Cavalry population

I think what this game needs is a cavalry population. You need people for infantry, so why not make cavalry require men and horses.

This would make a great improvement to the game IMO

First no 15 units of macedonian cavalry. Italy could have low population of cavalry to represent Romes weakness in there numbers while the eastern territories have a high cvalry population with a high production rate.

Alls thats needed is a base reproduction rate for cavalry and should vary upon region along with stables increasing cavlary reproduction rate just like farms increase population.

And elephant population too, 2 full stacks of elephants just isn`t right.

And while we´re on the subject, something like an "elite population" for the elite troops would also be a good idea, because a full stack of urbans doesn´t make sense either.

More like you have too upgrade a regular legionary cohort into and urban one. But only after the get 1 silver chevron in experience. Having a population count for horses and elephants might be able to work but it would just grow at the insane rates that the people do.

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Originally Posted by the tokai

And while we´re on the subject, something like an "elite population" for the elite troops would also be a good idea, because a full stack of urbans doesn´t make sense either.

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I reckon there should be a limit on the proportion of soldiers who can be from an 'elite' unit, say 1/10th.

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Originally Posted by lars573

More like you have too upgrade a regular legionary cohort into and urban one. But only after the get 1 silver chevron in experience. Having a population count for horses and elephants might be able to work but it would just grow at the insane rates that the people do.

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I mentioned something like this in a post about a month ago. It's not very realistic to be able to recruit elite troops from the general population in 6/12 months, with no combat experience. New units could be created at the lowest level of troop type (melee, archer, cav, etc.). These units could then be upgraded (level-up style) to a better unit in their type when they reach enough experience. Similiar to the Roman hastati->principe->triarii progression. This would force players to use basic troops to get the more advanced ones, and should create a better troop distribution. This could also reduce the building requirements for troops, only equipment changes would need to be met. Instead of a tech tree, it's more like a troop advancement tree. Factions could start with troops throughout the experience spectrum, so when the game begins it's a little more interesting.

Problems I see with this approach:

Keeping track of merged troops.
Unit vs. individual experience (not sure how this is done in R:TW)
The AI would need to get better, otherwise they would have difficulty keeping units alive long enough to advance.
Temple bonuses would need to be taken into account.
Economics (upgrade and maintenance) would need to be worked out.

This is where I was going with the idea of having to recruit armies/divisions at a time rather than units. Various upgrades and all that would allow you to have special/more advanced types in the recruited army, but you would have more representative armies, rather than 20 unit stacks Praetorian Elephants and Screeching Onagers... It would also allow armies to start out with something other than 18 units of hastati, a velite, and a general.

Essentially, RTW should have been MTW+CivIII. However, to my dissappointment it wasnt. I would have loved your suggestion had it been in the game.

While there are some great ideas here, don't forget it has to be something that can be added with the minimal amount of disruption to the current programming and thus the amount of work required to have any chance of making it into a patch.

For cavalry, perhaps a horse resource could be used to make cavalry cheaper/quicker to build in some regions than in others, or farming output could be used to determine where cavalry is quicker/cheaper to build, or a combination of both. This would produce the desired outcome of limiting cavalry recruitment for certain areas without needing any major code changes.

As for elite troops, there presumably already exists a mechanism to upgrade one troop type to another, ie. the currently broken general's bodyguard upgrade from early to late. This could perhaps be modified so that instead of just a hardcoded upgrade of generals only it uses a new unit stat field that gives the upgrade for each unit. The trigger for when this upgrade was allowed for a particular non-general unit could be a certain experience level as per drone's suggested model.

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While there are some great ideas here, don't forget it has to be something that can be added with the minimal amount of disruption to the current programming and thus the amount of work required to have any chance of making it into a patch.

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Way too late for this upcoming patch and according to what I hear they only get 1 shot. Although this could be in a future patch it is more likley to be implemented in an expansion pack, for 1 it'd be a new feature and not a corrected bug, although those 15 unit macedonian cavalry armies are a bit out of place. CA does occasionaly stop here to get some ideas. People are saying cavalry is way overpowered and this would be a great way to deal with it.

