Ways to kill off useless family members.

Ahoy hoy there my friends! Your friendly resident Potato here again with a thread on useless family members. The ones who are so hopeless in everything that your blood pressure rises every time you have to deal with them...

Let's face it, we all have a few of those.

Those family members who just rub you up the wrong way by their inability to do anything properly, pathetic military commander, hopelessly corrupt and inept at governing and are just plain horrible to look at. Hell, they can't even be used as an extra unit of heavy cavalry because they only have 14 bodyguards on huge...

So... what do we do with these sub-par leeches hanging from the teats of your glorious empire?

Kill them in an entertaining manner of course!

What I would like to know is how you do it.

The person with the most ingenious, impressive and downright cruel idea to off those sons of cabbages will win from me a nice and shiny green balloon to signify the majestic glory of your wretched black heart.

Send them to fight a half stack pirate fleet with a pentekonteroi... a single one.

Send them to build a fort into enemy lands... alone.

While besieging a walled city, send a ram to batter down the gates, then place your general exactly under the enemy-held gates to turn him into a Man-Horse Schnitzel.

You can either

1) put that general you want to kill on a small ship and let him attack some pirate fleets. Works best against those huge fleets in Northern Europe.

or

2) use console commands and move that general to a far away Eleutheroi province and attack rebel stack. This is how I do it. Armies in Britain and in the steppes are ideal for this job.

I was thinking more tactically. I usually bring the sod along with me as bait for enemy generals. When the enemy engages and is then locked into battle against him I focus fire all my ranged units and siege weapons on the two of them.

A difficult one here which only works for Sweboz and Koinon Hellenon FMs but.... Have them garrisoned in a city, allow the city to be besieged and assaulted by an enemy using sapping points, have the FM stand on a wall which is about to get sapped and watch the results of Iron Age flight experiments.

Alternatively with mounted FMs have them play a game of chicken on a bridge with elephants coming from the opposite direction.

Send him hug an enemy stone wall tower?

If you're rich you can kill the guy with catapults :)) ( same tactics as with arrows).

Or my fave : Get him transported to India and let the curr die trampled by elephants .

You have to make sure there is a second unit on the field with him, or your useless waste of a scion will escape as he routs.

very effective is attacking a well garrisoned town and charging your FM through the gates and past everyone else. That way he can't run away without running through the crush, which is likely to kill him.
That's most effective, but not very entertaining. I like the siege weapon idea. maybe you could have him go look at the city wall as you direct rocks at it?

I don't know if it would work, but could you funnel an FM's unit left hand side first into the water during a bridge battle?

The foot bodyguards might take a walk on the damaged part of the wall in a city; i mean, if the guy is an idiot/trusting fool, he might really believe there is a kind of invisible "bridge" over to the nex wall... On the other hand, the foot BG are still quite large in size, so it´d be a waste - a heroic death is always prefeable so you can make up some fairy tail stuff out of it ;)

