Civil war and faction reappearance (+crash)

[bretwalda]

Hi there!

Do I guess it right that civil war erupts if your faction leader is dead and there is no male heir (no male person at the 'crown' tag)? Any ideas what could I have done in the preceeding 20 or so turns?

A backed up the loyals because they seemed to be a little stronger. However at the same time the French reappeared (with huge troops from thin air of course) AND taking some my troops to change allegiance. Is this common to happen at the same time? I guess my forces first become rebels and then joined allegiance with the French?

And if this was not bad enough, when I tried to consolidate my remnants of the empire, losing like 5-6 provinces - the game starts crashing...

I think what might have been a problem, that there was a unit in rebuilding that become rebel and then killed - but still showing in the queue with 0 men. Once that caused the crash to my desktop that I clicked on that, the other time it was the end turn button...

Any ideas or pointers to bug lists, so how to avoid crashes? Should I forget rebuilding?

I am kind of disappointed because so far I have fought all the battles (except for the small battles caused by this civil war) and it seems that there is no way to finish this game...

[doc_bean]

Have you tried using your emissaries to get foreign princesses to marry your king/heirs ?

Can't help you out with the bugs, sorry.

[bretwalda]

Have you tried using your emissaries to get foreign princesses to marry your king/heirs ?

Can't help you out with the bugs, sorry.
Thanks for answering. The thing that my previous king had mainly had princesses and the latest only had female offsprings and he got too late to the throne anyway... probably I have to pay attention more to the royal family to avoid such things.

Anyway, I will try the crashing savegame on another machine and I can post somewhere if anybody wants to take a look.

[EatYerGreens]

If you've recently installed Win XP Service Pack 2, then there should be a sticky thread in Apothecary about problems arising from that, which you should look at.

I had MTW running fine and was a couple of weeks into my first ever campaign. I picked up SP2 recently and things were fine for a few days but then I had a crash to desktop right after pressing Escape to get to the save game menu, after a pair of battles (one was 2500 vs 2400, took about 40 mins to complete). I restored from the last autosave, repeated the battles, won again and got a CTD at a different point, during what should have been a string of 9 naval battles which were previously won. Restored again (3rd day in a row), won the battles again and got another CTD during the naval battles bit. Gave up for the time being and started a whole new campaign, with no CTDs so far, so it's probably unrelated to SP2.

The upshot of this is that restoring from autosave is a bad idea and Ctrl-S quicksaves should ONLY be made BEFORE you start making moves on the strategic map and not right before pressing end-year, otherwise there's the same problem with save file corruption.

You might have more luck restoring from a proper, named, Faction:Year type gamesave but I've not attempted this myself yet so I can't make any guarantees.


With regard to the Royal line business, I've already seen a thing happen whereby some former Princes revert to being ordinary generals (in the case of the English, with names like "Sir Richard Plantagenet"). The unit icon loses its prince badge but right-clicking it to get the info parchment still shows the crown symbol, to indicate they are of Royal blood. These are uncles to a subsequent king and not in line to inherit the throne, until such a time as you get to your current situation.

Search through your Royal Knights units to see if you can find any like these. If you can't find any of them, it could be because you disbanded them, or the respective unit leaders got killed in battle.

There's no announcement by the game to say you've gone from 'Early' period into 'High' but I found out about it when I attempted to retrain a unit of Royal Knights which had lost men. I got a message to say that I could not train this unit type (I wish it had just added the words "...any longer", which would have helped). I even went and upgraded the Royal Palace building, tried again and got the same message. When I tried to train a fresh unit, however, it came out with a different icon appearance. The horse has a white/silver shroud over it whereas in the early period ones the horse is plain dark brown on the icon.

When they are no longer in line for the throne, the former princes turn into ordinary unit commanders and become 'eternal' for the rest of the game, so some of the early Royal Knights are still hanging around in my one. I can see why you might have disbanded some units of this old type, assuming them to be redundant. Especially so since you can't retrain them to get armour upgrades and so forth. You may have removed potential throne claimants in this way, hence the civil war.

By the way, if you can't pursuade other factions to accept marriage your princesses and decide to marry them off to a general instead, check the info parchment first and make sure they DON'T have the crown symbol (the type referred to above), or their offspring may end up with 'inbred' type V&V's.

HTH

[bretwalda]

Well, I am almost positive that I did not install sp2. I unchecked the auto-install and also explicitly forbid the communication of the updater on my firewall. I can just hope that it is enough.

