Ideas for Late Game to challenge an Empire

[Cryoshakespeare]

I've been playing a fantastic campaign as Pontos in 2.3, and I'm at turn 280. At this point, I own all of Anatolia as well as the two Bosporan cities north, and I have attained the reform. I really focused on city growth in this game, so every Anatolian city has at least a stone wall and paved roads at this point, and I've reached the stage where I'm building military far in excess of what I need as garrisons simply to reduce the boring reality of having too much money and just clicking to buy every new building as soon as each previous one is done.

I certainly am the strongest faction at this point, and so all of the normal challenges I'm used to have faded away (fighting other factions is easy, managing finances and public order in my powerful core territories is a matter of procedure now).

I know this question gets cycled around every now and then in forum posts, but I'm here to ask it again - Being open to restrictions from roleplay, what are some of the challenges you guys have set or simulated for yourselves that give you meaningful choices to make in the late game?

One idea I'm having is to limit constructing buildings based on certain parameters I have to fulfill militarily. For instance, it's often a nice idea to perfectly sort out a garrison of troops for your provinces that seem like they would realistically be demanded by the local nobility, but it's just as easy and tempting in game to fill those provinces with Pantodapoi and random cheap skirmishers to get the public order bonus, since there's little chance that any actual invasion could threaten you at all. So maybe I could impose the restriction that 60% of province income needs to go straight back into filling its local garrison, and that an "appropriate garrison" for the settlement size, culture, and government needs to be maintained in order to build buildings.

Things like that. Any ideas? ^_^

[Cryoshakespeare]

Well screw it, I'm going to break the first rule of forum posts and give a reply here before anyone else has had a chance to post, because I think I'm a rebel who will gain respect from casually disregarding the rules and then meta-ironically discussing it as a joke.

Another good idea is to set up a colony or capture a settlement far away from your core territories, say Syracuse in my case, and limit the defense of that place with a kind of "regional wealth" idea, where you can't actually bring the full force of your nation to bear in defending it. Kind of acts as a second early game start, but as in all these cases, it takes a lot of roleplay discipline and imagination to actually make it good.

There you go, I did it. Now close this thread and begone, and check out my submod EUD_Mod (because you need it). This is Cryo, slightly tipsy, thank you, and goodnight.

[QuintusSertorius]

Yeah, the "Client kingdom that must survive only on it's own resources" is a house rule I sometimes use. Deliberately putting it somewhere distant where you can't easily reinforce it adds to that challenge.

[Cryoshakespeare]

I suppose it's up to every player themselves to figure this kind of thing out. I mean, the game lasts for around 1100 turns or something, but usually by the first 200-300 you've "won" even with the hardest factions, so it can be difficult to find a way to keep the game engaging while still wanting to play out the story of your nation.

[I_Damian]

There's really nothing you can do tbh. All strategy games suffer from this. They start off so fun, then at a certain point you've won and that's that. Even Paradox strategy games suffer from this, with Crusader Kings 2 spawning in the Mongols/Aztecs/plague/whatever, but by the time they come... they're no threat. Stellaris spawns in crises, like super powerful extra-dimensional alien empires, but by the time they arrive you either wipe the floor with them, or they wipe the floor with you. No middle ground. Europe Universalis has totally random dice roll events that lower your stability, but when you have an outrageously large empire and so much gold you could buy the entire earth 100 times over... who cares?

It's not even just strategy games. It's most games. Ever played an Elder Scrolls game, or a Fallout game? 1 hour in and you're pretty much God. May as well quit right then and there. You've got all the money, all the potions, good gear, good spells... what else is ever going to challenge you? Why are you even looting that chest of treasure? First person shooters suffer as well. I just finished a game called Prey on hard difficulty. Excellent game, my personal GOTY 2017, but by the end I had basically infinite ammo for all my weapons and infinite grenades of every variety, enough materials to make a thousand medkits, enough food to feed an army...

Overseas colonies that must survive only on their own is a silly idea. Well no, actually it's a very fun thing to do and it's something I do ever since I first installed EB back in 2006 (was it 2006 when it first released?), but in real life a colony that gets no aid from its mother faction rebels. Why be a colony if you're getting no help? Some of the things I do to make EB harder:

Give most of my money away each turn. You can do it by bribing rebels and then disbanding them, or by giving it to a one-city nation that's having a hard time, or whateer.

Only the king (or faction leader) can lead a full stack army. His heir can have 16 units (including his general bodyguard), everybody else can have 12. Disloyal/unreliable generals can only command city garrisons.

Keep a huge navy. Those ships really add up in EB.

Realistic armies. As Pontos I would have only one or two units of elite infantry, one or two units of elite cavalry, the rest of the army would be mercenaries of medium quality and low-level recruits from my own lands.

No unit retraining, only merging to replenish.

