Rebels in EB

[Rodion Romanovich]

I haven't seen this discussed elsewhere but I might be wrong, if so I apologize for posting this again:

I'd like to know how rebels will be implemented in EB. In R:TW it's pretty ridiculous, unrealistic, and of course tedious gameplay with 1000 brigand armies moving around where most of the battles in the campaign are actually turkey shoots vs brigand with 0-10 own losses and 500 enemy casualties. On the other hand, it'd be boring, and unrealistic, if rebels didn't play a major role in the mod, and if no troops would be needed behind the border areas. As I see it, the most realistic and fun way of implementing rebels would be to make the appearances of rebel armies more rare, but making rebellions larger when they happen. That'd finally force the player to keep not just 4 cav units but entire legion(s) even in areas that were conquered a long time ago, which is realistic.

Some historical examples of importance of rebellions:
* Teutoburg forest: the romans started pincer movements into germania but had to abort the operation due to a rebellion in Illyria. 5 legions had to be moved in order to stop the rebellion. This gave the germans time to prepare themselves, and when the operations towards germania could be launched again, they could defeat Varus in the teutoburg forest. If they hadn't recieved this extra time they would probably have failed, or at least their victory would maybe have been a pyrrhic victory rather than a slaughter.
* Trajan's Parthian war: Trajan never defeated parthia. He moved in and occupied Ctesiphon but the parthians never met him in the field, instead they retreated from the roman gigantic army of 10 legions and around 100,000 auxiliaries. If he had continued he might have been able to crush parthia, and thus eliminate the only real rival to the roman empire in that period, but a rebellion forced him to return west. When part of the gigantic roman army was gone, most of the cities revolted and slaughtered plenty of romans. Hadrian had to move the border back to where it was before the war, and the losses after the second dacian war (which was a revolt) as well as the losses of the parthian war where so huge it forced rome to recruit legionaries in provinces too (rather than just in Latium), and more auxilia from the provinces, which meant less loyal troops with lower morale and will to defend rome. After the parthian war the romans started losing ground. The rebellion that called Trajan back from the war was crucial here - even though roman casualties were small, the opening of a second front played an important role. Most rebellions often mean cutting off the retreat and reinforcements path and therefore, if they're strong enough to beat the cut off army, can turn pretty nasty for the conqueror they rebelled against.
* There have been many rebellions where rome has lost more than 1 legion, which is pretty much considering that they had around 20-30 legions for most of the time. Cynoskephalae was for example a rebellion and even though romans won they took recieved many casualties. Spartacus managed to defeat several roman armies before his defeat at Silarus river. The guerilla warfare in north africa was costly for the romans, and took many years to win. Spain saw some revolts as well, as did Gaul, although most gallic revolts where pretty easily beaten. The war Caesar vs Vercingetorix war could be seen as half-rebellion half war.

In general I'd like rebels to be an important factor in conquered areas and if EB would make it tricky to pacify newly conquered areas. In return, for balancing AND realism, it would be nice with a feature where small towns with small garrisons would (unless the conqueror has made himself known as a cruel exterminator) surrender immediately when armies move up to the city rather than fight a battle that'll no doubt be a slaughter. In short - small cities should be easier to conquer but also easier to lose. I'd like if EB changed garrison public order bonus to be based on troops quality rather than garrison size so that for example some 100 legionaries and 50 cavs in the garrison would be worth more for loyalty than 500 peasants. Another nice feature would be if rebellions would grow larger and larger the more successful they've been and the longer the player waits before suppressing them.

[caesar44]

agree
there is another problem with the rebels , if you at war with a rebels army in gaul then all the rebels in the world will be at war with you - why ? what is the logic in that , why rome is at war with the rebels in arabia while their empire lets say stop in greece ?

[Rodion Romanovich]

agree
there is another problem with the rebels , if you at war with a rebels army in gaul then all the rebels in the world will be at war with you - why ? what is the logic in that , why rome is at war with the rebels in arabia while their empire lets say stop in greece ?

