M2 HRE Test OOC Thread

I think that's right, TinCow.

BTW, what do people (esp. TinCow and Tamur) think ooc about the composition of the putative South German army. I proposed hiring some merc crossbows and spears, as they are distinctly superior to the peasant archers and spear militia. But Lucjan has a point that they are more costly (almost twice the upkeep) and with three general's knights units, we may not need to rely on quality infantry. Maybe form an army of our own units and go for the mercs in a crisis? (We may need quality infantry if the Italians comes for us.)

What should be the initial composition of the force?
3 archers - so we have a chance of missile superiority
3 spears - to protect the archers & be the anvil
3 generals - the hammer
1 mounted sergeant? - backup for the hammer

I guess we should do this in character, but ooc is easier.

Sorry, yes, TinCow is correct. Any militia the city can recruit are upkeep free.

As for army comp, it's going to be a coalition of the southern dukes, so I'll keep out of that, just wanted to say that it may be preferable to drop one archer for a spear. With so much cavalry I'm not sure if you should really be worried about missile superiority, and more with holding the line. Spears die really quickly in m2 if faced with even a slightly better foe, so you may want a reserve, as opposed to extra missiles, who if your initial line breaks are a guaranteed flight risk.

Lucjan I am a little confused about the accounts for Innsbruck this season - I built a road, but I can't see it being deducted from my balance anywhere. (This may relate to the earlier discussion about putting in a column for building costs etc - the WoS has been preoccupying me, so I am not following this as closely as I should be).

Agreed with Lucjan on more spears, less archers. Two units of archers plus three generals and the mounted sergeants gives us a strong force in the pre-melee and very strong force in the pinned stages of any battle.

I think we need that stronger spear line to avoid losing the advantage that a solid pin/flank maneuver gives us.

Turn 4, I could train units of Town Militia and that would allow me to move Leopold & company halfway to the rebels this turn. I contribute two units of Spear Militia plus an Archer unit to the combined force.

Whoever commands that battle make sure you use your generals to max effect against their crossbows, they have Hussites, which, although they're ranged, are absolute beasts in early period melee too. (I believe they have 11 attack and 14 defence, superior to any infantry we can field right now)

From Orders thread:

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Originally Posted by Lucjan

OOC - Just a note...are merchants really worth it? They die really quickly when encountered by enemy merchants and cost 550 to build, but only bring in very meager amounts in trade, only around 22 florins for the highest of trade goods. Maybe I'm missing something and they contribute to something other than "merchants income" in the treasury window. But if they don't, they seem like wasted cash. Could somebody more knowledgable on how they work fill us in?

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Merchants start making a lot of money when you use them to 'defeat' other merchants. The higher the skill of the defeated merchant, the more money you get. Even a level 0 or 1 merchant will reward you with a good 500 to 1000, and high level merchants can net you upwards of 5000. Of course, this only pays off if you succeed. If you fail, you lose your merchant and your investment.

I find it is best to 'train' merchants by letting them sit on resources for a while. It seems that they work best in groups when they are all sitting on the same kind of resource. This helps them gain points in the monopoly trait line. Once a merchant is around level 4-6, it's time to go hunting with them. Try to take down easy targets first to gain experience, then work your way up to the tough ones.

Also, other merchants will not 'attack' your merchant unless he is sitting on a resource. If you do not want to be attacked, do not end your turn on a resource.

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Originally Posted by TinCow

From Orders thread:
Also, other merchants will not 'attack' your merchant unless he is sitting on a resource. If you do not want to be attacked, do not end your turn on a resource.

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I hadn't noticed this, but that does make it easier to micromanage them into real economical big guns.

One more thing about agents though, some of them have an agent limit on the number of agents one can recruit. Priests and merchants are the best examples of this ofcourse (I never reached the agent limit for spies and diplomats).