Lose cities on purpose. Either to the enemy, or to rebels. Frontier cities changed hands all the time.

Intervene in foreign wars which you gain nothing from, other than to preserve a balance of power.

There's more but I'm forgetting. If you do all these things right from the start it really slows the game down and creates a challenge.

[Jurand of Cracow]

I find two separate issues in this thread:
1. (the main one) what artificial home rules can you introduce to add the challenge to the game when you've got pretty decent, a stable empire according to the EBII rules (QS mentioned 10-12 settlements?)
2. (a tacit assumption) it's not possible to make a late game challenging given the snow-ball effect appears.

ad. 1 - it's very personal choice. Me, I'm never enticed by artificial rules as "intervene in the others' wars" or "keep a colony in a far-away land". Such actions should be beneficial for the player from the gameplay perspective - and this is the task of the modders to provide reasons for such behavior. My style of playing is to play by the rules: it's my ingenuity to find out what the game / the mod allows me to do provided the set-up rules (and it's indispensable that the mod makes the rules clear). I admit following some home rules - but they're only to get rid of outright (and un-historical) exploits or to provide for a behavior I consider to be very "historic". I'm always looking for a mod which provides "historical" parameters for the game - and I think EBII is very good on this, especially for the first 2-3 hundreds of turns.

ad 2 - I think some proposed rules directly target the issue of amassing too much money in the late game, eg. "have a large navy" means "throw away much money and cope with that lower budget". The "snow-ball effect" has always been a worry of the M2TW modders. Some crude arrangements were introduced - in the Deus lo Vult mod there were additional costs for having more than 5 or 10 settlements (I don't remember precisely) - and they went up fast so that the 15th settlement added more to the costs than the 10th. Some more advanced thinking is present in the SSHIP mod - the increasing public unrest of the outlying settlements makes big garrisons necessary what in turn requires much more outlays on the pricey upkeep - in this framework an additional settlement could make the player losing money, not gaining it (you may see an example of costs here, it's the difference between column "Garr costs" and "Income").
For me, the most interesting solutions were included the Byg's Grim Reality IV submod to the Stainless Steel. Byg introduced many mechanisms making you losing money in the historically sound circumstances (money for the nobles, marriage costs, supply costs etc.), made recruitment restricted for the big factions (through the War Councillors' / Personal Training Staff system plus religious requirements) and also expansion very difficult (again: WC/PTF system). For me, it's the best historical gameplay submod I've ever seen.


The bottom line: I think that - if it's necessary, I don't have a firm opinion yet - a willing modder could make a submod based on the Byg's ideas adjusted to the Europa Barbarorum realities.

[QuintusSertorius]

Creating your own "foreign wars" narrative where you never take land is a lot of fun. I find the game gets boring once you have more than 10-12 settlements; not only do you have loads of money, but the management of settlements comes to dominate what you do from turn to turn. Adding more settlements just increases the management overhead, which is tedious. Whereas interfering in other people's wars, choosing a side to aid and giving them your conquests, or simply swatting aside the armies of the other aggressor, can make for interesting times. Especially good when you ensure that no one ever really wins, they just prolong the conflict and keep each other busy.

[VektorT]

Well, you can do what I do in Europa Universalis after I become a major power and things get to easy: ̶r̶o̶l̶e̶p̶l̶a̶y̶ ̶i̶l̶l̶u̶m̶i̶n̶a̶t̶i̶ turn the world into your sandbox but do not outright conquer it.
I mainly do it in 4 steps:

- Have a pet nation/ally and take care and feed him.
So you are Pontos, right? Let say Koinnon Hellenon is down to just one city in the middle of the Mediterranean and Makedonia and Epeiros took the whole Greece. Ally yourself with the Koinnon Hellenon and declared war against Epeiros and Makedonia, try to drag KH with you but if they refuse whatever. Campaign against Epeiros and Makedonia for the whole greek peninsula and the Balkans. Keep one city for yourself has a beachhead, but whanever you take a province, give it to KH (or after making peace). Play the liberator for once and not the conqueror! When someone declares war on KH, you help them! When they attack someone... you help them! Who knows, maybe if you keep doing for a while KH becomes a power to rivals your own and now you have fun destroying what you built!

- Choose an enemy and make him cease to exist, but dont annex them.
You are doing just the opposite now: instead of peting someone for life, you are bullying someone to death. Your final objective is to put their existence to an end, let's say it's Egypt. You wont conquer Egypt, or at least not hold their province forever, you just go there and try to do 3 things: thrown other people against them (so their cities becomes part of someone else), capture their city and let it rebel or capture everything and them distribute to their neighbours. Your final objective is just Egypt doom, nothing else. Obviously it is better if you choose a bigger nation away from you... just for the challenge and logistic hell! But DO NOT raise their cities! You want it to prosper under someone else... maybe just to feed bigger conflicts later on.

