A quick question from a modding newbie...

[afrit]

Seems like you are having a good challenge !!

I am eager to learn how your middle game turns out. I am also working on a mod that makes the game more challenging, but without the major overhaul of RTR or SPQR mods.

I still worry that most mods make the early game harder, but once you conquer your immediate neighbor(s), you get back to the inevitable win syndrome. I want a mod that keeps me working for a 100 years!

[Razor1952]

Another solution maybe is to make peons only recruitable a la ZOR(zone of recruitment) or really reverse ZOR. Peons( and militia) are only recruitable OUTSIDE your core cities. That means the ai can't build them till it has conquested other factions/rebels.

[Slider6977]

I read most of these posts (skipped some however). But I would like to help. If you want to help the AI (particularly early in the game and with Pop. growth) then you can do what you said by upping pop. growth of buildings and farms, etc. But, from reading your posts you also don't want them to get out of control, so you would like the bonus to disappear.

You can do this as easily as adding a pop. growth bonus to farms and buildings. Say you wanted to up the pop. growth of level one farms to that of level three, or four or five. As already posted, you can add a line that gives the level 1 farm to that of higher levels.

If you want that bonus to eventually disappear or get lower you can add a line that says:
population_growth_bonus bonus -1. As you can see instead of increasing pop. growth by .5%, you can decrease it .5% simply by adding a negative number to the end of the line instead of a positive. So it basically works both ways. You can increase the bonus or decrease it. Now you can use your own judgement as to how much you want to reduce the pop. growth bonus for extra levels of farms past the first level.
Good luck.

[Simetrical]

Note that it would be a bad thing to construct a tech tree such that non-mutually exclusive buildings contribute to farming_level or road_level; neither of these should be allowed to go above 3, which is their maximum... I'm not entirely certain how the code would react if they did. Same with weapon upgrades, or xp upgrades above 9.

Weapon upgrades aren't a problem. Vanilla RTW, in fact, came packaged with the Pantheon of Artemis, which gives a +5 upgrade to missile weapons by itself! People have been puzzling over that, and I've heard conflicting reports of the extra +2's effect. You could get pretty close to a +9 XP bonus in standard 1.2 (+7 with a Pantheon of Epona and any +2 unit), but you couldn't reach it, and I haven't seen any mods that let you.

As for farming_level, RTR has a temple that increases it, I think. Maybe I'll check to see if it's working, and what happens if you go over five total.

-Simetrical

[Pode]

As it's primarily the barbarians that struggle the most with pop growth, I added a health bonus +4 for barbarian cultures only to the base governor's building, so they get an extra 2% growth and 20% happiness. The next level town I cut this in half, and for lvl 3 towns in half again. Seems to be working so far, but needs more testing.

I also worked out a less severe approach to bridling the AI's poor unit choices, without having to monkey about with costs and build times. I made recruiting low level units dependent on the presence of a blacksmith. For example, a level one town builds a barracks and trains militia. At level two, it upgrades the barracks and can train hastati. now in order to unlock militia for this lvl 3 barracks, it has to build a trader to unlock the balcksmith and then the blacksmith, then finally the upgraded milita. In the meantime, the only thing available to train tin town has been the hastati, so the army should be a nice mix. At level three barracks, hastati need the blacksmith to unlock them, and militia need the second level smith.

Peasants I tried to link to farms, such that you could only recruit them in a town with maxed out farming. I thought this would incentivise the AI to build pop growth, and punish the human who wants the cehap hug garrison with some extra squalor and teething pains along the way. Alas, I couldn't get it to start a campaign with those tags in place.

Frogg, if you want to check on the AI in your game, open RomeShell and type toggle_fow to show the map, then toggle_perfect_spy to make all factions omniscient (sp?) Hope this helps, I feel like I owe you any help I can give for all the electronic lives under my command that were saved by your guides.

[afrit]

COuple of questiosn for pode:
#1. How did you give the population benefit to barbarians only?
#2. I cannot get the toggle_perfect_spy to work for me. gives the unknown command reply. toggle_fow works fine, so does show_cursorstat. I have vanilla 1.2

[Pode]

1: add this line to the capability of whatever building you want to have it, where X is the number of bounus levels

population_health_bonus bonus X requires factions { barbarian, }

2: Sorry, I haven't tested it. I quoted it from someone else's research posted elsewhere on one of the big three forums, don't remember where. I think he opened the .exe with a hex editor and found a bunch of things romeshell might take as commands. Too bad it didn't work, I was looking forward tio using it myself.

[Angadil]

I also worked out a less severe approach to bridling the AI's poor unit choices, without having to monkey about with costs and build times. I made recruiting low level units dependent on the presence of a blacksmith. For example, a level one town builds a barracks and trains militia. At level two, it upgrades the barracks and can train hastati. now in order to unlock militia for this lvl 3 barracks, it has to build a trader to unlock the balcksmith and then the blacksmith, then finally the upgraded milita. In the meantime, the only thing available to train tin town has been the hastati, so the army should be a nice mix. At level three barracks, hastati need the blacksmith to unlock them, and militia need the second level smith.

Hmm... very interesting. How are you actually doing this? I tried to incorporate the presence/absence of certain buildings to the recruiting requirements of certain units (eg: recruit "unit X" requires factions { A, } and building_present_min_level B b) and I only got CTDs.

Of course I'm a very new, very ignorant modder...

Thanks in advance
A.

[Pode]

Umm, RTW likes me more than it likes you? :) That's exactly the way in which I did it, so I have no idea why it didn't work for you. Be very, very careful with punctuation, spelling, etc, the usual stuff.