[Brainstorm #5] Alexander The Great

Tommy4ever said:

I imagine for the first couple of decades of game you just play Alexander (or watch an ultra successful AI Alexander) go on a conquering spree then die. Then his Hellenetic Emprie crumbles and the successor states squabble over the carcass. That is how the game should start.

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The game should start with Macedonian dominated Greece desiring to conquer Persia, likely succeeding, but not certainly or always. Sometimes Persia should win, maybe Alexander gets killed leading his armies during the campaign. Or what happens if after conquest of Persia he doesn't die young and leaves a strong heir. And while there's all this action in the East, Rome is fighting for dominance against other city states within Italy etc.

I'd like to see HTTT's CB system, and in addition I'd like to see personal, character based CBs (That allow you to assassinate, or banish characters with impunity).

What I'd need in an expansion isn't exactly related to the time-period of Alexander, I'll make a little sorted list of what I find important.

1. Revamped UI. It's pretty ridiculous that Rome has a much more primitive UI than EU3. I can't remember all the annoyances I had with the games UI, but some pretty basic things like there being no 'war overview' panel (bottom-right, just above minimap in EU3), and that tooltips only show how many units an enemy stack consist of, which means nothing if it is somewhat depleted. Also the event popups doesn't make a lot of sense unless you know every character by name and know what every trait does.

2. Something like HTTTs CB system. The current system of CB (or lack thereof) doesn't work properly.

3. Better AI! The AI does the most retarded things, but tactically and strategically, even more so than in EU3.

4. Something like INs rebel system.

4. A more functional and historical system of clients and other states giving tribute, as well as possibilities of integrating these states into your empire.


And there's A LOT more that I can remember right now, though a more detailed map is obviously one of them - which would be even more important now if you'd like to play as a fledgling Roman Republic in Italy!

One thing that's certain is that this expansion would have to be great indeed if you want it to be successful! An expansion to Rome would have to radically improve all aspects of the game, not just add new content. Just look at how dead the forum is now, if all you'd do is to add some more content without altering the gameplay, it will only be a short buzz, and then people will go back to EU3, Vicky or wherever they feel they belong.

death&d3cay said:

I'd like to see HTTT's CB system, and in addition I'd like to see personal, character based CBs (That allow you to assassinate, or banish characters with impunity).

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would that be a "casus belli personae"?

I've thought of a couple of ideas that would help Alexander go on a realistic conquering spree if thats where the game starts.

For the life time of Alexander Macedonia get major bonuses for its armies - these go once he dies

Persia gets nerfed for the duration or either Alexander's or Darius' (is that the right Emperor?) life

Macedonian AI is made ultra agressive with a great desire to attack Persia and take specific areas (Egypt, Levant, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia). When Persia dies the Ai would become rudderless (like Alexander's army in RL) and not know what to do.

After Alexander dies Macedonia should ALWAYS be hit by massive strife that would simulate the Civil Wars.

This would help create the situation I described earlier. Essentially the first couple of decades of gameplay will focus on Alexander's challenge but when he dies its all back to the regular game.

I put this already in the poll thread:

