Displaying general's/family member's civic management ability automatically

[Septentrionalis]

I like to play a management-centered game (Romani) with less emphasis on expansion and military steamrolling whenever possible. I also like to have a governor in each region capital instead opting to disable auto-management. I find the greatest flaw in this awesome mod to be that one cannot tell from the family member stat card if they are suitable to govern a region/settlement. And yes, I have thought about it for a long time before making that claim.

To give an example, I can have a fairly established leader in his middle age with nice stats and not too many negative traits, but where ever I send him he takes the public order down because of some trait that I have not been able to prevent or counter with other traits. Such as "works during games" for Romani that gives a +3 unrest. Fair enough; there has to be some balance and not every general can make managing a region a breeze. However, when I do need to send a suitable governor to a settlement, I can not see how good they really are from any stat on the character card. It makes management from a player perspective very hard and time-consuming.

It also seems that avoiding unrest is the most important quality for a (non-military) leader as it affects everything from further trait acquisition to tax collecting. One could calculate all traits for each leader manually on paper or a file on another computer, but I see no virtue in making players spend a long time doing something that a computer can handle in a millisecond or less. Surely it would not count as an exploit to have the most important stat displayed automatically? My questions are:

1. Can this be done within the confines of the engine? If not in the existing stats, could it be a trait of it's own that gets updated when other traits modify the score?

2. Do you agree or disagree with anything that I tried to describe above?

3. How do you handle selecting governors for regions (in general or particularly demanding regions)? I am very interested to hear your two cents, whether it is ignoring the stats or having a complicated system or something in between.

[Lusitanio]

In EBII there is a great amount of traits related with management of cities. To do what you want would require creating a new trait like "Good Governor" with several levels in which all the good traits would converge so that you would know who is a good governor and who's not. However, due to the amount of traits and triggers required, that would be a huge amount of work just to show something that you can test simply by leaving your General as governor in a city and seeing the effects on the city's public order. Not worth it in my opinion.

Besides I think it is too gamey. When I want someone as a governor I normally check his basic traits (educated, smart, charismatic, etc) and send him to the city I want. If he ends up being a bad governor, well not all in ancient history were perfect governors x)

[Septentrionalis]

In EBII there is a great amount of traits related with management of cities. To do what you want would require creating a new trait like "Good Governor" with several levels in which all the good traits would converge so that you would know who is a good governor and who's not. However, due to the amount of traits and triggers required, that would be a huge amount of work just to show something that you can test simply by leaving your General as governor in a city and seeing the effects on the city's public order. Not worth it in my opinion.

Thank you for the two cents that I asked for! I now see that I was clearly too vague in my opening post. Or in fact forgot to narrow down my question to have to do with "effect on public order", which I was only after. I know that there are a number of other things including food production, tax collection, mining expertise, etc. But what I want to know is can the general manage a settlement without causing unrest.

Besides I think it is too gamey. When I want someone as a governor I normally check his basic traits (educated, smart, charismatic, etc) and send him to the city I want. If he ends up being a bad governor, well not all in ancient history were perfect governors x)

As a role player, I respect that approach towards the game a great deal. I would in fact be okay with altogether hidden stats, if that was the case. But since the effect of a general on public order is available to the player but only through manual calculation, I was hoping that it could be displayed automatically to save time. I am not looking into min/maxing everything, but I do not like the manual work when I need to figure out whom out of 50 governors I should send to deal with a particularly troubled region far away.

[azayrahmad]

I gather that you want to have something like 'Total effect on Public Order' trait that is basically total sum of all public order related trait of the character, so you can decide whether it is worth it to send a family member 5 turns away if he is only going to reduce public order anyway. I'm not a mod developer, but unless a trait can change another trait I think it requires some sort of script that will be triggered every turn, which I imagine would be a hard work to the developers and will slow down the campaign end turn considerably. Also some public order trait are acquired in the settlement (e.g. interloper trait) so in the end this information might not be truly accurate anyway.

[Septentrionalis]

I gather that you want to have something like 'Total effect on Public Order' trait that is basically total sum of all public order related trait of the character, so you can decide whether it is worth it to send a family member 5 turns away if he is only going to reduce public order anyway.

Spot on! That is precisely what I want. Just like the three or four stats that each general have these days, that are calculated somehow but are either not equally useful or I just don't know what to do with them.

