Gross Disparity in Ability

[Clegane]

I'd like to start by saying that I absolutely love this mod. It elevates an already excellent game to a state of near-perfection that never ceases to amaze me in its depth, complexity, and challenge. A million thanks to everyone involved in its creation and implementation.

That said, I have a question/gripe that is bothering me. I'm playing my first EB campaign as the Sweboz and no matter how I seem to 'invest' in their nurture, every one of my generals winds up being a drooling idiot. They all seem to marry the most idiotic of women, to boot, insuring that the shallow gene pool is perpetually filled with urine. I can occasionally develop a fellow who is good at managing a city, but I cannot seem to build a field commander for the life of me.

In contrast (and the primary point of my gripe) are the dozens of 'rebel' faction villages all around me. I send spies in to peek at them and I see that they are grossly in debt, terribly underdeveloped in terms of cultural buildings, and generally poor-run.

And yet every single time (not exaggerating here, it is literally every time) I invade one, their leader takes the field with more command bars than Julius Caesar. I examine these generals and their traits with my spy (who is, consequently, maxed out in his espionage ability, so I know it isn't just his lack of reporting skill) and, even with conditional modifiers, their traits don't give them any more than like 1 or 2 points in Command. But as soon as the battle screen comes up, they 'magically' acquire half a dozen more command points. How and why is this happening?

Even if every single one of these backwoods barbarians somehow had the martial prowess of Sun Tzu and T'sao T'sao combined (which the battle screen claims they all do), why doesn't that show up when I spy on them? Its like the game suddenly ratchets up their command ability just because I had the audacity to invade them.

This wouldn't be so bad, mind you, if the generals I was able to field (several of whom score at least 4 or 5 out of 6 in terms of 'positive characteristic skills) could manage to gain so much as a single point in Command, but absolutely none of them aside from my starting king can do that. And I've been through no less than 12 generals thus far. Every one of which aside from my primary starter made it from their teens to their mid-fourties without having enough field skill to lace their own boots.

[Foot]

How many times do we have to discuss this.

Ignore command stars for ai generals. We purposefully boost them to help in their difficulty against you. For your own generals, its not the command stars that count its the morale boosting traits that tell you how good a general is. Check your traits and nurture your general's best abilities. Command stars suck compared to morale boosting traits. Command stars only effect units in a small radius around your general, morale boosting traits affect all units under your generals command.

Foot

[Clegane]

Thanks.

Sorry if this was an oft-asked topic. I couldn't find anything about it in the FAQ, though I may simply have not been looking hard enough. I also tried the search engine a few times, but the topic was very broad and I was having some trouble narrowing down what words were most appropriate to secure an accurate search.

So...again, sorry, I hadn't realized this topic was a dead horse. I'll refine my forum-searching skills before I post again.

[Foot]

Thats alright. It should probably be in the FAQ, but I don't think Marcus has updated recently.

Foot

[140]

Just on this note I don't like this decision myself.

If command stars are so useless as it's explained every time then why did the team spent great effort to stop players acquiring them ???! And at the mean time gave AI a boat load of them ???! What a waste ?! To increase difficulty why not just give them +10 morale trait or whatever. I wouldn't mind.

Every AI general has 10 starts is simply UGLY. This is the single most annoying thing of this mod for me. When Pyrrhus starts the game with like 5 stars and a random general has 10 stars it simply isn't right period.

Anyone else agree with me ? It's like the whole screen is drawn with green trees, no desert no snows etc. Then you tell me when the fight begin they look like trees but the units actually fight like in deserts. The xxx desert bonus will apply. This wouldn't work would it ??? The game is a visual game I'm not calculating maths equations here. I don't want to see trees but have to think underline the desert bonus is applying. The beautiful command stars is there to see but it's useless ?! And I don't want to go compute all those +1 morale, -3 morale and stuff who are actually making the difference.

[Callicles]

@ 140

You are right. I remember how Polybius described the situation before Cannae: Hannibal was outnumbered, but he could look out over the field into the Roman camp and see only 3 stars floating next to Varro, the Roman General, while he saw 8 stars rising high into the sky next to him. When he saw this disparity in command stars, he knew victory was certain. Lesser generals had to worry about morale, the availability of water, the weather, the terrain, and the individual personal strengths and weaknesses of his commanders and captains. But not Hannibal Barca; he need only look to stars to know that victory was assured.

Of course, when he wasn't feeling up to the challenge, he had his aides compute the various simple math problems required to keep his army marching. 2+2+1-1-1+2 was too much for Hannibal Barca. Besides he could not take the time to be troubled with such simple arithmetic. Instead, he just wanted to fight the battle and be done with it. After all, he had to read the second act of Hamlet for 9th grade english in the morning. He did not have time for such things like logistics, strategy, and realism. Perhaps tomorrow afternoon, once he has finished his milk and cookies, he'll reinstall Vanilla... those arcanii were cool, and the mummy-like egyptians were far more interesting than the Ptolemaioi. Besides, who ever heard of the Getai, anyway?