Message: "Your Faction has been eliminated"

[HindSight2020]

I've been playing a single player campaign for a while now. I made it to A.D. 10 (or there-abouts). Suddenly, I received the message (in rather large lettering), "Your faction has been eliminated. Do you want to continue playing?" I chose to continue playing. I didn't notice any change. I am still rated by the Senate and the people as being ahead of the other two Roman factions, and I'm still getting instructions from the Senate on missions and tasks to complete. So I'm puzzled about the message. I was wondering if anyone else had received this message and whether anyone knew what it meant. (Sorry if this is an old issue and if it has already been covered.) Is there a limit of years in which you have to attack Rome and take on the other two Roman factions? Or is something else going on?

[The_678]

I don't know but my guess would be the end game limit. The game is supposed to end at 14 ad but I personally haven't gotten that far so I couldn't tell you what's going on.

[Oaty]

If this is your first campaign it will not unlock the factions for you. If you already unlocked all factions from a previous campaign then no big deal. It will leave all factions that you have defeated unlocked.

At least my understanding of what happens.

[Didz]

Crumbs!

You made it to AD10 without triggering a civil war.

How on earth did you manage that?

[Siris]

He has very, persuasive diplomats.

[Uesugi Kenshin]

I triggered civil war shortly after getting Brutii to Anatolia(Asia Minor) That was well before 157BC. I was loved by the people and oh who cares about the senate, let's go kill the old guys in purple robes!

[Colovion]

I've never even made it to 200BC. I can't even fathom the tedium that would result of playing it till 10AD.

[HindSight2020]

I'm not sure what is going on in my game -- that is, why I've been able to get into the AD (or CE) time period. One of my friends suggested that maybe I had encountered a bug. It didn't seem to be acting weird other than the fact that a civil war hasn't happened yet. Of course, I don't really know how it was intended to work. It just could be that other people get a civil war so easily, because they're doing something differently from me. I was wondering if others just got tired of the suicides. I always said yes to the suicide. I'm into the AD 20s now. The only non-Roman faction is the Scythians. They have three provinces. The rebels have 4 provinces. So there are only 7 provinces left that are not controlled by a Roman faction. My Scipiian faction controls more than half the map. I'll let you know if I get to the Civil War of 1861.

[The_678]

So does this mean there is no more end game date? I remember everywhere saying the game runs from 270 bc to 14 ad but if he is on 20 ad he's past the limit. Hmmmm something to think about

[nokhor]

i think he got the end game date. thats what the 'your faction has been eliminated' message was. i am amazed that a player actually got past 150 b.c. such patience and perseverance. that is now my new goal. hindsight, how did you get by with suicides every turn or so? how many family members do you have? how many are coming of age each turn?

[HindSight2020]

I just kept accepting the suicide "mission". It wasn't every turn. Sometimes there would be a turn or two where I was given a break. There didn't seem to be any pattern. I thought it would have made sense for the game to tie it to whether another mission was accomplished. I tried to do a good job of completing any reasonable mission. In my Scipii game, I ended up taking all of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia Minor and some of the area near the Black Sea. Plus I had half of the Iberian peninsula (Spain, Portugal), and I controlled all of the islands. So I moved my capital down to a central point in Africa. I gave up trying to have a governor in each city -- particularly the islands and the Iberian peninsula. They aged too fast and died -- even without the help of being forced into suicide. I seemed to get a lot of new general/governor-types at my capital. I spent a lot of time shuttling these guys either west toward western Africa or east toward the Middle East and Asia Minor. They usually never made it too far north of Jerusalem. I thought it would help quell some of the riotous conditions I was seeing. I haven't been playing the Scipii game for a few days, because I started a Julii game and now control all but one province on the Iberian peninsula along with all of Gaul. I have provinces stretching from the Atlantic to the Caspian Sea. Only the Britons are giving me trouble with their special swordsmen and chariots. They control 5-6 provinces in northern Europe. I think the year is somewhere around 210 BC. I'll get back to my Scipii game. I thought I'd trigger the end game by attacking Rome, but my army wasn't big enough. I went back to a previously saved game (something I really don't like to do, since there is so much that goes on during each turn). The main problem is that my treasury is in the red. It is difficult to increase my holdings when I can't train new troops.

