Merchant ,Priest and Princess in EBII

**kambiz** · 08-31-2007, 10:43

In M2TW ,besides Spy ,Diplomat and Assassin we have also Priests/Imams ,Princess and Merchants ! Considering the timeline of EB II I'm wondering what use they would have in EBII?

Well for merchants ,Of course they can continue their current role ,But princess and Religious characters I have no idea !!!

**Kampfkrebs** · 08-31-2007, 12:51

As long as religions will be implented, there will be also a use for religion related charakters, imo.

**Morte66** · 08-31-2007, 13:57

I've been playing M2TW lately and I really hope EB2 doesn't use pricesses, merchants and priests. Here is my reasoning...

The Total War series does some things better than others, when jusged by the standards of PC games in general (i.e. the things I could play instead).

The Good Stuff: Warfare.
RTW (especially EB) does the battlefield better than anything else I've played, and strategic maneuvring is OK.

The OK Stuff: Management.
Running your economy and recruitment is OK, seeing threats coming and deploying to be ready is interesting, but plenty of games do this at least as well.

The Ugly: Agents.
Spies who open gates (ridiculous). Diplomatic agreements that last about a nanosecond. Hitting end of turn and thinking "damn, did I move that diplomat another few inches across the steppe or did I forget". The absolute lack of a "show me all the agents that haven't moved this turn" button, which has been standard in other games for 15 years.

Now M2TW added added merchants who raise trivial amounts of money, and princesses whose diplomacy sticks about as well as the diplomats', and priests who need to be moved and monitored so you can watch a few numbers go up and down. They took the least interesting part of RTW and made it into a larger part of the game -- they made it bigger when they should have made it better. And it drags the average down.

Do not repeat this mistake EB2, EB team. Keep it lean and mean, concentrate on the good stuff. More is not automatically better.

**Foot** · 08-31-2007, 14:27

Well, now that I've got Kingdoms there is a little thing that I want to work on which will basically use merchants (though not as they are now), so they'll have to be in. Princesses are quite interesting, and with a modifiable diplomacy engine (to some extent) I'm hoping that these will add a little something something to the game. For priests, we will probably not use if the case is true that any new implemented religions don't get access to their own priests.

Foot

**MarcusAureliusAntoninus** · 08-31-2007, 20:03

I can agree with you on many things, Morte66. The new agents in M2 seem like a total waste. Merchants either have to be superpowered or dead. The AI will hunt down your merchants, even if they don't want the resource, and buy them out. So you either have to put tons of effort into merchants or none.

And the religious guys piss me off. The AI will cluster them around your town, and you have no way of getting rid of them. Why can't my priests denounce their Imams? Instead I have to send an assassin, who takes for ever to get them all, and then my faction leader is an evil man, because he killed them. I hate that trait system of making my leader evil for using assassins. Assassins are necessary to the game system. I've had my faction leader lose traits when I had an assassin assassinate an enemy assassin. Protecting your people from a killer makes you evil?

**Son of Perun** · 09-01-2007, 21:33

I also think that EB does not need those characters. Playing MTW2 i have never used princesses because they can not really change anything. Priests are not suitable for EB period and merchants are useless because of things explained by MarcusAureliusAntonius.

Originally Posted by Foot

Princesses are quite interesting, and with a modifiable diplomacy engine (to some extent) I'm hoping that these will add a little something something to the game.

I doubt that. In history there were many attempts to make diplomatic relations better this way, but often it was futile (Seleucids and Ptolemaids unsuccesfully tried to make more firm peace by marriages).

**Bootsiuv** · 09-01-2007, 22:59

Well, it wasn't always done for firm peace....it was often done because the new husband might fall in line for the throne somehow, and then that empire would pass to the Seleukids (or Ptolemaios, depending on who the girl was....I know I've heard it before, but I can't remember if it was a Seleukid princess or a Ptolemaioi Princess).

**abou** · 09-02-2007, 03:44

Originally Posted by Son of Perun

I doubt that. In history there were many attempts to make diplomatic relations better this way, but often it was futile (Seleucids and Ptolemaids unsuccesfully tried to make more firm peace by marriages).

Unsuccessful for the most part, but they still did it. It seems to have worked better for the Seleukids and Antigonids. Also, marriage between tribes was common and the Carthaginians, Numidians, and Iberians are strong examples that tended to be successful.