Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 2:23 pm
Oh, lawdy, now he says that he's not arguing economics while initially following up with the following: "Frankly, I feel like the more recent Total Wars I've played (Attila's Charlemagne version and R2) have basically just made the early game more expensive, you ride out those problems and eventually you can actually afford stuff and then eventually you're just crazy wealthy."
It's fun to claim that I'm not reading something; it's even more fun to look at you and see that you're not reading YOUR OWN POST. Technically, I guess, you COULD not read while typing, lel
LAWL, OK, so, I suppose the screenshots demonstrate several things. First off, the year is 1780+, a year I literally never get to because I always win Empire a solid 30-40 years earlier; I'll note that you're still not even close to winning by 1780, which is even more entertaining. Indeed, if I were to spend an additional 60-80 turns wasting time and building up my armies instead of actually doing anything productive, yes, I, too, could amass massive armies like that.
As such, I don't see my fewer armies as being "bad army building" and your more numerous armies as utter boredom, and, by extension, failure.
Indeed, the AI COULD amass large armies, but I was referring to my own armies, lel. Given how glacially slow you do anything, I'm not surprised the AI amasses far larger armies in your campaigns than in mine, such that hordes were my only concern, regarding extremely large and time-consuming battles. As an aside, one of the reasons why I trend towards blitzing things is precisely to stop the AI from getting huge.
Indeed, I did. And it was not at all difficult to "identify characters." The first unit in every stack was a general, iirc, and thus would gain exp when sent into battle. As soon as that general got a second star, boom, character with stats. Admittedly, it really sucked when a peasant unit just happened to be the general, but wutevs. In this manner, it was extremely easy to create, if you will, characters and thus rotate out the corrupt governors. It's worth noting that because I was too busy winning and not sitting around building more armies, I definitely had fewer armies and thus fewer characters to look through.
Such a system did incentivize such fiddling, since, as you noted, characters could build up corrupt traits which could suck. Thus, obviously, it's necessary to rid the corruption by just shifting governors. I don't know how you arrive at the argument that somehow I should be stupid and let my corrupt guys stay in charge; I suppose I would be incentivized to keep them in charge if I felt like nerfing my own economy.
I'm reading a few guides that are saying that in M1, a "little bit of income" is generated by various buildings when the player has no trade partners, which could then be increased by other buildings.... I wish said guides had concrete numbers, but it's definitely not the 0 income that you claim.
Definitely only 4ish levels of castle, but upgrades for the castles could be built. However, there was no limit to the building slots, so a province could get real fat, whereas there's a very limited number of building slots and worthwhile buildings to build since....Empire, I'd like to say.
Corruption wasn't mandatory like it is now; it was limited to governors before. In other words, it could be managed and removed before; it is a feature now that can't be removed. I suppose I was not clear what I meant.
I suppose the question then, is, what do you consider "early" "mid" "late" game? I'm used to playing OPMs or gimped sick men, so my definitions are less concrete turn counts and more phases of the game. "Early" defines my early expansion against 1 or 2 immediate neighbors, probably with an early rival (eg my Syracuse vs Rome or Colchis vs Armenia). "Mid" defines my ability to then take on the next big bad(s) (eg using the Syracuse example, then going after Carthage or Colchis vs a major Anatolian power, forgot who it was now), but this time able to rapidly build up my economy, at the same time. "Late" is when my economy is on a roll and I have multiple armies deathballing around taking all comers.
Early game, using my definition, is easier on the economy side, since I'm more focused on rapid advances and good generalship to gain huge advantages. At a few hundred cost for the early game economic buildings and few hundred cost for units, the early game has stayed the same across all the TWs (barring already developed settings like Empire and Napoleon). It's the midgame that I have to worry about balancing things, since I need to quickly grow my economy to be able to support multiple stacks for lategame, and I can't afford to pull one of my few frontline stacks from the front to deal with rebellion. Early game, because I'm working with such small territory, dealing with rebellion is easy; I actually just got through murdering 2 rebel spawns as Syracuse, hah.
tl;dr: lol, really? Accusing me of "not reading" while ignoring the refutation of the original points you made, which was "two interesting features" that made MTW "superior" and "just made early game more expensive..." Clearly, MTW has a BETTER economic curve than the latter TWs and same early game, rendering your complaint moot as clearly MTW hits that point FASTER while having the same early game. Trade income could nosedive, but wasn't wiped out (and depending on the buildings, could still be substantial, cuz hilariously fat percent increases). Corruption is for lazy nubs in MTW and felt far more in latter TWs (ie, no bite, definitely a bark, though)
PS: *sigh* I miss the good ole days when 2 general stars equated to 1 exp per unit in the army, when 1 exp gave comparatively huge stat boosts.