IIRC the first three levels of a church only allow for 1 priest in total.
I thought with the construction of a cathedral I could build an extra priest in my Milan save.
I guess it works the same way with merchants, one per city untill at least the level 4 market.

In that case it does not seem right for a Duke to profit from other Duke's mercantile buildings, unless its in consultation with the other Duke.

Eh, good point Strappy Horse. I had not thought of the faction-wide limit on merchants. That alone is reason enough for Vienna not to recruit anymore until the market gets to a higher level.

I think all provinces should have ownership of the merchant slots they generate. For instance, if Nuremburg generates 1 merchant slot, I can maintain up to 1 merchant at any time without consulting anyone else. This would also allow for more trade between Dukes, as I could very well sell the rights to my slot to Vienna.

I would avoid selling agent slot rights for anything to other players for the sole purpose of keeping an organised record of things without having to update three pages worth of changes every turn, because even now we're starting to get into a situation where multiple dukes are lending forces to a conglomeration of units and it's going to be impossible, with several dukes lending the same unit types, to keep track of the upkeep from which duke's spears died and which didn't.

I recommend you all chip in exactly 1/3 of the cost, as you all equally benefit from the protection of the army and whatever potential offensive maneouvers it may make. Or come up with some other way, but once losses start to set in, it's not going to be possible to keep track of all the individual units. Any ideas?

Another issue I could see coming up is if the army gets disbanded after it has performed its tasks. As an unrelated example, say three dukes each contribute one unit of spear militia to an army. The army engages in battle, and one unit of spear militia suffers serious casualties, and the other two just a few. Who gets what back when the army is disbanded? Also, dukes may contribute unevenly to an army, so splitting the upkeep evenly might be unfair. Here is what I propose.

I think it would be possible to split these things up fairly with the application of the appropriate amount of math. I understand the chancellor may already be getting overwhelmed with the number of computations needed. However, unlike the end-turn accounting, these computations would only have to be performed twice: when the army is assembled, and when the army is disbanded.

1. Each duke will pay a constant fraction of upkeep.

The fraction of upkeep can easily be computed at the begining, when the army is formed. Just add the upkeep of all the units a duke is contributing, and divide it by the upkeep of the enitre army. This fraction remains constant. As the army loses men, the upkeep of the army goes down, but each duke still pays the same fraction of the upkeep, regardless of if the units he contributed were the ones that died or not. The fraction need be calculated once for each duke, when the army is formed. The fractions of all dukes need add up to 1. Round-off error is possible, in which case the discrepancy could be added/subtracted from imperial coffers.

2. When the army is disbanded, each duke will: a) receive back any unique units he contributed, and b) will take an equal number of casualties in non-unique units.

This is one is more tricky. Part A is easy. If there is only one unit of mounted sergeants in the army, then the duke that contributed them will get whatever of them are left alive at the end.

Part B applies when there are multiple units of the same type in one army. It's impossible to tell which duke's unit is which on the battlefield. Ideally, they would all take the same number of casualties, and each duke would get back the number of units he contributed. But, they'll take uneven casualties, so unless there is some way to evenly split up the remaining troops among the dukes (is there?), there'll have to be an equivalent way of doing this.

I'll illustrate one equivalent way using an example. Say 2 dukes each contribute 1 unit of town militia to an army. Town militia has 75 men and costs 290 florins to recruit, and 125 florins to upkeep (as an exercise, each duke would have to pay an upkeep fraction of 0.50 for this army). Now suppose these units take some casualties, such that when you recombine them you have one full unit (75 men), and one depleted unit of say 30 men. Total number of casualties was 75 - 30 = 45 men. That is 22.5 men/duke. So, each duke should, ideally, receive 52.5 men. However, one of them will receive 75 men, while the other receives just 30. The discrepancy is 52.5 - 30 = 22.5 men. The idea is to make the difference up with money. The militia costs 3.87 florins/man to recruit. So, the duke that is receiving extra men should pay 3.87*22.5 = 87 florins to the duke that is receiving fewer men. This idea can be extended easily to multiple dukes and units. This computation need only be performed once, when the army is disbanded. It need not even be done by the chancellor, just keep a record of who contributed what.

