A quick question from a modding newbie...

[frogbeastegg]

In the export_descr_buildings file the entry for level 1 farms has ‘farms+1’ as a tag. Now, if I want to lump all the population growth bonuses onto the first level of farm I just change that farms+1 to farms+4, correct? Following on from that, how exactly do I remove the farm population growth bonus from all the other levels of farms? I guess it is not quite so easy as simply deleting that line of text; formatting must be kept, I assume? What exactly do I want to format it to? Just remove that one line of text entirely, or do I need to do something with the '}' tags too?

So, um basically this is what the section looks like:

farms requires factions { barbarian, ct_carthage, eastern, parthia, egyptian, greek, roman, } 
        {
            capability
            {
                farming_level 1
            }
            construction  2 
            cost  600 
            settlement_min town
            upgrades
            {
                farms+1
            }

What do I want to change it to to remove the bonus?

I just want to see if this helps the AI out any; I play on the largest unit size and I tend to find plenty of very empty cities thanks to the AI recruiting loads of warbands and other large, junky units. Boosting growth might be one part of a solution to this. It's the first of several changes I'm going to try in an effort to make the game more fun; the frog mod.

Thanks.

EDIT: Oh yes, I want to keep the money boosts intact and unaltered on all farm levels if I can. The more I look at the file the more I begin to suspect population growth and monetry bonus are one and the same thing. Not good ...

[JeromeGrasdyke]

Now, if I want to lump all the population growth bonuses onto the first level of farm I just change that farms+1 to farms+4, correct? Following on from that, how exactly do I remove the farm population growth bonus from all the other levels of farms?

Ah, not quite. The "upgrades" section just shows what upgrades are available after you've built this building - if you were to do what you proposed above, you'd find that having built farms, you could suddenly build farms+4, which I believe is the Latifundia. The farming_level bonus listed corresponds to a game-side effect which wraps up the following: 1) graphical effect to show more farms, 2) one population growth pip per farming level, 3) monetary bonus per farming level.

Because of that, it'd be impossible to seperate out the various farming effects, but if you wanted to make them all available when you build the first lot of farms, you could change the "capability" entry to 'farming_level 3' ... capabilities are not automatically inherited along an upgrade chain, so if you wanted to still have that bonus when you upgrade farms to farms+1, you'd have to change the capability entry for farms+1 to also have 'farming_level 3'. Buildings in an upgrade chain do automatically supplant eachother when built, so you wouldn't end up with 'farming_level 6' when you build farms+1.

Having done all that, if you wanted to add further capabilties to the farms+1, to make them worth having after normal farms, you could add extra lines to the capability section -- if you look at the buildings further up the tech tree, they often specify multiple capabilities.

Note that it would be a bad thing to construct a tech tree such that non-mutually exclusive buildings contribute to farming_level or road_level; neither of these should be allowed to go above 3, which is their maximum... I'm not entirely certain how the code would react if they did. Same with weapon upgrades, or xp upgrades above 9. The other capabilities don't suffer from any limits, as far as I can recall.

Hope that helps

[khelvan]

Ahh, frogbeastegg, you have stumbled into the wonderful world of hard-coded fun!

The farms+1 bonus raises the Base Farm Level by 1. The BFL (for short) has hard-coded bonuses to both income and population growth. I believe someone posted a very nice experiment through which the BFL bonuses were deduced, perhaps over in Ludus Magna. However, the long and short of it is:

You can't separate income bonus from population growth, since they're hard coded to BFL.

Edit: Ahh, I see you want to increase population growth while keeping income the same? This is actually easy (we have been trying to reduce pop growth while keeping income the same).

You simply need to add the bonus to population growth to your upgrades en lieu of the farms bonus. If you give me a bit, I'll find it in the code for you.

[khelvan]

Affecting BFLs (i.e. farms+1) is the only way to affect the income bonus from farms. However, you can add a separate bonus to population growth:

population_growth_bonus bonus 1

This add, I believe, +0.5% to population growth.

