The trait system is really beginning to grate on my nerves!

I've about had my fill of these useless fools that fancy themselves my generals and governors. Their all wildly extragant and incomptent in management and command utterly.

I don't understand how they can all end up like this. What the hell am I building all the Academies for? I thought they were supposed to train better people. It doesn't seem to help at all.

I'm currently playing as the ERE on normal/normal and I don't have a single useful general or governor save my faction leader. One of them is so terrible, I had to remove him from the town because he was causing more damage then good. He's camping in a little fort in the middle of Sassind land. Hopefully they'll put him out of my misery before he dies of old age. Ugh. What's the deal with this? How do I generate decent characters?

For example, I managed to crush 3,000 Huns that were laying siege to one of my towns with just a general and about 700 men. He didn't gain anything from the battle at all. That doesn't make sense. Command experience should be gained not only by the number of battles, but by the quantity of enemies faced. That should have at least gained him a star or two! :furious3:

Someone help me out here and tell me the secret to nurturing good generals and governors, please before I go insane.

Yes, I was playing a game recently and ended up shunting out my generals from towns, they had become so atrocious.

From what I've gathered, setting taxes high can be best for traits and also not having more than 50,000 in gold. I suspect keeping them in the field rather than governing also reduces the risk of bad traits. But I tend to have one or two that are field generals and just hope for the best with the rest.

I wish someone would just make a mod to strip out all the bad traits. It'd be so much more pleasant to play. Sadly, I have about 100,000 denarii or so I think. I just haven't had much to spend it on.

Govenors should move out of their city each turn and back in again. Provided they have spent some movement points they wont trigger some of the bad trait checks the computer does each turn.

Exception is in the turn the city is going to complete a building. Now you want the governor to remain stilll and have a very high tax rate. This will gnerate various positive trait checks. I will allow my city to riot (removing most troops to avoid damage) in order to achieve the high tax element of a building completion turn.

Spend that money. Who is fighting an enemy of yours ? Do they need any money ? Gift it to them, buy maps from them. Or use the money to bribe enemies that your field armies cannot deal with easily.

(these are RTW V1.5 tips...think they apply to other versions)

Good luck

Ships/Troops are a good way to use money or you can use diplomats and give money away.

be careful guys,... you might have enemy spies in your cities that make also has a big effect on your cities hapiness!

The bad manager traits come from having excessive treasury. That will be checked every turn for a governor, with one check each at 50K, 100K, and 150K in the treasury. That number includes the income you just got, so if the end turn processing puts you over the top, your governors check. I don't recall whether or not that particular one happens only if they have full movement points or not. If you have 150K or more, it'll check 3 times a turn for every governor, so your management goes in the crapper pretty quickly.

The bad taxman traits come from having a tax rate other than Very High and still having 105 or greater public order. I don't know how often that checks, it might only be when a building is completed, but I haven't dug into the files to see.

Hmm, looks like I'll be trying that very high taxes thing. Also if you wanted to mod the bad manager traits it would be better to make the checks happen at say every 100,000 to 300k or 250k to 750k or at 1 million to 3 million.

I know Malrubius made a trait mod for 1.2, sadly that's not going to help you. There might be some other trait mods for 1.6, a good place to search would be the Forge.

The original poster said he's playing ERE, which means he's playing BI. The threshold for negative traits coming is was dropped in BI, I think to 12,000d. Since he said he has a 100,000d treasury, it's no wonder his family is full of fools, drunkards and dotards. You can't have that kind of treasury in BI and expect to have any usable family members. I just finished an ERE game, and all of my family was good Romans, each and every one of them. I almost never finished a turn with more than 1000d in the bank. It's too late for this game, but try the ERE again following that rule and see if your family doesn't prove to be better behaved and less like the scions of a wealthy family.

11k AFAIK, Gardibolt. Denarii is your problem mate, just get rid of it. (Even though I don't really care about it, I don'tput generals in my cities so what the heck.. My treasury won't affect me..)

