Gameplay Idea regarding troop disbanding

[VARVS]

I just posted this but I am not sure if it worked, so mods please delete one of these if it is here twice.

Just finished a biography on Augustus, and one thing that stuck out was how the problem of disbanding troops was a huge one for the late Republic once the professional army was implemented. It was a source of the Strife between Marius and Sulla, and Pompeys need to get his troops settled was a major factor in the creation of the first triumverate. Augustus caused major strife in central and southern italy with his settling of veterans, but he had no other choice.

Wouldn't it be interesting if you could have a cost to disband units (If this is even allowable). You could limit this to post marian legions and equivalent professional units in other factions. If the cost to disband a unit was significant, then you would require a strong economy to have a military. As it goes now, by that stage your economy is so large that you can pay the one time costs of building armies, then disbanding them when specific threats dissappear, thus keeping a robust economy. If units cost a lot of money, and then cost more to disband, you would be required to raise troops more carefuly.

For factions with money problems, you can cause units to turn independent once there is none to pay upkeep (if possible). Another interesting twist would be to assign a huge destruction value for land improvements (if they can be destroyed, I know they couldnt in EB1). If assigning a huge happiness penalty to doing this would represent the land given to troops, potentially causing a revolt as it displaces local population.

Just an idea, not sure how much of this is even technically possible, given that I am not sure if you can assign a disband costs to units, or an alternative values to land improvements.

[Bel Matina]

Right now, to my understanding, the costs associated with settling retired professional soldiers are represented by the need to build and upgrade colonies in order to have a province produce units. You can read more about it in the teaser thread for the Roman faction. It might be possible to represent those dynamics with more fidelity, but I'm not entirely sure which costs you're referring to. Are you talking about the administrative costs associated with granting land for their retirement or is there something else?

[moonburn]

i think he means the land grants wich later on in roman times where mainly for veteran soldiers who survived the years inside a legion wich then should also grant the right to recruit evocattas

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

Well, if land grant is a building, maybe you could make it so you can't disband troops in a town that doesn't have that land grant building in it.

Or if the game engine can't cope with that, then how about have the Marian reforms script insert a building that massively increases unrest in Roman towns, and only building the land grant building will resolve it. So the Marian reforms come with a huge unrest problem and much of the empire going rebel, thereby simulating a devastating Roman civil war that coincides with the Marian reforms.