I've taken notice of the talk here in recent days about adopting various "iron man" rules concerning unit building. One that I agree is essential is to do no unit retraining - it just makes expansion far too easy.

But there have been a few other rules proposed concerning restrictions on new unit recruitment. I think one proposal was that you only recruit in cities which share your culture. Another, that you only recruit from cities in your home country or from the cities you begin the game with. Another idea is to only recruit from your capital - a bit extreme for me.

Personally, I've always thought you should be able to recruit in any city, but I've never much liked the way you can conquer a foreign city in RTW and immediately be able to crank out military units of your own culture's type from what is essentially an enslaved and hostile populace. It offends my sense of realism. There should be a period of time in which a newly conquered city is becoming assimilated to its new masters and their culture, before they become a reliable source of recruitment. But how to simulate that?

It occurred to me as I was playing today that there is actually an easy way to simulate this period of assimilation already built into the game. And that is the phenomenon of unrest. When you conquer a new city, there is always a degree of unrest apparent in the public order list. So all you have to do is to make a rule that you cannot do any recruiting in any city which is experiencing any degree of unrest.

Adopting this rule has a number of realistic and agreeable consequences. The main one is that it prevents you from recruiting right away in a newly conquered city - and the time you might have to wait to start recruiting can vary a lot. But I think there are other consequences. For example, I think I'm right in saying that you can lessen unrest by putting in a stronger garrison, or lowering taxes. Later in the game, it's not unusual to get some unrest even in your home cities, so adopting this rule might mean that you can't simply use these cities as both cash cows and recruitment centres. If you want to recruit, you may have to put in a stronger garrison or lower taxes.

Also when there are rebels in a province you usually get some city unrest, so there's an added incentive to deal with those rebels quickly. You may even find that as squalor takes hold in the midgame, you can't recruit from your larger (and better developed) cities at all!

Taking this idea one just step further, you could also make it a rule that you can't crank out miltary units from military buildings of a different culture in cities you've conquered. So not only can you not recruit right away, but you must also pull down those foreign military buildings and replace them with your own. This is another method of making your expansion just that little bit slower and more expensive.

Anyhow, I've been using these rules in my latest campaign and they seem to be working quite well.

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Those are some good observations about one of the major aspects that lead to huge armies and steamroller games. Have you tried RTR 6? Their area of recruitment concept and auxilia phases address these issues in a creative way. It makes you think twice about committing large armies and advanced units, since the nearest retraining/construction facility may be many turns away.

My ironman contribution: No army can stay in the field without a general. When generals are killed in battle leaving the fielded army without one, another must be dispatched ASAP.

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No, I haven't tried RTR 6.0 yet. I did play RTR 5.x. Now I will probably wait for the post-BI version of RTR, or perhaps the post-BI version of SPQR.

BTW, I like your ironman contribution. I might adopt that one myself. The only problem I see with it is that you wouldn't be able to get any "man of the hour" adoptees, which is one of my favourite game features. But I suppose you could modify it by saying, you can't move or stay in foreign territory without a general. Then you could still generate your men of the hour from fights with rebels, or when defending your own territory.

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I too am for the no armies without generals, although slightly different. I set up my own rules, although never got around to playing a campaign through to use them much.

Part of the rules was having 2 distinctive types of force: garrisons (for defensive duty) and legions/attacking armies. Only legions/attacking armies can move into enemy territory and they must be led by a general. If the general is lost in hostile territory, the army must either retreat to a previously built fort and await the arrival of a new general, or it must retreat immediately to friendly lands.

Any army without a leader such as a garrison army, is also only allowed a maximum of 10 units in it to suggest without a good leader, the army is too big to organise. The exception being legions who have lost their leader, they can keep their units until a new general comes along.

I also had restrictions of the types of units allowed in the legion/attacking force and making sure balance was retained (eg, for a Roman army, legionaries must make up half the total army, on a per unit basis, rather than man for man). Reinforcements had to be brought in to fill in any gaps before the legion could move on again.

There were also other restrictions and factors I won't bore you with, although one of note was once a unit reached x amount of experience, it couldn't be retrained, only merged. No more 5 men with 8 experienced being retrained as 80 men with 8 experience.

The basic idea was to create mini-campaigns where you form a structured army with a leader and send it off to fight in hostile regions. You stick with that army and reinforce it when you can instead of just sending in a rag-tag bunch of units to win all your battles.

With BI, you can recruit generals now so the idea of having armies always led by a general is a definite possibility.

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Hmmm, I like some of these ideas as well. I'd be interested to hear what your other ideas were as well. ( you are a bona fide professor after all )

I quite like the idea of a ten unit restriction on any stack without a leader. The only problem with this sort of thing of course is that if the rules get too complicated there's too much bookkeeping and it becomes a chore trying to remember it all. It's the sort of thing that would be better built into the game itself, but I don't think CA would go for that level of complexity.

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Hello there

I also use some of the rules you people have mentioned. I tend to recruit my high level troops from my capital and destroy army buildings when taking settlements. Then I limit myself to only producing first tier troops from these settlements. I also used to have set legions: 10 infantry (hastatii etc), 3 cavalry and 2 missile, with the other 5 being local mercs.

One question I have: I agree with the problems on retraining but having no retraining means you miss out on the upgrades, unless you only retrain a full unit. I think it may be best to limit retraining to 1 unit per settlement per turn. What are your thoughts?

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Now that you mention it, I have never really missed it that much. I do still occasionally get them when I sally from a besieged city or attack straight from a town, in which case I still consider the army to be attached to a city (with a projection force of one turn's march). Actually, I have been getting so many adopted heirs that I can manage cities and keep a sizeable field force. The original intent was to force me to balance governors and standing armies, with an eye to how much income I a gaining/losing. But some games it seems that half of the ancient world wants to be part of my family!

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