Has anyone ever conquered the entire map?

[Constantius I]

Its taken me about 20 turns just to get all of southern Italy and one city in Sicily, I think its almost impossible to conquer the entire map.

[Foot]

Well thats three provinces in 20 turns. there are 199 provinces, so a simple calculation will give us 1327 turns (rounded up). The campaign runs from 272BC-14AD which is 286 years or 1144 turns. At the rate you are going, then no the whole map is unconquerable. To conquer the whole map you would need to conquer 1 province every 5 turns (rounded down), which is doable. However the Sahara desert is unconquerable unless you cheat.

Foot

[The Wandering Scholar]

Woah thats a lot of agressive turs

[TWFanatic]

If you've ever conquered the entire map, my advice to you is to get a job (and a life while you're at it). On EB, conquering the whole map would take me years.

While I appluad your math skills Foot, I think you don't take into account that the more you conquer, the easier it becomes to start conquering faster.

[Foot]

And? I was calculating the minimum number of turns you can spend on per province, not a actual representation of a how a game turns out.

Foot

[The Persian Cataphract]

It is possible to defeat the system given that you have enough money and knowledge on how to exploit the flaws in the diplomacy. Of course, the financial matter is more than often a matter of cheating, and I managed to re-create the Achaemenid borders with Pahlava within five turns. You could probably within five years of intelligent use of diplomats conquer the bulk of the Eurasian mass of land. Give yourself fourty turns and you'll no doubt have it all. This, of course is a huge minus, because there is no challenge to it.

[Torvus]

I conquered everything but the Sahara with Bactria. of course, i was cheating... "Zeus" liked to give me money...

[Ibn-Khaldun]

I conquered everything but the Sahara with Bactria. of course, i was cheating... "Zeus" liked to give me money...

"Zeus" gave you the money and "Athena" was building your cities and "Ares" won your battles????

[cmacq]

Its taken me about 20 turns just to get all of southern Italy and one city in Sicily, I think its almost impossible to conquer the entire map.

If you play your cards right, you shave some serious time off that 20 turns.

[d'Arthez]

I once had a Roman campaign (v.081a ) in which I conquered about 100 settlements by 242. I skipped Polybians as I immediate qualified for Marians. Did not use any cheat, but exploited many of the battlemap AI weaknesses.

However, the further you expand the bigger issues like culture penalties and distance to capital penalties will be; you need an army of great governors / conquerers to take everything east from the Levant. And that is even when you are willing to exterminate populations of all towns you conquer.

[Constantius I]

Well Ive gotten two more provinces in the last 3 turns!!! I guess I'm on pace ;)


Sicily is mine, I em going to get sardina, and corsica than take massina. Then we shall see what happens. Having the entire map isn't going to happen for me though haahah.


Still only have one 15 stack army, though all those troops are battle hardened veterans.

[fahrenheit]

[QUOTE=Constantius I]

It always starts out slow, but as long as you keep conquering and making money soon you can afford more armies and will be able to conquer more settlements quicker.

Just hang in and eventually you will dominate the world.

[TWFanatic]

And? I was calculating the minimum number of turns you can spend on per province, not a actual representation of a how a game turns out.

Foot

Precisely. We need a new formula to take into account the culminative effect of expansion speed.

[Constantius I]

Well thats three provinces in 20 turns. there are 199 provinces, so a simple calculation will give us 1327 turns (rounded up). The campaign runs from 272BC-14AD which is 286 years or 1144 turns. At the rate you are going, then no the whole map is unconquerable. To conquer the whole map you would need to conquer 1 province every 5 turns (rounded down), which is doable. However the Sahara desert is unconquerable unless you cheat.

Foot

Why is the Sahara unconquerable?

[Admetos]

Because it's a wasteland with no point in owning. That plus the fact that the script places special buildings there to track your progress.

[Constantius I]

Because it's a wasteland with no point in owning. That plus the fact that the script places special buildings there to track your progress.

Do I lose troops if I venture into there?

[NeoSpartan]

culture penalties and distance from capital penalties will cause to have HUGE garrisons in too many of ur towns, plus having to fight rebellions every other turn.

and don't get me started on squallor....

[Landwalker]

Precisely. We need a new formula to take into account the culminative effect of expansion speed.

Happily.

As the Romani, you begin play with 5 provinces. There are a total of 199, and you have 1144 turns in which to achieve this. The solution is to find out what your rate of expansion relative to your existing size you must average per turn in order to conquer the entire map in the allotted time. This accounts for the "snowball effect" of expansion, where greater territory means greater resources means greater ability to prosecute wars. It only considers rate of expansion, however, not the many variables (like financing and order) necessary to maintain that rate.

Warning: The following contains math.

