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Emperor Leo

The Brainstormer
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May 17, 2008
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I've seen quite a lot of good ideas being thrown in various threads, regarding elements of the game which we feel could be improved, added or scrapped (i.e. bribery, military units, etc.). So, I thought, why not start making regular threads that focus on different aspects of the game and brainstorm a few ideas. Wether any devs will look in and take notes, I don't know, but it's still fun to share ideas. :) I thought I'd focus this thread on "Siege and Occupation".

Siege and Occupation
Focusing on provinces during wartime (including rebels and barbarians).

As the game is at the moment, to win a province, you simply stand an army on the province and wait until the province is yours. How do you feel this could be changed or improved, if need be? Addition of siege trains? More control over siege tactics? Scorched earth tactics?

One thing I would like to see is taken from Rome - Total War by Creative Assembly. I know this is sacrilege on these forums, but I always liked the options presented to me once I had conquered a province. The options were: Occupy, Enslave or Exterminate. I'd like to see this introduced to EU Rome. Once the province is captured, you're presented with these choices. Here's how they could be used in EU Rome (I'd also add the "Sack Province" option from Medieval 2):

Occupy Province: No change from the current game.

Enslave Populace: 25-50% of the province population is transferred to your own capital as "Slave". Infamy increased. Revolt Risk increased.

Sack / Loot Province: Target province tax rate converted to treasury gold (e.g. Province Tax: 22 = 22 Gold). General's personal wealth and popularity increase. Infamy greatly increased. Revolt Risk increased.

Exterminate Populace: 75% of the province population is exterminated. Infamy greatly increased. Tyranny increased. Ruler's popularity decreased. Revolt Risk decreased. 50% target province tax rate converted to treasury gold. 25% chance target province primary culture converts to your culture. All negative effects doubled if target is the same culture as your own.

Obviously, these ideas aren't totally solid, but that's why I've thrown the ideas into the pot. The reason for these options would be to make occupation more interesting, add another layer to wars and add more incentive to defend your lands. Sometimes, if you're at war with a large country that you have no intention of claiming in a peace deal, you can use the war to another advantage, whether it's to gain gold or weaken the opponent. These options will also be fun for playing as Tribes who want to go on a savage rampage.

Thoughts? Throw in some more ideas! :)
 
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Sounds cool.

One thing though: if the province you sack or exterminate is a colony, it should turn back into an unoccupied, uncolonized province. That way you can colonize it yourself again.
 
Big populations sieges should then be much more difficult, or you would make e.g. Carthage severly damaged by destroyed Carthage the city, making the conquest of it too easier.
 
One thing though: if the province you sack or exterminate is a colony, it should turn back into an unoccupied, uncolonized province

I like this idea. It's the same as when Barbarians loot a province in vanilla.

Big populations sieges should then be much more difficult, or you would make e.g. Carthage severly damaged by destroyed Carthage the city, making the conquest of it too easier.

My sincere apologies, but I don't really understand exactly what you mean. I don't think population size should effect siege time. If anything, a large population would starve faster due to their being more mouths to feed. I think that larger populations should lead to a higher revolt risk once the province is occupied. This would then be an incentive to exterminate or enslave the populace to keep it under control.
 
The question is ... would you really be amused to see AI does this ugly stuff to your provinces? Especially at higher difficulty it's very common to see half of your territory being occupied before you are able to push them back.
 
You would have to scale down on the described effects dramatically to maintain just a semblance of game balance.

My experience from modding is that doing this will spiral the total world population out of existence even if you put the chance of the AI doing that last bit at very low you would still see border provinces losing huge amounts of population on a regular basis and having the economy system tilt even more towards the big four. Not to mention what the player would do if the AI did this to the capital of the player's country.

On a related note, there are already game mechanics for this. For instance a small part of the population is actually taken as slaves upon occupation (and you can change that value in the defines file if you want). The entire population is converted to freedmen and slaves when you take a province in a peace deal. The looted and occupied modifiers lower income and growth for a province while raising revolt risk...

Honestly I think it would diminish the overall game experience though I understand why you would like to be presented with the choice to do this for fun (or maybe strategic reasons from time to time) it is simply too powerful in the hands of the player and to dangerous in the hands of the AI to make good game play, which is way (I suspect) PI did it the way they did in the current game mechanics.
 
