Way To Many Armies !!!!

[team_kramnik]

In the end the current script is an infinite source of troops. And factions like the Arche Seleukeia (which isn't attacked by anyone but instead takes out the surrounding factions one by one) or Pergamon (which doesn't attack, except the rare cases where they go and conquer Ephesus and Halikarnassos to be destroyed by Makedonia after that) just build up army after army after army.

So how to address that? I can think of several possible solutions (which ideally would work in combination):

(2) Increase the recruitment costs. Not necessarily the upkeep, though. This would perhaps encourage the AI to invest in other developments rather than the one hundred and first Hoplite.

(2) is IMO the only way to balance Total War games, even though no mod implements this. Upkeep should actually be much lower. I edited both EB1 and Stainless Steel this way with splendid results. This way every battle has strategic results. With balance relying on high upkeep cost losing battles is meaningless, if not beneficial.

Effects:

- enables defensive wars, the Holy Grail of TW balancing

- buildings are cheaper than armies, the ai actually wants to build them and a complicated money-script might not be necessary

- makes war dangerous: m2tw ai takes army strenght into account for diplomacy. Attack one neighbour and your loses might encourage another thinking you're easy prey. And he would be right. In my SS game I eventually reached a stage where it was better to buy peace with everyone than risk my army in a potentially devastating campaign.

- one province Macedon sitting on it's rich home province will still build up big armies. But you only have to face them once. And it would occur much slower giving you the option to destroy them before they become powerful. This was afterall why the Romans started the 3rd Macedonian War. Of course with this setting ai can be set to be more aggressive as the loss of it's armies and it's inability to rebuild them will naturally prompt it to seek peace.

- punish fast expansion

All mods decided for low recruitment costs and high upkeep, but why?

[roastedpekingduck]

Which file can I find the recruitment costs in?

[Piter]

Reduced income from cities.

If the bonuses for the AI is not exaggerated, it should help. Unzip to a folder eb2
http://ge.tt/6IiYUv02/v/0

[QuintusSertorius]

Which file can I find the recruitment costs in?

They're in the [Your M2TW folder]\mods\EBII\data\export_descr_unit.txt, in the stat_cost line.

[roastedpekingduck]

So I'm trying to come up with a way to just multiply the recruitment costs in export_descr_unit.txt. With two recruitment costs and the comma separation between the recruitment and upkeep costs, how would one multiply just the recruitment costs on all the stat_cost lines?

I am sure that team_kramnik did not just edit the lines one by one.

[Shadowwalker]

I always do it that way. Maybe I'm just stupid but I never found a way to tell the file to just increase the recruitment cost automatically. So I usually spend 2 hours on manual editing.

By the way: just increasing the recruitment costs does nothing significant to change the number of units/stacks the AI factions field.

I did a test campaign with Saba and tripled the recruitment costs, while not touching anything else (left the number of available units, upkeep, AI money script etc all unchanged).

The only consequences of this are two things:

(1) Smaller factions (especially all the one-province factions) need longer to do anything, if they do anything at all and get destroyed by the larger factions even more easily.

(2) The AI generally needs more time to build up the first full stacks.

But once you're 200+ turns into the campaign the situation is the same as if you didn't change anthing, just with the difference that you have less factions alive and those factions are a bit larger usually (given they were large at campaign start - i.e. Qart-Hadasht, Rome, Seleukids etc).

I have little time at the moment, I'll get back to this topic later and share what I found out in the last weeks. :)

[roastedpekingduck]

Thanks for checking that out, Shadowwalker. Perhaps unit costs and upkeep both need to be stepped up? My feeling is that eventually, because of hardcoded AI behavior, the AI will always prioritize units even when not financially feasible in the long-term.

Man, I'm sure there has to be a clever regexp that pulls it off in Vim. I have just not been able to factor in the commas in the regexp.