Quote Originally Posted by PseRamesses
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.