Keeping the game interesting past mid-game

[Razor1952]

I guess I'm in the majority , early on things can be challenging especially if you are playing a mod like SPQR or RTR. Still once you've cracked 20 or 30 provinces you are usually in an unassailable postion.

So this thread is for suggestions to respice the mid to late game .

Mine is below

I recently read an excellent thesis on traits and how once you got past 50k/100k/150k denarii all your governors got bad traits, the only solution was to keep your governors out of your cities. Not very elegant IMHO.

So my simple fix is to limit my treasury to under 50K by giving it away to your closest/best opposition. My staunch allies Carthage turned against me in 2 turns when I gave them 150k denarii. Now at 46 provinces I 'm sure I can look forward to some exciting battles. I plan to go past the 50 provinces using this technique.


Please post any other simple techniques you use or can suggest.

So I decided to

[Puzz3D]

Your ally attacked you because you gave them 150k denari? It's nonsense.

[Magraev]

They should value you higher for that! Maybe the reason was, that they felt strong enough??

[Razor1952]

Your ally attacked you because you gave them 150k denari? It's nonsense.

I can't say I was expecting that, but thats what happened. I presume having all that money changed the way the Carthage Ai viewed me with regards to it being able to possibly best me , but then again thats pure speculation.!

I ceratinly feel sometimes that the ai will attack if it perceives me as weak and conversely . So maybe having all that money made the Carthage Ai "feel" like it was stonger than me.??

[TB666]

Well if I was Carthage then I would have consider that money an insult.
So yeah I would have attacked you too

[Lord Adherbal]

I remember "buying" Carthage into a protectorate for 150k, after them breaking peace with me continuesly (and me buying back the alliance). The next turn they declared war on me again. *sigh*

[Hold Steady]

I propose using crazy idea's to spice up the game. Like moving to Britain as the iberians, give the cities to the carthagians and look forward to a heavy enemy the moment you're ready to cross the channel.
Or repeat Hannibal's conquest though the alps at the start of a Carthagian campaign. Goal: take rome with only starting troops. When you're done with that, the remainder of your cities will be in dire strais, if not taken, you're bankrupt and your immediate enemies are at war with you and strong as hell.
there must be other crazy ideas: Take the three nile cities with only starting troops for the selecuids, or playing Greek, never sail your ships out, only repel blockades.
Or for the macedonians, abandon all cities and move to italy. who needs BI?

[professorspatula]

There are a few things you can do to add interest to a mid-late campaign.

One is to pick a faction to 'befriend' and support - preferably a weak one that a strong rival faction may be at war with. Take a general and a good sized expeditionary army and also a diplomat and/or spy, then send them to your chosen faction's land. Have the diplomat forge an alliance and military access with the faction and now build a fort next to their most vulnerable settlement. Whenever they are attacked, your army can intervene and help them beat back the aggressor. Your general can also hire mercs and build a series of forts to protect your ally if you so wish, although spreading your expeditionary army too much might be folly. Every few years, send in reinforcements from your main empire to support your expeditionary force. You could even take over an island such as Crete or Cyprus and use that as a base for your reinforcements. Meanwhile your diplomat can buy map information from your ally every few turns for a generous sum. Factions seem to get offended by gifts, so exchanging money for something else is the way to go to help them financially.

It's a good way to add a bit of a challenge, as you're trying to keep another faction from becoming wiped out using just a minimal force, plus you still have your empire's borders to expand elsewhere.


If that's not for you, or even if it is, you could also start to form specialised armies for your future conquests instead of rag-tag bands of units stuck together. Consider only using infantry heavy armies with just one or two missile and cavalry units for support whenever invading the enemy land so you can't just rely on cavalry and archers to wipe the enemy out in seconds. Also make sure a general leads every offensive army. Or even perhaps send miltia forces into suicide missions into enemy lands. Two thousand upgraded town miltia can be fun to control at times, and if they survive and win a few battles, reward them by sending them back home and disbanding them so they can live out the rest of their live's peacefully.

Another challenge is to restrict your recruitment to one season per year only. Eg only recruit new troops in summer, and only retrain in winter. That way the AI can churn out units twice as quickly as you in theory, adding a little more challenge.

[Oaty]

Get a huge empire and then stop retraining/training troops. So your only option is to start abandoning frontier regions. An indirect representation of the Roman withdraw from Briton and the following territories.

