Quote Originally Posted by Simon Appleton
I wish CA could have gone the whole hog and let the dead generals be replaced by total newbies. As it is, I hardly noticed an adverse effect of greengenerals on quality. IIRC, it's pretty much a name change and minor reshuffling of stats.
I have to agree with that. In real life, empires would wax and wane because in one era they'd have some seriously deadly guys in charge but they'd die off and the years of peace between wars would mean the next fight would be between leaders who maybe knew the 'doctrine' but had never really experienced war first-hand and could still be caught out by situations where any amount of 'book learning' was no real help.

I suppose the CA implementation of shaving off a command star or two represents a passing on of knowledge in father-to-son fashion but I would rather couple this with having the V&V's wiped clean and starting again. Losing 'Expert attacker' would lose 2 stars in one hit, for instance (or is it 3?).

Total loss of all stars would be a real bind but I have to admit that this is a fairer representation of reality. The valour boost given to the troops is on account of the general's great reputation and the loss of it represents their lack of trust in the greenhorn replacement. After winning battles in spite of that, he gains stars and they gain respect for him, hence the valour boost comes back - albeit a bit at a time.

It would add to the game dynamic to have wars suddenly being triggered because a great general, defending a boder zone, has passed away and now the AI sees it has an edge over you which it should exploit without delay.

Equally, while you have the 'hero' general's, you need to make maximum use of them, not sit around twiddling your thumbs....

Quote Originally Posted by Simon Appleton
What seems more of a problem for me is the 50 years of peace. It seems that leaving your generals lying inactive in cities often leads them to go bad, especially if you are very rich, and they pick up all sorts of vices.
Very true but I think this is exactly what would happen. They are the archetypal 'evil geniuses', in some way. They probably expected to spend their lives doing the thing they love best, which is battling. Left to moulder just looking after a garrison post or managing a province and they start turning their talents towards lining their pockets or picking arguments and killing innocent folk who disagree with them. (I like that one about accidentally killing a visiting holy man over an argument about the choice of wine to go with the cheese course - totally OTT).