Research on campaign mechanics - post results here

[Beefeater]

One thing I can confirm is that family members in a city with an explorer's guild are likely to pick up the 'explorer' ancillary, who gives +15% movement.

[Temujin]

I also have a number of Explorer Guilds. They seem to be entirely random, though they seem to only be offered to coastal cities.

I have an explorer's guild in Baghdad, playing as the Egyptians.

[Whacker]

OK, I don't recall seeing anything documented to this effect, so I have a question regarding priest mechanics. Playing as England, my priests wandering around my lands seem to gain piety very slowly, which is to be expected from other's posts and findings. My question is, which I have not been able to determine, is do the priests need to be inside cities to gain piety and preach, or should they be parked outside the cities on the maps to preach and gain piety? Or does it matter?

[PickledGecko]

Preists gain piety quickest in areas of low Catholicism. Put them in and around Turkey, Egypt, Jerusalem (high Islam) or Russia (high Orthadox) to gain piety the quickest

[Shahed]

Excellent thread. Definetly my new hangout.

All my questions keep in mind I'm playing Turks and will be for the near future (till I finish at least one campaign).

Guilds: They seem to mostly pop in cities. So that means castles become redundant except for some specialist guilds ?

Can I post questions in this thread btw ?

[Barny Bangs]

Guilds, Guilds, Guilds

I suspect that guild offers depend on your style of playing. I only got offered two thieves guilds, while Assassin's guilds get offered every second turn. My first Assassin's guild in London got upgraded to a HQ after I turned London into an assassin asembly line.

I also got four Templar's guilds, they were offered to me after one of my characters finished a crusade and got the Templar retinue.

Merchants guilds seem to pop up occasionaly, I got one Merchants HQ in Rennes, the others I declined.

For Theologician Guilds, I got offered my first after my prince got a 8-point piety ranking (also after a crusade), which got level ups after only some turns.

Woodsmen guilds were offered to me after I built my first level-4 Archery building, yet I did not recieve possibilites for upgrades yet.

Swordsmith, oh Swordsmith. The guild that made my blood boil. Never got offered one, yet three castles I took (from three different factions) all got swordsmith guilds. I got offered to upgrade the Swordsmith guil in Palermo after I mass-produced some dozen units there, but I am not sure if that was just some coinicidence.

Edit: I forgot: Also got one Explorers Guild, but never got upgraded (for 80 turns)

[Quillan]

Priests can gain piety in a few different ways. Periodically they'll get retinue members that add piety, like monks, choir boys (that just seems wrong somehow), deacons and such. However, most of the incremental increases I've seen come from two trait lines: the anti-heresy trait and the increased faith trait. The first comes from reducing the amount of heresy in a province, so you can park a couple of priests in a province with heresy for a while, and they'll go through a 1 or 2 point piety increase over time. The other only seems to happen when you put the priests in a province you control, but your faith is well in the minority. Over time, as your faith surpasses the previous faith, they get piety increases because they see their preaching make a difference. I've gotten the "enemy of heresy" traits by putting my priests in foreign lands, but I've never gotten the "growing faith" traits if I didn't own the province. I've dumped priests into Turkish territory, cranked my faith up to 80% from 0%, and not gotten the traits. But I have seen it at lower differentials of faith percentages when I owned the province.

[Whacker]

Priests can gain piety in a few different ways. Periodically they'll get retinue members that add piety, like monks, choir boys (that just seems wrong somehow), deacons and such. However, most of the incremental increases I've seen come from two trait lines: the anti-heresy trait and the increased faith trait. The first comes from reducing the amount of heresy in a province, so you can park a couple of priests in a province with heresy for a while, and they'll go through a 1 or 2 point piety increase over time. The other only seems to happen when you put the priests in a province you control, but your faith is well in the minority. Over time, as your faith surpasses the previous faith, they get piety increases because they see their preaching make a difference. I've gotten the "enemy of heresy" traits by putting my priests in foreign lands, but I've never gotten the "growing faith" traits if I didn't own the province. I've dumped priests into Turkish territory, cranked my faith up to 80% from 0%, and not gotten the traits. But I have seen it at lower differentials of faith percentages when I owned the province.

Thanks Quillian, that is helpful info. I just realized while I was reading your post, I think we'll be able to find out when the 1st patch/unpacker is out what the triggers are for the retinues and traits. Hopefully that'll give us a good clue as to what causes them and how to effectively gain them.

Cheers!

[Barny Bangs]

As for priests and the retinue they gain:

My priests always started out with a rather meek piety rating. After building a tier-2 Theologicans Guild in Jerusalem and a cathedral all the priests I build in Jerusalem automatically start with at least a level-5 piety, in most cases even higher (at least one base point + two points from retinue + Bishop trait + guild bonus). On a global scale my priests receive "special" retinue more often (royal seminarian, witch hunter, crusader knight, deacon) in addition to their "normal" retinue (choir boy, monk, etc.).

