The effect of command stars - moddable?

Boy, these issues just keep cropping up, don´t they...

JeromeGrasdyke was kind enough to explain to us the effects of command stars on the general forum. The gist of it is that in addition to the morale, responsiveness and other such boni the stars give straight bonuses to the units´attack values.

Now, I think many of us here agree that it is not fun to play on Hard or Very Hard (battles) because all it means is that the AI gets huge combat bonuses for its units, throwing unit balance to the winds.

These stars, unfortunately, do the very same thing - a 7 star general means +7 attack, basically.

This is why the Julii cut through seemingly similar Gaul units like they weren´t there - the player generally has good quality generals to start with, and then goes from victory to victory, increasing the stars as he goes for his chosen commanders. And this means that the battles in the future will be more and more skewed.

The AI simply can´t do the same.

Now, as for me, I´d like the units on the battlefield as balanced as possible - I don´t want to give the AI unfair bonuses due to difficulty, but nor do I want to use unfair general bonuses.

The question is, can anything be done about it?

Are these things hard-coded, and if yes, is there a workaround? I wonder if the battle mechanics are relative or not....Is attack 120 vs. defence 70 the same as attack 12 vs def 7....or is 132 vs 127 the same thing?

I posted on TW center as well in response to this, but I figure I'll post this here as well.

This still seems less overpowered than stars were in MTW. For every second star there you got 1 defence and 1 offence. Since most units stats have way less offence in this game than defence (eg: it is common to see units with offence less than half the defence, like lots of roman units, quite a bit of cav and nearly all spear units) I don't see the problem.

Also stats there in general were much lower. The +1 to attack and defence there was on units that had at most 8 or 9 as a stat and most had far less like between 3 and 5. Here it is units often have 15 or more defence, with some higher ones being in the 20s. Attacks while lower than defence its still common to find units with over 10 attack, like some heavy cav and heavy infantry, also a bunch of the better archer units.

The only thing I can think of that makes it a problem for RTW is its less often that an enemy general will get lots of stars. In MTW this is almost always through heirs, and what they start at is often decent. Here people start with 0 in everything most often.

Scorpion, could you please post the link to the thread you're talking about in the previous post? I can't find it on here or on the .com, so a link to it would be much appreciated. Thanks :)

Sure, here it is

Just wanted to give a heads-up that I have made a mod that removes command stars....it gives morale bonuses now.

It´s a damn shame about losing the other effects of command stars though. But it makes battles vs. the AI much more even.

In the export_descr_character_traits.txt file, it has a list of traits for various character types. These include 'family', 'spy', 'assassin' and 'diplomat'.

Is it possible to include 'captain' as a character type here? If captains could be awarded certain applicable traits such as Good Commander, then wouldn't this go some way to helping the AI in field battles??

How did you do that?

Tombom, I edited the traits file (as well as the retinue file) and basically made all things that modified command modify morale instead. Specific command bonuses (like attack, ambush etc) were removed.

But will that fix any experience gained from battles? The effects of command stars are hardcoded?


CBR