Rome
- Add more provinces, more countries, more tribes. One of the problems of Rome is that the map is too small, the countries too few and the big ones too dominating. If it is set in the Alexander time, Greece should be an interesting place, not a 5 province thing. Make it much more complete, add small countries, city states. Do this for all the map because the current map is too simple. Provinces are so big that Carthage touches the Lusitanians easily and then obviously steamroll them. The big 5 are too dominating and few provinces only helps them in steamrolling small, 1-2 province countries.
- Of course, expanded map. The obvious step in an Alexander based expansion is to expand it wast to the Indus and north to the Aral sea at max. Also adding Meroe. This is the minimum. However, when I imagine a start at a date the macedonian height, a map like this would be hilarious. You would own half the map and then proceed to steamroll smallish Rome and Carthage. I mod Rome too and again, referring my mod this time for Rome (sorry for the publicity, but it really completes what goes in my mind), Magna Terra, I wanted to make it possible to start at an Alexandrian time and have fun. How? Including all the known world. Ouch! India, the giant steppes of Central Asia, Arabia, Nubia and Ethiopia, China. Too much? Surely for an expansion, but I think it would be a much more fun game with an Alexandrian empire with much more to conquer. And suddenly the game is not the monotonous big 5 in Europe, we can start at a post-Maurya India and with the warring states in China. The Seleucid syndrome (east backs safe) would be solved too by India added (this syndrome would also probably exist in a Macedonia that ends in the Indus). If well done, it increases the fun, as it will be very different experiences. We can pick a giant empire and go for world conquest. Of course these big empires require what I'll refer in the next point.
- Make it enough funny to play with our country and characters BY ITSELF. That is, in big empires like Rome and Macedonia, give us toys to make us entertained and thrilled and think to conquer our neighbours later or make us suffer the consequences of a major war with an weakened ruler internal network. Make families matter, make governors/government interaction much more visible, make us keep an eye in what's going on in our empire. Create governors/governors interaction. Family rivalries/alliances. Political character marriages. Use our armies not to conquer other countries but to remove governors in mini-civil-wars. Allow us to use military stacks of doom for conquest only after we have our empire internally stable (example: make sure governor A of a important province will not use its own military strength to create a civil war by ensuring it is allied with our family and giving it prestige and all he wants, while having national armies close to governor B that likes to rebel), making conquests slower and helping the small countries to have a chance to breathe with their smaller manpower. This "country only game" would pave the way to a further expansion dealing with the Roman Empire.
- Make us care about characters, not only by their skill but also by their political/wealth importance. Guy A sucks, but he is powerful, so we must do something to make him entertained otherwise our ruler/dynasty may be start to be looked as weaker compared to theirs, affecting income, loyalty, etc. Create more positions for characters than just tech guy/governor/government. Link families and/or character to regions and/or create a regional influence ranking by family, adding lots of possible events and help us sort all the characters of our empire. Example: family X is very influent in Galatia. Maybe it's better to allow them to dominate the local businesses (micromanageable or automatic - like a turn on/off switch then for all the jobs in that region for that family)
- More decisions and laws. Missions are too blank too. Give us a big reward for unifying Greece.
- More diplomatic interaction between countries. Nothing happens in EU Rome diplomatically. Barbarian/Civilized country/provinces interactions - take this money, don't attack us. Grand alliances of small countries, defensive alliances.
- Tribe migrations (can be left for an hypothetical Roman Empire expansion), internal administration too but made different for tribes.

anomanderus said:

would that be a "casus belli personae"?

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I personally loved the term "ad hominem" someone else came up with.

Trin Tragula said:

The main thing to include in an expansion about Alexander the great would be a mechanism for empires to actually crumble or atleast shatter. I would've figured the Diadochi period as more likely as the theme for an expansion but one that sees both the rise and fall of Alexander's empire (and the Persian empire for that matter) might be even more interesting.
The presence of such a mechanic would hopefully make gameplay more interesting throughout the EU:Rome era.

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This, very much this. Empires, especially monarchical ones, need to be much more fragile than they currently are.

Well, maybe this time I will come with something relevant.

Important characters
The problem with Paradox games is that they're huge. You can't make AI as good as, say, Galactic Civilizations because you have 200 countries (in EU3 anyway) you have to manage in real time. And charatcers are even worse: they tend to be numerous.

So here the solution. Make prominence stat something more... prominent. Make prominent anyone who is interesting, powerful, promising. Prominence comes to guys with titles, generals, heirs - that's pretty obvious. Let's give prominence to wealthy men (like "prominence bonus for being most wealthy guy"), people who are friends or enemies of other important people (it should be some % of friend/enemy: character becomes impotant if he king's friend. But general's friend becomes important only if he has something else like money or other friends), people with significant fame - war heroes, triumphants, people with good stats etc.

Let's make some prominence treshold that makes characters important. Usual people live their boring lives with no events, they can become significant under some circumstances or if some important people helps them. But we don't care much about them, they just exist to play as statist. Important people aren't numerous but they can do much more. Something happens with them all the time, they try to do something, they've got goals.

And also there could be chart with important people and their relations so it's easy for player to follow them.

I got some ideas today while at work. One thing I'm thinking about is something like HOI3's national unity, that decreases and rises during war as you win and lose battles. After all Alexander didn't have to siege and conquer every city and population center within Persia, but to win few decisive victories and crush Persian armies. So we would have some kind of national value, and if by constantly losing battles that value drops to zero your nation collapses like Persia did.