So mostly my priests from Jerusalme start out as bishops and have from a young age on great piety levels (The pope, one of my guys, is currently 33 years old and had level 10 piety).

IMO theologicans Guild combined with cathedral is far more important for piety levels than cathedral or huge cathedral on its own. The priests I churned out in Edinburgh (huge cathedral) were not that great before I build the Theos guild.

[FactionHeir]

As for priestly piety, there seem to be a few factors:

Putting a priest in a region with heresy AND another religion than yours lets the priest get the purger of heresy line of traits fairly quickly.
If there is only your religion and heresy, it goes quite a bit slower.
Putting a priest in a region with your religion and another one (ie. 70% catholic 30% muslim), will often result in no special traits (except orthodoxy/violence/purity) being assigned at all. If you are lucky you get the growing faith trait.

Putting a catholic in muslim regions without heresy or paganism often results in no gain at all.

Having multiple priests in a region will train them all sometimes and sometimes only trains a few of those. I.e. I had 2 priests in the Algiers region. After 10 turns, one of them had 6 piety, the other one still had 1 piety and only got the "orthodox" trait. Stark difference really.

Bottomline: Put priests in regions with heresy and another religion than yours. They'll train quickest there, especially if its the catholic/heretic combo together with either pagan or orthodox.


On guilds:
You are offered only 1 guild a turn and only can have 1 guild per city/castle. What kind of guild you get is actually fairly random IMO although others may claim otherwise. I most often get offered thieves guild followed by merchants guild. I have never been offered masons, woodsmen and theologian's guild chapters. Knight orders usually seem to appear after crusades, but I have heard conflicting reports about that as well.
I.e. i was producing priests every turn in every city in the holy land and none of them got theologian's guild. Or I was mass producing knights in my european castles and often didn't get offered anything there at all while i keep getting offers from hospitallers in my border castles and cities and newly conquered territories. Oh, and I only ever got a swordsman guild and explorer's guild once on my own (without capturing it from the AI), even though I mass produce dismounted feudals too and have all map info already early game.

[KARTLOS]

question - is it possible to have both templar and hospitaler guilds in your faction. in my experience i only ever have one or the other - i would like to know if this is always the case?

[FactionHeir]

From my experience, yes, you can only have one or the other.

[Quillan]

According to the export_descr_guilds.txt file, you can only have one of the Hospitalar and Templar chapter houses. You can have one of those two, plus a Teutonic or a Santiago depending upon your faction.

;------------------------------------------
Guild templars_chapter_house
building guild_templars_chapter_house
exclude st_johns_chapter_house
levels 100 250 500

;------------------------------------------
Guild st_johns_chapter_house
building guild_st_johns_chapter_house
exclude templars_chapter_house
levels 100 250 500

;------------------------------------------
Guild teutonic_knights_chapter_house
building guild_teutonic_knights_chapter_house
levels 100 250 500

;------------------------------------------
Guild knights_of_santiago_chapter_house
building guild_knights_of_santiago_chapter_house
levels 100 250 500

[Whacker]

According to the export_descr_guilds.txt file, you can only have one of the Hospitalar and Templar chapter houses. You can have one of those two, plus a Teutonic or a Santiago depending upon your faction.

Excellent discussion folks. Question on the mechanics I haven't been able to discern so far from this and a few other threads. Is it a random event that governs if one gets the Hospitalar or Templar houses? The reason I ask is because several others have been offered both in their english campaigns. Have we determined what causes this yet? Reason I ask is if it's possible to "lean" towards the Hospitalars, I'd prefer them over the Templars...

Cheers!

[Nestor]

Did anyone receive more than one offer for guilds in a single turn? I didn't and I have the feeling that I get offered again and again the same ones (for spies and merchants). If this is the case it becomes very difficult to receive an offer for some of the rare guilds that need more work to reach their threshold, even if you always turn down the ones you don't want.

Can someone confirm or provide evidence for the opposite? It could be the reason why we don't get some of the guilds.

[Jagger]

Sounds like if I want to dominate the college of bishops, I need to use assassins to destroy large religious buildings such as cathedrals in the land of my enemies. Then my enemies won't be able to produce high level priests straight out of the factory.

[Bongaroo]

In my French Campaign I was able to dominate the College of Bishops by building Cathedrals. It was late in the campaign and I hadn't done much to keep up relations with the Pope, I was at 2 or 3 on the Pope-o-scope. I built Cathedrals like mad and seemingly with each cathedral I had a priest promoted to cardinal. Maybe not 1 for 1, but almost. My best guess is that as my relations improved with each cathedral, I was more likely to have priests promoted, but I can't be sure.

[Shahed]

TRADE FORTS

I just tried the merchant fort i.e

-Build fort using a general on a resource.
-Put in a few merchants.

Each merchant in the fort will now be trading the resource.