Wow, that really was a drop. I don't have BI, and my rule is to always spend down to the point where I don't go over 50K even with greater income than anticipated.

So there is absolutely no mods whatsoever to solve this problem? I find it incredible stupid to be punished for having excess denarii to spend. ERE is a big empire, and I tend to be a defensive player. Build everything up to the best that can be built, defend in the meantime, then come out kicking and steamroll everyone else.

Is there no way to just disable the whole system within the game? How would I go about removing all the anti-traits? Or at least the ones that make no damn sense.

As it stands now, I'm getting hammered by the Sarmatians, who bribed one of my best cities and conquered Constantiople from me with their wonderful horde. WRE is sinking every ship I have. The Sassinds are keeping me quite busy trying to finish them off. Most of my cities have no governors at all and my generals are all getting killed off by a super assassin somewhere near Constantinople as I'm trying to bring up forces from Anitoch to pin them down. It's a fine mess.

If I don't find a way to get rid of these traits, I'm shelving it and waiting for MTW 2. I've had about my fill of this non-sense.

Well most traits are kind of on a line. With 0 being the starting point and the good and bad version being the positive and negative ends on the line. So the bad management are the opposite end of the good management. It's just that good management isn't the anit-trait to bad, so you can have characters with good manager traits and bad at the same time.

And like I said if you add a zero or two to when the checks happens you can have a really fat treasury. So the question is where is it in the traits file that designates where the checks for bad manager start?

Go to your descr_strat file - remove all the lines beginning 'traits'

Then delete everything in your export_descr_character_traits file.

You'll get a couple of non-CTD error messages, but you'll be able to start a campaign without any traits.

So how do I change when the checks for embezzeler start?

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Originally Posted by Epistolary Richard

Go to your descr_strat file - remove all the lines beginning 'traits'

Then delete everything in your export_descr_character_traits file.

You'll get a couple of non-CTD error messages, but you'll be able to start a campaign without any traits.

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Just FYI, this will also remove all the beneficial traits as well, so don't expect to see any high-star generals around after you've done this.

It should go without saying that you should make a copy of the original files first before any editing.

Alternatively, you could try to find those few traits and exclusively delete those. It makes no difference though, only the influence or command decreasers matter. Management is only for money, which you'll have plenty of anyway.

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Originally Posted by Excalibur Bane

I've about had my fill of these useless fools that fancy themselves my generals and governors. Their all wildly extragant and incomptent in management and command utterly.

I don't understand how they can all end up like this. What the hell am I building all the Academies for? I thought they were supposed to train better people. It doesn't seem to help at all.
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Academies are overrated. In vanilla RTW, the probability of an academy improving traits is miniscule.

The main problem with bad traits developing is generals/governers sitting idly during turns. Every idle turn has a small chance of them developing bad traits whether they are in a city or in the field. You can either accept it as an inevitable consequence of managing a big empire (hence realistic) or mod the traits file.

And there is a whole guide explaining traits on this website.

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Originally Posted by orangat

Academies are overrated. In vanilla RTW, the probability of an academy improving traits is miniscule.

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But the benefit of academies is farming ancillaries, rather than fostering traits. A chirurgeon (sp?) alone is worth building an academy for, IMO.

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Originally Posted by econ21

But the benefit of academies is farming ancillaries, rather than fostering traits. A chirurgeon (sp?) alone is worth building an academy for, IMO.

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What does chirurgeon (sp?) do - BI or RTW vanilla?

Well, the game is actually starting to turn around. I've isolated at least one good general. He's about 6 stars I think now. I managed to take my revenge out on the Sarmations for capturing Constantinople. They horded it awhile back, so I brought an army of heavy onagers forward to assault the city. He had around 3,000 men and instead of storming my onagers, they all huddled in the city. I brought forward my ten onagers, set them on fire at will, set them to use fire and watched the show. I have unlimited ammo on. The city ended up being their funeral pyre by the time I was finished, I sent in some infantry to mop up the survivors when the battle time limit was close to expiring. Very satisfying and a whole lot of fun :)

Where is the guide on editing traits here on the site? I'd like to modify them without wiping all of them out.

