How RomeTotalRealism saved my affair with RTW

[screwtype]

I thought the battles were much slower in RTR...........maybe i have just adjusted to the speed if this is an incorrect assumption.

I think you're right, battles do last longer in RTR, but still not long enough.

The reason they last longer, I think, is because the morale of all units has been considerably pumped up so they don't rout so quickly. For example, my base unit in my current campaign is the humble Greek levite, in vanilla RTW they have a morale rating of just 6 but in RTR they are pumped up to 11. Add a general with a few extra morale points and these guys just will not rout. I've frequently noted they will fight on until there is just one guy left in the unit! - which is pretty silly given they are just a militia.

The problem is that just pumping up the morale doesn't really solve the problem of fast battles because (a) it unbalances the game and makes cheap units almost as good as elites, and (b) because higher morale doesn't fix the real problem which is the superfast kill rates.

As for the AI on the strategy map,i recently used the toggle_fow cheat to see how the game was developing and noticed that there were NO rebel provinces left.The Ptolemies aggressively attack my cities and army stacks and as i stated in previous posts in this thread i have noted the AI slipping armies in behind my lines several times by sea.

What can I say? It's not my experience. I'm 40 turns into my current campaign, I already have 30 provinces and am the most powerful faction by quite a margin. After 40 turns there really shouldn't be any rebel provinces left and yet they are everywhere.

Part of the problem seems to be that the game just appears to "forget" stacks altogether. For example in the first couple of turns of this campaign Pontus sent an army over the straits to park outside my city of Byzantium. Suspecting it of being about to lay siege, I thought perhaps I could change its mind by offering trade rights, which I did. Pontus accepted, and since then that Pontic army has sat outside Byzantium doing absolutely nothing for 38 turns, and ditto with the ships that transported it.

I also noticed that the Sarmatians were advancing on a rebel city on the Black Sea coast quite early in the game. But instead of conducting the siege, the army appears to have forgotten why it moved adjacent to the city and has now just been sitting there doing nothing for dozens of turns. I can't help wondering if the loadgame bug actually causes the tracking of AI stacks to be totally lost, so that they are no longer even in the AI "loop". (I have only rarely needed to load a savegame in this campaign).