[screwtype]

Get a huge empire and then stop retraining/training troops.

After reading that, it occurs to me that an easy way to add extra challenge to the game is have no RE-training of troops at all. So you can't just go and rebuild an army in the nearest city ten units at a time, instead you can only train one unit per city per turn.

If you wanted to make it harder still, you could have either no hiring of mercenaries, or only hiring of one mercenary unit per province per turn, or something similar.

[rebelscum]

Ah .. how to cure seven year itch. Well the best way is to go have an affair with the pretty blonde at the post office and then go back to the wife ...
erm thats not what your talking about is it ?

[Hold Steady]

Ah .. how to cure seven year itch. Well the best way is to go have an affair with the pretty blonde at the post office and then go back to the wife ...
erm thats not what your talking about is it ?

It gets better when you have kids, who wants to miss the court-fighting over custody..

[Orda Khan]

I presume having all that money changed the way the Carthage Ai viewed me with regards to it being able to possibly best me!

You reduced your holdings to less than 50k and you gave Carthage 150k and you are surprised that they attacked you? Perhaps they saw themselves as three times wealthier than you and decided, as TB666 suggests, to teach you a lesson for the insult

.......Orda

[econ21]

I got to 50 provinces (and the wonderful CTD) with Rome in RTR 6.0 and it was still challenging.

Part of the challenge came from taking balanced, historical stacks rather than going crazy with the best troops.

But the other part of the challenge was that I ended up fighting virtually every faction in the game. Not just my neighbours - Greece, Gaul and Carthage. But also Macedon, Seleucia, Egypt, Armenia and IIRC Iberia

This was partly due to my launching a spoiling expedition to Asia Minor when Seleucia came near to 50 provinces. But largely it was because I was attacked as my over-stretched forces expanded in different directions and I never managed to knock out any factions. Reading some of the accounts of the day, it was a feature of Republican Rome that they campaigned on many different fronts and that's how it turned out with me.

The other thing that helps is never exterminating cities - this really slows down the rate of expansion as it ties up your units in garrison duty.

[Elros]

How about doing a game purely using mercs? Or just mercs in the province you hired them? That would make taking cities like Carthage a nightmare with just a few skirmishers.

[caesar44]

[QUOTE=Simon Appleton]I got to 50 provinces (and the wonderful CTD) with Rome in RTR 6.0

Should I expect this also ?

[econ21]

[QUOTE=caesar44]

I got to 50 provinces (and the wonderful CTD) with Rome in RTR 6.0

Should I expect this also ?

Yup, if you have started a Roman campaign in RTR 6.0, then it will crash to desktop when you conquer 50 provinces. It's not a biggie - your computer isn't damaged or anything - it's just anti-climatic (and, of course, you can't play beyond 50 provinces). It's something to do with there not being a Senate faction.

There is a workaround you can download - it kills the Senate on turn 1. You can find a link to it in the RTR forum. But it only works for games started after the workaround was installed.

The 6.1 patch will fix the crash.

[screwtype]

How about doing a game purely using mercs?

Now, I think that would be tough. And I kind of like the idea of having to rely on random appearances of mercs. It might give your campaign an unpredictable quality that effectively emulates the vagaries of war.

[Alexanderofmacedon]

How about doing a game purely using mercs?

That would be very hard...

I'm not up for that kind of time/challenge

[AntiochusIII]

Are the AI capable of utilizing mercs on their own? If yes, that would make an interesting concept of allowing only one way of recruitment through mercs. I know, unrealistic, but could be one hell of a fun, giving everybody the randomness and the chaos. Mercs, of course, would have to expand its roster and its regeneration rate in the same time.

[player1]

This is post from LordDragatus, from RTW Heaven forums.
It is so good that I reposted it here fully:

LXPeng having too much money can give you the following traits:

Corrupt: reduces law and bribing resistance.
Aesthetic: improves influence (city is easier to control) and reduces command.
ExpensiveTastes: reduces management so you get less income.
Epicurean: increases income, but makes easier to bribe.
BadAdministrator: reduces management so you get less income.

So what exactly is the problem? Expensive tastes and BadAdministrator shouldn't be much of a problem. They simply reduce management so you get less income. If your governors are outside of a city they get to keep their manegement, but it's not doing anyone any good now is it? A city with a governor with 0 manegement is just as good as a city without a governor. And they may still well have more than 0 manegement.