Personally, I think the bad traits system is a good counter to having too much money and too much opulance. When you are at a stage where you have too much money the game becomes too easy, this is a little bit of a leveller thats all.
Edit it out and you are just making the game easier still. Then, no doubt, you will be complaining that there is no challenge in the game.
There is a reason these things are in the game, just overcome them and win. Much more satisfaction dude.

EDIT: How the h*ll can anihilating a city using ten onagers with unlimited ammo be satisfying? I think we are very different people, I prefer a challenge.

He obviously had a bone to pick with the Sarmations and damn those female archers can be intimidating.

Anyway, he could have used 20 standard onagers for the same number of turns to construct! :laugh4:

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Originally Posted by Slug For A Butt

Personally, I think the bad traits system is a good counter to having too much money and too much opulance. When you are at a stage where you have too much money the game becomes too easy, this is a little bit of a leveller thats all.
Edit it out and you are just making the game easier still. Then, no doubt, you will be complaining that there is no challenge in the game.
There is a reason these things are in the game, just overcome them and win. Much more satisfaction dude.

EDIT: How the h*ll can anihilating a city using ten onagers with unlimited ammo be satisfying? I think we are very different people, I prefer a challenge.

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I've never complained about anything being too easy. I just don't do it. But punishing a player for having too much wealth or planning ahead just a little to well, is a retarded game mechanic. Period. If this was the case in reality, every empire in history that was successful would have run itself into the ground with drunken fools and dotards that didn't know how to run an empire.

I'm glad that you prefer a challenege, I prefer entertainment. If you cannot see the fun factor in obliterating a city in the above mentioned fashion, then I guess your one of those realism junkies. To each their own.

At any rate, I'm being "challenged" sufficently by the WRE. The rest of my enemies are smoking ruins at this point. We are in something of a stalemate, he sends hordes of troops to siege my cities, I slap them down, and have just enough time to recover before he hits me with another wave. I think every one of my generals has the "Eagles Collector" trait at this point.

The ironic part is, that most of my losses are not at the hands of his troops but rather those autocannon ballista mounted on those damned siege towers. They cut down 100 of my men every siege I go through with ease. Whoever came up with that unbalancing little idea is clearly mistaken*. There simply isn't a way for a siege tower to pack ten ballistas inside the tops of them. Very annoying.

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Originally Posted by orangat

What does chirurgeon (sp?) do - BI or RTW vanilla?

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Its in both i think.

It either increases the likelihood of you having children or increases the revival rate of troops after a battle. Cant remember which.

The trait system was a good first try by CA but it fell a bit short. Look to player1's bug fixer to correct some of the more bizarre errors.

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Originally Posted by Excalibur Bane

If this was the case in reality, every empire in history that was successful would have run itself into the ground with drunken fools and dotards that didn't know how to run an empire.

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Hmmm, sounds kinda like the late Western Roman Empire to me..... ~;)

I'm with SFAB on this one. THe game is easy enough as it is, I like a challenge, and I like my characters to have personalities.

Hooting mad generals with a bossy mother-in-law and drunken uncles following them everywhere add to the challenge and the entertainment value as far as I'm concerned.

Good job CA! :2thumbsup:

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Originally Posted by Divine Wind

(Chirurgeon) either increases the likelihood of you having children or increases the revival rate of troops after a battle. Cant remember which.

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It's the second one. I don't remember, but it may have had a morale effect too.

I think that you should be able to try to reform your generals. Assasins can easily get rid of drunken uncles and mad mothers. And well...you can always say if you dont sober up your fired.