Nations resilience to collapsing could then be determined by a number of factors like goverment form, leaders stats, technology level, religious power and omens, so that we would have nations that fall easily if they are crushed badly enough, but others like Rome that can withstand defeat after defeat before giving up.

DarthJF said:

I got some ideas today while at work. One thing I'm thinking about is something like HOI3's national unity, that decreases and rises during war as you win and lose battles. After all Alexander didn't have to siege and conquer every city and population center within Persia, but to win few decisive victories and crush Persian armies. So we would have some kind of national value, and if by constantly losing battles that value drops to zero your nation collapses like Persia did.

Nations resilience to collapsing could then be determined by a number of factors like goverment form, leaders stats, technology level, religious power and omens, so that we would have nations that fall easily if they are crushed badly enough, but others like Rome that can withstand defeat after defeat before giving up.

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Good idea.

Solves a major problem. At game start Persia should have a pretty low national unity (or whatever it will be called) to make it easier to collapse. This way in normal circumstances it'd be quite hard to collapse a major power but at game start it wouldn't be impossible for the Macedonians to collapse Persia.

Tambourmajor said:

A complete rework of the culture mechanic. At the very least, provide the functionality of the EU3 culture mechanic, with primary & accepted cultures, culture groups etc. instead of the wonky thing we currently have.

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I was thinking about this the other day...

How about giving each province a Primary Culture (the culture of the general populace), and a Ruling Culture? That way you could simulate situations like the greek Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt, the greek ruling classes in Macedonia and Epirus, and Alexander's efforts to make the Macedonian ruling class in conquered Persian territory appear more Persian. And of course you could simulate Persian ruling classes in non-Persian territories of the Persian Empire. This might be a way to more accurately recreate the Seleucid Empire, too - Macedonian ruling classes over non-Macedonian populations.

syncretic cultures. So we can have greek speaking Israelites and Buddhist bactrians.

I'm not to sure that an Alexander era game would be that interesting... Come on, it's Europa Universalis: Rome, not EU: Alexander or EU: Macedonia.

What would be interesting is the strife after Alexander's death and the wars of the Successors.

Also, I do not concur that the game should end in the age of the Empire. As has been said before: a game starting in 1AD might be very dull, as Rome has already conquered a large portion oif the map. Roughly only Britannia and Parthia would be left. Unless the map is enlarged, and Rome could march into the middle and Far East. I'd like that.

Marcus Scipio said:

I'm not to sure that an Alexander era game would be that interesting... Come on, it's Europa Universalis: Rome, not EU: Alexander or EU: Macedonia.

What would be interesting is the strife after Alexander's death and the wars of the Successors.

Also, I do not concur that the game should end in the age of the Empire. As has been said before: a game starting in 1AD might be very dull, as Rome has already conquered a large portion oif the map. Roughly only Britannia and Parthia would be left. Unless the map is enlarged, and Rome could march into the middle and Far East. I'd like that.

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I game set in the era of the Empire would be much more about internal politics than external. It might be best to even start it at the end of the Marcus Auralius (sp?). That way you quickly get thrown into Civil War (the Crisis of the Third Century) then all sorts of woe with the rise of Christianity, divided Empires, barbarian invasion, rivalry with the Persians and of course civil strife beyond reason.

Thats what the Roman Empire game should be. In EU Rome you'd build and Empire in the game based during the Empire era it should fall apart.

Empire era would require another game to be represented correctly. A game that concentrates only upon internal Roman power struggles and in which you would play an ambitious noble family with sights of being Emperor instead of the Emperor.

Tommy4ever said:

I game set in the era of the Empire would be much more about internal politics than external. It might be best to even start it at the end of the Marcus Auralius (sp?). That way you quickly get thrown into Civil War (the Crisis of the Third Century) then all sorts of woe with the rise of Christianity, divided Empires, barbarian invasion, rivalry with the Persians and of course civil strife beyond reason.

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Marcus Aurelius.

But THAT would be great... A game starting 395 AD!

Marcus Scipio said:

I'm not to sure that an Alexander era game would be that interesting... Come on, it's Europa Universalis: Rome, not EU: Alexander or EU: Macedonia.

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While Alexander was busy showboating around Asia there were all sorts of interesting things going on in Italy.