Replenishment

[Sp4]

Take into account though, that each turn is a year. 2 turns is 2 years waiting for replacements, which is more than feasible. A man can walk a long way in a year...

I find this entire thing a little stupid to be honest. If you look at what certain people and stuff can do over the course of a year, it's a miracle this game lasts as long as it does but we can make up for that with out own little RP ^^ I rather like replenishment to work like it did in M2 or R1, where you have to march your army somewhere where it can train its elite units and then click a button to say hey! I want replacements. Kind of like repairing ships in S2 worked, I liked that.

But for that to work, people have to stop dying from every little thing, like... bad weather, hot weather, cold weather, sandy weather, snowy weather, swampy regions, food shortages, certain agent actions would have to be less significant for the whole thing to work though I am not sure. By the time we got auto replenishment, I was all holy shit! Yes! No more retraining units after every battle cause my OCD hates me walking into a battle with anything less than 2600 people!
Now I had auto replenishment for a while and seen what it is capable of in Rome 2 (Replenish an entire army of elite units that lost half its strength in a battle somewhere at the arse end of the world) I kind of want it gone again... or toned down.
I also find the amount of people that die in these campaigns a little over the top. I guess it comes down to scale and stuff and all that but I guess in reality if an army suffered a loss of 75% of its manpower, it wasn't gonna sit down in a nice little village and come back a year later, happy and eager and above all, just as experienced as it was when it ended the battle.

Maybe experience of units should play a much much greater role and auto replenishment should make units lose experience. It's only logical I guess. Maybe there's a point to merging units too then.

[Alcibiade]

Maybe experience of units should play a much much greater role and auto replenishment should make units lose experience. It's only logical I guess. Maybe there's a point to merging units too then.

I totally agree with that. After 40 turns and with the help of agent training my legions will never walk into a force half as experimented as they are !

[nearchos]

I rather like replenishment to work like it did in M2 or R1, where you have to march your army somewhere where it can train its elite units and then click a button to say hey! I want replacements. Kind of like repairing ships in S2 worked, I liked that.

I like that also.
I still remember epic battles in R1 where i was leading battered armies with big proportion of mercenaries, whatever was available, just to fill the gaps, at the spot to withstand the next assault.

[Sociopsychoactive]

I like that also.
I still remember epic battles in R1 where i was leading battered armies with big proportion of mercenaries, whatever was available, just to fill the gaps, at the spot to withstand the next assault.

Now, not that Historical accuracy is the point here, but that is more accurate by far. By most accounts Legions in the field did not replace lost soldiers at all, they would usually re-form or entirely replace the legion at the end of it's term of service, or disband it after the campaign for early republic pre-marius troops. There is little to not evidence to say the romans replaced lost legionaries. They DID however replace Auxillia, and that was half the point of the Auxillia system. These were the local troops to augment the roman soldiers, who were reguarded as the true strength of a legion. The auxiliaries would be recruited localy, trained localy and while they would accompany the legion on campaign into far and distant lands (and were usually carefully kept from being stationed in their home towns) they were troops that could be trained and replaced locally.

So hows this for a complcated suggestion?

All Legion troops (or faction focus troops like horse archers for parthia, phalanx for greece ect) cannot be replenished anywhere, and must be re-trained in a building suitable to recruit them, ala R1.

All Auxillia or standard troops (like almost all factions have two barracks chains this could be tied to this happily) and mercenaries replenish according to infrastructure and other effects, such as food surplus, with a relatively small nerf being applied if no troop-producing buildings are nearby.

Yes, this is complicated, but in my minds eye it works. The replaced troops for the core ones are experience rated the same as fresh recruits would be (with suitable bonuses from military buff buildings ect) so the orerall experience of the unit would usually drop, but only significantly if it took significant losses. Also, as is VERY historically accurate and still true to this day, the soldiers that die off all the time are the fresh new ones, leaving you a core of very experienced troops that only changes drastically when you suffer extream losses. For rome, campaigning far from home would be more troublesome, and invading Germania would be a very tough decision for any commander, as the cold kills veterans and rookies alike, whereas battle kills rookies far more than veterans. Auxillia and common troops would replenish at a decent rate still, meaning you can keep your army going happily for a long campaign with under-stength legionaries without it being a campaign killer every time you lose more than ten men.

Thoughts?

[AntiDamascus]

Funny enough, I think naval units replenish too slow.

