RTW Vices rant

[the Black Prince]

ok, so you get your coming of age event and your new general sets off in the world. if your looking for a good general, its not overly hard to get him to fight tyhe battles and win, and do it enough times and he'll become a great general. fairly simple. i currently have one army led by Manius Victor, and the other by Decius the Great...

but getting the good virtues for governor seems to be next to impossible! sure, i can understand leaving a man in a backwater town, he'll become corrupt...

but
my young general Appius Rupilius was born in Massilla and took up his first task on behalf of the great Julii faction governing Segesta, where he performed admirably.
however, as time passed, Caius Julius, governor of Ariminium was in ailing health (and a pretty useless governor) so i moved my aspiring administrator from Segesta to Ariminium, right next door to my capital, and previously one of the richest towns in the empire. hardly a backwater assignment.

on entering the city, the lad, now aged 23, took over from Caius, who remained there to end his days in peace. the lad was considered
Absternious (+2 Management, -10% popularity with the people)
Calm (+1 Influence, +1 Management)
Restrained (-1 Influence, +100% to cost to bribe)
Gate Keeper (+1 Command when defending walls)
Spartan (+2 Management +200% to cost to bribe)

when i checked back on him 3 turns later, he'd managed to pick up the following...
Poor Trader (10% Penalty to Trade Income)
Usesless Assesor (10% Penalty to Tax Income)
Flexible (-20% to cost to bribe, -1 from Law)

WHAT? how can all of that gone wrong in 3 turns?
is it actually possibly to train a decent governor? fully half of my family are better off outside a city... and the only good governor i have is my faction leader, not because he's got good management, but because his influence is high enough to increase public order enough to tax heavily...

looking through the traits list, i know traits like Trader and Assesor exist... i've just never seen them
what gives?

[Dutch_guy]

I would say that you had the tax very low in Ariminium, and had them a little higher in Segesta.

If you tax your people under the high - tax rate you will get those negative managing / assessor traits

:balloon2:

[Mayfield The Conqueror]

If you tax your people under the high - tax rate you will get those negative managing / assessor traits

What a pile of horse manure! Is this true? There is no relationship with the loyalty level of a town? I use the 100% loyalty as a threshold to raise, lower my taxes and if high turns my countrymen into raving revolting peasants I will lower my taxes accordingly. But if this is true I am level lowering my tax levels again.

That and CA really needs to fix it :)

[the Black Prince]

surely a person who is able to extract a very high tax without causing a revolt is actually a very good tax assesor, not the other way round????

[magnum]

You can get the Flexible trait whenever one of the following occurs:

1) Treasury goes over 50,000
2) Whenever you are investigated by the senate
3) Dad is corrupt when you came of age (don't think this applies to you)
4) Someone is adopted into your family (you bribed a general to your side)

You can get the Usesless Assesor trait whenever you have the Flexible trait above and taxes are set to anything lower than High.

You can get Poor Trader whenever you build any building that is not a trader/market building.

In short, everyone tends to get bad trader before to long. The odds are you'll get it eventually. You got Flexible somehow (either #1, #2, or #4 reasons) and having earned that you were now eligible for Useless Assesor. Now the odds for most of this is kinda small, about 5% per turn. You just got unlucky enough to get em all real quick in a row (but then the argument could be made that you were lucky that you hadn't earned one or more of them during your time as governor of Segesta, so I guess it evened out.)

[Dutch_guy]

What a pile of horse manure! Is this true? There is no relationship with the loyalty level of a town? I use the 100% loyalty as a threshold to raise, lower my taxes and if high turns my countrymen into raving revolting peasants I will lower my taxes accordingly. But if this is true I am level lowering my tax levels again.

That and CA really needs to fix it :)

yeah I know what you mean.
It means that we have to tax the shit out of the people , AND keep em loyal, otherwise we will get the neg. traits .... it sucks, that;s wy I almost never get those good traits.

:balloon2:

[the Black Prince]

found some of this in the export_desc_character_traits file


;------------------------------------------
Trigger corruption1
WhenToTest CharacterTurnEnd

Condition EndedInSettlement
and Treasury > 50000

Affects Corrupt 1 Chance 3
Affects Aesthetic 1 Chance 3
Affects ExpensiveTastes 1 Chance 3
Affects Epicurean 1 Chance 3
Affects BadAdministrator 1 Chance 3

;------------------------------------------
Trigger corruption2
WhenToTest CharacterTurnEnd

Condition EndedInSettlement
and Treasury > 100000

Affects Corrupt 1 Chance 3
Affects Aesthetic 1 Chance 3
Affects ExpensiveTastes 1 Chance 3
Affects Epicurean 1 Chance 3
Affects Embezzler 1 Chance 3

