Senate mission tweaking?

[PseRamesses]

Is there anyway to change the senates approach to the missions you get or is this part hardcoded too?

It´s frustrating, unhistorical and completeley unlogical and sometimes even suicidal the way it´s working right now. Ex: You´re at war with the Greeks and you´re given a mission to take a Carthaginian city, then a Gaul one etc. The senate is constantly working on giving you no option but to constatly be at war with 3-4 factions. For a small thriving Roman state this is suicidal. For a large Roman empire it´s just bad economics.
The way it should work is that if you´re not at war with anyone then the senate can pick any foe that suits their agenda best. When you´re at war the senate should give you missions that involves actions towards the enemy not creating new ones.

Another thing is the shere stupidity of most "capture this and that city". Ex: You´ve just begun your war against the Gaul and fighting in th Po-valley to secure Italy when the senate says "take Narbo Martius"???? halfway into France and very hard to protect. To make this objective you have to march through enemy territory for 3-4 turns just to get there and take a city in the middle of nowhere with no connection at all to you current lands.

It´s ok that the senate will give you impossible mission when you´re getting powerful but in general the whole senate-missions concept could have been such a gem but now it´s one of the most frustration parts of the game IMO. Is there anything we can do to get around this? Thanks in advance!

[Kull]

Is there anyway to change the senates approach to the missions you get or is this part hardcoded too?

I think so, although you'll have to see if your results mirror mine (I had a thread about this, but god only knows where it went) Anyway, here's some of the pertinent information:

3) Senate "Take City" Mission Realism: I performed a limited test of this using the Brutii (Vanilla RTW 1.2, no saves, through Winter 262BC), and it seems to work. One of the large complaints about Senate missions is the tendency to skip nearby targets in favor of those farther off. Asking the Julli to attack towns in Greece when there are Gallic villages right next door is insane! But changing a single variable seems to help dramatically (unfortunately this variable only appears in the the "Take City" function - there's no way to similarly limit the scope of blockade and other missions). Begin by opening the "descr_senate.txt" file and look for the following lines (they are at the very bottom of the file):

Take_City
max_region_traversal 3
Duration 10
-3 E p3
-3 M p2
etc, etc

Change the "max_region_traversal" variable from 3 to 1, and now all your "Take city" Senate Missions will target ONLY adjacent cities. In my test game, this change resulted in several noticeable differences from the standard RTW game:

1) Only adjacent cities were targeted (although the number was low - see details below).

2) A much larger-than-normal number of blockade missions were assigned.

3) There seemed to be a larger number of "dead periods" (i.e. turns when no mission was assigned). Fortunately these would only last one turn.

As noted, only three "Take City" missions were assigned. The first was the standard (probably hard-coded) Brutii mission to take Appolonia. Soon after, came a mission to attack Thermon (adjacent to Appolonia). After that came a long sequence of blockade missions. Even though I was at war with both Greece and Macedon, and they had cities very close by, none were ever the target of a Senate Mission. Eventually I got tired of waiting and moved up the coast of Illyria to take the rebel village at Salona, and immediately on the next turn was asked to conquer Segestica (an adjacent town under Macedonian control). Not sure if there's a connection, but it seems likely.

There may also be an AI drawback to this change. Although the Julli took their opening village, they have not yet moved across the sea to get Sardinia. Likewise, although the Scipii now control all of Siciliy, they haven't invaded North Africa. Again, it's early in the test game, but it would be nice to hear the experience of others on this subject.

[bouis]

I don't think that the Senate gives missions to AI factions at all; or if it does, the AI factions ignore them without consequence.

I've done plenty of testing on this.

[Kull]

I don't think that the Senate gives missions to AI factions at all; or if it does, the AI factions ignore them without consequence.

I've done plenty of testing on this.

Thanks for the info. One question though. I recall reading somewhere that a "Unified Rome AI+Senate" faction expands much slower than a "Unified Rome AI w/o Senate" (I think it was someone with the RTR team). Assuming that's true, it would imply that the Senate is having some effect on the AI. Is that something you tested too? Just curious.

[PseRamesses]

Begin by opening the "descr_senate.txt" file and look for the following lines (they are at the very bottom of the file):

Take_City
max_region_traversal 3
Duration 10
-3 E p3
-3 M p2
etc, etc

Change the "max_region_traversal" variable from 3 to 1, and now all your "Take city" Senate Missions will target ONLY adjacent cities.

Thx Kull, I´m looking forward to the outcome of theese changes. How about the senates lack of ability to choose an enemy to attack, could this be tweaked in the same manner too?

[Kull]

....How about the senates lack of ability to choose an enemy to attack, could this be tweaked in the same manner too?

Not that I'm aware of. From a design perspective, the human player could be at war with anyone - and the importance of each enemy would alter from game to game - so it doesn't seem like an option CA would code. The good news is that simply reducing the Traversal value tends to focus the Senate's requests upon nearby enemies.

BTW, I've never tried a value of 2, so you might test that out too.

[PseRamesses]

Not that I'm aware of. From a design perspective, the human player could be at war with anyone - and the importance of each enemy would alter from game to game - so it doesn't seem like an option CA would code. The good news is that simply reducing the Traversal value tends to focus the Senate's requests upon nearby enemies.
BTW, I've never tried a value of 2, so you might test that out too.

That´s correct. I went through the files and found nothing that I could related to the senate´s ability to choose the "right" enemy. But I´m playing RTR most of the time and they changed the traversal value so with that mod I don´t have this problem. The problem with the vanilla game is that the senate constanly rotates missions between 2-4 enemies so there MUST be some file that contains this behaviour. If not the whole "mission-concept" is completely random and therefore doomed as yet another half-way produced feat of this "could´ve-been-the-greatest-game-of-all-times".