- Just raid stuff.
It's kinda the same from above, but now you are not destroying whole states... just killing their people. Assemble an army and send it in a raiding fleet to, say, Spain. Disembark there, go for a capital or rich city, kill who stands in your way, take the city, raise it, demolish it building, them back to them in a peace offer and go back home with their gold and scalp. Let them grow back into it, whatever, some years/turns late you come back again and raid another city! Or maybe two! Or maybe the same one, you sick bastard! Keep doing it until you sent them back to the stone age and their cities became less populated than Mars! Make sure this region of the game map is the most ed up of them all and their owner are super miserable and just waiting for someone to finish them off because you wont. If you are petting another nation and don't need all the gold just give it to your pet nation, whatever, you was there for the killing anyway.

- Be super status quo.
Draw borders in the map by yourself. "Greece should be here, Galia here, the Romans shouldn't be in Spain"... whatever. Define a political map in your head and try to enforce it. Dismatle the bigger ones, feed the small ones, get yourself in other people wars to enforce that no one else expands out of the playpen you choosed for them... declare war on both of the belligerent and force them to chill if you must. Your are a superpower, you do whatever you want to enforce peace... YOUR peace!

Those are just some suggetions from what I use to do in Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings 2 and sometimes in Total War games, sometimes I do one of them, others all of them... of course TW is more limited in that diplomatic aspect, but anyway, you have your armies to do the diplomacy for you.

[Marvzilla]

I like to roleplay a lot, in my current KB campaign I own almost all of the provinces surrounding the Euxine, but keep myself limited to them, an Empire of the inner sea in 245 turns or something. The historical army composition thread and pdf are great for roleplay as well, and I take the ethnicity of my FMs greatly into consideration when using troops, sometimes making small stories out of their characters, such as a Bosporite, whose family where attuned governours of Olbia. His brother got killed by the Getai fighting in the west and his whole young life has been consumed with battling them, gaining the One Eyed trait and finally destroying the faction. After that I left their settlement so they could rise up again, as a constant danger to my western territories.

[Cryoshakespeare]

There's a lot of fantastic ideas and points in this thread already, thanks guys.

One of the main principles mentioned that I'm suspecting has a large impact is: playing the game with roleplay and these ideas in mind the entire way through. It can be an exciting experience as a faction like Pontos, who start off in a genuinely difficult position, to surge to that stage of where you are suddenly a powerful player on the block, capable of duking it out with big factions. You want to reach that stage where you feel safe, like you don't have to fight any more except for more glory and power.

But obviously, reaching a stage where you are content to rest on your laurels is when you're mostly likely to disconnect from the experience of playing the game, because doing things is still work, though you could feel a sense of peace and passivity more easily by just not playing the game.

In a sense, the underlying natural goals of the game (for me at least) are to reach a state of abundance, and to have all threats be minimized. So every artificial goal and limitation placed by roleplay and house rules should serve to keep me grasping at these ideas but never reaching them.

Interesting stuff, I'll post about my own solutions to this problem soon, though you all have certainly provided an inspiring framework. Thanks!

[mephiston]

Back in EB1 days I had an extremely fun campaign with Pontos.

I decided to roleplay the kingdoms of Mikra Asia, so I played a bit with the initial army positions and in 270 BC I owned Nikaia (kingdom of Bithynia), Pergamon (kingdom of Pergamon), Amaseia (kingdom of Pontos) and Mazaka (kingdom of Kappadokia).

Then I added a bunch of house rules, inspired by Konny's ones:

- Each kingdom had its royal line: the Kianos for Pontos, the Herakleotes for Bithynia, and two other guys (one gained by marriage, the other a client ruler) for Kappadokia and Pergamon.

- Each kindom had its own army: the wages are paid with half of the income of the kingdom. The army was composed in the following manner.
Check money -> Add 1 levy unit;
If sufficient money for upkeep -> Add 1 "citizen" unit;
If sufficient money for upkeep -> Add 1 "citizen" unit;
If sufficient money for upkeep -> Add one "noble" unit;
If sufficient money for upkeep -> Start again.
So let's take for example Pergamon. Suppose I have 2000 income per turn: then I can use 1000 for paying the army, so I will hire 1 unit of Akontistai (levy, 202 mnai/turn), 1 unit of Hoplitai (citizen, 342 mnai/turn) and 1 unit of Hoplitai (citizen, 342 mnai/turn). Next I have a "noble" unit, but I can't afford it (1000-202-347x2=104 remaining for troops) so I need to wait.
I checked every 4 years the income of my cities to update the army, following the progression explained before. I looked to the FM's traits to decide recruitment as well: one "Hellene" was more likely to recruit heavy infantry as noble units, while one "Kappadokos" generally preferred cavalry. Recruitment was also region-influenced.