I agree with FLYdude's #1.

As an alternative to simplify the casualty problem even further, how about this:

All casualties are deducted initially from the units owned by the player who actually fights the battle. Any extra casualties beyond that are allocated to the person whose contribution to the army has the lowest upkeep, followed by the next lowest, etc. Arrangements can be made for rearranging the casualty deduction order, but this must be completed before the time the army is constituted. If no arrangements are made, the above order is default.

Reasoning behind this: The general in command should take responsibility for the majority of the casualties, since it is his own actions that result in the losses. If he has to bear the brunt of the losses, he will be wary about taking risks. After that, the person who contributes the LEAST to the army will take the losses. This will encourage people to contribute larger amounts to their allies, rather than smaller.

I would agree with TinCow's emmendations, except that I'm unclear how the deductions from the commanding general would work?

Or, alternatively, maintain them as three seperate standing armies and move them in unison, so as to surround the opponent, that way upkeep doesn't need any awkward mathematical divisions and everybody loses what they're supposed to.

As, reviewing the rules, this united army conflicts with the 1 army per duke rule, as you would all have standing units in one large army, you'd be unable to create a second one.

I am still not seeing a big mechanics problem with combined armies (as opposed to equity or political problems). The only mechanics problem I can see is identifying whose unit is whose, so we can keep tabs on the upkeep and casualties. When units get battleworn, this may be less of an issue - my peasant archers may have 58 men, Tamur's have 59, so we will know whose is whose before battle starts and should be able to keep track of them - hopefully the order of the units on the units tab is the same as that in the detailed post-battle casualties report.

The identification problem will only arise when units are full strength or otherwise are identical through coincidence[1]. In that case, I like TinCow's idea: in the case of units that are identical at the start of a battle, then after the battle, the unit with the highest casualties will be said to be that of the commanding general; the others will then assigned to other contributing Dukes with the ones contributing the least in upkeep taking the biggest hit.

I think the Duke commanding the combined army should take care of the record keeping concerning the assignment and upkeep of units, to ease the Chancellor's burden.

In-game, players could agree on more radical solutions: e.g. treat the units as common property, with pooled upkeep; require equal contributions etc. But I'd be inclined to leave those to emerge as political solutions to the equity problem rather than ones imposed by the game rules to solve recordkeeping or identification problems.


[1]I am assuming the commanding general will be honest and scrupulous in keeping track of unit casualties - so if his unit gets wiped out, he won't say it was another players unit. But conversely, if it genuinely happens that another player's unit that gets wiped out, I don't think the commanding general should be forced to adopt that unit ex post and take the hit. In my experience, M2TW combat is a lot bloodier than RTW (or at least Roman RTR) so we have to accept significant casualties.

Perhaps we should leave this casualty issue up to players to decide amongst themselves, and relay how they want their upkeep to be dealt with to the chancellor.

I've got enough things to keep track of the way it is, so I'm just going to keep them as all seperate stacks, and work out the upkeep regularly.

Also, to accomodate the idea of dukes holding more than one settlement, the spreadsheet is going to go by overall ducal holdings rather than individual settlements.

Rather than keeping track of the spreadsheet stuff for 3 seperate settlements all held by one duke, I'll just add his three settlements together into a single row named Duke "whatever".

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Originally Posted by Lucjan

I've got enough things to keep track of the way it is, so I'm just going to keep them as all seperate stacks, and work out the upkeep regularly.

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But if they are three separate stacks, in what way are they a single army? :inquisitive: If you merge them together, I'll keep track of the upkeep and which unit is which. (At the moment, it's pretty simple - everything would be Tamur's except for two generals and one archer.)

At the moment it's simple yes, but I'm thinking about what should be done in the future, if this were to be attempted with, say, a full stack crusader army or something of that ilk.