I have tried this with 3 merchants in a fort just outside Constantinople, trading silk. All three are n00bish merchants but are making about a 1000Florins/Turn all together in that fort.

Don't know if this is intended but it works anyway.

*sees a mad rush to build forts in Timbuktu*

Discussion thread is here:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=75540

[Bongaroo]

Can enemy merchants not seize the assets of a merchant in a fort? Seems like an exploit if not.

[Shahed]

Discussion is in this thread:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=75540

[sapi]

Can enemy merchants not seize the assets of a merchant in a fort? Seems like an exploit if not.

No, they can't, so i'd class it as an exploit, but the jury's still out on it (see above)

[ArchieGremlin]

I did a bit of digging in order to work out what effect the various trade buildings have on the value of a settlement's trade routes and I thought you might like to see the results.

The short answer is that anything in the building browser with the property "Increase in tradeable goods" will increase your trade income by 10% or 20% of the base value.

It's hard to tell how much extra money you'll make when you're choosing which building to construct next. However, the increase in trade value will affect all land trade and sea export routes in the settlement with the new building. It will also increase the value goods imported from this settlement by other settlements.

For example, if Bruge exports cloth to London then upgrading Bruge's Market to a Fairground will increase the value of London's sea import route from Bruge. (But not the other import routes in London.)

I you want to work out a settlement's total trade bonus then just add the bonuses for each building together. For example, if London has a Shipwright, a Great Market and a Merchant's Guild then the trade bonus is 90%. (30% + 50% + 10%) This means that the value of each trade route is 190% of the basic value. (i.e. 1.9 x base value) The bonuses are all listed in the table below.

Note that the bonuses aren't multiplied together. If you add Merchant's Wharf to London then the value of each trade route won't increase by 20%; it'll increase by a factor of 210/190. (about 10.5%)

A good strategy for maximising your income is build ports first and then the other improvements starting with the cheapest.

I don't know what determines the base value for each trade route.

I haven't looked at the effect of roads on trade.




The buildings listed in this table are the ones that are shown in the game with the property "Increase in tradeable goods". (This matches the "trade_base_income_bonus bonus" property in export_descr_buildings.txt.)

* I've checked the behaviour of most buildings but the ones I couldn't check are marked with a *.

# The "Sea Trade" buildings have the property "Trade fleets available x". As far as I can tell this has no effect on the value of trade. Does anyone know if this property does anything at all? (It maps to the "trade_fleet" property in export_descr_buildings.txt.)

enjoy,
Archie

[ArchieGremlin]

Nuts. I've made a mess of the table and I don't seem to have the right to fix it. Please can a kind admin fix the table for me or allow me to edit it myself.

cheers,
Archie

[sapi]

Nice work on the research there mate!

It seems to me, looking at that, that the best things to build are ports (because they produce naval units, are relitively cheap and also increase trade) and printing presses/houses (for the happiness bonus)

The problem that you will have had with the table is that spaces are automatically condensed.

You can fix this by using another character (such as -) to space the columns or hosting the spreadsheet offsite (at a location such as google spreadsheets)

[d3nn16]

Hi,
I'm playing with Venice and the pope was a pain in the ass (at least as long as he was in Italy before I moved him to Caffa ).
I don't know if this was talked about in other posts or if you all know that already and it's worthless to post it.
How many of you sent an assassin kill an agent after saving the game then reloading it because he failed ?
Personally I tried this as soon as I could get assassins and I remarked that the succeeding of an assassin depends on the movements and actions your other agents and generals did before.

So a little test you can do in your campaign right now is choose an assassin and give him a target (you saved the game before) and see if he fails. In this case reload the game and move only one other agent or general and retest with the same target : a very likely result is that your assassin succeeds (this is how I managed to have 13 cardinals, get rid of the pope each time he's nasty and move him to Caffa, kill all Mongolian Generals and transform them in rebels [in most cases when many generals die in a turn the faction is destroyed], and become master of the world ).

Still, if your assassin has 5% chances most of the time he will fail (at least I don't insist much when the assassin has low skill level). When I killed the Mongolian Generals my assassins had 9/10 skill level and 16-20% chances (I had to move other generals and captains around the map and even fight some battles before they succeeded in the same turn).

The trick works with other agents too : priests when burning heretics, merchants (I once succeeded in buying an egyptian merchant with 5% chances), it must work with princess too but I didn't try it.

The first agents I move around a map at the start of a turn are my assassins (sometimes they all get killed except one that succeeds after what the others succeed as well).

Some of you already think it's not their style of gameplay, and prefer more hard games. I agree, and I'll try it in my next campaign.

[Darkarbiter]

I seem to remember if your priests are garrisoned while your building or upgrading churches they tend to gain piety through traits or retinue. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

[sapi]

I'll test it later this arvo - i've got a bunch of priests in jerusalem with nothing better to do.

[TevashSzat]

I believe dark arbiter is correct from reading the triggers for the traits somewhere on the forum