Myth's solution to internal politics, civil war and characters

[Myth]

After the rather anti-climatic civil war I had as Rome on Legendary it became obvious for me that the system is unrefined and possibly unfinished. Currently, the AI spawns more stacks than your standing armies, of similar quality (sans the experience chevrons) and all close together. That's great initially. But the fact that the AI doesn't use them for much but capturing one full province, means those armies it has will quickly starve out. By the time you gather up your loyal veteran armies, the loyalists will be reduced to a group of starving, undermanned armies.

The gamey, artificial and outdated Rome 1 type approach would be to make the loyalists emerging faction immune to attrition from food. This is however, a bad, immersion breaking way to solve things and it will leave many players with a bad taste in their mouth. You could get away with things like this when R1 came out (SPQR cities don't rebel, VH battles gave +7 attack/defence to AI units etc.) but not in 2013.

Also, we have the problem of the lack of a family tree, the lack of meaning to internal politics and the lack of immersion and caring for an army general. It is also quite useless to have a general with good governing traits since one can't afford to let an army to sit there so the guy leading it can govern a province (armies are capped as we know). So here is my solution:

1. Return the Loyalty stat from earlier titles.

If you remember in Medieval II, a general with low loyalty was prone to rebellion, taking his whole army with him. Characters of your house will be more loyal to you (bar some unfortunate random events like a young buck falling in love with your FLs wife and absconding with her). Characters of rival houses could be loyal to you... but if civil war hits they will heavily favour their own house (unless you have given them such a good position and title that it doesn't make sense to ally with their original house. And they have to be greedy and selfish for this).

2. Character traits should be displayed and should influence special events and civil war behavior.

Your FLs brother who has been loyal for 30 years, who won numerous victories on the field, who has character traits like "honest/prim" should not go to the enemy camp. Alternatively, a miserable wretched little cousin who has "ambitious/cunning/dishonest" will jump at the first opportunity to further his own position. Even to the point of leading troops to betray you when civil war comes/

3. Introduce the Provincial Governor mechanic.

It is historically accurate that Roman senators, consuls and generals would at some point, retire to become provincial governors. Especially if things in Rome heated up and they had to disappear form public life for a time. Caesar was governor of Gaul for 3 years IIRC. When assigning a character (statesman, general etc.) to the position of provincial governor we basically remove them from the character pool for several years, barring extraordinary situations like a massive threat to the capital/faction, or civil war.

Incompetent provincial governors can be the bane of a large empire. Boudicca's rebellion happened mainly because of a greedy and incompetent governor. Same with the uprisings in Syria and further to the east. Generally, when some major rebellion from Roman rule happened, one could find a really bad governor somewhere in the mix. Now, the player could recall bad governors or send an agent to... remedy the matter more directly. Recalling a governor before his term has ended can happen only when extraordinary evidence pops up that he is incompetent, like a rebellion, or a dignitary/spy discovering that they have been stealing from the taxes etc.

When civil war comes, the provincial governors will be weighed out and those not loyal enough would defect, along with their entire provinces, to the loyalist faction. Sure, it's a "realm divide" mechanic of sorts, but at least this way a really strong faction will pop up in your face and its troops will not starve to death 3 turns after they have appeared!

The governors also now don't collide with the number of armies allowed. When you see that a general would be more useful to you as a governor, you send him to govern, be it to raise income or suppress public order problems.

4. Make the game 2 turns per year at least and add seasons.

A quite simple solution that will double the general/governor lifespans to the point where we actually can see them gaining a lot of skills and a history behind their actions can be formed.

5. Add a family tree

Also a very frequently requested feature. The family tree can help you determine who is who and how to assign positions within your republic/empire/kingdom. Females should be born and should appear, and should be used for marriage and politics.

6. Add a popup message when a promotion is available to one of your faction members

Turns are hectic and long. One doesn't always remember to look if a promotion is available now. Also, promotions shouldn't cost so much gold, if they are won by virtue of many conquests, vanquishing a faction your faction hates, or by Heroic Victories.

[Kamakazi]

Its rather hazy especially on the bribing portion of things..... I miss the days where you could bribe enemy armies to your side. Added a bit of finesse at times

[andrewt]

Why do we even need these things? I finished 8-10 campaigns with M:TW 1. No other game since then has come close. I believe I completed Empire twice. Steam has me clocking in at 370 hours played. I finished Shogun 2 five times (2 vanilla, 1 Rise, 2 Fall). 685 hours played. I just finished my first Rome 2 campaign. 234 hours played.

The end game just feels like a slog, even with frequent ARing. Realm divide, civil war, Mongol/Timurid invasion, black death, all sorts of other stuff adds to the challenge but doesn't decrease the tedium. On the contrary, they just made it more tedious for me. End game just feels like "ugh, another battle." I decided not to play Rome first this time around while learning the game. I want to play as Rome next. Parthia looks interesting. So do the Seleucids. A bunch of other factions look interesting, too. But not if each campaign takes over 200 hours to finish.

I love to conquer most of the map. I don't like the short campaigns in Shogun 2 where you only end up having a third of the map. I played domination all the time. But at some point, all these things that are meant to slow down the player from steamrolling the game just adds up. The game is just way too long. Even Shogun 2 was way too long. I don't know when it started (Rome 1 maybe?) but I wish they would try to make the game length manageable.

They seem to be catering too much to the "Please slow down how fast I can conquer stuff because I'm only interested in playing one faction" crowd.

[Kamakazi]

what difficulty were you playing on? my first campaign took about 1/2 to 1/4 of ur time

[Bramborough]

Kinda wondering same. I consider myself a slow, deliberate player, and 282 hrs of R2 has been good for 2.5 campaigns. I could see taking much longer if you play out every single battle, but "frequent ARing" is mentioned. 234 hrs sounds awfully long for a campaign...IF that's ALL you were doing. Lots of custom battles in between to try out different troop types? Other started-but-unfinished campaigns?

None of this is meant as critical at all...just trying to figure out why your campaign is taking so long. Even that in itself isn't necessarily a problem...it's not a race, after all. But it seems to be a dissatisfaction, so wondering what factors are making your campaigns so much longer, so perhaps can offer suggestions.

[Sp4]

My first campaign ended in 60 BC, so thats 210 turns? Probably actually played just that campaign for maybe 60 or 80 hours and throughout the early and mid game, I played every single battle. It was only about the last 15-20 turns where I just auto resolved everything cause I was steamrolling anyways and wanted to get it done and couldn't be bothered anymore.