Beginner's Guide to RTW - Question Collection

[therother]

I am highly interested in 'official' information, you know the old "CA guy X said command stars are worth ...". Collect it, bring it back with the dev's name and a full, proper quote.

Jerome Grasdyke has answered this very question quite comprehensively in the thread below, entitled "CA: what do command stars do?":

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=37001

It currently affects both morale and combat ability - we tried it for a while with just morale, but it ended up being not enough of a bonus. The combat calculations have changed so much from Rome to Medieval as to be unrecogniseable, so it's no longer easy to equate stars to experience.

As a rule of thumb it's one point of attack per command rank, up to a maximum of 10, and this can become negative for very bad generals. This combat bonus is applied to all troops under his command on the battlefield. Experience is one point of attack and one point of defense per chevron, plus a morale bonus as well.

The general's command also controls his radius-of-effect, which is set to 30 m + 5 m * command + 2 m * influence. This is used to award morale bonusses to nearby units (in addition to the combat bonus), and when testing which units are affected it tests the distance between the actual general's position and the centre-point of the unit being considered.

Edits:

Agents unlike MTW, they are not rent-free - 100 dinari upkeep per turn.

This is slightly inaccurate . Diplomats cost 50 denarii per turn, spies 100 denarii per turn, and assasins cost a whopping 200 denarii per turn!

how do you bribe naval fleets... if you can?

I don't think that you can.

and when i tried to bribe an army there was only an opinion for the army to disband i think and return to the fields or soemthing? i want to bribe them on my side

You can only keep units you could, in theory if not in practice just yet, train yourself. So if you are a Roman faction, you can keep armies from other Roman factions. You can't bribe an army/city led by a Faction leader or his heir. Similarly for barbarian factions, where you can keep barbarian units that you could train. Romans can bribe Roman peasants (say from a revolt in one of their cities), but not barbarian peasants and vice versa. If you want units from another culture, e.g. elephants as a Roman faction, they must be mercenary troops, either hired by a family member when he is outside a settlement, or given to you as a gift by the Senate.

Hope that answers your questions!

[frogbeastegg]

Ok, thanks people.

I've handled everything I can from this list and it seems no one has anything to add, so you can unpin this now.

[motorhead]

Retraining - From a dev at the .com (From his .com profile Dutch, Occupation :: Rome: Total War Lead Programmer, and he holds moderator status). Sorry, no original link, threads barely last a week before falling off the boards at .com.

Dutch
Moderator
Posts: 141
(10/5/04 1:55 pm)
Reply | Edit | Del Re: What's the go with retraining?
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Retraining can do two things:

1) if the settlement can produce that type of unit, it will replenish the unit with new soldiers *at the units average experience level*; these soldiers are subtracted from the settlement population as normal
2) if the settlement can produce armour or weapon upgrades for which the unit is eligible and which it does not already have, retraining will add these to the unit being retrained

If the settlement can do both, it will do so. Replenishment costs a proportion of the unit's cost in denari, while retraining for upgrades costs a nominal amount per upgrade. You can retrain as many units as will fit into the recruitment queue in one turn, although you end up paying for all of them. Hence it is often better to retrain a lot of old units if you need troops quickly, rather than recruiting new.

Academies
Originally from here.

How does the Academy bonus work?

The Academy generates ancillaries for characters which are inside a settlement which contains an Academy. If you examine export_descr_ancillaries.txt you will be able to spot them, together with a lot of other ancillaries which are linked to the presence of buildings.

Culture and Unrest Penalties
From here.

Culture penalty has a maximum of 50%. As a general rule of thumb, the amount is determined by the proportion of buildings in the settlement which have been built by factions of your culture - for example, if you're playing the Julii, and you take over a Greek city which is split 50% between buildings built by the Greeks and the Brutii, you should see something like a 25% culture penalty. Then when you replace the buildings built by the Greeks, the culture penalty disappears. Who last built a building-of-governance has a substantial influence as well.

Turmoil on the other hand has quite a few causes; it includes unrest after a city has changed hands (which dissipates over time), problems due to a Governor's unpleasant habits and a bunch of other things. It can vary quite a bit.

Protectorates - broken. To be fixed in 1.2
Acknowledged as broken by dev here.

[frogbeastegg]

Excellent information, motorhead. Thanks.

[Claudius the God]

can you get retinue that prevents corruption when governing a settlement?
and how do you go about affecting the settlement details screen? besides building health facilities, improving agriculture and building buildings and having a competent govenor in place.

one thing that got me when i first played, i kept on running out of money because the settlements that were being automanaged were spitting out troops that i didn't want be careful about the AI assistance for managing towns people... better off turning it off entirely otherwise you'll have many extra unwanted Velites or somesuch unit

[frogbeastegg]

Ok, thanks everyone. Version 1.0 of the guide is about ready to go gold; it should be up tonight.

This can be unpinned now, thank you.

[Claudius the God]

is it possible to make a group of units simply rush in a general direction without staying in formation?
i almost lost a battle because my cavalry went into formation before charging the gateway i was fighting to control