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Generally it seems the administration system seems to do exactly what it is supposed to do: punishing overextending and blitzing the campaign map. It is absolutely possible to counter the rampant corruption by slowing down the speed of expansion and building up your current settlements (higher developed settlement have more buildings with +law).
To give a different example: My last Armenia campaign ended with me taking the 50th settlement somewhere around turn 130. I had an income of +90k per turn, almost all cities were Huge Cities, some of them brought in up to 10k per turn with 0 corruption and my armies were full of really expensive units (Azat Knights, Cataphract Archers, etc.). Also I never exterminated any settlements.
But I'm happy to hear it's still possible to rampage your way over the map. I do not want to eliminate that sort of playstyle with this mod, rather make it a lot more challenging as it's a complete faceroll in vanilla. Seems like it's working as intended.
I think I could at most support a single 20 unit army with the starting Germania settlements + surrounding rebel towns. And with that I would have struggled to defend against Gaul, Julii, Dacia Scythia and Britains, but again this is also made more difficult due to the long distance between german settlements. Because I was running into money troubles I actually considered the following strategy and also implemented it to some extent:
After fights merge units so that you have units with very few men and low upkeep costs and put them in relatively safe settlements. Over time you gather many of those and then when required you can disband newer troops and go "dormant" and save up money and focus on developing your settlements. Once you want to expand again or if you need to defend yourself you can just retrain those units and have a full stack army within 2 turns.
I am not sure and you probably know better: I felt like with eastern factions (Parthia) I had enough buildings with a law bonus whereas this was not the case with Germania. Maybe they could get some law bonus in a temple? And I actually kept a few romans or greek temples cause they were stronger than what I could get as Germania. I would also find it cool if it was easier to get weapon upgrades for the barbarian factions to make their units a bit stronger especially after marian reforms.
Also I have to say I really like the feature of having to capture paved roads or dockyards as barbarians to be able to build them. That way you kind of preserve historical realism without sacrificing gameplay!
One more thing I noticed regarding harbours: Often when I checked whether upgrades to harbour
would increase my income they didnt. I have almost never experienced this in Vanilla. Also dockyards would improve trade income but in the same settlement the upgraded harbour would not. Dont know if that is a bug.
I agree though the starting economy for some factions (especially barbarians) is too tough. I think all total war games after Rome 1 have some sort of "King's Purse" mechanic (that's what it's called in medieval 2) and I plan on implementing something similar in the future to help boost the starting economy.
You're right with eastern factions having it a bit easier dealing with corruption as they get get the secret police buildings (carthage, numidia and egypt have them too).
Barbarian factions get the same amount of law bonuses as roman and greek factions though so they should be alright.
Also their military temples now also improve their economy with treasuries. The lv3 one can give up to +1200 denarii (on normal tax level). Obviously you need a huge city for that first. So they should be able to keep up with other factions in the late game.
I'm not sure what you mean by easier weapon upgrades for barbarians, can you elaborate on that? All of them (except britons) can upgrade at least one weapon type to gold and everything else to silver. That's quite similar to the other factions.
For the harbor thing: The normal Port buildings only give the first trade fleet and upgrades only give better ships. For the second and third trade fleet you need to build the warehouse and docklands.
But there is a max distance between settlements for them to establish a trade link via sea. Consequently there are a few settlements that will not establish a second or third trade fleet because the next available settlement is too far away. Not really a bug, more engine limitations and the vanilla map not beeing optimised for those limitations.
I was actually struggling quite a bit at the start. I immediately took all rebel settlements and then Gaul started attacking me and as I only had pretty much two half stack armies I went for them first. Secured the scythian/dacia border with a few phalanx on bridges/fords. I basically waited as long as I could to not have to fight britons and gaul at the same time and I think I took northern Italy before they attacked me and then I just destroyed several armies they sent by ship after taking samarobriva.
I dont know if you necessarily have to adjust the barbarian factions as I like the diversity of the different starts. As long as you can develop far enough which is what your mod now allows in contrast to Vanilla, I think its fine to have different starts.
Yeah, I guess it would be fine, I didnt have the money to really get all the law bonuses. What could maybe also help if one could start building the law bonus buildings one settlement level earlier.
By weapon upgrades I meant because the barbarians are so military focused it would be nice if they had easy access to upgrade their weapons. The only way to get them silver upgrades is by having huge city and building and building max market and then max weaponsmith, quite expensive for almost no other benefits but the silver upgrade. I pretty much never get that far and especially during expansion, its not really feasible to produce units back in the homeland and if I take expensive units I cant retrain them in taken settlements most of the time. But maybe this is also because of my playstyle. But I dont know, I feel like every faction should be able to reach gold upgrades in all weapon types eventually. Right now with Germania the only way would be in Rome where I still have the roman awesome temple (lvl 4) that gives a weapon upgrade. In comparison the germanian lvl 4 temple gives the same stats minus the weapon upgrades, no 20% law bonus and no public health bonus. So quite a bit weaker in comparison to roman. Maybe one could add the weapon upgrades for the barbarian factions to the Warlords holds or monliths. That way there would be also more incentive to build them.