Fate is not without irony, as once was said, and therefore a hypohonder and/or lame general might gain incredible traits after surviving those, and that would not be the point, won´t it?!
Though not really tacticaly sofisticated, you might watch for an expert enemy assasin, placing your hero where he can "threaten" an AI settlement - with luck you´ll get rid of him.
A bribery might offer you unexpected opportunities: while that treacherous peace of scum might not be killed immidietly you could become a change to do it yourself - something that is denied to you while he is still a family member of your faction!
(Scythed ) chariots are rumored to do wonders dealing with your dayly problems with inept generals; even if the coward flees, he won´t get too far away - the speed is, as often in live, decisive.
Leaving a fate of a FM to the gods is not only wise, but also a fool proof decision - permanently retreating from the chasing ( superior ) enemy, you could finaly manage to bring him in a situation where no retreat is possible any more, far away from your or allied territory. The gods will take good care of him, that is for sure ( read: autoresolving a battle middle in nowhere )
In case your subborn FM has managed to flee from the battlefield on any occasion, you might also find a truly glorious task for him: charging a single petifull soldier who is heroicaly fighting a unit of yours might cause your the spear of your the chosen men to stuck in his body, and thus not be able to escape anymore, while his retineu might gallop away ( read: sometimes, mostly during the sieges, a bug occures when couple of soldiers are stuck on the place fighting against already dead enemy, and if you are lucky, enemy soldiers might finaly bring your men down! )
Running your inept idiot of a FM long enough on the battlefield without any plan might tire him sufficiently not to be able to escape even a slow moving heavy infantry.
Charging ahead against a super veteran ( just to be sure! ) pahalangitai enemy unit might be the quickest way to get rid of those men, too.
Challenging a charge of famous eastern cataphracts, while insulting everything sacred on earth in pharsi, or any other apropriate language, might also bring you highly desired results.
An enemy unit of slingers ( positioned on a high ground somewhere in the mountains ), some poor Eleutheroi buggers, whom your hero FM would never see as a threat, but an easy bait, might also slove your problems; the good thing about it ( especially if they gain some experience after the skirmish ), you will even get a chance to reward this simple minded people for their duties on your empire and pay them well ( bribing them also gives you faction leader to gain some usefull experience in politics - solving problems which bother you, while organizing a generous and glorious aftershow party for you fallen hero! ).
You also might try and position your men right behind the town palisade that is about to be brought down by a ram - rumors say that those who escape their fate might gain the favour of the gods, and thus be even more vulnurable for assasins hands ( i do remember reading somehwere on the forums those bricks of wooden wall are capable of killing soldiers ^^ ).
Have you ever seen a man driven in the corner? Well, then you will definetly like my last suggestion on the subject! Let him starve! But... since the gods are mercifull, sometimes, they´ll might releave him from his pain and send a messanger to end his sufferings ( read: let your FM strand somewhere, starving, with 0 movement points, and wait for the enemy to end his worthless life ).

Good luck! ;)

Just do it via script!

1. Find genericScript.txt in Rome - Total War\EB\Data\scripts\show_me and open it
2. Put a semicolon before the line console_command toggle_perfect_spy
3. Add the line console_command kill_character "[character name]" below it (without the brackets, but with the quotation marks. Look here for internal character names)
4. Save the changes
5. Load your campaign
6. Press F1, and click the question mark button in the upper corner of the screen that appears
7. Click the 'show me how' button
8. And voila, your useless FM is no more!

Have him lead a pathetic stack deep into enemy lands, and fight anything that moves......if he survives, he's probably a hero and all of a sudden somewhat useful - if he dies then well "whadda you lost" :)

An easy and guaranteed way to kill them off is solo assault on a rebel settlement. When they start pouring out the gates, have them charge to a point inside the walls. Once inside, they won't get back out again, and make sure you keep them uselessly moving instead of fighting so they can be overwhelmed.

For comedy value I sometimes see if I can reach the rebel FM before the bodyguard are all cut down.

Charge him head first into a phalanx! *pincushioned*

i find it´s extremly honorable for the family to have many heroic deaths i always get my fm´s who married ma daughters in the 1st 5 years into their marriage heroic death

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Drewski

Have him lead a pathetic stack deep into enemy lands, and fight anything that moves......if he survives, he's probably a hero and all of a sudden somewhat useful - if he dies then well "whadda you lost" :)

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Yup, it is what I do. Leads to some very fun battles, on top of things, and I have actually managed (once...) to scrounge a good general from a waste of meat.

If you are a western faction, send him eastwards to the lands of the Saka, if you are an eastern faction, send him to the wild lands of the Sweboz, and let him die by the hands of the fearsome warriors there. So far from home, he cannot retreat back to you own lands after a defeat and will DIIEEEEEE!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SwissBarbar

If you are a western faction, send him eastwards to the lands of the Saka, if you are an eastern faction, send him to the wild lands of the Sweboz, and let him die by the hands of the fearsome warriors there. So far from home, he cannot retreat back to you own lands after a defeat and will DIIEEEEEE!

