descr_senate

[Al Khalifah]

Was having a modding vision the other day and opened this file by mistake but was quite intrigued by what I found.

This file essentially governs two things:

• The way the senate will treat the player
• The senate offices

The first point is covered through a series of coefficients but I didn't really experiment with these.
From what I can tell they control the senate's attitude towards a Roman faction as a result of success/failure in the missions they give you and how much success you will need to achieve in order to incur their jealousy. It also seems to control the likelyhood of your faction being given a random non-story mission (story mission for the Scipii would be the conquest of Sicily/Africa for example). There are detailed sections regarding specific mission types (such as Capture Rebel City) and how the senate will respond to failure, success or how long the player is given to complete the mission etc.

The second point which I did player around with is fairly self explanatory yet very useful for tweaking the senate offices, either to make it more like a controlling faction for a total conversion (e.g the Papacy) or for the purpose of improving realism.
For example, I never understood why only one consul was elected in R:TW, but I quickly rectified this to the correct two. All it took was one string change - no monkey business. For each type of office, it is possible to alter:
The Title (though this may be translated elsewhere, I'm not sure)
The quantity of citizens holding this office at one time
The duration of the office (in turns, not years) - at current this is set to 8 turns for all offices which is innaccurate but makes better balanced gameplay
The number of times one character can hold the same office
The restrictions in place on holding a particular office, which include:
Cannot hold office consecutively
Must have been quaestor already
Must have been aedile already
Must have been praetor already
Must have been consul already
The benefits of such an office (not stat points!). This includes:
Your faction cannot be investigated by the censor
If the censor investigates your faction, the character will not commit suicide

Just thought I'd share this info in case its of use to anyone else.

[LucaviX]

Very interesting stuff, thank you VERY MUCH for sharing. This, my friend, should be sticky posted!

Cheers!

[Kull]

I ran some tests on two aspects of this file (altering Senate mission distances and frequency of officeholding), but didn't pick up on the ability to assign more than one person to the same office - worse yet, I assumed it was impossible! Here's a link to my thread on this subject:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=44428

I ran an additional test and was able to have 4 Quaestors, 4 Aediles, 2 Praetors, and 2 Consuls all holding office at the same time (which is extremely cool!) The only noticeable problem is that only the name of the 4th Quaestor is visible on the office scroll, but that's a pretty minor glitch - everything else seems to flow normally. Assuming nothing else is changed, here's how to add additional officeholders (in this example we'll bump the number of Quaestors from 1 to 4)

Begin_Offices

Quaestor
Rank 10
Quantity 4
Duration 8
Sittings 1
Restrictions
End_restrictions
Senate_benefits
End_senate_benefits
End

[Al Khalifah]

I wouldn't recommend having more than one censor. It doesn't cause the game to crash, but it does lead to some strange events. I think the two seem to cancel each other out. Don't know why this should happen.

My only complaint now from a realism stand-point is that consuls can return be consul again in two years time. This should be 10. Oh and there's no age requirement (pre or post Sulla), although by the time the characters in the game have progressed far enough in the Cursus Honorum they are about the right age. Well actually theres lots of historical errors, so sod going through all of them...

[Kraxis]

I never had the guts to actually test out with more officeholders. I asked about it some time ago but noone seemed to know.
So I only changed the duration and the limits of the offices (none can be held consecutively).

I think adding more than 2 to the offices might create a hail of officeholders and even empty spaces early on.