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View Full Version : Campaigns, AI\'s & Historical limitations.



giskard
10-06-2002, 01:33
Hello all http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

Historical accuracy is a wonderful thing but how does the game translate it in terms of fun for the player ?

The devs made some compromises in the game and id like to explore some of these and add my own experiences to it in order to draw some conclusions that may help campaign makers. (Key reason this post was posted in this forum).

Western europe is mostly catholic by default. Catholic nations are on the whole pretty nice to other dispite the minor squabbles they sometimes have. The same is true for any faction with a similar region to another.

Now the devs could not exactly get away with making England a muslim country in the original game but we can. So what happens if we mix up the religions in western europe a bit ?

Mixing religions has several major effects on a campaign but heres a couple of the better ones.

1)Crusades don't always go to muslim countries if other religions are strong enough.

2) Capturing a region that is not of the same religion requires the player to keep a sizable force there for a few turns whilst he makes improvements and stabilizes the region. The less influence his own religion has the longer he must wait for a region to stabilize. So this gives the player a reason to use priests.

3) Regions that are owned by factions who dont share the same religios beliefs have a nasty habbit of revolting if left unattended.

4) Different religious beliefs leads to a measure of distrust amongst factions that frequently breaks out in war. So no more stagnant strategic maps.

We can now add the Rebelion value to this mix too.

What happens if you give a region a rebelion value of 2 ?

Well for starters then other regions are 200% loyal this region will only be 150% loyal. The loyalty value can change instantly if an building or improvement is destroyed and this can lead to a revolt. So only a large force can secure the area. The rebels are frequently loyal to the original region owner too so dead factions can return in force. This makes for an interesting side effect in game play.

Now we have quickly looked at Religions and Rebelions, lets look at Historical games.

If most of Europe was Catholic then any historical game must reflect that. In doing so we give up several features that would bring our campaigns to life and make them interesting.

Traditionally stable states must be give a rebelion value of 0 which again effectively turns of the advantages of Rebelions in our mods. It also reduces the chances of the original own reemerging later.

Religion and Rebelion settings are not the enemy of campaign writers. They are in fact useful tools for controling our mods and giving the player random surprises during the game. The higher the rebelion value the larger the army for instance. So any rebelion will be a major one.

All of this works extremely well when the mod maker carefully builds in these differences into his campaign.

By choosing key regions, giving the player some benefits for owning those regions, say a nice +2 war +2 loyalty title and a little bit of tax you effectively give wise players defensive point on the map. An area to capture at all costs, and to keep.

The religion and rebelion values can be added to this region to make the players stay in the region a lot more interesting and less boring.

One thing to remember is that Rebelions only start if the player doesnt have enough troops in the region and didnt stabilise it first. Troops cost cash and on average it works out to 100gold per unit. So if a region needs 400 peasants to control it then that would require 200gold. So you should always factor in this cost when working out the tax income for Rebelous regions. Remember you can delibrately make it expensive to occupy a region too if you wish. Most of the time you must carefuly what that the cost doesnt exceed the players income or the game become unwinable

There are advantages to manipulating the values mentioned above. Even Historical campaigns be made more accurate if the mod maker is willing to change a religious value to promote the sort of trouble that historically occured in that region.

A good example would be to make scotland a muslim culture and religion. England would have the sort of problems they traditionally had with scotland. This may not be historically accurate but the results seen in the game would be very accurate.

Giskard

[This message has been edited by giskard (edited 10-05-2002).]