intense recruitment modding? Possible?

hi guys!

im totally new to this forum so if this thread is wrong here i d be glad if someone put it where it belongs. thanks.

well im not just new to this forum but also to game modding itself. so what i d like to know is whether it is possible to change something so that u can recruit more than one unit (like in medieval 2)?

also is it possible to manually alter the recruitment time of every unit?

imo it just is unrealistic to levy a unit of equites or triarii or other elite infantry and cavalry within 1 turn i.e. 4 months.
unfortunately my latin is pretty bad so i had no chance to read Vegetius in the original but as far as i know from interpretations of his work even the basic training yet alone took pretty long. so lets say the whole recruiting and training process of elite units surely took at least longer than 4 months...
same might be true about other factions. it might just take 1 turn to levy a unit of ordinary barbarian spearman but certainly longer to recruit well equipped barbarian heavy infantry although maybe not as long as roman triarii (2 turns vs 3 turns...) on the other hand a nomadic faction horse archer might also just take 1 turn coz they are like doing nothing else than horse riding and archery since they were kids.

thus i d like to change the recruiting time of all units so it will be more realistic/ what i think would be realistic as i dont know how long it took to catch, train and equip an war elephant.
at the same time i would like to recruit more than just one unit. its okay that it takes longer to recruit some units but at the same time there should be the chance to recruit more than one because army facilities at this time surly were capable of training more than 80 men at the same time.


is this possible at all?

if yes does it work or will it totally crash the game?

is the ai capable of handling all this or will it fundamentally worsen the game play?



thanks a lot!! Chris

Yes, it's possible, no it won't cause crashes. It might even improve gameplay, as there wouldn't be as many fullstacks of elites used by the AI. It's easy to mod recruitment times. Go to My Computer/Local Disc/Program Files/The Creative Assembly(Activision for some people)/Rome Total War/EB/data/export desc unit. At the top of the file, there is a little description of how to mod unit strengths, costs, recruitment times, etc. You can mod using nothing more than notepad for some files, Including this one.

Hope this helps!

Edit-Welcome to the fora!

thanks a lot!! found the related file looks pretty doable so far.

but what about recruiting more than one unit at the same time (like in medieval 2)? is this also possible?

thanks Chris

Yes, that is also possible. To recruit more than one unit per city per turn, simply change the recruitment time of a unit to 0. That way you can recruit up to 9 units per turn in any individial city. This would make a lot of sense with units like levy hoplites/spearmen/akontistai. The AI might not work well with this though as it would likely depopulate all of it's cities. Also, you may find yourself facing endless stacks of enemy levy units. Still, it seems like reasonable idea.

mh so i guess it is not possible to recruit at the same time in one city e.g. 1 unit that takes 3 turns, 1 unit that takes just 1 turn and 1 unit that takes 4 turns... = 3 units with different recruiting times all together in one city? thats not possible then i guess?

You could recruit multiple units with different recruitment times in the same city. You just have to prioritize which unit you have first. For instance, do you want to have 2 units with one turn recruitment or one unit with two turn recruitment. However, if you are planning to recruit units with 0 turn recruitment and other units in the same city, always put the 0 turn recruitment units at the front of the recruitment que. That way you will get all of your 0 turn recruitment units in one turn as well as getting a turn towards the next unit in the que.

sorry for bugging u on that but i dont really get it.

right now when there is more than 1 unit in the recruitment line (i havent changed anything so far), each unit takes 1 turn to be recruited.

e.g.: recruitment line = 2 hastati, 2 principes, 1 triarii > 1st turn = 1x hastati, 2nd turn = 1x hastati, 3rd turn = 1x principes …and so on

so always takes 1 turn for 1 united to be recruited.

what i d like to have is to recruit them all in 1 turn.
i guess that in particular is only possible when lowering the recruitment time to zero?

No problem at all. I'm happy to help out.

Yes, the only way you could recruit a bunch of troops in one turn is to make them have zero turn recruitment. However, you could have a number of zero turn recruitment units in the que as well as a one turn recruitment unit and have them all be recruited in one turn. 0 turn+0 turn+0 turn+1 turn=1 turn.

looks like i got sacked one time too often... :dizzy2: but i finally got it. hooray :idea2:

i wont go for the 0 recruitment considering the cons u mentioned. instead i will raise the recruitment time for some units like heavy cavalry. although this means that one city wont do anything else for 4 turns recruiting wise. but i rather have it this way than recruiting elite units within 3 months...

alright thats all. thanks again! Chris

No problem at all. I'm happy to help out.

The AI actually has infinite pop in its cities...so you'd get infinite stacks of CRAPPY SPEARMEN OF DEATH!!!

We'll experiment with it in AtB.

Main problem with 0 turn recruitment is that elites are not 9 times stronger than your 0-turn units. It is more effective to just spam and swamp the enemy. The game is much more balanced with 1 turn recruitment.

Also, not sure how this would work out, but I know the AI gets a population boost to counter what it loses when it recruits a unit. This is set for large or huge size I think. Playing on anything less than that may see a population explosion in AI cities and may make them unable for the AI to hold them due to public order penalties.

Although increasing the turns on the elites is a valid idea. If you don't want to affect the AI you could mod each faction individually and just swap the files around depending on who you want to play as. I do this for a few of my self mods that give bonuses to computer factions while keeping it normal for me. Only takes a few seconds of copy and paste and renaming at the begining of each play session.