Is it me or do the general's age...

[Seign Thelas]

One year every 4 years? What causes this?

[katank]

2 years/turn in terms of campaign time is to ensure that you get a good rate of progress so you get to see things like the Mongols and gunpowder in a reasonable time frame.

Characters aging 1 year every 2 turns is to allow for some time to get used to characters. If your generals die really quickly, you wouldn't have time to build them up etc.

Hence, in short, gameplay decision. Don't sweat the temporal paradox and just enjoy the game.

[Wizzie]

The FAQ (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showpost.php?p=1303097&postcount=1) stickied at the top of the forum says:

Q: What's up with the passage of time? Characters don't age properly!

A: It's a temporal paradox. One turn covers roughly two years. But characters age one year every two turns. I recommend not thinking too hard about it.

OK, you're not satisfied? Well, in defence of CA, characters will last as many turns as in RTW, which arguably is long enough to get used to them but not so long they last forever. Two year turns arguably allow technology to develop before the player has completed his victory conditions - in MTW, most players would never get the chance to play with Gothic knights.

You can mod how years relate to turns. But so far, characters will always age at one year per two turns.



Originally Posted by Lusted
Characters age 1 year every 2 turns, so if you mod it to 2 turns a year, they will age 1 year a year. But the campaign wil last for 900 turns.

To carry out the change Lusted mentions, edit the "timescale 2.0" line in the descr_strat.txt to be "timescale 0.5".

Still not satisfied? I recommend not thinking too hard about it.

In addition to that, if you do mod it to the two turns per year, you should be aware that the game may go "beyond it's limits" towards the middle/end of a campaign, as population and wealth will be rising in all regions for four times longer than the campaign would have been tested/intended for. It also means you will likely have Citadels and Huge Cities by the 13th century (less than half way through the game) and will reach the end of the build trees in most settlements sometime after this point. People who have set it like this also have complained that it takes forever to get game-essential events like Gunpowder, Mongol/Timurid Invasions, The Americas, and the Black Death as events are linked to year number, not turn number. Some mods exist to remedy this, like Wonderland's SloMod (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=73286).