those darn rebels

**sassbarman** · 01-10-2005, 08:28

hello all, it's been awhile since I've visited the orgs' forums, not since the early days of medieval, and just thought I would get my two cents in on CAs' latest offering.
Great game, certainly the best in it's genre, and it will only get better once the patch is released, good show CA. Ok enough of the ass slapping and shoulder patting now to business. I think everyone will agree that the annoying popup rebel stacks needs to be spiced up a little, because right now they are well... just annoying.
My suggestion is that because they always seem to show up on trade routes and are presumably pilferring from our empires, why not have their armies get bigger the longer you let them sit there. That would do two things, one make fighting them much more interesting, and two depending on how long it took you to get a diplomat there, much more expensive to bribe. Just a suggestion to CA, what do you guys think.

**Darius** · 01-10-2005, 13:27

Personally I find I've learned to despise any and all bandit forces while loving the idea. However it gets really tedious having to keep all these reserve horsemen around just to take care of them, so my new method of cleansing is through cold hard cash, and hey, sometimes I'll get a unit or two, and even if its just peasants or something equally useless, I can just disband them for population. Think of it as "indentured servitude"

However there is some merit in the idea. Consider that if the bandits got large enough, that they may just simply march on your nearest settlement and try to carve out a petty kingdom of their own!

Now that would be interesting to say the least.

**Sinner** · 01-10-2005, 14:04

I generally like rebels. While they can on occasion be an annoyance because I want to get on with something and not be forced to waste my time, or my troops' time/lives, in dealing with them, overall they can be quite beneficial.

Rebels are generally quite vanilla and small in numbers, so you don't have to worry about going against masses of elite troops, which makes them excellent training tools for both troops and generals.

As Darius notes, they can also be a cheap source of troops or population. I'd much rather bribe a rebel Hastati as a Roman faction than spend twice the money as well as the population cost to build my own. Plus every now and then you get a rebel leader, which are far cheaper than other factions' and you don't run the risk of hiring one who has sat in a city with a temple of Bacchus for the past decade.

Great idea about them increasing in numbers if left alone and trying to capture cities, something that I wouldn't think would be all that difficult to add.

**sassbarman** · 01-10-2005, 20:39

I never took it as far as to have them get big enough to march on cities and carve out their own empires, now that would be spicing it up.

**drone** · 01-10-2005, 21:49

You can play the rebel "faction" with a small mod to the game. Then you can see how much fun rebels could be. New armies popping up everywhere, towns all over the place at the start, no worries about population happiness (what are they going to do, start a rebellion?). Good fun if you get bored with the usual campaign.