There is another parameter for trade bonus:

trade_base_income_bonus bonus 1

Again, I believe this is a +0.5% bonus.

There is, however, no separate function for increasing farm income, that I know of.

Edit: I see Jerome has beaten me to the draw. If anything I say conflicts with him, you know who to believe ;)

[frogbeastegg]

Thanks. Ok, time to look in a slightly different angle then. I want to achieve two main goals:
1. To get the AI to use large quantities of good units. Since 1.2 the AI has been much more aggressive and uses bigger armies (excellent), however they are almost entirely militia and warband level units.
2. I absolutely insist on using the largest possible unit size because I am a silly, stubborn frog. At the start of the game with a bit of work I can get my cities growing well even while continuously building units. The AI often can't; it drains its cities so much they very rarely advance a level. This only exacerbates the low tech unit issue.

1.2 has really brought a lot of new/fixed stuff to the game and improved it; I want to capitalise on this. The AI sadly it insists on using entry level units, even many turns into the game.

So, playing with farms looks as if it will become a deal too weird. Current random thoughts:
-If I reprice each and every unit for every culture so militia, peasant and other low level units are more expensive than their higher level counterparts the AI might use the better units. If I increase the price of early units I probably risk harming the AI instead of helping it. If I lower the costs of all later units to ridiculous levels that should help. It will give the AI more money both in the bank and coming in per turn and that should also help it out a little. I'll be swimming in cash; nothing new there. Going to be slow, time consuming and very trail and error as to what prices work for what effect with what unit and what cultures.

-If I add entirely new pop growth bonuses instead of moving those that already exist in the game I risk creating hellish situations with unhappiness. That hurts both the AI and myself, and potentially creates a disaster scenario. Better to move something already there, but I don't want to make later buildings pointless.

-I have seen people talking about removing lower level units when certain higher level buildings are made, for example preventing peasants from being built when a level 3 or better town centre is present. Not how I want to handle this.

-Knocking down building times may also help; the AI will get more done in the same amount of time, and that gives it more potential. Assuming, that is, it has the resources and will to take advantage of this. I remember dropping build times really beefed up MTW's AI and gave it claws.

NB: I have no idea how to edit any of this, very little idea of how it will work, and absolutely no modding knowledge beyond tinkering with MTW's projectile_stats.txt and whatever the building production file was called.

[Red Harvest]

Adjusting the unit cost for "huge" makes sense...I think. Unless I'm sorely mistaken, units cost is the same in "large" as they do in the unit stats file which is set up medium size units. I suppose "huge" would do the same.

I'm busily invading Gaul again in yet a new campaign, and it has stacks of simple warbands. I can see why though, that is all it can build in the cities I've hit so far. I faced a couple of swordsmen units in the first big army, but the next several have all been base level with perhaps a unit of cav.

Another way to approach it with huge might be using 2 turn builds. That would reduce the depletion of population at the start of a campaign. At least it will give the buildings a chance to get upgraded before the population is depleted.

I've modded so that there won't be any more war dogs or head hurlers being built.

[frogbeastegg]

With cost I was thinking more Spartans cost 30 denarii both to build and in upkeep while peasants cost 800 in both areas. If the AI factors cost/stats into its purchasing decisions, and it must do surely, then the Spartans will be its choice. I'm just making the numbers up now; I don't know many of the unit costs by heart and I'd need to decide what was worth what before doing anything. I'm also not sure how high I can raise the prices of various units before I risk breaking things - most factions have to use at least some crappy units right at the start of the game because nothing better is available.

Upping all build times to 2 turns may harm more than help, I suspect. It would slow down troop building and perhaps result in smaller armies being sent my way.

My current thought it adding some pop growth to a building which also has the correct happiness bonus built in to counter the squalor and unhappiness effects the extra growth would have. Not sure how the numbers for this will work out either, but say having +1% pop growth and +5 to law on the first level barracks ... but I think that may be a bit excessive on the law front.