Obviously, the effects that I've linked to each option were just basic ideas, to give you an image of what each option could do. Maybe the options are only available to Generals or Rulers with certain traits or martial skill or maybe armies of a certain size.

The main reason for adding the options was to give you a reason for occupying provinces. Most of the time, when a country declares war on you, you are only occupying enemy provinces to gain enough of a warscore to declare peace. If you declare war, you have now got the option to wage war in your own style. Are you out to assimilate the enemy into your empire? To become rich through pillaging? To send the enemies people to toil in your fields? To become the most brutal savage in history?

By the way, I don't want you to think I'm defending the idea simply because it's mine. I'm seeing this as a "for" and "against" discussion. If the idea's crap, then we'll reject it. :)
 
I like the idea and yes you have to take into account the AI. Have a look at these old mods:

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?p=9504062

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?t=353368

A summary of the two mods effects:
LootingTablePic.jpg


Plus there was another thread on Cheexsta's MMR project website. This had a brilliant idea of even taking the decision out of the players hand in some cases, for example, if you had a greedy Roman aristocrat leading your army with the get rich objective, he might all of a sudden just pillage the province on his own with you having to live with the consequences as ruler.
 
I like these ideas, but you should probably get alot more gold from sacking and the others. I mean, most provinces don't have high tax rates. I think it should be double, perhaps even triple the gold received. And also, you should be able to loot and/or destroy buildings in provinces. That way, sacking Rome could be an interesting option if you're running low on cash...
 
Just said that higher population provinces should be harder to occupy. Sieging is too common and if you can exterminate populations like that countries would be destroyed easily, then being easily picked by other neighbours. I was just proposing that big cities should be harder as if they are exterminated the country will get a big kick in its power, and with the current system it will happen rather easily.
 
Just said that higher population provinces should be harder to occupy. Sieging is too common and if you can exterminate populations like that countries would be destroyed easily, then being easily picked by other neighbours. I was just proposing that big cities should be harder as if they are exterminated the country will get a big kick in its power, and with the current system it will happen rather easily.

A good way to solve this is that the higher population, the higher garrison. The minimum would be 1000 of course(By the way, maybe having a fort in a low-pop province might increase the pop?), but a city with high population would probably have more people who could either be militia during a siege, or just people that have signed up for the army.
 
A good way to solve this is that the higher population, the higher garrison. The minimum would be 1000 of course(By the way, maybe having a fort in a low-pop province might increase the pop?), but a city with high population would probably have more people who could either be militia during a siege, or just people that have signed up for the army.
Very sound idea. Logically the more inhabitants a city has, the more guards are needed to garrison the growing walls/keep order. Would make sense if the garrison scaled with population, and then fort upgrades was put to increase defense, i.e. siege longevity, instead.
 
Very sound idea. Logically the more inhabitants a city has, the more guards are needed to garrison the growing walls/keep order. Would make sense if the garrison scaled with population, and then fort upgrades was put to increase defense, i.e. siege longevity, instead.
I like this. It would also be pretty cool to be able to retreat an army inside a city's walls, but have it suffer pretty appalling attrition. Any generals leading that army would either die or be captured by the enemy if the city falls, and the army could be sold into slavery or ransomed back to the owners at the end of the war ;)
 
Very sound idea. Logically the more inhabitants a city has, the more guards are needed to garrison the growing walls/keep order. Would make sense if the garrison scaled with population, and then fort upgrades was put to increase defense, i.e. siege longevity, instead.

I like this. It would also be pretty cool to be able to retreat an army inside a city's walls, but have it suffer pretty appalling attrition. Any generals leading that army would either die or be captured by the enemy if the city falls, and the army could be sold into slavery or ransomed back to the owners at the end of the war ;)

Indeed.....I like this too......this would work very well :cool:
 
I don't know many historical examples of a province being sacked or the population being enslavet. It's good suggestions but I think they should be toned down a little bit to be more reasonably.
 
The barbarian I have heard of but never the Romans. I thought that they only enslaved the population when it was a rival city.. In game terms, their capital but not small cities.
 
Big populations sieges should then be much more difficult, or you would make e.g. Carthage severly damaged by destroyed Carthage the city, making the conquest of it too easier.
I'm not that very convince on this. I think siege defence should always be linked to the level of fort and the number of garrisons.

OT: I don't see why Rome TW is an awful game. It's the best of the series!