Destroying Buildings

First of all, I would like to congratulate the team for doing such a wonderful job with this mod; it sure is going to the list of my favorites!

I have one quibble though which is not really minor, to me at least: as a general house rule guideline, in order to be fair and make the game more challenging, I don't do things on the strategic map that the AI doesn't: so e.g I don't retrain, I don't block river passes on purpose and I don't destroy buildings. Now as I understand it in EB one actually has to destroy government buildings of a captured region in order to build one's own and eventually develop the province culturally, financially and militarily. So here are the questions and suggestions:

1) Does the AI handle this? Is it in fact going to destroy foreign government buildings to build its own? In my experience the AI never destroys buildings, unfortunately. Does this mean that AI factions by default cannot develop captured provinces?

2) If the above is true, I think, if it is possible, that rebel regions should start without the regional pacification government, so that the AI can start building its own government right away. Because if I am right in my assumptions up to now, factions beginning with one or two provinces like Pontos, Hayasdan and Sweboz will never be able to advance in the game if controlled by the AI, because they will never develop any province they capture.

I don't mean to sound critical, I love the government concept, it adds a certain depth lacking in other mods, but my concern is that the AI should not be even more hampered by this, given its already hampered state.

Thanks for reading.:bow:

i believe the ai is automaticlally given an appropriate government complex when it captures a settlement.

That's great news to me! I will do some more playing later to confirm it ~:)

Yes, AI factions are automatically given the best govt building for them in a given province when they take it. Rebel cities are not - you notice they build regional pacification buildings along the way. We're fine with them growing more slowly than the AI factions.

Just be sure to always destroy any govt buildings when you take a province (unless you had previously built it and lost the province - you can repair those).

That can have some odd side effects though. Back in the Aedui campaign I tried back in .74 there was this one annoying Roman diplomat that kept bribing one of my cities (the one the Aedui start with in Northern Italy, don't recall the name). The Roman coffers were apparently deep enough that he managed to pull it off every turn no matter what I had in the city, so I resorted to leaving it empty so I could easily retake it the next turn. Well, the script faithfully spawned the Level 2 Roman gov't there every time he re-bribed it, and destroying that actually always netted enough mnai to repair the damaged buildings in the city (such as my own Level 4 gov't which of course got damaged to 100%) every time.
I was feeling a little silly with the whole circle, admittedly. :sweatdrop:

And then 0.8 descended from the heavens in a ray of light. :angel:

Oh well, that's the reason I don't play VH campaigns, because I actually have to worry more about the AI's diplomat's than its armies. :/ This doesn't really help gameplay for me, at all.

I must admit the experience also put me off the VH campaign difficulty. I was already halfway down the peninsula and had just sacked Rome itself, and the buggers still had that much money to throw around...?

A good compromise might be playing on Hard campaign difficulty. The rebels will attack your cities as well, but won't be so aggressive, and the AI won't make use of bribery so often.

H/H is what I play in RTR and its mods, as I feel the AI needs some bonus to compensate for the fact that it is painfully predictable on the battlemap, but not anything like the +7 it gets on VH; it is just plain ridiculous to see legionairies routed by slingers in melee.