Simple Senate Modifications

Here's three simple Senate Modifications that should add a more appealing (and realistic) flavor to your Gameplay:

1) Senate Election Frequency:

(EDIT: I incorrectly assumed that you could not adjust the quantity of simultaneous officeholders, which turned out to be false, so this section was all about simulating that difference by changing the frequency of elections. It's still an interesting option, so I've left it intact.)

Elections every 8 turns is not hardcoded - it's easy to spice up your game by changing the frequency for individual offices. In the example below, we'd like to see new Quaestors and Aediles elected every year, Praetors every 2 years, Consuls and Censors every four years, and Pontifex (a lifetime office, I think), every 10 years. Begin by opening the descr_senate.txt file and look for the following lines:

Begin_Offices

Quaestor
Rank 10
Quantity 1
Duration 8
Sittings 1
Restrictions
End_restrictions
Senate_benefits
End_senate_benefits
End

The first line we intend to modify is "Duration", which will change from 8 to 2 (this number refers to turns, not years - hence "two" is the number that will generate an annual turnover of Quaestors). Looking further down the list, you'll see that every office looks much the same, and all we need to do is change the duration numbers for each, as follows:

Aediles = 8 to 2
Praetors = 8 to 4
Censors = no change
Consuls = no change
Pontifex = 8 to 20 (This might be too long, since a death in office will leave this post empty for quite some time)


We'll make one additional modification that should increase the number of ex-officeholders. If you look further down in the file, you'll see that the "Consul" section has a unique command (no other office features this):

Consul
Rank 40
Quantity 1
Duration 8
Sittings 0
Restrictions
not_consecutively
praetor_tenure
End_restrictions
Senate_benefits
no_censor_suicide
End_senate_benefits
End

So our second modification will be to add "not_consecutively" to every other office. To do this, simply copy (or type) "not_consecutively", as shown above, between the "Restrictions" and "End_restrictions" lines for every other office.

That was pretty easy, eh? Now sit back and watch the elections unfold!


2) Increasing the number of Senate Officeholders:

Credit where it's due - this method was first suggested by Al Khalifah in this thread:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...322#post734322

Historically, the Roman political system had far more lower-level officeholders (aediles & quaestors) than higher ones - censors, consuls, & pontifex. Fortunately this is very easy to implement, simply by changing the "Quantity" row as shown below. I ran a test and was able to have 4 Quaestors, 4 Aediles, 2 Praetors, and 2 Consuls all holding office at the same time. One minor problem is that only the name of the 4th Quaestor is visible on the office scroll, but that's a pretty small glitch - everything else seems to flow normally. Assuming nothing else is changed, here's how to add additional officeholders (in this example we'll bump the number of Quaestors from 1 to 4)

Begin_Offices

Quaestor
Rank 10
Quantity 4
Duration 8
Sittings 1
Restrictions
End_restrictions
Senate_benefits
End_senate_benefits
End


3) Senate "Take City" Mission Realism: I performed a limited test of this using the Brutii (Vanilla RTW 1.2, no saves, through Winter 262BC), and it seems to work. One of the large complaints about Senate missions is the tendency to skip nearby targets in favor of those farther off. Asking the Julli to attack towns in Greece when there are Gallic villages right next door is insane! But changing a single variable seems to help dramatically (unfortunately this variable only appears in the the "Take City" function - there's no way to similarly limit the scope of blockade and other missions). Begin by opening the "descr_senate.txt" file and look for the following lines (they are at the very bottom of the file):

Take_City
max_region_traversal 3
Duration 10
-3 E p3
-3 M p2
etc, etc

Change the "max_region_traversal" variable from 3 to 1, and now all your "Take city" Senate Missions will target ONLY adjacent cities. In my test game, this change resulted in several noticeable differences from the standard RTW game:

1) Only adjacent cities were targeted (although the number was low - see details below).

2) A much larger-than-normal number of blockade missions were assigned.

3) There seemed to be a larger number of "dead periods" (i.e. turns when no mission was assigned). Fortunately these would only last one turn.

As noted, only three "Take City" missions were assigned. The first was the standard (probably hard-coded) Brutii mission to take Appolonia. Soon after, came a mission to attack Thermon (adjacent to Appolonia). After that came a long sequence of blockade missions. Even though I was at war with both Greece and Macedon, and they had cities very close by, none were ever the target of a Senate Mission. Eventually I got tired of waiting and moved up the coast of Illyria to take the rebel village at Salona, and immediately on the next turn was asked to conquer Segestica (an adjacent town under Macedonian control). Not sure if there's a connection, but it seems likely.

There may also be an AI drawback to this change. Although the Julli took their opening village, they have not yet moved across the sea to get Sardinia. Likewise, although the Scipii now control all of Siciliy, they haven't invaded North Africa. Again, it's early in the test game, but it would be nice to hear the experience of others on this subject.

Hm... I'm more interested in upping the number of officeholders, but haven't got around to change it. Why is it you won't go there? CTD?
But your ideas about changing the offices themselves are good, and I think I will adopt them.

Btw, the limited Roman expansion might have something to do with the siege-bug, rather than the Senate. What about setting the 3 to 2 instead of 1? That should broaden the options a bit while still keep it close.

Interesting. Thanks. Do you know much about the other factords in the senate text file?

i.e what p and r and E, M and D refer to? I think p and r could be penalties and rewards and E, M and D might relate to easy, medium and hard missions, but I'm not sure how they all work with the negative and positive numbers?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jambo

i.e what p and r and E, M and D refer to? I think p and r could be penalties and rewards and E, M and D might relate to easy, medium and hard missions, but I'm not sure how they all work with the negative and positive numbers?

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I believe you are right as to what the letters stand for.

However, having played around with this file all weekend, I'm convinced that the game does not actually use the penalty/reward scale from this file. I switched all the penalties to "Outlaw", failed mission after mission and was never outlawed. Something in the hard code must be determining the effects of completing/failing a mission.