Europa Barbarorum II FAQ

[Andy1984]

I can only reply to the third question. While I don't have EB installed on this computer, I know that the early versions of the money script did give a bonus per city. However, this made the silver/yellow death problem even worse. I am not sure how your solution will help start-up empires but not the existing ones.

I didn't know the team already experimented with bonusses per city. Please discard the following text. I typed it earlier, but now realise it has certain major flaws in it. One of them being the fact that expanding empires already receive huge financial bonusses by looting big cities (which doesn't seem to pull off the empire-building I expected it to do). Therefore I believe this idea needs to be better worked out by me, before I can even hope to make a decent statement. I left the text so those interested could read it.

Even existing empires would not be sustainable for prolongued periods of time, because even existing empires will still have too limited resources when they start throwing away their money by depletion of the mercenary-pool in Sardinia. I believe the difference made is that factions that expand thanks to either luck or great generals are more likely to hold on temporarily to their resources because they now have some extra funds to do so. Existing empires would also benefit from it, but only in the short run. Because even for them, building ships or sending an army to Arabia is not going to rescue their empire. In the long run, it seems to be a matter of time before even the additional bonusses gained from cities are insufficient and factions start to overexpand... leading to a collapse. The higher the bonus per city given, the greater the variability of the size of (bigger) empires. The smaller this additional-city-bonus, or the bigger the standard amount of money each city gets, the smaller this variability.

These are issues not faced by smaller factions, as they tend to be the ones without military harbors, or without opportunities to place stacks without moving them (Southern-Italy, Southern-Iran, North-Africa, Arabia). Whatever the Lusotanni or Bactria do in the beginning of the game, they'll almost immediately benefit from it. If they initiate a construction, this will add to their demographic growth or to the quality of units trained. If they deplete some mercenary pool, these mercenaries will be standing next to their capital and close to the target they'll attack. Smaller factions, or at least factions that can't build ships, seem to be run more efficiently by the AI. Hence my idea to compensate for it. But it will be a subtle balancing, that's for sure.

Secondly, you cannot draw conclusions about faction-expansion on the basis of EB1. The M2:TW strategic A.I. may not work the same, and there are many new options (and new factions) to consider.

You're right. We should wait and see how factions in EB2 behave. In the mean-time I can experiment with different money-scripts in EB1.

kind regards,

Andy