Exactly. I don't know exactly how R:TW engine works, but would it be possible to have reappearing factions whenever there is a rebellion? So that if Greece is conquered, and there is a rebellion in Greece, it'd "spawn" in as a Greek faction if Greece had been eliminated prior to the rebellion. That would solve some of the problems, but in the vanilla R:TW taking all settlements from a faction eliminates it and turns them into the standard rebels we dislike, so that means a rebellion with reappearing faction would have to take at least one settlement immediately in order to work - or? If that problem could be overcome it'd make possible some really sweet ideas!

The only problem left to solve would be slave rebellions etc., who can't carry the names of any particular faction. But if the problem above is overcome it'd maybe be possible to add such factions but with no land and no armies from start of the campaign but with a possibility of appearing later. That would mean there'd be a limit to number of simultaneous slave rebellions but how often will there be more than like 3-5 slave rebellions anyway, so if 3-5 slave rebel "factions" would be added in the background I think that'd work.

I'd be glad if anyone who knows more about possibilities/limitations of the R:TW engine could comment on this and I hope what I wrote in this post was comprehensible.

[Steppe Merc]

Unrealistic how? You know how many factionless armies were around? A whole lot. As for the factions reapearing, it can't be done.

[eadingas]

I doubt any of these can be changed, except for number of troops and chance of appearance of rebels.

[Rodion Romanovich]

Unrealistic how? You know how many factionless armies were around? A whole lot. As for the factions reapearing, it can't be done.

Unrealistic with bandits that are so stupid that they aren't hiding from the armies of the empire they're in. Successful bandits would rather try to hide in woods like guerilla between their raids. Besides, irl handling brigands is easy once you find them, and letting the player command such battles is like letting the player command if wheat or corn is planted on the fields in his provinces.

Sad to hear reappearing factions can't be done.

[Sarcasm]

I think that only if a large rebel army sucessfully captured one of your cities, would a faction reapear.

[Southern Hunter]

I agree. Less often but more strength would be much more interesting and realistic.

Good spot.

[jerby]

for all I know, the starting city's will be a lot less, factions will ahve a buffer of rebels between factions.
so rebels will be frequent.

[Sarcasm]

That´s only true for some regions. The Eastern part of the map is very crowded. The Seleucids in particular have like 5 adjacent other factions.

[Valens]

It's a good idea, but reappearing factions isn't possible under R:TW mechanics. And, if you think about it, rebellions in R:TW are already pretty rare; and when they do occur (especially with larger settlements) the rebel armies can be quite formidable. I actually think that rebellions should be a little MORE common, to increase the importance of certain troops that would have to be recruited to counteract this which I'll go into later. Mostly what you were referring to was those annoying brigands.

Personally I think CA shouldn't have even implemented brigands, because yes they are a waste of time and an unnecessary pain in the butt. They should just be a statistic of the province, like part of the settlement details window; X amount of trade income lost due to brigands and lawlessness. The countermeasure for this would be to construct forts along the province's roadways to reduce this effect. This would not only spare the player the tedious job of having to squash each stupid brigand army one by one, but it would also have the dual benefits of making forts a little more useful (I rarely use forts as-is), AND be more realistic.

Brigands never really assembled into armies, mostly small bands of highwaymen to prey on caravans and travellers. Law was enforced along the highways by patrolling detachments of soldiers sent out from town garrisons and local forts, and when conflict did occur it was never more than a minor skirmish. There's absolutely no reason to have actual in-game battles versus brigands. It should just be an automatically calculated statistic of the province, just like farming, trade and everything else.

I also agree with troop quality determining the law bonus... to an extent. Peasants should grant absolutely NO law bonus, because they ARE citizens; and who's gonna obey their neighbor when he tells them to obey the law? I'd tell my neighbor to piss off! Peasants should only be recruited for absolute emergencies... when invaders are at your doorstep and the treasury is dry. The next step up would be the various militia and town watch troops that vanilla R:TW had. You'll notice when you zoom into a city, you'll see the city's population mingled in with the town watchmen. I've always regarded these guys as kind of a police force. They're relatively cheap to recruit, but in battle their use is limited. However, I believe that they should grant the largest law bonus, simply because they actually patrol the streets in-game. Pretty much all other troops should grant the same law bonus, all of which being lower than the "police".