My game crashed when I pressed 'end turn' or clicked on that odd unit (that happened to be in Hungary, by the way - if you don't understand the pun look to the left side ;) ) I could save fine with ctrl + S and also using escape and save through that.

On the royal blood thing, I am sure that I did not disband any royal blood, actually I did not disband any cavalry unit that was not mercenary. (actually those run down units with 1-2 men turned against me - and were ruthlessly killed in the battle ;)))

Probably I did not pay enough attention to my royal family. Crown princess should be carefully kept and selected. I started another game (I got VI in between and decided to install it) and so far seem to work out. Aaaand I try do everything right and pay attention to every unit and agent! ;)

[EatYerGreens]

Come to think about it, I'm pretty certain that whilst they are still in line for the throne, the prince units don't have the 'Disband' button on them anyway. I will need to check again to see if this is also true once they have become plain generals. Maybe one of the more experienced players here will comment about this.

The game manual itself does have something to say on the subject of civil wars. First you need to have reasonable numbers of unit leaders with low loyalty - enough for a rebellion to stand some chance of success and second they will seek out a member of the royal line to give allegiance to and become their new king. Presumably, the candidate prince needs to be similarly low in loyalty.

You WILL need to review the generals' loyalty scores from time to time. It only takes a few seconds to check every member of a stack. The odd one or two is not a problem, so long as the general of the stack has high loyalty. But, if that general is the ONLY one in the stack with low loyalty, then watch out.

Troops he commands will follow his orders, even if these are treacherous to the country. In the real world this was usually down to commanders being able to abuse their powers of summary execution for failed attempts at desertion or mutiny. In the game, the info parchment for the general adds a footnote (hover the cursor over the line of loyalty shields to see it), warning you not to put this person in charge of a large army.

Keep an eye on your king's influence rating. If it goes down, or they are a newly crowned king and it was low to start with, all your generals' loyalty ratings go down in response to it. Of course, checking every single unit every few years will become tiring and timewasting when your empire has grown substantially so the quick way is to check the king's rating every year and only begin to check on stack leaders if his influence drops below 4 or 5. Put any troublesome generals (loyalty rating 0, 1 or 2, say) into the stack which your king commands.

Actually, as your campaign succeeds, the influence of your kings increases and boosts loyalty, so you'll need to check less and less when things are progressing well.

You can boost an individual's loyalty by issuing them with province governorships - preferably the newly acquired ones. Personally, I wouldn't strip a title off another noble for the sole purposes of boosting one general's loyalty by a mere one or two points, especially so if the original title holder is the one with high acumen rating and the troublemaker has as few acumen feathers as he has loyalty shields.

In fact I'd think twice about issuing a freshly obtained governorship to a potentially disloyal general and issue it purely on the basis of best available acumen rating.

I don't know this for sure but the most obvious option, of disbanding his unit, even with high command stars rating, and building a replacement might result in his becoming available to an enemy faction as a mercenary unit, so my preference would be to send them on a suicidal attack mission, along with a bunch of similarly low loyalty units... who knows, maybe active duty of this type, as an alternative to sitting around garrisoning a valuable province but seeing no action may pay dividends by boosting their loyalty. You're demonstrating your trust in their leadership abilities, or some such.

I've yet to experiment with this and I'm wondering if a sequence of failed conquest attempts (say it takes several attempts to get him killed off) might only achieve a further reduction in the king's influence score. It has to do with the way his actions are percieved by the rest of the world. I've been advised that failed crusades can have this effect too, having mentioned that I'd used one specifically to rid myself of some troublesome units, sending them to a destination so far through enemy territory they had no hope of reaching it.


Glad to hear you're back on track with the patch and VI installed and starting over with a fresh campaign. After crashing problems of my own I restarted what was to have been my first ever MTW campaign but this time I'm doing it as the Byzantines. Best of luck with yours.

[Procrustes]

I think the quickest way to raise a general's loyalty is to marry him to one of your princesses. They will marry whomever you give them - it's a good way to use a princess who is 30 and about to retire.

Personally, I avoid suicide battles if I can - the only time they make sense to me is if I am facing an overwhelming enemy and I desperately need to bleed him or pin some of his troops in a province for a turn. Otherwise you are just hurting your king's influence. If I have a general I want to kill in battle, I put him in a stack with a better general (so that he isn't commanding) and then take him into a battle I plan to win. Sometime during that battle my cannon fodder general will charge into melee and die valorously, hopefully taking some enemy with him.