Army/Build Mod Suggestion

While this suggestion may be useless after the CA patch come out, I still decided to post it for discussion.

Problem: player complants about either having to take 50 settlements to win or not being able to spend money fast enough in the end game.

Mod Suggestion: Various mods have been posted that use "zero-build-time" for units. For some units this is more realistic than the standard game (for example Peasants or Macedonian Levy Pikemen where a zero-build is an effective military draft of untrained cannon-fodder). It also seems unrealistic to require up to 20 turns to build a full army stack in a huge city. I would suggest a compromise where all level 5 units would have zero-build-time. I have played a complete game to victory where I made all of my elite units zero-build in a huge city while not buildable in smaller cities. Thus an elite full-stack army could be made in two turns per core huge city, limited ony by your available money. I left the "regular unit build-times" alone and used the smaller cities to generate garrison troops. This seems reasonably realistic to me. The test game seemed to work OK and the AI armies looked reasonable during play.

Mod Drawback: Doing this for all factions (having two versions of each or even most units, one for normal-build and one for zero-build) could run into the absolute unit type limit real fast.

Discussion or comments are welcome.

An original idea!. Make high level units zero-time recruitment, but keep low level ones at 1-year recruitment! This is the reverse of the CA approach where some later units take 2 years.

However, I think this makes late expansion too easy (once you have lots of money). Therefore I suggest a limitation: limit all high level units to your "homeland" or a static "zone of recruitability". This geographical limitation balances the zero-time build.

I suggest this be done at level 4 barracks.

Anticipated effects on player:

Once you hit high level barracks, you can field good quality armies quickly near your homeland. You will then have to transport this army to the more distant theatres, since you cannot make them at the front. (Without the zero-time build, it is too tedious to transport high quality troops a long distance, and you will prefer to use locally raised low-level troops instead).

Anticipated effect on AI:
AI will be more inclined to produce high level units, as opposed to low ones locally. It will also defend its homeland effectively by raising these armies quickly. However, long distance expansion will be hampered . It may also bankrupt the AI (but they seem to go bankrupt anyways).

Effect on faction balance:
Factions that start with high level barracks or achieve them quickly will easily overpower their neighbors. HOwever, at level 4 barracks, this may not happen for a while.


Of course, we won't know till we test. Which I can't currently do.

I may have just have thought of another solution after thinking about the "scripting thread" and what is in the "Sons_of_Mars" files. The people who are messing with scripting would have to say if this is possible. Suppose each faction had it's own new unit (call it dummy_army for now) which was conditional on having all level-5 troop buildings (or level-3 for barbarians). The build-time for dummy_army would be adjustable per faction. When the dummy_army unit was first moved out of the construction city, an end_turn movement_points trigger could call a faction-specific script file that removed the dummy_army unit and replaced it with a predefined faction-specific full stack army. If possible, this would seem to solve both realism issues and the make-work problem of having to grind out and assemble armies from your core cities in the end game.

Can any of the "scripting guys" tell me if this is a feasible solution?????