Collapsing large kingdoms -- why?

[Wolfgrin]

I'm playing GoG 1.6 and am frustrated that almost every kingdom that grows large soon collapses. The vanilla game was like this, too, but this seems worse. The map is covered with tiny one province, rebel kingdoms.

I know others have mentioned this problem and postulated that war exhaustion and nostalgia might be leading to massive uprisings which the large kingdoms can't quell. I've tweaked both of those settings (-5 for each), but it doesn't seem to help.

Any thoughts?

I'd really like to see several of the kingdoms grow large and STAY large, so I have worthy opponents by the time my own kingdome has grown.

[w0lfshad3]

Play my latest updated mod(with peace_patch), i'm actually getting beaten back by it :D
I didn't see any large kingdoms fell alltough there are plenty of loyalists around(there's some squable over land but the face of the map didn't change drastically even in 1300 game turns).

The reason why empires colapse in GoG is that it doesn't use peasants and empires who start w/o any means of having armies fall to the first attack of even a small kindos who succeeds getting a swordsmith in place.

My mod differs from that because i reworked the food costs. Squads have 2x units so 70 peasants costs 70 food(there are 70 peasants[2x -10] fo mathematical reasons you need not worry about that, it balances the game very good).

Thus AI and yourself cannot get a full peasant army in good time so he first builds a mixt army, Then he builds an all no peasant army mostly after he gets the buildings in place.

[Laudan]

Trying the MOD HARD "Invade" and you see many big kingdoms !I played this MOD and never Kingdom go down.Exampel:Wales a small Kingdom comes up from one to 29 province !!if you played this mod you see many big Kingdoms over 10 provinces.Try the MOD for 3 hours and you see it.

[Elvain]

what we need is:
- AI able to use at least 3 marshals all the time(the large kingdoms: not very highcost of marshalls, income high enough)
- balance rebels to be challenge for player, but leaving some space to Ai to deal with them
- smart AI that will make his kingdom rest from wars for a while

those are basic things. First 2 are more-or-less moddable, the last isn't.
Right now I'm trying to ballance exactly this. In my current game after almost 4 hours there are:
- Holy Roman Empire with 18-22 provinces all the time-they expand. From time to time some provinces are taken by loyalists, but the main body survives untouched and is slowly enlarging(I found that AI is able to adopt provinces :hello:)
- Ayyubids with currently 13 provinces. They have advantege of meeting mostly 1-2province kingdoms, yet they eliminated Cyprus, Antioch and Athens(expanded to 2provinces). They haven't lost a single province during almost 4 hours. They are little isolated so use tactic: eliminate kingdom, peace for a while, eliminate another, peace again. Cyprus and Antioch are already adopted by AI(or nostalgia disappeared suring peacetime)
- Golden Horde with 12 provinces (they hold 10 provinces for already 2 hours since they eliminated Muscovy). Now they finnished conquest of Samara and are forwarding Novgorod which wil be piece of cake for them...

Sweden was also very strong for 3 hours - eliminated Teutonic order and Denmark and expanded against Novgorod, but now it broke down into a civil war-lost everything but their Sweedish lands. Untill this civil war they succesfully expanded from 4 to 8-10 provinces and held them untill the civil war(also Swedes adopted 1 province. But this condamned civil war make them lose everything.However, this could happen also to me if not having heirs)
England also eliminated both of Wales and Scotland and held it for 2 generations, but finaly loyalists were too strong.

but generaly kingdoms are being eliminated rather than big guys breaking down...
but I'm not satisfied yet, so this version of my mod isn't available yet...

[Wolfgrin]

Sounds encouraging, Elvain. I may try some more tweaking on different aspects of the game tonight. If it leads to any success, I'll return to this thread and report. In the meantime, I hope others will share their thoughts on the subjects. Good luck to all.

[w0lfshad3]

I'm way ahead of you elvain :P
In my mod with 2 free marshalls large empires have 3(3rd at 90 upkeep).
Every kindom has 2 at least for the rest.
Germany was making +650 income(well until it bacame Bohemia's vassal and Bohemia was making 350+ afterwards:)
Besides that only France seems to be playing rather stupid in particular but even so it didn't fall.
Instead they are getting bigger and bigger but quite slow.

I dunno why people calculate the game in hours. I can play at fast speed or very slow speed thus its not making sense. The convention is that 1 game turn occurs in 1 second at 1.0x speed so i propose you express it in turns or at least aproximatively when you lose track. The best way to keep track is to watch books grow. In my game it takes 300-500 turns for AI to get 7+ level towns and after about 1000 turns he begins to have level 11-12 towns. In this time in my mod you can get 5 provinces if you hassle a bit.

[Elvain]

Yes. You may be right. But I don't want to make game with AI able to build strong empires where player has everything for free, his income is in kilos per turn etc.

