RTW AI same as MTW AI

[econ21]

(1) is really interesting, as it never occurred to me. I would usually *fill* with Hasti, but your view is BETTER! When I decide to return to RTW, probably to try out the EB mod, I'll incorporate (1).

Yes, I don't know about EB, but in RTR - and probably vanilla RTW - Roman heavy infantry is just very powerful compared to most neighbouring ones. I suspect that this is historically accurate, but if you have a lot of them in a stack, it just makes the battles dull. From Goldsworthy's book, it seems a common Republican army was two legions and two alae (sp?) of allied troops, often Italians or Gauls. Filling out your stack with these makes your Roman units seem precious and also gives a reason to bother with the nice AoR system of RTR. Battles are more tense, as half your army remains good true Romans but the other half is - if anything - inferior to your enemies (at least the Greek type enemies).

What's your basis for (5)? History? I think the penalty for Extermination is a good one. If a player plays with some economic restrait, the Extermination could be rather costly, as one waits and waits for the Population to grow so you can upgrade and build *good* buildings, etc. With some cities, *Order* might require Extermination, but you pay the penalty.

It's a mixture of history and gameplay. It just does not "feel" right to be exterminating every captured city - if that was what was done, surely the Romans would have been universally detested? However, from Goldsworthy's book, there do seem to have been occasions in which the Romans did massacre everyone in a city if it had bitterly resisted a siege - apart from anger management and looting, it had the side effect of terrorising other cities into not resisting.

But more importantly, I find that there is not much of a penalty in gameplay from extermination - big conquered cities often have most of the buildings you want and you only need a few cities to recruit from (in RTR, you can only recruit your best troops from older cities, not newly captured ones). If you lost the extra upgraded buildings with extermination, there would be a genuine trade-off. But extermination gains you a docile in tact city and allows your army to move on to the next battle. By contrast, even enslaving a faraway, alien city of 12,000, I find I still have to leave virtually an entire stack there for several years to keep it loyal. It really slows down conquest - and eats into your treasury as you need many more stacks - making the late game more of a challenge. A slower expansion is also more historical, I suspect.