Perhaps adding to the tech levels present in each city might help? Placing more advanced buildings and sticking higher level farms in place in nearly every city might give the AI a bit more of a helping hand. That would in effect get the cities growing fast sooner, and past a certain bonus/population it is hard to drain your city even when constantly recruiting. Everyone has access to level 3 farms so far as I know; having one in every single city from the start might provide enough of a boost. No idea how to edit what buildings are where in the campaign.

[afrit]

[QUOTE=frogbeastegg]
My current thought it adding some pop growth to a building which also has the correct happiness bonus built in to counter the squalor and unhappiness effects the extra growth would have. Not sure how the numbers for this will work out either, but say having +1% pop growth and +5 to law on the first level barracks ... but I think that may be a bit excessive on the law front.
QUOTE]

That's what I would do too. I tried the following with the 1.1 and it helped the AI expand faster (although it made it easier for me, as well):

1. Add law bonuses to core_buildings (+2 for first level , +4 for second, +6 for third etc..) This makes the AI have less rebellions (less of an issue in 1.2 anyway) and get more money (less corruption)

2. Add population bonuses to the low level core buildings only . This helped raise population for smaller towns, but slowed down once large size was reached since the bonus disappeared. (someone even suggested giving negative bonuses to the imperial_palace. Problem is this might trigger an irreversible population decline).

3. Made all AI factions Genghis

With those settings, I saw Egypt take over all of Asia before distance from capital and other issues slowed them down. The early-mid game (250-240 BC ) then became a fight between medium powers with large stacks. Unfortunately, the bonuses benefited me too and removed some of the challenge.

So, what i am really still trying to figure out is how to give those bonuses to a few factions and not others (ie exclude my faction) so that the "blessed" AI factions become more of a formidable opponent in the mid-game. Alas, no luck so far.

[Red Harvest]

I've been thinking about this more today and I think the real source of the problem is that initial city & population sizes shoulld be scaled up for "huge." The same is true for "large" though to a lesser degree. The problem is population, not cost of the units. This would require a rather large edit to the descr_strat file. My current plan is to create a "provincial campaign" for testing this. It doesn't make sense for city size not to be scaled for larger units.

I plan to leave costs the same, but improve the basic military buildings in selected provinces in most if not all factions, and move the infantry builds down one notch lower. This should allow me to see some more representative armies during the *fun* part of the game--the early part.

As another typical example as Spain on VH/VH I've got the game in the bag again. I've plowed through the stacks of basic warbands of Gaul and now Briton. I can't be too critical of the AI in this regard...I had to carefully manage resources and rely on mercs until I could finally build some Iberian infantry--and they aren't exactly stellar troops. I just looked through the descr_strat file and most of the provinces I have conquered have less population than they began with. The breakeven seems to have been somewhere around 2000 initial population (on large). Only the larger AI cities are growing. I am just now ready to build Scutarii myself...which will figure prominently into my invasion of Italy.

Another thought for you. You can help the situation by upping the farming level of all provinces. This will increase the marginal growth rate considerably. It adds a growth bonus from the start. I thought there was a place that also set the base ag level (without upgrades) but I can't remember what file it is in.

EDIT: Found it. It is descr_regions.txt. Farm level is the final entry for each region. Low farm regions like Gallaecia (3) are very slow growing. In my campaign it was actually negative growth with very high taxes at 2000+ inhabitants until I upgraded both trade and farms while in campaign. By comparison, Africa (Carthage) has a 14 rating and grows like a weed no matter what you do.

[frogbeastegg]

After quite a bit of thought I have decided I love two ideas put forth here, so I shall start with trying them and then see if it is necessary to do any further editing.

I love the idea of slapping a law bonus on each level of the town centre. I can put the pop growth bonus here too, +2 for the first two levels, +1 for the third level and no bonus for the levels afterwards. I will add +5 law to the first 3 levels. I am not sure about the later levels; minus the extra growth the law boost should not be needed, but the AI might experience widespread revolting if the bonus is suddenly removed and it has not built up sufficient infrastructure to keep its people happy. So I think I may leave that bonus.