Oh ok, I didnt realize the harbours didnt have a tradefleet bonus anymore. That explains it then.
All in all, maybe many of my issues would be resolved if I just had a slower playstyle :D I'll have to try it sometime :D
Btw, is it possible that only the public order law penalty and corruption law penalty are different regarding their maximum values?
I see your point with weapon upgrades now, but I disagree that every faction should be able to get all gold upgrades (easily). Giving each faction only a selection of gold upgrades adds flavour to them and they feel different to play. Also it would make a bunch of temples completely useless.
Currently only a Pantheon of Vulcan/Hephaestus gives access to all gold upgrades and only Scipii and Seleucids can build it - with the drawback of their other temples not being that great: Scipii have no growth temple and Seleucids no law temple. I think stuff like this is important to have unique feeling factions. Giving everyone everything is balanced yes, but also boring.
Also I am much more generous with weapon upgrades than vanilla when it feels like a particular faction should excel in a specific weapon class. Staying with Germania as an example, in vanilla they can only get bronze upgrades. I gave them silver for everything and gold weapons for every single axe-wielding unit they have as axes are kind of their thing. Other examples are Scythia got gold upgrades for missiles (because horse archers) or macedon getting gold pikemen instead of the gold missiles they have in vanilla.
The comparison with the temple in Rome is a bit lacking. This temple is a unique building, only the senate can build it and they can only build it in Rome (the three roman houses cannot build it). Yes, it's absurdly powerful and a bit broken, that is intended. I didn't think Rome was special enough in vanilla (it's one of the worst settlements in Italy), and I'd like to give some intrinsic motivation ("I want to conquer Rome because it has a super strong bonus") instead of the purely extrinsic motivation ("I want to conquer Rome because the victory conditions say I have to").
Let me give a brief summary of how corruption works: Corruption is always a percentage of your income. Your capital will always have 0% corruption, it starts at a distance of 16 and it caps out at a distance of 100 with 65%. +1 Law reduces it by 3% (consequently -1 law adds an additional 3% on top).
If you want more details I recommend this (quite old) discussion: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php/38146-Corruption/
Here is another one about taxes: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php/37831-Tax-Income
Now is it worth building something for that 3%? I'd say that depends on the situation. If the settlement is really wealthy probably yes, if it's just making a few hundred denarii probably not. Also if you expect to complete the campaign somewhere around turn 50 then it's also probably not worth it. But then there are actually very very few buildings worth building at all. I think it's fitting fore the administration system to cripple your finances if you're on a path of destruction. You are not investing anything, you are trying to stay afloat with pillaging. The vanilla game rewarding this sort of playstyle by giving you thousands of gold is a bit silly in my opinion.
Again, I think it's a valid way to play like this and you have proven it's still possible to do it.
Now back on track with corruption: If you're expecting to end the campaign somewhere around turn 150, it will be much more worth it to build stuff. How to get rich? Your capital will always have 0 corruption (and get +20% trade income through capital bonuses), so choose one that will be very rich later in the game. Also the neighbouring settlements should be potentially profitable too as those will have very low corruption values. Using your example with Londinium and Bylazora: those are miles apart so even in vanilla Londinium will be close to the corruption cap of 65%. I'd argue Bylazora is a poor capital choice, as it's not a rich settlement and the distance to it's neighbours is rather long. Set your capital somewhere in Italy or Greece instead. I only brought up Londinium as a pontentially early game money-maker for Germania, not really late game.
For example in my Armenia campaign my most profitable Settlement early on was Seleucia (lots of trade links with neighbours) but once I conquered all of the Seleucids territory I set the Capital to Antioch and never changed it. Antioch, Tarsus, Salamis, Sidon and Jerusalem then carried the whole campaign financially.
Weapon Upgrades:
I see your point especially about making each faction distinct and didnt know that germania could only get bronze I guess then your mod is already an upgrade towards my preference :)
I didnt realize that overpowered temple was just in Rome, I thought all roman factions had it, then it is fine, and i like the argument about adding intrinsic motivation.
Corruption:
Super interesting I read the forum posts, learned a lot. Btw, Bylazora as capital was just an example as it was the furthest city I have from Londinium. So far I kept it in Arretium/Rome for maximum income.
However, I think something is still going on. Because building the first 3 law benefit buildings does not decrease corruption in Londinium in my case with Bylazora as capital. What I would guess happens is that the 65% cutoff of corruption gets applied after calculating law benefits. So e.g. because of distance corruption would be 80% - 9% from buildings ==> 71% ==> 65% cuttoff gets applied. Instead of the buildings benefits getting applied after the cutoff to produce 65% - 9% ===> 56% corruption. I guess this could also be intended but it makes building law buildings on the edges of the map pretty useless. But I guess corruption is hardcoded and not accessible via modding?
