction to use the armies offensively, given they are hardly a match for a trained army. Case in point, about 80-90% of the combatants involved at the Battle of Carthage were just the cities inhabitants.

Not only do we have no such unit (and wouldn't waste a slot on it), they'd provide no resistance whatsoever. In autocalc they'd have no impact, and in a battlemap siege they'd die like flies. The mechanic represents veterans who live in the city, freed slaves and so on, they are adequately represented by the units that spawn.

[hacon]

If I remember in RTW1 you could use garrison to population ratio to decide whether you spawn a garrison, not sure about this in MTW. Also, one feature I do like about RTW2 is that when a city is besieged a garrison is spawned but is removed after the siege. You can do this in Kingdoms by designating a unit as a garrison unit then deleting this kind of unit after the siege. The downside is all of this type of unit for a faction will be deleted even those in your field armies. Thus new units will need to be created as garrison units only. However this may not be possible because of the hard-coded limits in the game.