Moving each tech level of troops down a barracks is so simple and elegant; love it. I do wonder what to do with the last level of barracks; it will become useless.

I think I may boost the cost of the militia level units, say make levy hoplites the same cost as normal hoplites to build but not in upkeep. That makes them more of a human town guard type unit than an AI mass production item, or at least so I hope.

I'm also going to fiddle about with build times to get the higher tech items in place faster; I remember what a massive improving effect this had on MTW.

Any further editing, such as my original plans to make most good units cheaper, can wait.

[frogbeastegg]

Ok, here's what I have done:

-All peasant units have had their build cost tripled.
-All militia/levy/warband type troops have had their build cost doubled.
-All buildings with less than 6 turns build time have had one turn knocked off, except the temple lines and farm lines.
-All buildings with build times of 6 turns or more have had two turns knocked off except the temple and farm lines.
-All temple types now progress smoothly with an increase of one extra turn per level, removing a sudden step up of two turns to the build time.
-All farms are now 2 turns to build regardless of level.
-The town centre types now all sport a +5 law bonus, just like a law god shrine.
-The first two levels of town centres have a 2% population growth. The third level has a 1.5% growth bonus. The next level has a 1%, and the remaining level has no pop bonus.
-All unit types can now be built one barracks/stables/archery range level before the default.
-The final barracks/stables/archery range level gives a +1 bonus to all unit types coming from that building, with the exception of all elephant and wardog types.
-Romans no longer have wardogs.

I've tested all my changes and they are working, so I got my editing right (). I just need to play for a few hours and see how it goes. I think the 2% for the first town levels should be enough to bump the AI past the tricky smaller populations, and it will have the advantage of shifting the AI towards more advanced units sooner.

If this is not quite the effect I am looking for I might try adding extra buildings to the starting positions of each city, i.e. placing more advanced farms etc in at the start. I have absolutely no idea how to do this, or even where to look for the necessary files.

[curufinwe_91]

try this thread if you want the ai to build more advanced units.

http://p223.ezboard.com/fshoguntotal...cID=1029.topic

i've used a slightly different version,but the idea behind it is the same.

[Epistolary Richard]

-All unit types can now be built one barracks/stables/archery range level before the default.

If that doesn't work, you could always allow a first level barracks to build all the units available to that faction. If nothing else it should give you greater insight into the AI's recruitment cost-benefit analysis.

If it's still building peasants and militia when it could be building elites then you'll have to start twiddling with individual units' recruitment cost & upkeep.

[frogbeastegg]

Thanks for the extra ideas.

I'm playing Greece, VH/M with the changes I listed above and this is more like it! I've had to work right from turn 1, work like a mad thing just to hold on to what I have. I just encountered an absolutely massive, well balanced Carthaginian army, the Scipii keep tossing triarii and principes at me along with the usual hastati, and the Macedonians are showering me liberally in assorted cavalry. It’s now summer 264BC; I'm only just barely managing to hang on to everything, and my money is spent the instant I get it. My armies are battered and really in need of refitting as they consist mostly of exhausted, beat up hoplites and my assorted general’s cavalry units. I need more navies, and the ones I do have are barely still afloat. If I lose even 1 battle now I think my game is effectively over. I’m being blockaded and besieged in at least one place each turn.

I'm one happy frog

I do need to capture/scout out some cities and distant armies just to see how the AI is doing with regards to troop types overall and population growth. Hehe, I can't even afford to build the prerequisites for spy production.

[afrit]

Seems like you are having a good challenge !!

I am eager to learn how your middle game turns out. I am also working on a mod that makes the game more challenging, but without the major overhaul of RTR or SPQR mods.

I still worry that most mods make the early game harder, but once you conquer your immediate neighbor(s), you get back to the inevitable win syndrome. I want a mod that keeps me working for a 100 years!

[Razor1952]

Another solution maybe is to make peons only recruitable a la ZOR(zone of recruitment) or really reverse ZOR. Peons( and militia) are only recruitable OUTSIDE your core cities. That means the ai can't build them till it has conquested other factions/rebels.

