Faction Zeal and Other Interesting Ideas for Faction Size & Expansion

[A Terribly Harmful Name]

Hello,

Recently I have been deeply immersed into SS 6.1 for M2TW, which makes for a very interesting campaign and has a nice couple of submods that add precious realism to the game, one of them being Real Recruitment and the other being Byg's Grim Reality, which is the reason I post this.

BTW, Byg's mod can be found here in TWC: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=106060

BGR III, the latest stable release of the submod, is quite an interesting pick because it adds a whole deal of events and traits around the "Faction Zeal" of yours, which gradually decreases as an Empire grows in size. While the particular explanation by the modder for it is quite shady and not very clear ("vice", "corruption" & "sloth"), the effects are no less involving, challenging and realistic because they tend to make big empires as they should be - that is, difficult to govern. You can find a detailed explanation of the system on the mod thread, but basically the more you expand, the less loyal, able and pious your generals become. Rulers of potentially big empires must have a very strong authority to retain the cohesion and integrity of what would be far easier to do with a one province backwater, and recruitment is greatly limited by the standing of the particular general with the rest of the faction and his "War Council" membership, which basically means he is a trusted and important general with power over the most important military affairs in the kingdom. While your Faction Zeal is High, this might not be a big thing, but as the Empire grows so does the potential for rebellion and unruly vassals, as well as the king\emperor\high chief's own power hungry motives cause recruitment to be centralized and placed upon the hands of fewer, capable and trusted generals. The loyalty of your main body of generals and family members also tends to go down, and so does the propensity for revolt and civil war inversely.

The main inspiration for this came when I was playing the HRE, which is a big faction at the start of the SS 6.1 timeframe; I was having a particular tough deal with my vassals and thought: "why not in EB?". Basically, this modification would do great work not only to stop the player from having an easy time at steamrolling the whole world once a certain power base is conquered, but also to simulate the often delicate intrigue and balance of power in large kingdoms such as the Seleucid Empire and a potential Achaemenid wannabe, as well as the late Imperium Romanum. Players will be forced to rely on their trusted generals far more to conduct their campaigns, and keep an almost constant watch on their distant vassals to check for their loyalties and potential risks.

Overall, I think that an adapted approach to EB in the guidelines of this mod would be a great innovation and add much fun and historically accurate challenge to our campaigns.

Edit - By "vassal", I mean FM's\Generals entrusted to ruling a province.

[Megas Methuselah]

That sounds awesome, man. I'm sure the EB team will incorporate a similar mechanism in EB2. The fact that I keep hearing over and over of the difficulty involved in the maintenance of large empires in the future release only gets me excited.

I really like how this sounds, though. I'd prefer to hear what an EB member has to say about this, aside from the standard "We don't know at this time."

[sirmic]

Concept is great, but it caused big slowdowns in turns for me(i dont know the current state, probably improved...).
I tried it with scotland. Made big challenge for me, but i felt cheated as enemy had acces to much more elites(even profs) than me(better troops are aviable only in settlements with generals which are members of war council - great idea but maybe too strict as enemy have many stacks of elites and overhelms you...).

[antisocialmunky]

I do like SS's faction zeal stuff and limits on large empires. However, I think that you need to improve on it and tweak it a lot rather than just port it over. Alot of the recruitment restrictions in SS are rather annoying especially since the only thing that happens is you have your war council guys sit in castles and then ship the units they recruit to your awesome general that is operating on the front. I don't think that what the guys behind the recruitment mod and Big Grim intended especially with the trait descriptions.

Factions like Rome aren't well represented well by the curren't rulership methods anyways. I'm sure the EB team has some good ideas drawn from SS put into historically accurate terms. Heck, if you wanted accurate representation, you would have to get a Roman player to raise a whole legion at one time.... which is possible actually.

[Subotan]

I saw a good representation of managability of big Empires with Rhye's and Fall's mod for Civ 4. It's basically Civ 4, with some cool new featurtes/techs in, BUT, with the addition of stability, which is explained in the link I provided. Makes for a very interesting game, and if anyone likes EB, and plays Civ 4, check out Rhye's and Fall.

[antisocialmunky]

I dunno, Rhye's and Fall is a different beast. It tries to make the world progress historically rather than change history.(especially Nationalism)

[lobf]

I dunno, Rhye's and Fall is a different beast. It tries to make the world progress historically rather than change history.(especially Nationalism)

I was reading through it, interested, until I saw that the earliest civilizations it has are Egypt, India, and China. No Sumerian/Babylonians or other "Iraqi" cultures. This really bothers me.

[Puupertti Ruma]

Those tree civilizations get to play for maybe 10-15 turns until the next batch of civilizations spawn. Those include the babylonians.

[Subotan]

I was reading through it, interested, until I saw that the earliest civilizations it has are Egypt, India, and China. No Sumerian/Babylonians or other "Iraqi" cultures. This really bothers me.

It does contain the Babylonians at the start of the game.