I'm not a mod developer, but unless a trait can change another trait I think it requires some sort of script that will be triggered every turn, which I imagine would be a hard work to the developers and will slow down the campaign end turn considerably.

I was hoping it could be done like the other stats for generals. In original RTW, influence was exactly that. Influence would tell you how much the general could positively influence the general sentiment in a region, and it was very very useful.

Also some public order trait are acquired in the settlement (e.g. interloper trait) so in the end this information might not be truly accurate anyway.

That does not matter. All kinds of temporary effects could be excluded because the player can anticipate those. Any general regardless of ability will obviously fare worse than usual if sticking his nose where it does not belong.

As a general note, I am very surprised how little interest there is towards having this information. I was sure that many players would like to have the old stat back because it makes managing a state so much easier. And by easier I mean not requiring so much manual work that does not bring anything into the game in terms of enjoyment or immersion.

[Jurand of Cracow]

My 5 cents:
1. I agree with Lusitanio - it's so much work that's not worth it. The EBII is too complex.
2. afair, the TATW has something like this concerning a few attributes - perhaps made by Withwnar. As everything made by this man, it's a good piece of coding, imo.
3. the DLV (and DoC) have a very simplified structure of a general progression - that's very boring, but you can immediately see every effect in one trait.
4. even now some of the information in the EBII is lying to the player - see my analysis here.
That's said, I'm quite in line with your thinking, Finnish man. It'd be nice to have all this information in one place. As an alternative, I gather this info for myself in a spreadsheet:



JoC

[Spartan 666]

I agree that the complexity of the trait and ancilliary systems do not allow to understand easily which characters are the best governors. I constantly look at the traits and ancilliaries but in the end I end up trying to send them one by one in the city and then I leave the one that allows greater public order.

[Septentrionalis]

My 5 cents:

I guess those other mods are cool but cannot be used in conjunction with EBII in any way. Thanks for pointing to your analysis as well. I have in fact come to trust no stats. Just like the stats on unit cards, the values of which cannot be used to determine the effectiveness of units the battle field.

With the unit card thing I am happy, however. The units have written descriptions and I do not feel that I need to know their true stats. If it says it is an elite Celtic unit, I can just imagine how they would do and observe their success or lack of it on the battle field. With generals it is different, however. There is no description that says "this guy is great at keeping the peace in troubled regions". Instead, I have to start calculating stuff myself.

That spreadsheet of yours is impressive indeed! I have thought of having to do something like that if not quite as grand, but there are some practical concerns. First of all I would need a laptop or something at my side. But more importantly, do you regularly go through all the generals and check if there are changes? There is no notification when an individual character gets a new trait apart from some special ones like offices, right? Sounds like a lot of work that computers are meant to do for us to begin with.

EDIT: No, wait. I guess all those "reads at the games" and "superior miner" ones also trigger a notification at the end of the turn. My bad.

I constantly look at the traits and ancilliaries but in the end I end up trying to send them one by one in the city and then I leave the one that allows greater public order.

Sounds like a good way of coping with it, but I really wish that you did not have to go through all that trouble. Managing a large dominion is a lot of work in this mod even without that kind of trial and error gameplay.

[Jurand of Cracow]

I would need a laptop or something at my side. But more importantly, do you regularly go through all the generals and check if there are changes? There is no notification when an individual character gets a new trait apart from some special ones like offices, right? Sounds like a lot of work that computers are meant to do for us to begin with.

Yes, I do use a laptop on side. And I do regularly go through the generals as the coders are rather thrifty with providing these pop-ups when the traits change. I try to have a different approach in my modding for the SSHIP and I make pop-ups. And yes, the computer should do it for us. In the newer TW it does, but with imprecission and in a boring way. I much prefer the M2TW engine way, even with the use of spreadsheet.

[Spartan 666]

Sounds like a good way of coping with it, but I really wish that you did not have to go through all that trouble. Managing a large dominion is a lot of work in this mod even without that kind of trial and error gameplay.

This is the only effective way I have found so far, unfortunately. I usually keep all FMs in the capital hoping they get good traits and ancilliaries from the education buildings, then when it's time to send them to a city as governors, I take them all out of the capital and start sending them back in one by one (save for the capital governor of course). The one that gives the highest "score" wins (I usually care only about public order, sometimes also population growth, never about income).