EDIT - Also, what does everybody think of the 1.1 patch? I'be played three custom battles with it and so far I am very, very pleased with the changes. This is the game as it should have been released to begin with.

I will say though, it's gotten very, very costly comparison to Rome in regards to manpower. We should be ready to take a much larger number of casualties than we're accustomed to, and yes...to lose more than once in a great while. Of the three battles I fought, Poland vs HRE was a severe loss, Poland vs Hungary was a decisive win, and Poland vs Byzantium was a pyhric victory, I had virtually nothing left, but luckily they had even less.

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We should be ready to take a much larger number of casualties than we're accustomed to, and yes...to lose more than once in a great while.

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Battles in M2 are *much* more difficult, no more rolling over enemies as if they didn't exist.

I'm interested to see what this does to the PBM, since there is a very real danger of a battle-naive or overconfident character (which is what I'm playing Leopold as) dying pretty quickly, unlike RTW. Or getting himself captured, that should be fun.

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If you merge them together, I'll keep track of the upkeep and which unit is which.

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Thanks econ, time is a miser here so I wouldn't be able to do it. In future, it might be good to have the one designated as commanding general be responsible for this, but ATM I can't do a good job of it.

Ok, I've got a simple idea for determining who takes the casualties:

The casualties go to whomever the General says they go to. Don't loan military units to someone who doesn't like you!

eh, I like this! Very simple, and it gives even more possibilities for RP and character relations. Besides, with the amount of altruism running about in the test so far I'm not worried at all.

*begins to worry after saying that*

I can agree with this. Actually, now that I think about it, I could see some players possibly opting to take casualties earlier than others to lower their upkeep.

EDIT - Now that we've bumbled through that issue, on to the next turn!

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Originally Posted by TinCow

The casualties go to whomever the General says they go to.

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That would work, but I would add a couple of riders:

(1) Where possible, the General should keep track of people's units - the identification problem should only arise with full strength or coincidentally identical units. (I think the detailed after battle casualty screen should be enough to track all units that are not identical).
(2) The player controlling the General cannot merge units (to alter the immediate post-battle situation).

To be honest I think the whole merging of individual armies is placing too much of a rules-heavy outlook on the game. All the technical garbage should, at least the way I see it, be restricted to the chancellor, otherwise we run the risk of having lesser dukes than we potentially could. And nobody has still answered how we go about sneaking around the "1 army per duke" rule if you have a combined army from multiple dukes that exists as one entity on the campaign map.

Just voicing some concerns, but I'll continue as requested, and we'll see how it works out.

Hello guys. I have finally been able to play MTW2. However, as I was able to go from low graphical settings to high, I don't regret the wait.

I see the test has been quite successful in compiling a list of rules and finding solutions to various problems, but as I have been away for 10 days I have missed all the reasons and actual changes taking place. Are you going to collate the rules for the proper game? And speaking of the proper game, when do you propose we start it?

We'll definitely compile a detailed list of rules for the proper game.

Personally, I would prefer if we wait until the Civil War is over before we start the full version of this. Most of our potential players are involved in that as well and it's a major workload to do both at once. I would be afraid that starting before the end of the Civil War would result in either a poor start here or a poor ending there. Besides, I can't imagine it will go much beyond the New Year.

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Originally Posted by Lucjan

To be honest I think the whole merging of individual armies is placing too much of a rules-heavy outlook on the game.

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I can't see how we can play the game without merging armies. I don't know about other people, but by turn 100 of my English campaign, I only had around 4 full stack armies. The rest were placeholder garrisons. Unless we are only ever going to have 3 dukes, I don't see how we can compete with the AI with Duke-only stacks. My experience of M2TW so far suggests that it is not safe to go to war with half stacks or less. It's not like Romans in RTR - a human half stack against an AI full stack will lose. (At least if I am the human.)