[Owen]

I really don't understand how you can have reached the end of the game, have enough cities for the senate to think you want to be Emperor, have too few troops to be able to attack anyone and still be losing money. Either you're garrisonning your cities with Urban Cohorts or you've never built any port or trader improvements or roads at all.

[HindSight2020]

I've got roads, highways, markets, ports, etcs. They are in all provinces (of course, the coastal ones have the ports). And my cities are garrisoned with high quality men, otherwise I wouldn't be able to re-conquer them after they revolted. No. Sometimes there is the dynamic of how far a city is from the capital -- which I think affects its effectiveness at an economic level. But I'm still learning the game. One thing I do is always let the game automatically choose the tax level. (Maybe that's a problem.) Then what I do is change the level the computer will use from "Balanced" to "Financial" or "Growth" in order to tinker with the amount of funds I receive and balance that with the approval rating. The approval rating goes down when it isn't set to "Growth", but the income on "Growth" is the lowest. I usually set it on "Balanced" and let the revolts come as the may. When I got to the point where it looked like I controlled half the map, it was too awkward to get into the nitty-gritty of going through each city every turn to make sure their tax level was correct. I find that part of the game boring. If I have to do too many administrative things in the game, it gets too annoying to play. If that's the only way to have a high level of income, then I'd rather play a game like Diablo II. I have too much administration at work to have to deal with it in a game. I have to let the computer be my administrative assistant to take some of the tedium off of my shoulders. If there's a better way then cycling through 40-50 provinces each turn in order to maintain things, let me know.

[Owen]

The ability of a garrison to increase happiness is directly proportional to the number of men in the garrison. Now, while I consider it a little silly, to say the least, that a peasant can keep control just as well as an Urban Cohort legionnary, or even a Town Watch man, that's the way the game mechanics work. Since unit upkeep becomes much more expensive as the units become better and unit sizes become smaller, you take a double hit from this effect. Hence, if you are using high quality troops to garrison any city that isn't vulnerable to be assaulted at any time, then you are losing money hand over fist. This fact is the source of many of your problems.

Then again, I have have heard that the AI autotax feature is very poor, so that is the other half of the problem.

[HindSight2020]

I'm not sure I follow what you are saying. You say it is "directly proportional." To me that means that the more troops there are, the happier the populace. Now if you mean that it is "inversely proportional" I have a hard time seeing the link. I don't have peasant soldiers, nor do I have Town Watch. I get the best troops I can and put them in each city. I guess that's a drain on my finances. I'm always willing to change tactics or strategy.

[Owen]

I'm not sure I follow what you are saying. You say it is "directly proportional." To me that means that the more troops there are, the happier the populace. Now if you mean that it is "inversely proportional" I have a hard time seeing the link. I don't have peasant soldiers, nor do I have Town Watch. I get the best troops I can and put them in each city. I guess that's a drain on my financially. I'm always willing to change tactics or strategy.

By "directly", I meant that is varies proportionally with troop numbers alone and there is no adjustment for how good the troop type might be at "policing". Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Using advanced legions as garrison is a huge financial drain, and will cause further problems in those cities that are big enough where the cap on the happiness effect of the garrison is the 20 unit maximum that can be held in the city, rather than the 80% in-built maximum.

I would disband a third of your troops, or half if necessary to get where you are well in profit, then gradually build up peasant garrisons and then take your remaining advanced troops and march on Rome. That should take you something like ten or so turns.

[Lonewarrior]

That is pretty weird how never triggered civil war

[Owen]

That is pretty weird how never triggered civil war

No, it's easy as long as you keep agreeing to kill your faction leader when the senate demands it.

[Lonewarrior]

No, it's easy as long as you keep agreeing to kill your faction leader when the senate demands it.