[phred]

I think that's a reasonable solution. The problem would be that the AI would probably be crippled by it.
If you could mod the game so that it only happened to the human player, I think it would work.

I just started a new campaign as Rome the other day. My current plan is to train cohorts only in Rome - all other provinces will have an auxiliary barracks.
I'll make a half stack in Rome and then move to another province with an auxiliary barracks and fill out the stack. It wont do anything about replenishment but I think it'll make the campaign more interesting.

[Bramborough]

So hows this for a complcated suggestion?

All Legion troops (or faction focus troops like horse archers for parthia, phalanx for greece ect) cannot be replenished anywhere, and must be re-trained in a building suitable to recruit them, ala R1.

All Auxillia or standard troops (like almost all factions have two barracks chains this could be tied to this happily) and mercenaries replenish according to infrastructure and other effects, such as food surplus, with a relatively small nerf being applied if no troop-producing buildings are nearby.

I think that's a pretty darn good idea. I see no reason why it shouldn't be workable for CA to do something like this.

As far as phred's justified concern that the AI wouldn't be able to handle it very well, I also see no good reason why such a system could not be made to pertain only to human players and not to the AI. I know any feature whereby the AI "plays by different rules" should be done carefully...but such differences do exist.

In the current situation where 75% of our complaints about the game are some variation of "Beef up the AI and make it harder on me!", a more stringent "player-only" replenishment characteristic sounds not only acceptable but desirable. (The other 25% of complaints are some form of "Make me care more about my generals!").

[Sp4]

So hows this for a complcated suggestion?

All Legion troops (or faction focus troops like horse archers for parthia, phalanx for greece ect) cannot be replenished anywhere, and must be re-trained in a building suitable to recruit them, ala R1.

All Auxillia or standard troops (like almost all factions have two barracks chains this could be tied to this happily) and mercenaries replenish according to infrastructure and other effects, such as food surplus, with a relatively small nerf being applied if no troop-producing buildings are nearby.

With the exception for... Rome... they have 2 buildings, one of melee and horses and one for javelins, slingers, archers and mounted ranged units (slightly different for barbarians). You end up with auto replenishing all the ranged stuff and having to send back all the melee stuff. That either makes factions like Rome pretty op or you just run around with ranged stuff all the time and everywhere. I guess a stack of peltasts and skirmishing cav can still be quite hard to deal with.

[Sociopsychoactive]

With the exception for... Rome... they have 2 buildings, one of melee and horses and one for javelins, slingers, archers and mounted ranged units (slightly different for barbarians). You end up with auto replenishing all the ranged stuff and having to send back all the melee stuff. That either makes factions like Rome pretty op or you just run around with ranged stuff all the time and everywhere. I guess a stack of peltasts and skirmishing cav can still be quite hard to deal with.

While true, this isn't actually how the Auxillia barracks works in reality, just in the Italia province. The first horse unit you get (Equite) is indeed recruited from the Manipluar barracsk and later upgrades, as is the Uber-cavarly of the late game. I don't see this as a problem having to retrain them back at base. The main mid-game cavalry is Auxillia cavalry and it's variants, which is trained from the other one and would replenish just fine. While almost all ranged and support troops are auxillia barracks recruits, so are low-level melee. Social Hastati as the Italia example, (and the later versions of the same) gaelic and celtic warriors, Iberian swordsmen, the various forms of hillmen. All of these are light infantry, yes, but all are melee specific and I havn't included the many and varied spearmen.

Yes, your army would end up leaning heavily on what are traditionally 'support' troops after long journeys and many battles, but thats kinda the point isn't it? I thik this would actually penalise rome more than other factions as they relied so heavily on the heavy infantry. The other change it makes is encouraging the human player to build Auxillia barracks in lots of different places and use all the wierd and wonderful region specific troops you can therefore recruit. Has anyone actually managed to recruit roman auxilliary war elephants yet? Not just hire them as mercs? I had to work very hard to get cretan archers as my standard roman ranged unit, and then ferry them back to italy to meet my main armies and distribute.

My worry is more for the other factions than rome. Cavalry aside (most have a seperate specific cavarly recruitment building) they tend to recruit from two buildings, thats fine, but the unit availablitiy for the celtic nations is more than a little random. Uner the current method, everyone just picks a 3 or 4 settlement province and builds all the stuff there which works, but under this method you would have siege units and high end melle not auto replenishing. I'm not sure whether that works well yet.

[Sp4]

My point is really that Rome's supporting units are vastly superior to just about any other faction's supporting units.