Re-unification – an epic, themed WRE PBM

[Dutch_guy]

1) Play a full reign: To allow people to get into character, players will play for the entire reign of an Emperor. To stop this being too onerous and to allow more players to participate, I propose players ensure the faction heir is in his 50’s when the faction leader dies. To this end, players may want to save every turn so they can reload their last turn and chose a new heir if the designated one was too young or too old when the Emperor dies.

This sounds good and as the title says : Epic.

2) Have fun!: Players are encouraged to role-play the game and exploit story-telling opportunities. They need not always write from the perspective of the Emperor – they could follow a specific general who catches their eye or even an ancillary. They could get their generals to do something quixotic if it is in character for that general (or seems like fun). But they should not to leave successor players in very difficult situations (e.g. by disbanding the entire army or withdrawing entirely to Britain etc) and should work towards the general theme of the campaign, re-unification.

agreed.

3) Re-unification: The overall theme of the campaign will be re-unification of the Roman Empire. To this end, players should aim to conquer all the ERE starting provinces and hold every last one of their starting WRE provinces. I am not sure if holding all WRE and ERE provinces alone is sufficient for a WRE victory, but it is close. I will check later on and produce a specific list of the provinces needed to meet WRE victory conditions.

Again, this sounds epic. I can imagine it to be great fun reading - or perhaps writing - about the great final battle before the gates of Antioch...

4) Respect the frontier: As a corollary of the re-unification theme, players are not to try to hold any provinces that were not originally parts of the WRE or ERE. They may pillage them, but should not leave a garrison there. The idea here is to work within the frontiers of the Empire. Historically, there were presumably reasons for the frontiers being where they were – logistics, guerilla warfare etc. – and a WRE campaign that is won by just picking up some weak barbarian provinces would be too short to get an epic PBM going (someone won in 380AD on VH/VH).
5) Friends, Romans, countrymen!: Players should not exterminate any towns that start under Roman rule (WRE or ERE). The theme is re-unification, not fratricide. Players may exterminate barbarian towns, but may not hold them. Even these exterminations should be done sparingly, for role-playing reasons (e.g. to avenge the loss of a city or army) – not as a quick exploit to pre-empt the AI building up its armies or to get some easy money.

I can see this producing some good ingame moments, especially if that frontier tribe eventually becomes a superpower, we'd be hard put.

as for the last 4 points:

6) Don't kick the underdogs: Players should not wipe out the weak non-horde barbarian factions – IIRC, Celts, Berbers, Allemanni and Saxons. This is to better simulate the ever-present “frontier” and the threats posed by smaller tribes neighbouring Rome.
7) No Vandals here!: To try to keep the economy tight, players should not disband any buildings for cash. They may freely dismantle religious buildings in order to manage religious discontent or convert populations to a favoured faith.
8) No dirty peasants: No peasant units may be recruited or retained. They are too cheap as garrisons and anyway, that is what the limitanei and foederati were for.
9) Game settings: The campaign will be on VH campaign, M battles. Large units. Timer on. Patched to 1.6. I think we should probably adjust the settings to reduce the rate of spawn of rebels and pirates, as they are tedious to fight – I’ll look into this.

Well exept for point 8, I usually play this way anyway, so no big deal to make these above quoted rules official -

So I'm in, though preferably as ...say player number 4.

Do want to play, but spare time is getting harder to come by now a days so I don't want to disturb the earlier fase of the campaign.

That's all for now, If I get any flashes of inspiration I'd let you guys know.

[Mount Suribachi]

Yep, I'm definately in. Been a while (too long) since I did this.

Simon, if I may make a request about my position in the order. After this Monday (30th Jan), the way my shift pattern falls I will be off work for 5 of the next 7 days, giving me plenty of time to play BI

So, depending on when you start, could I go first or second?

A word of warning though, I've only been playing RTW since Christmas and I've not played a BI campaign yet...then again, I'm not like to tear up the map so maybe thats a good thing

[Tricky Lady]

I would be interested to play, as you've so kindly added me in the To Be Confirmed category.

I must add that I've hardly played RTW, leave alone BI, recently so you shouldn't expect too epic wins from me. But as TinCow mentioned, losing some battles every now and then might bring some life into the PBM again, as everyone usually steamrolls over all opponents quite easily.

Due to (or should I say: thanks to) real-life issues I haven't been playing any PC games recently, so I might not really fulfill the request to play within one week and post a write-up and pictures at most two days later, I suggest that you complete the list first, determine the order (I'd prefer not to play the first or second turn), and then I'll try to make sure that game life gets priority over real life again (just for once ).

I do agree with all of the suggestions made by both Simon and TinCow. I should make a short memo when I start playing as I do tend to play many rules that you're now explicitely ruling out (peasants for instance).