But you will eventually have no more leaders at the end

[HindSight2020]

To Owen: OK. So you're saying (1) that any troop level in a city above 20 soldiers will cause approval to go down and (2) the benefit of having the 20 guys in the city has no relation to the quality of the troops. Now when you say "20", I'm assuming you are referring to one group of 20 soldiers. So I could move the advanced troops to the front and replace them with peasants or Town Watch. (I had always wondered why the other factions could get away with a very small group in the city.) Is this documented somewhere? I have the original manual (very fine print) and I've read/skimmed it, but I haven't yet bought the tip book.

To Lonewarrior: I just accepted the suicide command every time -- mostly because I was never sure about how strong I would be against the Brutii and Julii. (I wanted to put that off until I had garnered a lot of the map.) I would check my capital every turn to find out how many new leaders were given to me. Sometimes I would skip a few turns. As a result, there were 4-5 leader-types waiting for me sometimes. There were some turns where I had to split them up and send one to western Africa and some to Asia. As you get to a later point in the game, your family tree gets bigger and bigger. There are more and more births and people coming of age. Plus, there are adoptions and marriages. Then there are also times when a captain does really well in a battle, and he is offered as an adopted part of the family. Suicides only affect one family member, and this only occurred maybe two times every five turns. As it was, I couldn't keep a general with each army or a governor in every city. I never had enough people to do that, so I contented myself with getting a governor in the cities closer to the capitals when I could. Another reason why I accepted the suicide all the time was that I had it in my head that the civil war happened after all the other factions were eliminated. I'm past AD 20, and there are still provinces controlled by the Rebels and by the Scythians.

[Owen]

To Owen: OK. So you're saying (1) that any troop level in a city above 20 soldiers will cause approval to go down and (2) the benefit of having the 20 guys in the city has no relation to the quality of the troops. Now when you say "20", I'm assuming you are referring to one group of 20 soldiers. So I could move the advanced troops to the front and replace them with peasants or Town Watch. (I had always wondered why the other factions could get away with a very small group in the city.) Is this documented somewhere? I have the original manual (very fine print) and I've read/skimmed it, but I haven't yet bought the tip book.

Er, not at all. I'm referring to the fact that you can only hold a maximum of twenty units in a city. How big a unit of soldiers is depends on your campaign "unit size" setting. On the normal setting, peasants have 120 soldiers in a single unit, though the garrison effect on happiness scales with this setting, so one full single unit of peasants has the same effect on normal as on small, large or huge. If you are trying to maximise the garrison effect, you would have 20 units, each of 120 peasants, in your city. Of course, if you are trying to maximise the total happiness, then you'd actually have 19 units of peasants and a governor with as high an influence value as possible.

Many of the details of game mechanics like this are discussed in the "Ludus Magna" on this board.

Oh, and apparently the tip book is awful. Don't buy it.

[HindSight2020]

I must have sounded like someone who hasn't played the game much. I just have my own style, and I'm sure it is different from other people. I forgot how many peasants there are in a group, because I've never used them. I'll try them a little and see what happens.

[Owen]

I must have sounded like someone who hasn't played the game much. I just have my own style, and I'm sure it is different from other people. I forgot how many peasants there are in a group, because I've never used them. I'll try them a little and see what happens.

Well, I don't recruit peasants to send into battle. Think of the senseless waste of population... er sorry, think of the senseless waste of human life.

[Richard H]

Hi Folks,

I've had the same thing but different cause. I triggered the civil war fought for quite a while but was running low on troops and resources so used my diplomats to get ceasefires and then alliances back with the other two factions (playing as julii) I had conqured Rome. The problem I had was once I had a strong enough army to go back and finish the civil war I couldn't trigger it again. I think wiping out the senate with the other two factions still surviving is where I went wrong. Any rate played through into about 25 AD an no matter how many wonders I hold or provinces I can't trigger the war again. Between the rome factions we wiped out everyone bar rebels.

I ended up scrapping all the towns in states surrounding the other factions to give them more rebels to fight and the scipii are down to about 4 provinces and the brutii about 8 but have pretty much reached an impasse. I think I'll have to start again. Considering how long it took to get to that point

So word of warning don't kill the senate and make friends with the other romans. Friends are bad.