This system actually gives you, the player, an interesting trade-off. You want to keep order in your border towns far from the heart of the empire, but at the same time you want to defend it from invaders. Do you recruit lots of "police" troops to keep order but leave the poorly-defended cities vulnerable, or increase the regular army to defend the city but risk rioting and rebellion? It's a whole new element of strategy that you'd have to consider.

I'm quite sure none of the things I've mentioned are possible to implement, they're still good ideas in my opinion. :)

[Steppe Merc]

You are all talking about Western brigands. But in the East, nomadic raids by steppe tribes was very frequent. Bactria had a lot more to worry about by those raiding tribes than the Selecuids.
They are not just bandits, but also tribes, and smaller nations.

[Rodion Romanovich]

And, if you think about it, rebellions in R:TW are already pretty rare;

Oops, I meant brigands. I agree that they should have been removed and replaced by a statistical number reducing trade income, or if brigands could be removed by recruiting a police force or something. The regular rebellions are instead IMO too rare.

[Rodion Romanovich]

You are all talking about Western brigands. But in the East, nomadic raids by steppe tribes was very frequent. Bactria had a lot more to worry about by those raiding tribes than the Selecuids.
They are not just bandits, but also tribes, and smaller nations.

Yes, I was in a hurry so I forgot that. It was actually something I was going to mention. In the western half of the map you also the picts who were obviously enough pain in the ass to lead to the construction of Hadrian's wall, which was one of the most ambitious limes fortifications around the roman empire. Anyway, what I was going to say but forgot due to hurry was that I think map edges should be more like frontlines too - just because you hold a province that happens to be the end of the game map it shouldn't mean you have no frontline there, especially as the R:TW map ends in a place where the borders irl would be quite hard to hold, giving a little unrealistic strategical/tactical balancing of the eastern map part... However that's a little two-edged because irl you could theoretically have set out on expeditions and gotten rid of those raids (at least for a while), but if the map ends there you can't do that in the game. I don't know how to best solve that problem but I know EB has already used up the maximum number of provinces so the map can't be expanded any more (according to the FAQ). Maybe the most realistical way of implementing this is to have a medium amount of raids to the east - slightly less than when raiding was as worst but never be entirely gone. Anyway I'd like to know how EB will implement this because as I see it neither of these two ways is correct. Do you have any better solution than these two that are the only ones I can think of?

[AntiochusIII]

Can you delete Brigands from the game? Where? How?

[Valens]

You are all talking about Western brigands. But in the East, nomadic raids by steppe tribes was very frequent. Bactria had a lot more to worry about by those raiding tribes than the Selecuids.
They are not just bandits, but also tribes, and smaller nations.

Well, I don't really consider small nations and tribes to be "brigands", even if the civilized nations regarded them as such. In-game, these would be the peoples of the unconquered provinces, which the game incorrectly labels as "Rebels". I say incorrectly because... who exactly are unconquered people rebelling against?

Anyway, it would be very nice if these minor nations could be a little more active in-game. CA implemented brigands as a poor attempt to bog down the player's troops in backwater provinces, far from the front. But in my opinion, this could have been more effectively and more realistically achieved by simply allowing unconquered minor nations the ability to raise their own armies and raid across borders, instead of wasting away in their towns waiting to be conquered.

As for raids from beyond the edge of the map, I think that an occaisional spawn of a moderate-size "brigand" army at the very edge of the map (not in the middle of a province, mind you) would be the best way of handling that. This army would then be able to march westward and attack the closest city. However, since it's impossible for the player to march off the map and deal with the source of these problems, it only seems fair that these spawns shouldn't occur very often; in fact, only rarely. Just enough that a seemingly safe province at the very corner of the map is never "truly" safe.

[The Stranger]

i've read that they have more than 100 rebel units

[The Stranger]

As for raids from beyond the edge of the map, I think that an occaisional spawn of a moderate-size "brigand" army at the very edge of the map (not in the middle of a province, mind you) would be the best way of handling that. This army would then be able to march westward and attack the closest city. However, since it's impossible for the player to march off the map and deal with the source of these problems, it only seems fair that these spawns shouldn't occur very often; in fact, only rarely. Just enough that a seemingly safe province at the very corner of the map is never "truly" safe.[/QUOTE]

i agree with that