Negative traits

I've been playing BI and probably the most frusterating element of the game is how my generals stack up negative tax and trade traits everytime they manage a city. I understand if you move your generals in and out of the city this can be prevented to some degree but i micromanage my settlements enough to want to worry about this. In my current game I hardly have a general to sit in a city without costing it a bundle in trade or tax. I've heard there's a mod that makes it so you can sit in city and not have this happen does anyone know where to find it? Does anyone deal with this without the mod, or think this is a good element of the game? Was the thinking of the developers that it brings balance or realism to the game?

Have you tried Bugfixer? The BI needs the part1 & part2 patches, over a fully patched RTW 1.5/BI 1.6 vanilla installation.

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Originally Posted by Severus

I've been playing BI and probably the most frusterating element of the game is how my generals stack up negative tax and trade traits everytime they manage a city. I understand if you move your generals in and out of the city this can be prevented to some degree but i micromanage my settlements enough to want to worry about this. In my current game I hardly have a general to sit in a city without costing it a bundle in trade or tax. I've heard there's a mod that makes it so you can sit in city and not have this happen does anyone know where to find it? Does anyone deal with this without the mod, or think this is a good element of the game? Was the thinking of the developers that it brings balance or realism to the game?

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Keep taxes high to train your governors to collect taxes. Leave them low, and your governors will be terrible at collecting taxes - but the lower taxes will make your cities grow faster. Bad trader traits usually come when you ignore trade generating buildings. If you build roads, ports, and traders, you should avoid bad trader traits. The real hard one to avoid is the poor farmer traits, because building farms is usually a bad idea, but failing to build farms causes your governors to be poor farmers.

Other than the broken game mechanic that makes building farms a long term downgrade to your settlements, I think it's generally OK and don't use a mod to fix it. That said, I totally understand why some people like to mod it out, it is a good bit of tedious micromanagement to avoid having your governors get bad traits. My general solution is just to almost never use my family members as governors, instead using them as generals or, failing that, extra heavy cavalry under some other family member. It's not a perfect solution, but it usually works.

Guess, you can either use Governors or not. If you do put in the effort, then gaining high-influence governors (through developing retinues as Julii for instance you would also favour the +2 Influence +1 Management Priest of Bacchus, to Priest of Ceres (+1 Influence, +1 Farm output)). Good governors permit Higher tax rates in difficult cities with large growth rates and large Cultural Differences & Distance to Capitol postponing uncontrollable population explosion. The key is relatively early action, being proactive, rather than waiting till the issue becomes obvious. That means selecting a good Governor to follow up the invasion forces, rather than tie up a popular fighting General managing a large distant city. You may even have to use Faction Heir or even Leader, though that has drawback that a rebellion may follow siftly on their death.

If over-population is a problem, then "poor farmer" becomes a +ve growth slowing trait, for Governors of fertile cities due to reducing surplus farm output & pop. growth.

I tend to have the small slow growing places, without Governor, except when major city is to be enslaved, to allow low taxes, to speed development by earlier farm upgrades. But use a governor and higher tax in the fast pop. growth cities, but possibly move out the Governor on "large city capture" turns, once the 6,000 pop level has been reached.

Later in the game, many of my towns have had an issue with stalling growth, so farm upgrades (and forum's etc) have been necessary to maintain progression. The difficult towns, tend to be large captured places like Carthage, and Corduba though issue is mitigated by ruthlessly demolishing alien temples, early and rebuilding with a culturally compatible line. I don't think it's true that "farm upgrades" are always a long term problem, you just shouldn't build them automatically in fertile areas.

When you have killed off the necessary factions for "Victory" conditions, and are now settlement collecting, I wonder whether it's not simpler, to just roll forward with an invasion capturing 2 smaller settlements, than focus on re-capturing a city in rebellion.

But, around 35 settlements where city management starts to become a burden, I tend to get bored of the game due to perceived lack of challenges. Constant rebel armies (3 or 4 per turn) are boring, and the vastly larger empire than any opposing factions, make it rather trivial to crush further targets militarily by brute force. So I haven't spent vast amount of game time, struggling against rebellious cities. The frequency of rebels in countryside is reduced in some mods (like the Vanilla Play Balance Mod) to reduce part of issue.

