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View Full Version : RS1.5 Recruitment,AOR Info, Changes:



Roman_Man#3
11-06-2007, 00:02
By DVK - Taken from TWC

With the release of the next Update coming soon, I'm going to do my best in here to explain the changes that have been made to Roma Surrectum.

The first and most noticeable change you'll see is to the year displayed during the game. It will no longer be seen as BC\AD.....but as:

Ab Urbe Condita.......'from the founding of the city'.

Technically, this means from the founding of the city of Rome, but one can imagine it to mean from the founding of whatever city you like. The Roman's kept the years in this way for over a thousand years...some 500 years after the birth of Christ.....so it was a longstanding way of computing time.

There are two reasons for this change. First, to hopefully correct a known CTD issue in the years around 66-67BC that appear to be a hardcoded game caused call for a civil war among the Romans. Problem is, if there is no Senate, or any other Roman faction, the game immediately begins to CTD. So by changing the way the years are counted, the start date of RS1 will be 473 Ab Urbe Condita which the game will see as 473AD....500+ years after the supposed Civil War. There are no CTD's with this setting...so we'll see.
The second reason, which came about as a benefit of the first, is that it disconnects everything from 'historical' timelines. When things happen doesn't really matter anymore, because this is a 'game' world anyway, and it never conformed to historical time in the first place. Nor do I believe it even SHOULD conform to it....if everything happened the way it should've happened and when, there would be no point to playing most factions.

This 'disconnectedness' from a 'real' timeline has allowed me to implement some changes I've wanted to make for a long time, but couldn't figure out how to until now. They include at present massive changes in the way the Romans recruit units, but will eventually trickle down into all factions to some extent.

How this will work for the Romans is as foloows:

1. You'll be able to recruit the Republican Legion units (Hastati, Principe, Triarii) at the game's start. And as you expand into areas of Gaul and Greece, you'll see that Hastati become available (Republican Legion II & III respectively)..but they will cost more. As the barracks level goes up, the Principes and Triarii will be available as well outside Italy (costing more), while the same units will be available in Italy in lower level barracks and cost less.

2. When you build an 'Army Barracks', you will be initiating the first of RS's building induced 'reforms'. This building represents a '2nd Punic War' reform, where the use of the Roman 'cohort' was first mentioned. It will combine the Roman Hastati and Principe into one unit, and they will be called 'VE Legion's I and II'. VE Legion I will appear first in Italy most likely, and be available only in Italy. VE Legion II will be recruitable in certain military AOR's all over, and in Gaul and Greece. If you never built a 'Royal Barracks', these units would eventually replace all the Hastati and Principe units, but the Triarii will still be available.

3. Building the 'Royal Barracks' effectively brings about the first step of the reforms of Giaus Marius. Only in Italy, the first of the named and numbered Legions will begin to appear in each city..except Rome....12 of them in all.
You may still have other units available i other areas of the map...even the very first of Rome's units. But as you build they will all gradually change.

4. Building the Imperial Palace in certain cities will no longer trigger the 'Marian Reforms'...instead, the event has been renamed 'The Imperial Reforms'.
All of the old units will disappear from recruitment, and the Imperial Legions will then become available to recruit. Depending on what barracks you have, the first 12 Legions may appear in other Legion recruitment areas around the map, as well as all the others.

5. The object of this change is to show a gradual change, over hundreds of years, in the Roman Military, and reflects better, I think, the way things happened. Over a century passed after Marius before the first named and numbered Legions were ever recorded, so it stands to reason that the Marian Reforms involved a long slow process of converting the huge Roman military into profession armies.

Now, where can you recruit these Legions? I've made it easy. Every region that can recruit a Legion at some point has an (L) after it's city name. If you right click the region that city is located in, you will see the name of the Legion or Legions that are available there.

In your RTW\data directory, in the _Important_Stuff folder, you will see a new folder called 'New_Legion_Recruitment'. There are two maps in there and a text file that explain where all the Legions can be recruited.

OTHER CHANGES AND INFO:

1. All unit stats have been re-balanced, and a number of mistakes and imbalances corrected, as well as missing\wrong weapons values.

2. Some missing unit cards have been fixed (I won't guarantee I got them all).

3. Minor tweaks to the economy to correct some things I didn't like. Carthage made stronger. Syracuse and Bosporan made weaker. I did a lot of testing to get the balance better between Seleucid and all it's neighbors in an attempt to prevent Seleucid from dominating....but not just doing a belly flop either.
In my tests, they hang on a long time, but don't go ape all over the map.

