RTR Project 'Grand Campaign' BETA Testing through 0.4

[ahowl11]

Thank you Zephyronian and welcome to exilian!

[Zephyronian]

Of course thank you for inviting me.

[Zephyronian]

Okay finnaly Greek campaign is done Didin't face any bugs , but it was HARD, I mean REALLY hard. Every single roman "House" started to attack me on Sicilia Managed to make an alliance with Carthaginians to help me fight, so quick summary campaign ended with me conquering most of seleucid lands and destroying Macedons

[ahowl11]

Post some screens?

[ahowl11]

Testers: Good job so far but PLEASE give me a detailed description of the starting positions. Are they too weak, too strong, or just right? Telling me how your campaign goes is cool but I need to know how each faction starts out so I can balance them in the future. Go in depth with your analysis

[Zephyronian]

Indepth you say? Okay.... Greeks-starting position is great ain't too hard or too easy, but the settlement near Saramatians is a bit annoying to expand with because I never expand there, I always try to conquer all of Mediterranean and then just conquer Asia or Egypt, but it's your choice how to expand this mode so yeah.

Brutii- I haven't gotten to play with it yet

[ahowl11]

Okay post your results here when you do!

[b257]

Ok I have my Results from Carthage and Numidia:

First Carthage:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Carthage needs stronger starting armies, at least one decent stack with 3 or 4 Libyan spearmen. Expansion early on is difficult and at best you can only hold one city on Sicily reinforced by the stack from carthage.

Carthage's wealth offsets the weak armies. I found the wealth produced by carthage was sufficient enough for me to build up quickly enough that the loss of a city or two made no big difference. I was able to upgrade my capital to produce better units and in turn capture Sicily.

Utica and Carthage are too close, Utica's name plate covered the city of carthage and it made it difficult to click on the city.

Overall, while carthage has a weak starting army, the wealth generated balances this out though as you can build right away and in turn produce better units very quickly, you just need to turtle a bit.

Numidia.. that's a whole other story.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Numidia is a tricky faction, You need a lot of tactics to win with this faction, it's starting armies are weak and its economy is no better. Sure the units in the Carthage towns are pathetic enough that you can capture them but eventually a stack from the capital shows up and ruins your day.

Capturing rebel villages helps some but not much as carthage still strikes eventually and due to the weak early troop selection you lose villages rather quickly. Maybe a better starting stack and early troop selection will Balance out this weakness and maybe a better economy too. 

[ahowl11]

Good report b257.

I can make Carthage a bit stronger.

As for Numidia, shouldn't they be a challenging faction to play as? I don't want every faction to start off easy.

[b257]

Actually Carthage is already strong as it is with it's Economy. If anything just replace some of the swords men in the capital with Libyan Spears to make them look at least somewhat threatening to Rome.

As for Numidia, there is difficult and then there is "DIFFICULT" and let me say Numidia is the Latter. Nothing big in regards to its starting army just include a spear unit or 2 to at least have a chance at holding any captured settlements.

[Cozmicus]

So my good friend, I've tested the Dacians like 50 years or so.

you have done an amazing job, but there still a lot of work ahead of you. Now i will only write the bigger details of what is most important:
I've played hard/hard

As a faction the Dacians starts good. They are balanced and the game is easy in the binging. you can conquer very easy a lot of cities nearby because they are very poorly defended (most of them has only 3 ilyrians mercenarys units and you can conquer almost all the cities nearby  with only recruiting a few mercenaries. SO that has to be improve a lot..
* The capital (sarmizegetusa) is perfectly placed on the map but the other city Porolissum is a disaster. In the history that city did not exist it was a Roman name for a camp they build after the Dacins war 107 AD. So that we have to change
*The dacians family tree should improve, the faction leader should be at least 15 years younger because of the age of his sons and he has to have a daughter as well.. 3 sons and a daughter..
* On the minimap there are 2 dacians provinces, One you start with witch is correct but the other one to the est is a rebel faction called dacia as well. The minimap is a disaster by the way.
* Government building , I believe the barbarians faction should stop growing after reaching a minor city. (Just like RTR platinum 1.9 witch is the best out there mode i belive ) Other ways you have to change the in game pictures for the bigger barbarian city's. and the building should take alot longer to construct. A lot longer. now after 4 turns you can get all the units witch is making the game very boring...
* The city names around Dacia are horrible. As a very passionate historian I can tell you that 90% of them did not even exits and are places total scrappy on the map. For example the city near the black sea is called Tomi ? There was a greek city called Tomis around there so many names have to changed. Luckily i might help you with that.....

So the campaign map looks ok. The dacians gets strong quickly and there only danger are the macedonians so stay away from them... I like that actually. The Thracians are far inferior and they don't really bother you. They have problems of their owns with other factions...

I will test them later, but they looked ok as well from the AI point of view (me playing the dacians).

A big bug in on the map is a little lake between dacians and ilyrians (todays hungary) where there is a rebel naval ship going nowhere. It's actually quite funny:  the war fleet caught in a little lake for no reason at all.
Ah one more thing: the rebel factions is quite aggressive, there are a lot rebels showing up almost every year, witch can be funny sometimes.. The diplomacy between faction needs a change.  Every diplomat offers you their map in exchanged for money. and they all ask for alliances witch is stupid. a diplomat should not be able to talk to a city, i believe, if there is no governor with diplomacy skills.or with a army without a leader with diplomacy skills, they should only be able to bribe them or not.   that will make the game more interesting.
 
There should only be 1 Roman faction.. They are just in the way of each otherwise. and they should have it hard from the start, fighting rebels, greek and gauls other way they conquer everything to easy

[b257]

There should only be 1 Roman faction.. They are just in the way of each otherwise.

ahowl's getting the Eye candy and faction positioning done with first, when he has the visual bugs solved and faction placement set then he's getting into the dirty stuff in regards to implementing a new AI and Merging the Romans as well as introducing newer factions and other stuff.

[ahowl11]

Good job Cozmicus! Excellent report.
Yes, b257 is right, the first release is essentially vanilla visually revamped along with a few tweaks to the gameplay. Here is the plan that I have, and I hope it works:

1. Finish development for first release: descr_strat tweaks based off tests, UI's, RS2 settlement trees, other graphical improvements like culture specific UI for the campaign/battle map, and maybe new barbarian walls from RTR VII.

2. Release the first full version of the RTR Project on TWC, this release needs to be big and attract a lot of attention. Many people are still very unhappy with R2 and still think RTW is better. There is not a lot of development going on for RTW mods at the moment and people over there believe that we may not see any more RTW mods. That is why I have kept the RTR Project away from TWC because I want it to be a nice and fresh surprise for everyone there.

3. Along with the release I will include a concept of what the RTR Project is about and what it represents along with the big picture outlook for the mod.

4. Hopefully at least a few more people are willing to join/contribute to this so development can speed up and cooler things can be added.

5. Development of the second version, this is where it will get fun and difficult. A lot of history will be involved here!

[Zephyronian]

Brutii-almost the same as other Roman houses not to hard, but I woud like if you coud make Macedons not as agressive. Because the turn after I took Apollonia a 10 stack army came to kill me. (I know that these are not as detailed as the other people, but hey I hope they help )

[ahowl11]

Thank you Zephyronian, you do a good job