You may be genious, but it took me over 150 hours of playing, testing and ballancing the game to make it as easy as possible for the AI while the player still has problems in growing his empire.

No AI kingdom is able to stand smart player.
My goal is:
1) make the game challenging for me - I need to consider how to invest my money coz I don't have too much, I need to consider every step twice coz it may lead to colapse of my kingdom...
2) make AI kingdoms strong enough to be competable as much as possible.

To reach both requirements, you need to search a ballance for hours... Game where everything will be easy for AI(great!), but also for me, will be even more boring for me than hard game for both-me and AI.

I don't know how good strategist you are, but if playing your best you will never get to the phase where most of Ai kingdoms has higher income, stronger army and better developed towns than you. This is logically impossible: AI acts by pre-defined actions, while the player considers his sctions in actual conditions. If you say AI is better than you in your mod it doesn't mean AI is perfect, but that you play dumbly to be able to say it.

[Valgardur]

I have played GoG 1.6 with a lowered war ex. cap (-2) and a lowered nostalgy rebellion risk cap (-8). Worked fine - Hungary and France grew into two large empires that dominated Europe for five hours.

I have also played Wolfshad3:s balance mod (with peace patch, which I highly recommend!) with the same modifications as mentioned above to the rebellion risks (you should really try that out, wolf!). Wolfshad3:s mod make the empires stick too (specially with the peace patch) but in comparison to GoG all small kingdoms also have military strength, which increases the difficulty.

I cannot recommend anything though, look through all mods available and take what suits you best. But I do recommend that you lower the war exhaustion cap etc. considerably.

[Xuca]

I experienced something different in my mod: Kent, Auvergne, Alasce and Tyrolia broke off from England, France and HRE, and swallowed them. They surround my Kingdom and they all hate me! After some time some of them declares war to me, and after I win a few battles I sign peace with them. It's lucky that they hate each other, rather than uniting against me and smashing me!

Here's a question: how often does AI convert provinces and declares independant church? In my mod, he converts alot more, and Bulgaria declared independant church, which I haven't noticed before. I also have some screenshots.

[Elvain]

In my games, AI is converting provinces if he grows. In one game Venice conquered western part of Anatolia and ocnverted it all to catholicism. Also Almohads were very active in islamification of Spain and southern France after they conquered it..

about independent churches. Most of independents unfortunately fall to be dependent, but some stay independent and also Novgorod once declared independent church

I must agree that war exhaustion is one of the major issues that cause big ingdoms breaking down, so it is lowered in my mod aswell

[Angryminer]

I thought about removing war exhaustion. The 100 years war and different lessons in history show that war exhaustion in form of public resistance is a thing that came up after the medieval era.

Angryminer

[Elvain]

I thought about removing war exhaustion. The 100 years war and different lessons in history show that war exhaustion in form of public resistance is a thing that came up after the medieval era.

Angryminer
very good idea, and you are right. Peple were exhausted only there where villages were plundered...

so increasing plunder unhappines value and removing exhaustion oculd be the way :go:

could I use it?

[Anguille2]

very good idea, and you are right. Peple were exhausted only there where villages were plundered...

so increasing plunder unhappines value and removing exhaustion oculd be the way :go:

could I use it?

That would make sense.

[Angryminer]

could I use it?Of course! Of course!

Angryminer

[w0lfshad3]

I'm not saying the AI was beating me just that i had to use 2 marshalls and all the army i could master with the money i gathered, fight him, destroy his two full marshalls but could not attack the town right away because he left me w/o much health and i didn't want to lose squads for nothing(besides he recruits right away because of my 1 second military tick). After i came back replenished he had another 2 full marshalls filled less this time. After i beat those i attack the town because he should've run out of population by this time :D


You may be genious, but it took me over 150 hours of playing, testing and ballancing the game to make it as easy as possible for the AI while the player still has problems in growing his empire.

you make me feel bad :lol:

For the rest you are right and on that principle i based my mod:

If you lower economy you lower it for the AI too but AI needs money to recruit fom town so he will not have better armies if you leave him flatbroke. Instead i rebalanced the economy thus when i said Germany was making 650 gold income it was because it had a lot of resources(i was making just +50 or +100), so if i was at war with Germany he could've mastered 6 times as much army as me. Of course the player is able to beat the AI because of the dumb programming(intended or not) btu why should the player stroll through the map like crazy? :D I sayed this before and i'm saying it again: i'll obtain a positive balance faster than the AI then nothing will stop me. In my mod each kingdom i attack makes me lose a lot of time thus buying the rest of the kingdoms time to develop.
Besides empires manage to get high level towns(even maxed bulwark and all) before i even gathered 4-5 provinces.

BTW on what principle do i get in the available mods sticky?

[w0lfshad3]

you mean like this? :lol:
http://w0lfshad3.idilis.ro/HR.JPG

[dearmad]

Old thread I know but does anyone know where or what is the "peace patch" mentioned above!?!?