I presume the "annoyances" were built in game, to add new challenges later on, trying to maintain interest, and also force the completion of the victory conditions eg) Juliii taking Rome, before distant lands become unmangeable.

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Originally Posted by RLucid

But, around 35 settlements where city management starts to become a burden, I tend to get bored of the game due to perceived lack of challenges. Constant rebel armies (3 or 4 per turn) are boring, and the vastly larger empire than any opposing factions, make it rather trivial to crush further targets militarily by brute force. So I haven't spent vast amount of game time, struggling against rebellious cities. The frequency of rebels in countryside is reduced in some mods (like the Vanilla Play Balance Mod) to reduce part of issue.

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Around 30 or so settlements, I've found, the emphasis does shift from battles to empire management. That is, you have the resources to overwhelm any enemy with sheer brute force, and can thus typically afford to autoresolve many battles - but keeping your empire from flying apart takes some careful city management. Like you, I tend to find this stage of the game quite tedious, which is why I pretty much stick to short campaigns. I lose the chance to really explore my high tech units, but I avoid the endless string of pointless rebel fights and the constant stream of settlements in need of upgrades, new garrisons, or population control every turn. It does make some factions, where almost all the fun is in the high tech units, unappealing.

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Originally Posted by Praetor Rick

My general solution is just to almost never use my family members as governors, instead using them as generals or, failing that, extra heavy cavalry under some other family member. It's not a perfect solution, but it usually works.

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I also apply the same strategy. Yes, it would be useful to have a good governor, but my experience shows that fam. members more often tend to acquire negative traits (when left in a city for a long time) than positive ones. Even taking a governor out of a city doesn't always help - except if I send him to fight some rebels. However, the latter affects mainly his general's abilities, not his influence or management.
I have even had fam. members who appear from the very beginning with negative traits. Some, on the other hand develop some nasty traits ruining public order. So what I do is take those rubbish fam. members, group them and send them to fight the all - time appearing rebels. Perfect for the job.:afro:

If you're up to it I might recommend you to take an hour or two and change the probabilities for annoying negative traits in your gamefiles. Just like you say, those vices are quite annoying and furthermore it is silly that your cities get better along without a governor than with a governor. I modded mine for a while so that the average governor dies with perhaps 3-5 management along with some minor trade or tax bonus. Totally worth it and does not bring any balancing issues either, as far as I can tell. Mods are of course a rather more sophisticated answer but you might get something else than what you were looking for.

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Originally Posted by Lt Nevermind

If you're up to it I might recommend you to take an hour or two and change the probabilities for annoying negative traits in your gamefiles. Just like you say, those vices are quite annoying and furthermore it is silly that your cities get better along without a governor than with a governor. I modded mine for a while so that the average governor dies with perhaps 3-5 management along with some minor trade or tax bonus. Totally worth it and does not bring any balancing issues either, as far as I can tell. Mods are of course a rather more sophisticated answer but you might get something else than what you were looking for.

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When I do decide to use a governor, it's always in a big city. Family members seem to resent being stuck in a hick town as governor and retaliate with some bad vices. A big city may corrupt the governor, but is also likely to have buildings that generate good traits and retinues to cancel that out. A big city will also make better use of your governor's stats - it doesn't take any effort to hold a village and keep it peaceful, but lots of influence from the governor can really calm down a big city, and the income you get from management (admin income on the settlement details) is based on the existing revenue sources in the city, so a city with tons of rich trade routes will make a good bit of money from a high management governor.

Just be careful when your governor is calming down a city - if he's old, you don't want to see riots when he dies. If the city is big enough to rebel, it's probably big enough to be a huge shot in the arm to its prior owners, if it goes to them - and considering that you're occupying one of their big cities, they're probably not too friendly to you.

Hello Severus,

this link directs to the bugfixer already mentionated. You have to download both parts, as you are using Barbarian Invasion. IF you use Rome, download part 1.

Good luck

Caius

I am installing a fresh version of Rome Total War and DL EB 1.1. Will the bug installer mess up my ability to play EB? I am new to mods.

I think the fixer works with vanilla (unmodded) Rome and BI. It will make changes to EB.