End Game Malaise, what to do?

[OverKnight]

I'm about 100 turns into a Milan campaign H/VH and I've officially won. The Mongols are bouncing around the Baghdad, Mosul and Edessa axis sacking and killing the occasional Turk but not coming toward my territories in the Levant.

A part of me wants to see the Panzer-phants and the New World, but right now the game is a drag. It's devolved into agent management and stomping on the smaller powers left in Europe. My Empire is large and unwieldy.

Any tips on curing the late game blues and making the end game interesting? Or should I just start over and fight a defensive campaign on a smaller scale?

[Shahed]

Do this, it worked for me:

1. Create 8-12 Diplomats
2. Send your diplomats to every faction.
3. Before opening negotiations, open console using the tilde key `
4. Type "add_money 40000" and repeat that till you have 250000 FL (or more).
5. Donate this 250,000 FL to every faction.
6. For factions that are dying, give them more, check the graphs and give them more accordingly.
7. Keep only basic number of agents, 1 spy per army, 1 spy per city etc.
8. Go defensive and build up your economy and empire, and deploy powerful armies at your borders so the AI does'nt suicide attack you with 1 unit vs 20 in a city.
9. Give the AI about 15 turns or so, but by turn 3 after you've completed this you'll see the world start to change.

I found that simply by giving the AI money it gets much better off and starts producing something useful. Although this is not really a solution, but it makes the game much more fun late game. Oh if you do it try and balance the donations so that everyone gets them at the same time, except the underdogs who should get them 4-5 turns earlier.

For the micromanagement, have a look for the empire management thread I started (don't have link handy), you might get some pointers there.

Edit: Here you go:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...ghlight=empire

Also maybe this:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...ghlight=empire

Lemme know if that helps.

What I do is I have a turn cycle which goes like this:

1. Manage Navy.
2. Manage Army.
3. Manage training.
4. Manage building.
5. Manage doplomats/princesses, merchants, priests, spies, assassins... in that order.
6. Hit end turn.

If you look in the link I first posted, usually step 3 and 4 I can skip 5 out of 6 turns because my ques are always full, and I only refill them in "batches" of regions. e.g all England gets done once every 5 turns and then I leave it, all France or Normandy etc once every 6 turns etc. Cutting micromanagement is essential to later game.

Salute !

[Shahed]

And.. if you're using something like the BigMap mod (gives many more regions) and the turns are taking really long, you can ALT + TAB and watch stuff like this:

www.dateyourgame.com

or.. you tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGuUbWspc7c

Lots of vids to watch as turns change.
I also have a notepad handy where I just write stuff down, future glorious plans for the empire ! I've also got about 3-4 pages of improvements, mods, changes I want to make. Keeps busy in between turns.

[Durallan]

if you decide to keep going after turn 200, things seems to get easier, right now things are rather relaxed with the 7 or so factions left, mainly in alliances a couple are still warring but its interesting, most of the cities I owned first now have nothing left to upgrade, and turns don't take the half an hour that they did when there were still plenty of factions about declaring wars and the Timurids were around every corner.

[RickooClan]

What I do is I have a turn cycle which goes like this:

1. Manage Navy.
2. Manage Army.
3. Manage training.
4. Manage building.
5. Manage doplomats/princesses, merchants, priests, spies, assassins... in that order.
6. Hit end turn.

I have a similar approach on this except:

1. Manage diplomats/princesses
2. Manage wars, if any
3. Manage Navy
4. Manage Army
5. Manage Training
6. Manage building
7. Manage merchants, priests, spies, assassins

Diplomatic activities go first because it might adjust my strategic approach on neighbour factions, and hence managing the army accordingly or such.

[Shahed]

Rickoo, which mod are you using ?

[RickooClan]

Rickoo, which mod are you using ?

Was using carls problem fix on 1.01 and now playing 1.02 with a bit modding by myself.

[Matty]

Good idea. I'm in the 'almost dominant' phase as the Moors with 250.000 in the bank and 30-40000 coming in every turn. I'm at war with most everyone and they're sending diplomats requesting peace in exchange for insane amounts of money. As they're on their knees, I'm going to give it to them and see whether they use it to grow some hard core units.

[Shahed]

Thanks. I figured, because of the lack of diplomacy in vanilla, you had to be using a mod. I just tried UltimateAI, and I think for this mod I'll change my sequence as well, diplomacy seems to work with this mod.

Matty, yeah, do that, you can't use the money anyway. Just keep 30K and at end of everyturn give away any excess. It's artificial but it does help the AI. Also more than 30K and your characters start getting corrupt eventually. 250K in the bank = most corrupt empire in the history of corruption.

[dismal]

A part of me wants to see the Panzer-phants and the New World, but right now the game is a drag. It's devolved into agent management and stomping on the smaller powers left in Europe. My Empire is large and unwieldy.