- There were two blocks of defensive alliances: Bithynia + Pergamon and Pontos + Kappadokia. If one kingdom of the same block was attacked, the other would try to honor the defensive pact, but two kingdoms of different blocks shared no mutual obligations.

- Until one kingdom conquered Ankyra, I had to pay 100 talents (6000 mnai) every two years to the Galatians (subtracted money with the console); if I didn't pay, I arranged things in order to spawn a Galatian halfstack to raid.

- To make absorption of kingdoms possible, I decided that the main bloodline of the ruling family needed to die out and the army of the absorbing kingdom needed to be 50% bigger than the one of the absorbed. Pontos managed to absorb Kappadokia around 200 BC, because the king of Kappadokia died with no heirs and the army of Pontos was much bigger (Pontos had Amaseia and Sinope, Kappadokia only Mazaka).

I added other things EB1-specific, such as a crapload of money to the Eleutheroi to pump them up before trying to conquer them (Ankyra had a fullstack of angry Galatians inside by the time I attacked it, and I failed twice).

You can add as much complexity in your house rules as you want, just remember to play M/M if you're really strict with your rules.

Hope you're going to have loads of fun playing!

[Emperor Hantscher]

One thing I try to do is not run down opponents(except rebels or tiny stacks) on the battle field, it kind of just slows the campaign down a bit. Basically as soon as the end battle window pops up its over. Since thats when the battle would end for the AI if they win. It works better in other mods cause eb2 there is a lot of withdrawing and returning so I can use light cab to run down those untie while the battle is still going.

[VektorT]

One thing I try to do is not run down opponents(except rebels or tiny stacks) on the battle field, it kind of just slows the campaign down a bit. Basically as soon as the end battle window pops up its over. Since thats when the battle would end for the AI if they win. It works better in other mods cause eb2 there is a lot of withdrawing and returning so I can use light cab to run down those untie while the battle is still going.

This is not a bad idea. It always bothered me how every battle the enemy loses is basically Teutoburg or Carrhae for them.

[YourMadDoc]

One thing I try to do is not run down opponents(except rebels or tiny stacks) on the battle field, it kind of just slows the campaign down a bit. Basically as soon as the end battle window pops up its over. Since thats when the battle would end for the AI if they win. It works better in other mods cause eb2 there is a lot of withdrawing and returning so I can use light cab to run down those untie while the battle is still going.

And disable all ui during battles - minimap, unit ,cards, banners, green arrows under units etc to make battles harder to control and expansion slower. My main problem with building undefeatable empire too quickly is a fact that I win all battles, thus snowballing everything after first 50 turns. If you disable UI your losses will be higher, if you dont pursue fleeing units their loses will be lower so not every battle will be Teutoburg or Carrhae.

[Roma_Victrix]

Christ, am I the only one here who likes to crush and conquer all my enemies once I've become powerful enough to do so? It's very liberating, especially after getting besieged tons of times early on and putting up with their aggressive petty bullcrap for so long. Apparently I'm the only guy here who likes payback time.

In the several EB II campaigns I've played thus far where I've gone over 700 turns and into the 1st century BC with a huge empire, it has never been boring. There were still minor factions around to pose a consistent challenge, especially the Sweboz for some reason. They remain hyper aggressive even when they are diminished to roughly three or four provinces, building stacks and laying siege to whatever settlement of yours borders their territory. Defending borderlands of a huge empire is actually really fun so long as you have a few enemies to keep you occupied. Some people may consider that boring, so to each his own, but for me it's a rewarding experience after having built an empire in the first place.

They say that all's fair in love and war, but that's usually hogwash. Sometimes opponents were evenly matched historically, like the Hellenistic Ptolemies and Seleucids fighting each other, or the Eastern Romans and Sasanian Persians, or the medieval Italian republics of Genoa and Venice, or the medieval Southern Song and Jurchen Jin dynasties of China, etc. However, warfare has always been a risky business and if your nation had smart leadership it wouldn't enter a war that it wasn't sure it could win. Powerful kingdoms and empires throughout history picked on weaker ones and conquered/vassalized them as easy targets before moving on to grander things. The Romans conquered much of the Italian peninsula before daring to confront the Carthaginians in the First Punic War. Once they had soundly defeated Carthage in the Second Punic War and shored up the Western Mediterranean, they then swallowed up smaller powers such as the Illyrians and the Kingdom of Makedonia.

[YourMadDoc]

I personally really like to spread my culture into foreign lands so I still continue playing game even after I won. Large empire is still fun, but it does lack risks and challenge from early days. Once I attacked every neighbor to start wars, raised taxes to very high to start rebellions and uprisings and auto-resolved battles for 20 years to get some enemies back. I had to fight for life and almost lost my capital because 3 fking Nabatean stacks before reform are unable to defeat one Seleucid.