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Or just send him to India. Elephants do wonders vs them...stomp stomp

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Motep

Yup, it is what I do. Leads to some very fun battles, on top of things, and I have actually managed (once...) to scrounge a good general from a waste of meat.

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Yep....I firmly believe there is no such thing as a "bad general"---just one who hasnt tried hard enough yet....seriously I NEVER kill a FM on purpose with any faction, sometimes they have to live and die on the edge :)....its totally wonderful to take a "freaks in the sight of blood...lazy, corrupt etc" to a "local hero, with 3 stars, 2 man, and 4 inf" ;)

Hahaha... i like this thread....

as parthia i have my "butt of the 13th regiment" consisting of only useless FM's... they are quite effetive... :P

Move_character to 113,209 will send them to Gotland (off the coast of Sweden), then you have them attack the rebels there. The defeat will result in their death...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by The_Blacksmith

Hahaha... i like this thread....

as parthia i have my "butt of the 13th regiment" consisting of only useless FM's... they are quite effetive... :P

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seconded, I also have elite hoplite assault squad with KH, consisting of 8 useless FM's stacked together, somewhat surprisingly, they're being very effective for their job, despite anyone of them enter a city and it will turn into chaos. Thanks to auto-replenish and personal security traits, the're basically cheap-auto-replenishing elite squad of troops. Kretans and Wayward Spartans dominate the compositions :P

I try that with Sweboz as well, but not as great as KH ones (because Sweboz armor sucks and for somewhat reasons, their bodyguard sizes usually turns smaller than normal), so it's basically not elite assault squad, but elite suicide squad with Sweboz.

and I doubt you'll need that in Sabyn' everyone of your FM will at least having some good management skills... so they're best put as governors, despite they're mostly utter coward in the field of battles

I gather them together, load them onto a ship and take them somewhere far from my homeland then have them commit suicide by assaulting strong rebel towns one by one though not before recruiting some mercs and loading the troops back onto my fleet. Through this, I got myself some HAs as casse, some ethiopians as bactria and some germans as AS :)

Find out where they have some body of water on the battle map - then spend some time trying to drown his cavalry unit in it.

in rtw not sure if this works in eb but when moving a general from a boat to another boat in high sea it always ended with the general dead thats why i given up on my mediterranian roman express

I found the most effective and realist one.
Build a fort on enemy land especially on crossroads or close to bridges AI will besiege the fort and then starve your pathetic FM. Sometimes even AI prefers to assault ....

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Atraphoenix

I found the most effective and realist one.
Build a fort on enemy land especially on crossroads or close to bridges AI will besiege the fort and then starve your pathetic FM. Sometimes even AI prefers to assault ....

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In saying that, if you are besieged in a fort by an overwhelmingly large stack, just go out and auto resolve an attack. You should lose and your FM should die taking out as many of the enemy as they can... Glorious honourable death.

worthless or not, my braindead, drunkard, country bumpkin of an in law is still a human being! >:o

Quote:

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Originally Posted by -Praetor-

Send them to fight a half stack pirate fleet with a pentekonteroi... a single one.

Send them to build a fort into enemy lands... alone.

While besieging a walled city, send a ram to batter down the gates, then place your general exactly under the enemy-held gates to turn him into a Man-Horse Schnitzel.

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What if they keep coming back?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

https://i1096.photobucket.com/albums..._Mon_COTBP.jpg
In inferior sequels?

Rather just use them until they drop dead in battle.

I usually send them on "raids" into either barb or enemy territory. Deadbeat FM, couple depleted units and whatever mercs he can scrounge on the way. I once had one start in Tarsus, march to India (AS was my enemy), sacking cities along the way, then march back (sacking along the way). Made me HUUUGGGEEE amounts of cash from the sacked cities. He also killed the AS faction leader in what was supposed to be a suicide charge into his bodyguard. Then the moron died fighing applethrowers...

Try to conquer the alps singlehandedly.