It's fun to claim that I'm not reading something; it's even more fun to look at you and see that you're not reading YOUR OWN POST. Technically, I guess, you COULD not read while typing, lel
LAWL, OK, so, I suppose the screenshots demonstrate several things. First off, the year is 1780+, a year I literally never get to because I always win Empire a solid 30-40 years earlier; I'll note that you're still not even close to winning by 1780, which is even more entertaining. Indeed, if I were to spend an additional 60-80 turns wasting time and building up my armies instead of actually doing anything productive, yes, I, too, could amass massive armies like that.
As such, I don't see my fewer armies as being "bad army building" and your more numerous armies as utter boredom, and, by extension, failure.
Indeed, the AI COULD amass large armies, but I was referring to my own armies, lel. Given how glacially slow you do anything, I'm not surprised the AI amasses far larger armies in your campaigns than in mine, such that hordes were my only concern, regarding extremely large and time-consuming battles. As an aside, one of the reasons why I trend towards blitzing things is precisely to stop the AI from getting huge.
Indeed, I did. And it was not at all difficult to "identify characters." The first unit in every stack was a general, iirc, and thus would gain exp when sent into battle. As soon as that general got a second star, boom, character with stats. Admittedly, it really sucked when a peasant unit just happened to be the general, but wutevs. In this manner, it was extremely easy to create, if you will, characters and thus rotate out the corrupt governors. It's worth noting that because I was too busy winning and not sitting around building more armies, I definitely had fewer armies and thus fewer characters to look through.
Such a system did incentivize such fiddling, since, as you noted, characters could build up corrupt traits which could suck. Thus, obviously, it's necessary to rid the corruption by just shifting governors. I don't know how you arrive at the argument that somehow I should be stupid and let my corrupt guys stay in charge; I suppose I would be incentivized to keep them in charge if I felt like nerfing my own economy.
I'm reading a few guides that are saying that in M1, a "little bit of income" is generated by various buildings when the player has no trade partners, which could then be increased by other buildings.... I wish said guides had concrete numbers, but it's definitely not the 0 income that you claim.
Definitely only 4ish levels of castle, but upgrades for the castles could be built. However, there was no limit to the building slots, so a province could get real fat, whereas there's a very limited number of building slots and worthwhile buildings to build since....Empire, I'd like to say.
Corruption wasn't mandatory like it is now; it was limited to governors before. In other words, it could be managed and removed before; it is a feature now that can't be removed. I suppose I was not clear what I meant.
I suppose the question then, is, what do you consider "early" "mid" "late" game? I'm used to playing OPMs or gimped sick men, so my definitions are less concrete turn counts and more phases of the game. "Early" defines my early expansion against 1 or 2 immediate neighbors, probably with an early rival (eg my Syracuse vs Rome or Colchis vs Armenia). "Mid" defines my ability to then take on the next big bad(s) (eg using the Syracuse example, then going after Carthage or Colchis vs a major Anatolian power, forgot who it was now), but this time able to rapidly build up my economy, at the same time. "Late" is when my economy is on a roll and I have multiple armies deathballing around taking all comers.
Early game, using my definition, is easier on the economy side, since I'm more focused on rapid advances and good generalship to gain huge advantages. At a few hundred cost for the early game economic buildings and few hundred cost for units, the early game has stayed the same across all the TWs (barring already developed settings like Empire and Napoleon). It's the midgame that I have to worry about balancing things, since I need to quickly grow my economy to be able to support multiple stacks for lategame, and I can't afford to pull one of my few frontline stacks from the front to deal with rebellion. Early game, because I'm working with such small territory, dealing with rebellion is easy; I actually just got through murdering 2 rebel spawns as Syracuse, hah.
tl;dr: lol, really? Accusing me of "not reading" while ignoring the refutation of the original points you made, which was "two interesting features" that made MTW "superior" and "just made early game more expensive..." Clearly, MTW has a BETTER economic curve than the latter TWs and same early game, rendering your complaint moot as clearly MTW hits that point FASTER while having the same early game. Trade income could nosedive, but wasn't wiped out (and depending on the buildings, could still be substantial, cuz hilariously fat percent increases). Corruption is for lazy nubs in MTW and felt far more in latter TWs (ie, no bite, definitely a bark, though)
PS: *sigh* I miss the good ole days when 2 general stars equated to 1 exp per unit in the army, when 1 exp gave comparatively huge stat boosts.