And also one thing: I am a very (very!) cautious and slow player (no blitzing for TL) so perhaps my 'reign' would become a bit boring. Perhaps I can engineer a smashing defeat at one of the Western borders...

So, yes, count me in. I'll try to do my best to play and write within the 'requested' time-frame.

EDIT:
Oh, I just realise that my current RTW-BI installation might not be up-to-date... I play ....errrr... what do I play? Hmmm, better check, but I can't remember having installed patch 1.6. I have installed player1's bugfixer and professorspatula's Unlock All Factions and Horde mod. Are these two no-gos? Just RTW-BI, patch 1.6, no mod, modlets or bugfixers?
Perhaps I should reinstall RTW completely anyway, as I'd like to try EB too....

[econ21]

Great to see some quick interest here (maybe the Throne room is escaping its wintery period since VI).

From the responses so far, I propose the following order of play:

1. Mount Suribachi
2. TinCow
3. Tricky_Lady
4. Dutch_guy
5. The Emperor (TBC)
6. Simon Appleton

We can switch around to fit people's real life commitments as required.

Let's keep things open for more players and suggestions for a few more days, then we can confirm the groundrules and Mount can start on Monday or whenever suits him.

BTW: In my reply to him, I missed one of TinCow's proposals - no retraining. I guess the idea would be to stop depleted veteran units miraculously regrowing new veterans and also impose some logistical constraints on conquest. I confess I like it, maybe with the proviso that you can merge units together and retrain full strength units to get the full benefit of better armour and weapons (e.g. from Rome). I suspect if we are conquering ERE, it might be very easy to keep retraining and so maintain a killer army as we conquer because the ERE cities will often have the necessary troop building infrastructure. The no retraining rule would bring the game closer to the RTR/EB/MedMod geographic restrictions on unit recruitment.

PS: TrickyLady, I think bugfixer will not cause any problems but I am not sure about the professor's mods. A reinstall might not be a bad idea - the EB beta is definitely worth tasting as it is amazingly ambitious. But, at least on my rig, it crashed a bit too much for it to be much fun playing long term.

[TinCow]

BTW: In my reply to him, I missed one of TinCow's proposals - no retraining. I guess the idea would be to stop depleted veteran units miraculously regrowing new veterans and also impose some logistical constraints on conquest. I confess I like it, maybe with the proviso that you can merge units together and retrain full strength units to get the full benefit of better armour and weapons (e.g. from Rome). I suspect if we are conquering ERE, it might be very easy to keep retraining and so maintain a killer army as we conquer because the ERE cities will often have the necessary troop building infrastructure. The no retraining rule would bring the game closer to the RTR/EB/MedMod geographic restrictions on unit recruitment.

Yeah, the general idea would be to make battle losses significant. With retraining we all know we can lose 75% of our forces and still have a formidable army in one turn. I think exceptions to this would be allowed of course. Like you said, full strength and general units could retrain to gain armor/weapon bonuses. I also think we should allow retraining at any time for First Cohorts. I'm fond of giving these things unique names for my legions and it would be hard to keep the 'named' legions around if I couldn't replenish that unit. That wouldn't be that unbalancing though since few cities would have a barracks highly developed enough to retrain them anyway. Maybe allow retraining of ships as well, since naval combat is such a pain as it is.

[Mount Suribachi]

I guess the idea would be to stop depleted veteran units miraculously regrowing new veterans.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought experience was tracked on an individual soldier level - the experience on the unit icon is an average across the whole unit. I'm certain this was the case in MTW and STW (thinks: swordsman event), have they changed it for RTW?

So when you retrain a unit to re-stock the numbers, the new recruits will only have the valour/experience that their training centre buildings and/or commander provide, no?

BTW I have no problem with any of these rules, but before I start, can we have a little crib sheet with all the rules on them - just the rules and game details. With all the explanations and stuff above, it becomes hard to keep track of them all, thx.

[econ21]

Yes, they changed the re-training in RTW from that in MTW/STW for some reason. In RTW, if you retrained a unit, it retains its experience (chevrons). I don't know how that squares with experience tracked at the level of the individual soldier - maybe the new soldiers are assigned individual vet status equal to the unit average?

OK, I'll make a short crib list of houserules in a couple of days time when the dust has settled.

[TinCow]

Yes, experience is weird. It IS tracked individually, however when you retrain a unit, the new men all receive the average (displayed chevrons) of the remaining men. This means that if you have a unit that has been depleted to 1 man, but that man has three golds, when you retrain the unit the entire unit will have three golds. Ironically, this makes retraining better than combining veterans since combining has them retain their individual experience, even if lower than average.