Epicurean actually increases trade income so where is the problem with that? Oh yeah, they are easier to bribe. But with the 1.2 patch bribing became much harder. Bribing characters in cities is off course even harder. Especially if there is a diplomat in the city.

Aesthetic is bad for a general, but good for a governor. Since I imagine generals will spend most of their time out in the field fighting enemies they should be fine. And governors will profit more from influence than from command.

Finally we have corrupt which is the only really harmful one because it reduces law. but the maximum effect is -3 law and for this trait to actually have a bad effect there must be a law bonus present in the city in the first place. Still a governor with good influence should proboably be able to outweigh these bad effects.

So if you consider it carefully what you are doing is pointless, because while these traits are negative they aren't particulary harmful to someone who's already making lots of money.

I say, if you have 50000 or more money left at the end of a turn send a diplomat and bribe an army or something. Once that no longer works well enough you are already making enough profit to completly ignore the negative effects of these traits.

original thread:
http://rtw.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/f...=1,,0,10&st=10

[screwtype]

Another advantage of hiring mercs alone would be that you had almost NO control over the types of troops you ended up with. You would just have to grab whatever was available.

No more kickbutt cavalry armies.

[caesar44]

[QUOTE=Simon Appleton]

[B]

Yup, if you have started a Roman campaign in RTR 6.0, then it will crash to desktop when you conquer 50 provinces. It's not a biggie - your computer isn't damaged or anything - it's just anti-climatic (and, of course, you can't play beyond 50 provinces). It's something to do with there not being a Senate faction.

There is a workaround you can download - it kills the Senate on turn 1. You can find a link to it in the RTR forum. But it only works for games started after the workaround was installed.

The 6.1 patch will fix the crash.

Thanks , I will wait for 6.1 , the problem is that it will arase the saves

[Alexanderofmacedon]

Give money to other factions. I know it's simple, but in right amounts it would get pretty hard...

[Razor1952]

@player1

Yeah I know that the bad traits arn't that bad its just that not playing optimally goes against the grain so one simple rule to increase difficulty -like give all your money over 50k to the next biggest faction is pretty simple an you can retain your good governors traits.

[PseRamesses]

Playing a game beyond the 50 province level is just micromanagement, micromanagement..... however sometimes it´s fun and have its rewards. By this time my spy-network is extensive and I have them in every province in the map. This way I can check the development of weaker factions, which I always sponsor with all money I have over 50k and aid them in other ways.

Playing RTR 6.0 (except the Romans due to the CTD at 50 provs) and when at war with, let say Pontus, and I own the rest of Asia Minor I can make them a protectorate by giving them more regions then they started out with when the war began. This way you can actually rewerse back in actual size but grow in no. of provinces. I did a brilliant game as the Greeks this way where I rewersed back to just holding 4 provinces (Athens, Corinth, Elis and Sparta) but had well over 80 provinces through protectorates and my armies was mercenaries only. Great fun! I just wish though that there was a way to prevent my relation with protectorates to get effected by them going to war with each other. It´s a pity this feat isn´t implemented in the diplo-system.

[player1]

@player1

Yeah I know that the bad traits arn't that bad its just that not playing optimally goes against the grain so one simple rule to increase difficulty -like give all your money over 50k to the next biggest faction is pretty simple an you can retain your good governors traits.

But that's not optimal either, since that other big opponent would be harder to beat.

Bribing on the other hand is.

[Marquis of Roland]

I always give money past 50k to my enemies, or factions that I like that aren't doing too well (i.e. Germans they never have money).

I always build historically balanced armies (i.e. never use urban cohorts in field armies, I actually use them as garrison troops in Italian peninsula and so on).

I never spam cavalry (unless of course I'm Parthians).

I replace battle casualties not by retraining but building new units and dispersing them amongst my depleted units.

I never attack another faction unless attacked first.

I always send expeditionary armies to support factions I like that usually get wiped out in the beginning (i.e. Carthage, Germans, Macedon, Seleucia, etc.).

And of course I play VH/VH.

P.S.
Love fighting the Seleucids late in the game. They destroy all. Too many armored elephants!

[player1]

Conclusion: suboptimal play can be fun too

[antisocialmunky]

Play as the Romans and only use Gladiators, Arcani, and Town Watch.