A basic idea for this is like this
base cavalry can not fall below 100.
Now Parthian territory could have a high reproduction rate while the Italian peninsula has a low reproduction rate along with eastern territories starting off with more cavalry in there pool.
Now each level of stable class building boosts reproduction by half a percent. you could also have tavern class buildings increase production for barbarian classes since they can't go beyond a minor city.

Horses are also a resource that must frequently be replaced. In war time armies can go through horses quite rapidly. This is another reason the upkeep cost should be high. You need to buy a new mount for every man every few years...and that ain't cheap.

I'm not sure that for most factions standard units should be upgraded to elite units with experience (except for the early Romans). Which unit you were part of would be more dependant on what stratum of society you came from - eg: your training as a youth and your families wealth. Armoured hoplites were armoured hoplites because they were made up of the top levels of greek society. A veteran militia hoplite unit should still be a veteran militia hoplite unit - its better, but they still ain't the rich guys on the hill. Likewise auxillia should remain auxillia - they're not roman citizens, and won't become so until they retire.

However, i do think that there should be limits on the numbers of elite units that you can recruit - either linked to population (say 10% of the pop' are upper classes), or to the number of cities you control (max 3 elite units per city).

Maybe they should treat cavalry as requiring "horse" resource, sort of like Civilization 3.

I think the whole upgrading idea doesn't really fit well with RTW, an early roman army should have hastati, principes and triari. As things are now you will rarely use triari, and you'll use principes instead of hastati once you get them. Not to mention all the different cohorts or hoplites that are just a better version of a previous unit.
The experience before upgrading is a good idea, in theory, but I think it would require to much micromanagement and wouldn't be as 'fun' for most people.

I don't really see a problem with elite units, maybe because I don't use them much (granted, I'm only on my second campaign). At least early legion cohorts are retrainable in every city you take, and I don't want to wait two years on legion cav when standard roman cav is just as effective if charged at the back of a cohort.

Personnally, I'm about to mod a bit the game, and to apply a very simple change to "elite units" : I'll make them require a lot of turn to be built (something like 2-3 turn for a "well trained an professionnal" unit like principes, 4-5 for an elite troop like sacred band/triarii/bronze shield/etc., and 6 and more turn for ultra-elite troops like berserkers/spartan hoplites/etc.).
It'll reflect the years of training and practice that these units are supposed to have lived, and will restrain their levy to long period of military inaction (which means that you cannot draft them in a hurry, and will have often to rely on cheaper and more basic units).

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Originally Posted by doc_bean

I think the whole upgrading idea doesn't really fit well with RTW, an early roman army should have hastati, principes and triari. As things are now you will rarely use triari, and you'll use principes instead of hastati once you get them. Not to mention all the different cohorts or hoplites that are just a better version of a previous unit.
The experience before upgrading is a good idea, in theory, but I think it would require to much micromanagement and wouldn't be as 'fun' for most people.

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I agree. Upgrading really doesn't fit RTW. In playing through the factions, I find that I have always reached a "won" state in the game well before I can build a faction's "signature" troops. What fun is that? You play a faction to see some interesting troops, but by the time you get access to them you have such a steamroller, that they are irrelevant.

The experience upgrading idea has issues like you suggest. CA said they looked at this aspect a bit but it didn't work out--and it would be really tough for the AI to manage. That's why I think the idea of building whole armies with various "slots" makes more sense. Various structures would contribute to allowing access to elite or more varied or larger armies. But base level armies would be there from the start with characteristic units. When you retrain, you retrain an army (and upgrade it.) Structures would give them better gear/training. It would be a radical change to the current strategic game mechanics, but really only needs effect the unit training queue heavily. The structures could still perform much as they do now, merely redefining what they provide as benefits. There are some details to be worked out about the "pool" of cities from which an army is built. If you did an army build from 4 cities it might take a turn for a small army, 2 turns for medium, etc. Or you might build from a single city over 4 or 8 turns. Garrisons and the like could be handled differently from field armies...

With the 3D strategic map, I think the current unit build system of TW is due for a major overhaul. In MTW and to a lesser degree in STW I saw some of the same issues, but in RTW the superiority and inexpensiveness of cav makes the problem more acute. Also, the lack of era's contributes.