We begin with the equation s*(r^t) = F, where s is your starting number of provinces, r is your expansion rate relative to existing size, t is the number of turns of play, and F is your final number of provinces. Note that the ^ symbol indicates "to the nth power" (so that 2^3 would be "two cubed", or "two to the third power", or 2*2*2 = 8.

For example, if we began play with three provinces, and wished to achieve a total of 40 after 25 turns, we would have the equation of 3*(r^25) = 40.

Since the Romani begin with 5 provinces and we are allowing all 1144 turns to conquer 199 provinces, the equation becomes: 5*(r^1144) = 199. We want to solve for r, so that we know the necessary rate of expansion. So, here we go:

'  5 * r^1144 = 199
       r^1144 = 199/5 = 39.8
         1144 = log[base r](39.8)
         1144 = log(39.8) / log(r)
1144 * log(r) = log (39.8)
       log(r) = log(39.8) / 1144
       log(r) = 0.0013984992
    10^log(r) = 10^0.0013984992
            r = 1.003225354 

This means that each turn, your empire will need to be 1.003225354 times larger than it was on the turn before in order to reach 199 provinces in 1144 turns from a starting point of five provinces. This translates into a roughly 0.323% growth per turn.

If you would like to extrapolate this process to other conditions--shorter times, different number of starting provinces, or a different target number of ending provinces (particularly handy if you want to get it right down to the victory conditions themselves), here is the "end" formula:

r = 10^{[log(F/s)]/t}

So, going back to the original example of 3 starting provinces, 25 turns, and 40 end provinces, you're looking at an r value of about 1.1092, or a brique 11% growth per turn.

Got all that?

Cheers.

Editted what to make with the pretty alignment of equal signs.

Edit 2: It's worth pointing out that once you have "r", you can easily determine both A) How many provinces you need to conquer this turn, C*r, where C is your current number of provinces, and, if C*r is significantly less than 1, B) how many turns it should take you to conquer your next province, t = log[(C+1)/C] / log(r).

Edit 3: Mixed up a division and a multiplication in the "root formula" for r. This has been corrected, as well as its impact on the determination of how many turns it should take you to conquer your next province.

[sanitarium]

Well Ive gotten two more provinces in the last 3 turns!!! I guess I'm on pace ;)


Sicily is mine, I em going to get sardina, and corsica than take massina. Then we shall see what happens. Having the entire map isn't going to happen for me though haahah.


Still only have one 15 stack army, though all those troops are battle hardened veterans.

If/when you get the Marian Reforms, you'll find that taking over the world is extremely easy. You'll never have to go far to bring up fresh legionnaires, since you can train them pretty much everywhere. When you get rolling with the post-Marian cohorts, there isn't much that can slow you down.

[Alexandros Maximus]

what exactly ARE the "special buildings" in Terhazza?

[anubis88]

what exactly ARE the "special buildings" in Terhazza?

AFAIK they are some nonesensical building markers, nothing specific

[Alexandros Maximus]

nonsensical, as in, "retardedly out of place"? i.e. farm thingies in the middle of the desert... Little stonehenges, things like that?

BTW...I noticed that there are salt mines around terhazza...and they dont seem to occur anywhere else. was this done to add a degree of historical accuracy? AFAIK sub saharan africa was big on the salt trade.

[Ayce]

They probably have coded names that designate various markers in various files.

[General Appo]

If you really want to know, teleport an army there and take it. Then try to destroy and markers you see, and hope that the game doesn´t crash or the Baktrians starts recruiting free Goidils in India.

[PenguinLobster]

After reading that post I'm fairly certain Landwalker is Hari Seldon. *wonders how many people get the joke*

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

The scripts in RTW cannot 'remember' anything. Every time you exit the game, start it up again, and activate the script, the script starts as though it has never started before. The game remembers some things like turn number, but many of the EB features that require a series of events are not remembered. Though, buildings can be placed when you accomplish a goal and the script will check for those in the case you exit and come back, so you don't have to redo the goal. This is what the buildings in the desert are...

[NeoSpartan]

wow so thats how that works.. thanks MAA

[V.T. Marvin]

After reading that post I'm fairly certain Landwalker is Hari Seldon. *wonders how many people get the joke*

Well, I did not got it.
That is why we have the good old trusty Wikipedia!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Hari Seldon, in his capacity as mathematics professor at Streeling University on Trantor, developed psychohistory, allowing him to predict the future in probabilistic terms...

[Conradus]

After reading that post I'm fairly certain Landwalker is Hari Seldon. *wonders how many people get the joke*

Got it, though in my opinion Landwalker should get a life

[Landwalker]

Got it, though in my opinion Landwalker should get a life

That's how desperate I am to put off my work--I do calculus problems on computer game forums.

It's a testament to my high school math teacher that I still remember how to do all that four years later, because I certainly haven't done much math in college...

Cheers.