Message: "Your Faction has been eliminated"

[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.