The Will of the Senate - out of character thread III

[Dooz]

The upcoming EB release (0.8) will be for 1.5, which means you can use the BI .exe for that too, so you don't have to go back to 1.2 . Not only that, it's going to include a million and one new features, units, everything (not to mention factions). Man oh man, I can NOT wait.

[Mount Suribachi]

[1]OK, I did one - it took a lot longer than I thought. It's the Almohad campaign that Mount and I rate as one of the most - perhaps the most - memorable PBMs we've participated in. It's probably too long to read through, but it might give you an idea of the epic potential of some MTW campaigns. Reading through some old MTW PBMs, I noticed my casualty rates from battles were vastly higher than in RTW PBMs (and it's not because I've become a better player).

Damn straight. I had a quick skim through that thread and lots of old memories came flooding back. It really gives your "WTH??!!??! reaction when I handed you the savegame and then your gradual realisation of the incessant warfare my reign had seen. And who can forget those Umarian Mushrooms?

And you're right about the lack of casualties in RTW. I've often pointed out the way the battles in RTW lack the epic feel of STW & MTW. Really the only time I've recaptured that feeling is the WRE PBEM when I was battling the Vandal & Gothic hordes at the same time.

I would recommend BI though, it adds new features, the campaign is good & more challenging. And as time goes on I think more and more RTW mods will have their "final" version on the BI frame. RTW mods are now starting to reach full maturity, it will be a couple of years before MTW2 mods are at a really playable level (and I'm still waiting for NTW2!)

[Dooz]

Off I go to GameStop for BI.

[econ21]

So... let's do a test. econ21, play 5 turns on our current save with 1.6 BI, then send it to DDW who will play it for 5 turns with normal RTW, and then he should send it to me and I will play 5 turns with 1.6 BI. If the save game is still good for everyone at the end of that, I think we can safely adopt the policy. You don't have to fight every battle, but make sure you fight at least one or two to check for in-battle bugs. You can lose, just do a quick 5 turns and pass it on.

OK, I played through about 5 years. Not very seriously, although I did fight 3 battles (getting Numerius Aureolus killed at Debeltos!). DDW, the test game is test001.zip if you want to play out 5 years.

[Dooz]

Are there any mods you guys would recommend for the BI campaign that make it a bit more tolerable than the vanilla version? Somewhat more realistic hopefully, new skins, anything? I could have sworn I saw a mod like this a while ago, but now I need it and can't find it.

*edit*
I just stumbled across a post by econ recommending Goth's All Factions mod, which is what I was looking for hopefully.

[econ21]

Going off-topic, but here's a short advertisement for Goth's BI mod:

As WRE I just tried a sally from a North African town against some besieging Berbers. This is my main army of Africa. It's a little battle worn, but 5 Roman infantry and 3 archers - that should be able to beat Berbers, surely? I form up, Roman infantry at the front, backed by archers. My main deficiency is cavalry, but heck - I play the Will of the Senate PBM, so that's no problem, right?

After an inconclusive shoot out with the Berber missile cavalry, the battle proper opens with some Berber lancers charging some limitanei holding the centre:



They withdraw, to be followed by a charge of Berber camels against the same unfortunates:



While I am distracted by the contest in the centre, some berber cavalry - including mercenary Roman cavalry - moves round my right flank and then slams into my comitantenses. I bring my only cavalry, my general, in to charge their rear:



But it is not enough. My lone general can't cope with all the berber cavalry. The infantry on my left flank are lost on a wild goose chase after mercenary crossbowmen. My centre collapses when Berber reinforcements come and my general is killed. Things fall apart:



Now here's a loss sheet to rival the old MTW battles:



The road to Carthage is now clear for the Berbers. Yikes, reload time.

[Mount Suribachi]

Wow, and those graphics look AMAZING!!!

[Death the destroyer of worlds]

OK, I played through about 5 years. Not very seriously, although I did fight 3 battles (getting Numerius Aureolus killed at Debeltos!). DDW, the test game is test001.zip if you want to play out 5 years.

Errr...do you mean RTW 1.5 or our current setup ?

[Dooz]

Got BI, installed Goth's mod, everything is excellent .

[econ21]

Errr...do you mean RTW 1.5 or our current setup ?

Just treat it like a regular Will of the Senate savegame and see if you can play on with out any compatibility problems. (You might also check out the wierd Carthaginian behaviour and think how you think you/Mount should handle it should it happen in the real thing. Just sortying did not unfreeze them).

...except I can't turn off the green arrow markers. I've changed it in the preferences but they're still there. I can't play with those damn things, any ideas what I'm doing wrong, how to turn them off?

There are two preferences files - you need to edit the one in the BI sub-folder.

[TinCow]

Errr...do you mean RTW 1.5 or our current setup ?

Play a quick 5 turns with a battle or two with 1.5 and then post the save again. We're trying to see if it causes any problems switching between versions. If there are no complications, I would recommend that everyone who has BI play their terms and battles with the BI engine. The Massilia Ford battles wouldn't have been so easy if the entire Gallic force decided to swim!