;------------------------------------------
Trigger corruption4
WhenToTest CharacterTurnEnd

Condition EndedInSettlement
and Treasury > 150000

Affects Corrupt 1 Chance 3
Affects Aesthetic 1 Chance 3
Affects ExpensiveTastes 1 Chance 3
Affects Epicurean 1 Chance 3
Affects Embezzler 1 Chance 3

;------------------------------------------
Trigger corruption3
WhenToTest CharacterTurnEnd

Condition EndedInSettlement
and Treasury > 50000
and CultureType roman

Affects ApicianRomanVice 1 Chance 3


these are all very small chances... like 3% but it still seems to happy very regularly. perhaps it needs to be balanced out with an "Honesty" trigger that gives a random chance your characters will become honest adept financial masters


there's also a load of triggers that fire whenever you complete a governors building. along the lines of if governors building complete and farm is less than 1 or equal 1 affects trait poor farmer 20%.
so if you build governors buildings and military buildins and keep upgrading along those lines, you'll get those traits... bad farmer, bad trader bad miner etc.
but, ariminium was a settlement i'd devoted to money... so that was never the case... odd....

[Azi Tohak]

I too dispise the way vices were handled. Far too many bad traits for management. I think RTR fixed many of them, but in RTW I got so many poor assessors (thanks, my troops have better things to do than babysit) I just stopped caring. When you have a bunch of provinces (and my favorite, sea trade) it does not matter so much anyway.

Probably my favorite thing to do was just keep my generals out of towns. Keep them in armies (got to love the HC they bring for most factions!) was my strategy most of the times.

Azi

[player1]

It's good to mention that bad taxmen (useless assesor), is kinda buggy

This is the trigger:

Trigger governing19
WhenToTest GovernorBuildingCompleted

Condition GovernorLoyaltyLevel > loyalty_disillusioned
and GovernorTaxLevel < tax_high

Affects BadTaxman 1 Chance 15

The problem is that it penalized cities with normal or low taxes and yellow happines. Usually, if you are at yellow, increasing taxes would just lead to red and revolts.
(exempt if happines is 95 or 100, and you are at normal taxes, then it can drop to blue when increased)


On the other hand, trigger for GoodTaxman is kinda neat:


Trigger governing18
WhenToTest GovernorBuildingCompleted

Condition GovernorLoyaltyLevel = loyalty_disillusioned
and GovernorTaxLevel > tax_high

Affects GoodTaxman 1 Chance 75

Blue, very high taxes and good chance.
So when having city with very high taxes, try removing parts of the garrison a little to frop happines to blue and take the prize.

[player1]

As for poor trader, it's easy to remove.

First it has low threshold:

Trait BadTrader
Characters family
NoGoingBackLevel 2
AntiTraits GoodTrader

Level Poor_Trader
Description Poor_Trader_desc
EffectsDescription Poor_Trader_effects_desc
Threshold 1

Effect Trading -10

Level Inferior_Trader
Description Inferior_Trader_desc
EffectsDescription Inferior_Trader_effects_desc
Threshold 3

Effect Trading -20

Level Appalling_Trader
Description Appalling_Trader_desc
EffectsDescription Appalling_Trader_effects_desc
Threshold 6

Effect Trading -30

But, if you drop to Inferior Trader, there is no back so act quick.

Here are the triggers for GoodTrader (that cancel out BadTrader).



Trigger governing11
WhenToTest GovernorBuildingCompleted

Condition SettlementBuildingFinished >= trader

Affects GoodTrader 1 Chance 50

;------------------------------------------
Trigger governing11b
WhenToTest GovernorBuildingCompleted

Condition SettlementBuildingFinished >= port

Affects GoodTrader 1 Chance 80

;------------------------------------------
Trigger governing11c
WhenToTest GovernorBuildingCompleted

Condition SettlementBuildingFinished >= roads

Affects GoodTrader 1 Chance 80

So statt builing some trade building and there is good chance to remove that bad trait. Of course, if city has all trade building, nobody said you can't move governor to some other city temporary.

[Mayfield The Conqueror]

On the other hand, trigger for GoodTaxman is kinda neat:


Trigger governing18
WhenToTest GovernorBuildingCompleted

Condition GovernorLoyaltyLevel = loyalty_disillusioned
and GovernorTaxLevel > tax_high

Affects GoodTaxman 1 Chance 75

Blue, very high taxes and good chance.
So when having city with very high taxes, try removing parts of the garrison a little to frop happines to blue and take the prize.

That makes a lot of sense, because if your people are happy and you can raise your taxes all the way to very high then you really aren't doing anything special to deserve the trait.

I do enjoy the fact that the badtaxman is 1-15 chance, and the goodtaxman is 1-75 :). Talk about stacking the odds against you.