[Slider6977]

I read most of these posts (skipped some however). But I would like to help. If you want to help the AI (particularly early in the game and with Pop. growth) then you can do what you said by upping pop. growth of buildings and farms, etc. But, from reading your posts you also don't want them to get out of control, so you would like the bonus to disappear.

You can do this as easily as adding a pop. growth bonus to farms and buildings. Say you wanted to up the pop. growth of level one farms to that of level three, or four or five. As already posted, you can add a line that gives the level 1 farm to that of higher levels.

If you want that bonus to eventually disappear or get lower you can add a line that says:
population_growth_bonus bonus -1. As you can see instead of increasing pop. growth by .5%, you can decrease it .5% simply by adding a negative number to the end of the line instead of a positive. So it basically works both ways. You can increase the bonus or decrease it. Now you can use your own judgement as to how much you want to reduce the pop. growth bonus for extra levels of farms past the first level.
Good luck.

[Simetrical]

Note that it would be a bad thing to construct a tech tree such that non-mutually exclusive buildings contribute to farming_level or road_level; neither of these should be allowed to go above 3, which is their maximum... I'm not entirely certain how the code would react if they did. Same with weapon upgrades, or xp upgrades above 9.

Weapon upgrades aren't a problem. Vanilla RTW, in fact, came packaged with the Pantheon of Artemis, which gives a +5 upgrade to missile weapons by itself! People have been puzzling over that, and I've heard conflicting reports of the extra +2's effect. You could get pretty close to a +9 XP bonus in standard 1.2 (+7 with a Pantheon of Epona and any +2 unit), but you couldn't reach it, and I haven't seen any mods that let you.

As for farming_level, RTR has a temple that increases it, I think. Maybe I'll check to see if it's working, and what happens if you go over five total.

-Simetrical

[Pode]

As it's primarily the barbarians that struggle the most with pop growth, I added a health bonus +4 for barbarian cultures only to the base governor's building, so they get an extra 2% growth and 20% happiness. The next level town I cut this in half, and for lvl 3 towns in half again. Seems to be working so far, but needs more testing.

I also worked out a less severe approach to bridling the AI's poor unit choices, without having to monkey about with costs and build times. I made recruiting low level units dependent on the presence of a blacksmith. For example, a level one town builds a barracks and trains militia. At level two, it upgrades the barracks and can train hastati. now in order to unlock militia for this lvl 3 barracks, it has to build a trader to unlock the balcksmith and then the blacksmith, then finally the upgraded milita. In the meantime, the only thing available to train tin town has been the hastati, so the army should be a nice mix. At level three barracks, hastati need the blacksmith to unlock them, and militia need the second level smith.

Peasants I tried to link to farms, such that you could only recruit them in a town with maxed out farming. I thought this would incentivise the AI to build pop growth, and punish the human who wants the cehap hug garrison with some extra squalor and teething pains along the way. Alas, I couldn't get it to start a campaign with those tags in place.

Frogg, if you want to check on the AI in your game, open RomeShell and type toggle_fow to show the map, then toggle_perfect_spy to make all factions omniscient (sp?) Hope this helps, I feel like I owe you any help I can give for all the electronic lives under my command that were saved by your guides.

[afrit]

COuple of questiosn for pode:
#1. How did you give the population benefit to barbarians only?
#2. I cannot get the toggle_perfect_spy to work for me. gives the unknown command reply. toggle_fow works fine, so does show_cursorstat. I have vanilla 1.2

[Pode]

1: add this line to the capability of whatever building you want to have it, where X is the number of bounus levels

population_health_bonus bonus X requires factions { barbarian, }

2: Sorry, I haven't tested it. I quoted it from someone else's research posted elsewhere on one of the big three forums, don't remember where. I think he opened the .exe with a hex editor and found a bunch of things romeshell might take as commands. Too bad it didn't work, I was looking forward tio using it myself.