4. Roman unit cards now all match the textures on the battlefield.

5. Imposed some penalties in some areas to prevent or certainly hamper factions from doing things I don't want them to do. For example, any faction going north into the steppes will need a ton of money to garrison settlements. Happiness will be very low. This was to try and prevent Bosporan and Parthia from going north....and if they do..they won't go far.
Syracuse and Jerusalem will be trouble spots. Carthage will have more trouble holding Syracuse; everyone will have trouble holding Jersusalem.

6. RS1.5 will include the entire "UI" folder extracted, and a small 'mod.pak' file to change the Interface. So all packing and unpacking will be eliminated once a full installer is made. But for now, it will be easier for players to access the unit and building cards.

7. Also made a bunch of other small tweaks and corrections too numerous and minor to mention.

8. A number of new traits and fixes have also been included.


It's very hard to explain the AOR in RS because it's very complicated. I've tried to 'put it on paper', so to speak, but it would take more time than I ever have to finish it.

So here's an abbreviated explanation of the theory behind my construction of this monster.

I never liked the fact that in RTW you could just build everything everywhere. It was unrealistic, and plain silly to think you could recruit things all over the whole map. Also, it consistantly led to wholesale expansion by all factions in any direction they could go.....unless you limited them by making it take 1 or 2 turns to recruit units...also unrealistic. So how do you correct two unrealistic things when one is just as unrealistic as the other? An Area of Recruitment. Some AOR's are used to limit where particular units can be recruited on the map because they are specific units that would be dumb recruited elsewhere.....like an Athenian Hoplite recruited in Briton. That kind of AOR, used in RS, limits a unit to a particular city or area. You can also use the same thing to limit a building to that same city or area.

The second kind of AOR is what I call a 'Faction AOR'. This kind of AOR limits a faction to an area that it historically controlled or could've feasibly controlled at some point. Every faction in RS has this kind of AOR that limits their economy and their unit production to a 'homeland' area. Some are big, like Carthage, Seleucid, Egypt and Rome. Some are relatively small, like Pergamon, Pontus, Armenia, Gaul, Germans, Dacia. They basically involve the regions they start with and a 'circle' of regions that surround them, or regions that they did in fact once control (or did in the future).

The third kind of AOR is what I call a 'military' AOR. This basically gives every faction a 'fighting chance' to win. All Legion bases are both Legion AOR's and 'Military' AOR's. But there are many others.....mainly placed for reasons of common sense and strategics. Large famous cities are almost all military AOR's. And where there were no large famous cities, some were created just to have a place to build units where there would otherwise be none. So once you take these areas...even if you're little Armenia or Pergamon, you have a chance to still expand and win.

The fourth kind of AOR is the Legion AOR. This allows the Legions to be recruited...or in effect, be stationed in, various places where Legions were stationed. This AOR was not a matter of choice...with 35 legions, I HAD to create AOR's for them because there are too many of them. The maximum number of units allowed in one region is 30...so you see the problem. 35 Legions equals 70 units! But why limit where they can be recruited? Well, to reproduce the problem the Romans had in reality. They had 30 Legions active at the time of Augustus, and they were traveling all over the Empire fighting wars here, there, and everywhere. Plans were made for campaigns, and Legions marched off...only to be recalled and sent somewhere else because there was civil war or rebellion someplace else. Numerous Legions of Rome fought in wars from Britian to Parthia, and Egypt to Scythia. They were expensive to maintain and equip...and their numbers were limited. So part of the 'Roman experience' in my opinion, should be to experience the tactical problems of limited Legions and a vast Empire to hold together.

The fifth type of AOR in RS is what I call 'the Empire penalty' AOR. This uses some existing AOR's and some created for the purpose to penalize factions for extensive expansion. And the penalty is economic. The further you get from home...the less money you make. It represents the cost of sending armies to distant places, and the costs of controlling a vast area of people who are going to want something from you in return for their co-operation. So for example, if Armenia conquers a region in Gaul, they suffer an instant 35% penalty in the form of lost taxable income. 45% in Britain. The penalties expand according to the distance from where you start, and that's why it 'seems' like you have a ton of money in the beginning...until you start trying to conquer areas that are far away.