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And nobody has still answered how we go about sneaking around the "1 army per duke" rule if you have a combined army from multiple dukes that exists as one entity on the campaign map.

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Surely that's only a problem if we have more combined armies than Dukes? Which is unlikely for the same reason that I think combined armies are inevitable - one settlement alone just won't cut it.

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Originally Posted by Ignoramus

I see the test has been quite successful in compiling a list of rules and finding solutions to various problems, but as I have been away for 10 days I have missed all the reasons and actual changes taking place. Are you going to collate the rules for the proper game? And speaking of the proper game, when do you propose we start it?

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I confess this decentralised test so far has made me doubt about whether this is the right model for a PBM. It's too slow and clunky. I think by lowering it to the level of the settlement and general, we're going more micro than the game will support. The test shows it can be done, but personally I am not sure it the most fun way to play. I think the WotS model[1] probably strikes a better balance between pacing and player interaction.

[1]ie just let the reigning player play the game, subject to collectively decided motions and delegate battles to the individuals involved.

I am starting to agree with econ's last comment regarding the game going too slowly. It's taken us quite some time with only a few players just to get to turn 5.

However, I would like to see something done on at least a slightly more decentralised level. Perhaps footnotes of ducal control giving them more influence and imperial "privelages", individual players working out deals with the emperor for control of their own armies/agents and simply giving the emperor the orders for those agents via the cursor location command and a brief description. Dukes could request specific buildings be commissioned in their territories.

Example -
Duke Leopold of Vienna & Prague. Because Duke Leopold controls two cities he gets +2 influence, if Leopold's suggestions make these cities particularly prosperous the emperor may gift him some special troops or x number of florins from the Imperial treasury to spend whatever way he wishes.

Duke Leopold, while having no immediate control over the building of structures or recruitment of troops/agents in his land, can be bestowed these things by the emperor upon request or simply by the emperor's good graces.

Basically Leopold is required to fund the imperial coffers and in return he gains his rank, privelages, and must be trusted to lead an army or direct agents against his foes upon the emperor's request.

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In the long run I think this would be the better idea for a decentralised wots pbem, as it doesn't require we wait a certain time for orders to be placed and gives the emperor much of the same freedoms he had in the wots, but at the same time gives players more direct interest and potential control in specific regions that would be important to them. This was one of the drawbacks of the wots, senators who may have been born in Massillia could have been pushing for much more protection and action against Gaul when instead they were all barking about Macedon because they had no realistic, vested interest in Massillia at the time, if Massillia was lost, they lost nothing. A player who begins with land, rank, influences and privelages that are attached to something tangible however, will be more inclined to try and direct Imperial attention to his lands and do less trans-imperial campaigning because of the very real risk of his station actually being threatened.

What I mean is - if all your power is connected to ownership of a city/castle, your interests will focus there, rather than the other side of the empire if your privelages are threatened because your lands are at some kind of risk or in some kind of need.

Think about it. Maybe we should run the actual game that way?
Perhaps we should run the next couple turns of our test run this way?

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I confess this decentralised test so far has made me doubt about whether this is the right model for a PBM.

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Though I remain a strong supporter of giving the decentralised play a go, it does make the game move at a crawl. Trying to imagine what it would be like with even 10 dukes and 20 territories is a bit unnerving.

On the other hand, 1) we've been working through rules, breaking and reforming them, which is not a quick process, and 2) I think that book on the Roman civil war that's been floating around has had a certain effect on the speed with which things move in the test.

Since we're all involved to a greater or lesser degree in that *other* PBM, would everyone consider bringing this to a stop till Rome be resolved? In the meantime I'd like to take econ's initial rule set and modify it to fit what we've changed and discussed. Then we can argue, trim, and modify with some experience to back up our arguments -- all while Rome burns... err, I mean while the Rome PBM wraps up.

Then we can come back here fresh and give it another go at a more spritely pace, with a more streamlined ruleset.

What say ye?