[afrit]

Thanks pode. I didn't know you could put a conditional on a capability. Now I can make a super-duper opponent faction by giving them bonuses in the core buildings.

[Oaty]

Moving each tech level of troops down a barracks is so simple and elegant; love it. I do wonder what to do with the last level of barracks; it will become useless.

Easy solution plus 1 experience to all troops it can train.


What I did was give stonewalls a happiness bonus.

15 for stone, 25 for large and 30 plus 10 law for epic.

For me this is justified, whenever I take over a city with 20,000 plus inhabitants they get exterminated thus reduceing the population enough that all the happiness buildings make it unable to rebel and this is excluding the stonewall happiness. This in turn helps the A.I. and in reality those stonewalls were not garrisoned heavily.

And if were living back in those times would you be happier behind a rinkydink palisise or an epic stonewall.

[Angadil]

I also worked out a less severe approach to bridling the AI's poor unit choices, without having to monkey about with costs and build times. I made recruiting low level units dependent on the presence of a blacksmith. For example, a level one town builds a barracks and trains militia. At level two, it upgrades the barracks and can train hastati. now in order to unlock militia for this lvl 3 barracks, it has to build a trader to unlock the balcksmith and then the blacksmith, then finally the upgraded milita. In the meantime, the only thing available to train tin town has been the hastati, so the army should be a nice mix. At level three barracks, hastati need the blacksmith to unlock them, and militia need the second level smith.

Hmm... very interesting. How are you actually doing this? I tried to incorporate the presence/absence of certain buildings to the recruiting requirements of certain units (eg: recruit "unit X" requires factions { A, } and building_present_min_level B b) and I only got CTDs.

Of course I'm a very new, very ignorant modder...

Thanks in advance
A.

[Pode]

Umm, RTW likes me more than it likes you? :) That's exactly the way in which I did it, so I have no idea why it didn't work for you. Be very, very careful with punctuation, spelling, etc, the usual stuff.

[Angadil]

Umm, RTW likes me more than it likes you? :) That's exactly the way in which I did it, so I have no idea why it didn't work for you. Be very, very careful with punctuation, spelling, etc, the usual stuff.

Well, it is actually quite encouraging to know it can be done that way... at least by someone B-). Will keep working on it and will try to be extra careful, of course.

Thank you
A.

[Angadil]

Pode: Well, I'm honestly starting to think that you're right and RTW just dislikes me... I've tried every variation I could think of in spelling, punctuation, spaces... and it CTDs with admirable consistency as soon as I put a building in the recuiting requirements of a unit. Could I see an example of what you are using, Pode? Could anyone tell me what may be wrong with the following: recruit."barb.horse.archers.scythian"..0..requires.factions.{.scythia,.}..and.building_present_min_l evel.market.traderEndofline (dots indicate spaces)

Thanks
A.

[Pode]

Copied and pasted directly out of my file

recruit "east hoplite" 0 requires factions { pontus, } and building_present_min_level smith blacksmith

Now, I did try to link peasant recruitment to farms and got nothing but CTDs. Maybe it depends on .. . hold on, eureka moment . . . GOT IT!

The building you're making a prerequisite must be able to train a unit already. Farms and traders didn't work for us because they don't allow the training of any units in vanilla. Smiths work because they allow training of chariots.

Now, I wonder if I change the recrutiment of peasants from being a governor's building capability to a farm capability, I can make recruting stuff depednent on farm level?

[Duke John]

The building you're making a prerequisite must be able to train a unit already. Farms and traders didn't work for us because they don't allow the training of any units in vanilla. Smiths work because they allow training of chariots.

Excellent find! I'll just sticky this for the time being untill it gets put into a guide. It will save quite alot of frustration when modding.

[Angadil]

The building you're making a prerequisite must be able to train a unit already. Farms and traders didn't work for us because they don't allow the training of any units in vanilla. Smiths work because they allow training of chariots.

Beautiful. I can't tell you how helpful this should be for my efforts. The frustration Duke John mentioned was definitely reaching dangerous levels in my case. Deeply indebted

Thank you
A.