You certainly don't need to be micromanaging agents. Don't even bother with them. You can get through a turn pretty quickly just by focusing on a few things you want to do. Queue up a bunch of buildings every so often. Leave the rest of your empire alone.

I usually hit a point where I decide to finish off the game. I stop bothering with rebels, agents, building, etc. and just crank up armies in the areas where I plan to get the last few provinces.

[Skott]

I've given as much as 100,000 fl to factions that were losing a war against another faction I didnt want to win. It does certainly change things. I havent tried giving alot of money to every faction in the game. That might be interesting to do especially in the beginning. Might make factions harder to fight against thus making it more challenging. I might try that sometime and see what it does. An easier way would be to mod the starting factions treasury though I suppose. I assume that can be done anyway?

[Shahed]

Yeah it can be, I don't know where but I know what you have to do. Change King's Purse. I'm sure it only takes 2 minutes. If anyone knows please post up !

[RickooClan]

Actually there are only a few things to do for managing the agents.

For me, i will station a few diplomats at factions i often communicated with. Cardinals in hot heresy spot, priest in each city. Spies at critical spots or army and thats it. (I am not really fond of merchants)

If i receive any message they are killed/dead, i just replace them.

[RickooClan]

Yeah it can be, I don't know where but I know what you have to do. Change King's Purse. I'm sure it only takes 2 minutes. If anyone knows please post up !

But i think it only works in the beginning of the game? [ie, have to restart a new game to make it into effect]

Not sure if this could work on save game. If it does then it will be excellent!!

[HoreTore]

Doubling(or more) the value of the kings purse for the AI certainly makes things more interesting. The AI will use GOOD troops, and quite a few of them too. The effect is noticeable throughout the game, not just the beginning.

To modify it, look for the kings_purse entries in the descr_strat file. That file is only read when you start a new campaign.

[Shahed]

Cool. Thanks HoreTore.

[OverKnight]

Wow, thanks for the input everyone.

I too have a developed routine for each game turn. It's just that the management to battle ratio gets worse the farther in you get.

The complicating factor is I'm currently in the The King of the Romans PBM so I can't monkey around with my game too much. I'm not a confident modder so I approach it with caution.

Here's a link if you're interested in taking a look, it's a history of the PBM I assembled with links to battle reports and such:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=82780

Here's a FAQ for the PBM:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showp...18&postcount=1

If I start a new campaign, I might consider changing the King's Purse for AI factions. It seems a simple and elegant solution to making the game a bit more challenging.

I think it's time I go Mongol hunting in my Milan campaign, wave some bait around and see what happens. . .

[FactionHeir]

Modding a running game is fun actually. For when you need to change over for the PBM save, just move the modded files out of your data folder and move em back in when you're done.
Easiest way to remember is if you got a file that can only be used for one campaign but will crash the game if you try to load another save. descr_sm_resources is one such file (the 1.2 one anyway)

[TevashSzat]

I have a proposal for a modder to do. Do what was done in Barbarian Invasion and script it so that it your empire has become large enough and your emperor has low enough authority, whole sections of your empire will rebel and secede from your state.

Wouldn't it be great to have this massive 35 province empire and getting board and then suddenly have 10 provinces secede forcing you to fight through what is probably highly developed land against elite armies in order to regain your territories?

In a real life perspective, this makes sense too since as empires get larger, dissent will increase too and particularly when a new king has been crowned, dissenters may decide to secede and strike out on their own.

I personally, know nothing of modding, but it would be pretty awesome if someone can incorporate this into their mod.

[Agent Smith]

I have a proposal for a modder to do. Do what was done in Barbarian Invasion and script it so that it your empire has become large enough and your emperor has low enough authority, whole sections of your empire will rebel and secede from your state.

Wouldn't it be great to have this massive 35 province empire and getting board and then suddenly have 10 provinces secede forcing you to fight through what is probably highly developed land against elite armies in order to regain your territories?

In a real life perspective, this makes sense too since as empires get larger, dissent will increase too and particularly when a new king has been crowned, dissenters may decide to secede and strike out on their own.

I personally, know nothing of modding, but it would be pretty awesome if someone can incorporate this into their mod.

They did that in MTW, too, but it gave you the option to side with the rebels or the standing king. It was quite fun!

[Northnovas]

As for trying different mods I found that Med Manager useful. I have three different mods incorporated to the main game. You pick the root files from the game you want in the mod your using.
It gets a little wonky sometime setting up the icons but it works. I have never had CTD in any of the games I have played and when there is a mod that looks interesting it can be added without deleting other mods. It just keeps files organized and you just click on what mod you want to play.
It also allows you to edit within a save game dates, unit scale, difficulty. For not grasping the whole modding concept and loosing current games this is a nice aid.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=68328

[Shahed]

One of the cool features of MedManager is that you can edit your savegame, you can change the current date.