Replenishment

[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.

[Bramborough]

I think there's some truth to that. I had an idle notion during my last Rome campaign to build an army or two solely out of the aux barracks, without a single legionary unit. Didn't get around to it, but I suspect they would have done quite decently. Perhaps sustaining more casualties, but still able to handily beat all but the very strongest of AI armies.

A separate consideration...what about units which are common to both barracks lines? A specific example is Pontus' hoplite, which is trained with the Level I field, before one specializes into either the hoplite or auxiliary line. Early it may be, but this unit forms the infantry core of any Pontic army for a long time. Only with Level IV barracks (at the tail-end of the military tech tree and carrying a high squalor cost) does one finally upgrade to the faction-specific (I think?) Bronze Shield Pikemen. So is the hoplite "auxiliary" or not...and which replenishment mechanic would apply to it? Re-reading socio's description, I suppose it would be "standard" and would replenish as do the true auxiliaries and support troops. If that's the case, then this "two-tier" replenishment mechanic would affect legionary-focused Rome much harder than it would generic-hoplite-based Pontus (although perhaps balanced by the fact that Rome does have a pretty wide range of capable aux-barracks troops).

I still think it's a pretty neat idea, and any suggestions to improve the current replenishment mechanic are welcome. It might be harder than first appears, however, to balance such that it affects all the playable factions to a similar degree. And also to avoid unintentional consequences like creating a clear disincentive to recruit faction-unique troops. Would be pretty goofy if the game encouraged Rome to conquer the world without using its iconic legionaries.

[fallen851]

I actually prefer the RTW I system (at least in EB) greatly to the RTW II when it comes to replenishment and recruitment in general.

In EB, let's say I invade Gaul as Rome. If I want to replenish my armies without using mercenaries and merging existing units, reinforcements need to march over or around the Alps and join up with my forces. This offered a lot of strategy to the game. The AI often (likely by chance instead of a grand scheme) would cut off incoming reinforcements, and armies deep in enemy territory would literally be trapped. Overtime, their composition would become closer and closer to that of my enemy, as mercenaries were increasingly used from the region I was invading.

[Jarmam]

Im happy Im not the only one who's frustrated with how fast replenishment is. I loved it in Shogun 2 (up to the point where all your researches and keeps could spit out 60+ samurai replenishment per unit per turn), and now that Im playing with it in Rome 2 Im just annoyed at it. Now granted each turn is a year so it "technically makes sense" to replenish much faster, but this cannot come at such a hit to gameplay in my opinion.

The main issue I've come to find with the quickness of replenishment is how infinitely little I care about chasing routers and cleaning up after a battle. In Shogun 2 I would really go to lengths to try to maximise casualties by my main army and my light cavalry post-combat, because it mattered a lot, even with Ashigaru in the early-mid stages of the campaign. You could even speculate in culling down units to 20 some guys, then letting them run to bleed the enemy of upkeep costs, and this works both ways, as sometimes I'd be inclined to merge units to avoid the upkeep on my 30 Yari Samurai that would take 10 turns to replenish out. None of this exists in Rome 2. I will follow the same strong unit with my cav until its completely wiped out, then just move on with the campaign. And I have yet to merge any units ever. And that is a problem.

You could separate tiers of units and force some types to return to their spawning grounds to replenish, but this would be frustrating and also the Hoplite example of Pontus is excellent in illustrating the difficulty in where to set the "differentiator" between auxilliary and elite.
I much more like the other idea of "binding" replenishment to the raxes that produce said units. I will now demonstrate why in excruciating detail. For example:
If I have 10 Levy Pike units and 2 Silver Shields as Seleucid, and they all go from 160 to 40 guys in a fight, the levies should naturally respawn faster (as they do... a bit) no matter where. Say they got... 30 guys per turn as a base value. For example's sake I'll set the Silver Shield base to 10.
Now if a low level rax exists in the province Im stationed in it would boost the replenishment of the units it can produce (aka the levies). If the neighbouring province has said rax, it should boost it by less, and so forth proportional to distance. Say a.... 30 base boost (=100% the base rate), then 20 if neighbouring, 16 if further away, 14 if further etc (these shouldn't stack for gameplay reasons). With the Silver Shields this should then work with the t4 rax, giving maybe a 25 or so boost per turn (=250% the base rate), growing downwards in the same way; signifying that drafting levies without a rax is easier than elite troops, but once the infrastructure is in place it would boost the elite troops' replenish at a higher % of base replenish. That way you might want to speculate in getting higher levels of rax in far-away provinces just to be replenishment-centres, it would make me inclined to keep my elite units in reserve with more constraint when Im out and about and far away from Antioch, and it would make using entire stacks of Praetorian Guards less (MUCH less) effective, due to either low replenishment or a need for high squalor-raxes in the far side of the empire. Note that they wouldnt be rendered worthless, since they do replenish anywhere - but much slower than your cannonfo... main utility units. So this might even encourage diversity in army composition just from the replenishment system alone.

I just realized I really like this idea... where can I hire a modder?

[Sociopsychoactive]

Hmmm. Jarmans Idea has real merit, and is basically the same as Shogun2 with generic troops replenishing like ashigaru and anything else like samarai did. This is probably the simplest and most realistic fix. I'm not so sure the larger boost for higher tier units is even necessary, as the rates is S2 worked well without needing adjustment, but the adition of a 'neibouring barracks' calculator works well for me.

Back to my idea for a moment tho. The line is quite simple to me. For rome it's anything thats comes out of manipular barracks or any higher tier version of it. For all other factions the same is true in some way, Parthia has the noble line of recruitment buildings (elite) and the infantry line (Auxiliary). Pontus and all other greeks have the hoplite barracks chain (elite) and the peroikos line (auxiliary).

For barbarians it's a little less clear, but still works. The blacksmith line (Elite, includes balistae and chosen sword band ect) and the bronze-smith line (Auxiliary, includes sword band and spear band, but not chosen). Yes, this means that the balistae is considered elite for the barbarian factions only, but that works for me too. Siege engineers arn't exactly well known in the depths of germania.

So how about we merge the idea's? The units are still divided into elite and not, but instead of having to retrain them you have a major nerf to replenishment rate of elits unless the recruitment building is close? THe Auxiliaries and none-elites retrain at closer to current rates, meaning the armies can keep on trucking if they need to, but without the solid core uber-healing like they do now, and gradually retraining while in the arse end of the empire, but pumping troops out quickly while in the core provinces.