For example: distance penalty 60% and administration lv 10 (-10 law) --> 65% corruption and -8 law remembered by the game. So you only see a reduction in corruption if you have +9 or more law.
You still get the public order increase for the first 8 law though, so not completely useless.
These are however edge cases and will only start to appear at the very end of a campaign and only for a few settlements.
You are right though with corruption being hardcoded. I wish it wasn't, then I could just increase the coefficient and would not have bothered with the whole administration thing. I came up with it as a workaround of the actual problem: corruption values are too low to have any noticable effect in vanilla.
Might be an oversight by Feral, they added a multiplier to the public order distance penalty that can be changed with modding but not to corruption.
Unfortunately adding different localizations is not only a lot of work, they have to be redone every time there is a bigger update. I will consider adding them when the mod is in a more finished state but it will still take quite a bit of time to get there.
- I experienced game freezes when digging enemy walls during sieges (I believe they were on Italy and Roman culture) but still, could not complete manual battle, because every time wall has crumbled, then couple seconds later game would freeze/crash and it happened at least 3 times a row in that particular siege. Definitely something I never experienced in vanilla, but maybe just bad luck. No more crashes when using siege towers/ladders.
- Julii AI needs some serious help, they are the slowest roman AI faction in vanilla and often does not expand much compared to green and blue, but I feel that with your mod they are particularly bad. In most campaings I tested they secured at most their 5 initial cities and were slowly dogpilled by Gauls/Britons/Spain. In some campaings they outright died even before Marius reforms, leaving SPQR and rest of romans to fight for their lives.
- AI seems to hang and leave massive armies in strange places even more than in vanilla. For example Julli when failed to conquer Caralis (Scipii were slightly faster) they just left their faction leader and significant army just standing there for at least 20-30 turns, while Gauls attacked them and took Segesta. They also packed their other boat with troops and left them to chill with only 2 settlements under control. Another example would be Greeks having a few stacks just outside Scipii city in Sicilly and standing there for more than 250 (!!!) turns so far, even though they lost most of their cities. They do not attack and are ignored by Scipii as well, so only left massive trail of devastation behind. Or Scipii hanging out in force in southern Spain while losing their capital to rebellion and most of their cities in Africa to Egypt. There are many more examples of this and I fear in vanilla AI would not get stuck so much in strange places.
- AI is much more aggresive, sometimes to their own fault. When playing on VH as Carthage, Julii would contantly send new ships to Caralis even when dying from barbarians. I admit, it is something common in vanilla too, but in other campaign as Julii, I'm currently at turn 270 or something, conquered most of Europe, while Senate is dead, Brutii and Scipii are constanly attacking me and only me, do not even trade with each other or attack other neighbours, just fixated on sending massive armies to fight me, even while playing on Easy. In vanilla they would eventually fight each other or make peace. Not complaining about this one, but game is much harder compared to normal playthrough.
As of balance and economy it works well, at least for me. Bonuses to recruitment and contruction across empire are nice, so no problems here. So to summarize, I do not mean to criticize you or your mod, it's great and very close to vanilla, at least compared to most other mods. I am looking forward to updates and new features you bring, I just thought that maybe it helps you to pinpoint the issues and hopefully work around them. Keep up the great work!
Let me give you some insights into the issues you described and how these might (or might not) be effected by modding:
The freeze during sieges is strange but since this is the first time I have heard of this issue and I did not change anything related to walls, I do not think this is caused by my mod. So until there are multiple indepent reports for this issue I don't think it's worth spending time investigating this.
Regarding all the AI problems: AI modding in general is unfortunately really, really limited for rome remastered. Even if I wanted to (I believe me, I absolutely want to), influencing the sometimes irrational behavior of the AI is not possible with modding. This includes the AI constantly getting stuck on islands. Similar to this, the only thing that's having an effect on AI aggressiveness is campaign difficulty. In general I would recommend to play on hard campaign settings, the only meaningful difference to very hard is how aggressive the AI is towards the player. On very hard the AI will do some pretty irrational things, just to constantly throw armies against the player faction.
Also the AI for this game is not only limited to attack a single target (for example: carthage will always lose their iberian provinces at the start of the campaign because the AI cannot target settlements on sicily and iberia simultaneously), it is also not capable of defending settlements on the campaign map at all. It will not react to enemy armies approaching or attacking their settlements. Which is why you encounter AI factions getting destroyed on one end of their empire and not reacting to that.
The one thing that should be possible to change through modding is how passive the Julii are at the start. I think this is caused by gaul having one the largest starting armies in the game, the Julii AI will not declare war on them because the difference in power is too big (I believe the remaster changed how AI calculate strenght of enemy factions). Rebalancing starting armies should do the trick and I already plan to do this at some time but this is a low priority issue right now.
Again thank you very much for writing down your thoughts on the mod, I does help to see what issues players are facing for planning future updates