[Death the destroyer of worlds]

Right, right.
Well, just got back from a party so that will be done tomorrow...probably when my head stops hurting

[GeneralHankerchief]

Sorry everyone, I'm going out of town again and won't be back until Wednesday. If Marcellus gets into a scrap, I give my permission for somebody else to handle it.

This will be the last time you need to worry about me doing this.

[Dooz]

Or we could auto-resolve for some added drama . That's personally what I'd prefer and I think is part of the rules, unless GH and others are against it.

[Glaucus]

Hate to say it, but I also have to leave town for a few days, expected back thursday. The Consul may take care of anything comes up in the daily life of Quintus Libo.

[GeneralHankerchief]

Or we could auto-resolve for some added drama . That's personally what I'd prefer and I think is part of the rules, unless GH and others are against it.

Heh.

While I wouldn't mind fighting for my political life, it would probably be better for the Consul's sanity if someone else took over.

[Mount Suribachi]

Just a quick note to say I've do the BI thingy and it seems to be working at first glance. I'm gunna play for an hour or so, fight a battle and check the savegame will work, but won't have time to see if there is any noticable improvement in the gameplay before I go to work. Finish at 10pm, might get in an hour or so of my reign when I come home

[econ21]

It's an interesting question what we do about Lower House being temporarily away. Wherever possible, I would like to resolve things without either autoresolving (obviously!) or someone else fighting the battle, which is strictly speaking against the rules.

Where you can give advance notice, I think the best thing might be to post that you temporarily are joining the Upper House (and post again when you return to the Lower House). The Consul(s) can then act accordingly. They may be able to keep you out of the fighting and this might simulate a pause in the campaign etc. If it requires a temporary withdrawal of our men (or just their general) or even allows the AI to make a gain, that's fine. Wars should have some set-backs.

And of course, remember, Lower House generals have 2 days grace before the battle defaults to autoresolve - so if you were to return on Thursday, you could pick up a savegame sent on Wednesday.

The shame of Publius etc was due to him being in the Lower House. If an Upper House general gets whipped in an autoresolve, there should be no shame or adverse comment in character. I guess the autoresolve simulates what happens on bad days, when we are unlucky, caught on-the-hop etc. My thinking originally was that Upper House generals are either governors, second generals or couriers behind the lines. They should not be given frontline commands.

Things are tight on the Illyrian and Gallic fronts, in terms of Lower House generals, but with Wonderland and Glaucus becoming tribunes, the constraint should gradually ease.

EDIT: So, unless we hear otherwise, let's say Glaucus is in the Upper House until further notice; and GeneralHankerchief is in the Upper House until Wednesday.

[Death the destroyer of worlds]

Unless someone else gets himself killed
I won't be able to test untill late tonight. Busy busy busy. Bear with me here.

[Tricky Lady]

Going off-topic, but here's a short advertisement for Goth's BI mod:

As WRE I just tried a sally from a North African town against some besieging Berbers. This is my main army of Africa. It's a little battle worn, but 5 Roman infantry and 3 archers - that should be able to beat Berbers, surely? I form up, Roman infantry at the front, backed by archers. My main deficiency is cavalry, but heck - I play the Will of the Senate PBM, so that's no problem, right?

[...]

The road to Carthage is now clear for the Berbers. Yikes, reload time.

Hey, thanks for posting this battle result! I too played (or better: tried to play) a campaign with the Goth mod, but I got completely annihilated in my Franks game. I immediately horded, burned a few Roman cities to the ground, and then sieged three cities in present-day West and Central France. All sieges ended in the same turn. So far so good. I think my biggest mistake was to be a bit indecisive towards the big Vandal horde who started camping in my kingdom after ravaging northern Italy (and Rome!!). In the beginning of the game I settled for an alliance with them, so I thought they were just passing through my lands to settle in Spain. Nope! After 5 or 6 turns of them going to the south and then back to the north, they finally besieged my capital. At that time I had managed to organise one big army (which is strange as I usually try to build at least to almost full-size stacks, but in this campaign this was financially just not possible). I managed to beat the horde (at great cost) but just when I was about to launch the final attack on the last VAndal stack, the Romans came back with a vengeance, sieging my poorly defended town at the Atlantic coast with a huge army led by a good general. And that was the end of it. I beat the Vandals, couldn't retrain my army (no money left) and was pretty defenseless against the WRE. Sniff.

So it feels pretty good to see that you too suffer defeats in this mod . I haven't touched the Goth mod or any other mod after this defeat. Only played non-modded RTW as Romans. The shame!




PS. Reload time!?

[Tricky Lady]

I'm a bit lost now. What's with all this BI or RTW exe stuff?

My RTR copy is installed in a copy of my RTW folder, where I previously installed BI too. So in my RTR folder there's a folder "bi" too.
Does this mean that I am 'playing' RTR with the BI mod? Or am I just playing the mod with the RTW 1.5 exe?
Thing is that I can load the savegames without any troubles.

Sorry for these stupid questions!

[econ21]

Does this mean that I am 'playing' RTR with the BI mod? Or am I just playing the mod with the RTW 1.5 exe?

No, you are still playing with the RTW 1.5 exe. But you can easily play with the BI exe if make a shortcut to the BI.exe in your copied folder and add the "-mod" switch to the command line. In Windows XP, if I right click on my shortcut and select properties, I see the following entry for the "target" line:

"C:\Program Files\Activision\RTR-PEMN\RomeTW-BI.exe" -show_err -mod:

PS. Reload time!?

Yes, I am weak.

I would give the mods another chance; they are not that much more difficult - RTR and Goth mod in particular. I like the slower combat, the great looking skins and the historical details like the Roman leadership traits we have in this PBM. (I went back to EB the other day, now that they claim to have fixed the CTDs, but found I really missed the legio ancillaries.)

[Tricky Lady]

On the mods: last month I was playing the Terrae Expugnandae mod (or however it is spelled), which has some nice new skins, and some new factions too. Played the Seleucid empire and almost immediately started a war with the Ptolemies. All was going well, but just when I wanted to make the final push into the main Egyptian lands, Armenia started attacking me, conquering my weakly defended northern cities. Stress! So now I have to take my only standing army to the north and hope that I can build a more or less strong army in the south too. I also noticed my losses are bigger than in vanilla RTW, probably also due to the units having a much higher morale (didn't check this into detail though).
I even lost one of my (promising) generals when he charged a unit of Eastern spearmen. In vanilla they would have broken at the sight of the charging horses only, in TE they absorped the charge (and lost 15-20% of their men), then they fought back. I should have managed my general a bit more carefully and not confuse the strength of cavalry in vanilla to its strength in TE...

It's just that I'm so spoiled with the easiness of vanilla RTW. I really gotta 'learn' this game again, which is cool tbh. I just have to find the time to fight long battles (as until now I usually always played a quick session of RTW, where a huge battle would take no longer then 20 minutes). With these mods a battle of 20 minutes is a quick battle.

[Death the destroyer of worlds]

After you've got your setup running I advise playing a training campaing on H/VH. You'll probably get some serious defeats at first, but when you start managing draws in battles, VH/M will be a walk in the park. I advise reading the battles advice in the Senate Library thread for some good advice about coping with RTR:PE.

[Mount Suribachi]

Damn, you have to make a lot of notes before you can start playing as Consul.......

[Death the destroyer of worlds]

Good luck

TinCow, savegame is test2.zip.
Interesting developments. By the way, in my RTW 1.5 Carthage took all the islands and is now invading Sicily. So much for the naval invasions not working well under 1.5. Thrace offered peace (???) for 10,000 and Luvavum. I played two battles and won one battle and lost another. Checked the screens and clicked everyhing. No problems. I also saw very aggressive use of fleets by Egypt. It's a mess as I just let them overrun me and see what they'd do.

RTR:PE 1.5 should be perfectly compatible with BI 1.6 and RTW 1.5. The savegames should be interchangeable. The (minor) changes occur when actually playing, but these are not stored in the save as far as I know.

[econ21]

YAKOBU is retiring down from this PBM (and the Org in general):

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=68170

It's sad to see him go as he was a PBM veteran.

[Braden]

I don’t know, you go away for a weekend and see what happens?!?!

The great YAKUBO, gone?!......hmmmm, will have to see about visiting him across the road….all very sad that.
I miss the vote (my bad…sorry)
There’s all this talk of using ANOTHER mod
AND…..AND…..we can now use the correct Avatars!

Progress…pah! Fear change!

….Just so everyone knows, I will be away on Holiday yet again from Wednesday through to the following Wednesday, and as most of it will be spent in a field in Derby wearing armour and fighting the unending hordes of good…..I will be out of contact an unable to play/attend to this game.

Normal service will resume after this period though.

BTW – looks like I’m going to have to source a different graphic card for my PC, all attempts to get the 6200 chipset to work correctly have failed. After this coming weekend I will restore the system to be running off my old card, install all the mods, do some test battles and officially move to the lower house.

[TinCow]

Played through 5 turns on the test save. No problems encountered, so I think we're good to go. Carthage landed 4 full stacks in Sicily, but continued to sit there and do nothing. I even left Lilybaeum totally empty for 3 turns and they didn't take it. I don't know what that means, especially after they invaded and took all 3 island cities, but it is weird. Still, 4 full stacks plus attacks on the islands would certainly cause some drama in the Senate. Of course, we could always just accept they offer they gave me for peace: 52k gold plus all cities in Sicily except Syracuse.

[econ21]

I saw similar inactivity with the Carthaginian invasion of Melite - it is very weird. I have not generally noticed the same inane AI behaviour in other games I have played recently. Except I do remember AI Julii being stalled in many vanilla RTW games because it tried naval stuff to do with Corsica etc and never really progressed into Gaul. It reminds me a bit of Captain Corelli's Mandolin - maybe the islands are so pleasant, the invaders go native.

I think our response in-game should be vigorous enough that inexplicable AI inactivity is not too big a feature of the campaign, although I confess I did try in vain to persuade the Consuls to stall the Carthaginians long enough to get Aureolus there.