[request] Desolation, razing and settling

[miTo82]

Hello there!

As far as I can see, a lot of Attila players (me included) are a little bit disappointed with the razing feature of the game. So I just want to inquire you guys from the FotE-Team if you have planned a modification that will reduce the amount of desolated provinces in the mid-/endgame, so that not half of Europe is completely destroyed.

I don’t mean removing the raze option completely. In my opinion, razing is a very interesting strategy to kick some factions out of the game without expanding the own empire too much. Sometimes you want to get rid of an aggressor nearby but you don’t have the funds and resources to conquer a bunch of provinces in a short period of time. So it is a good way to burn down a couple of lands and later on resettle them time by time.

So I think “re-settling” is the best way to renew the land from destruction. But rebuilding destroyed provinces is very expensive and time intensive. So a good way is maybe to reduce the resettlement costs. And in combination with that: an “auto repopulation” of the former owner of the province after some time (maybe 2-5 years) is a good way to prevent half of the continent lays in ruins for the rest of the game because the AI still don’t want to resettle a desolated city…

So, dear Fote-Team: Have you some plans to put a feature in your mod to preserve the continent is desolated all the time?

Cheers, miTo

[Maximus183]

We're definitely planning on reducing the amount of settlements razed by the AI, since it is indeed a little crazy in the vanilla state. We haven't discussed the re-settling premises though, but I disagree about reducing the cost for it. If you think about it logically, you are rebuilding an entire city from ruins, which wouldn't be a cheap thing to do. I don't know it for a fact, but knowing the total war AI they can probably afford it most of the time, they just don't do it for no good reason (or some reason unknown the player. Lack of resources etc).

[miTo82]

With this little mod: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...WIP-Melior-CAI the AI is more willing to resettle desolated regions really fast (way too fast I think... sometimes after only 2-3 rounds), but maybe it’s just because the costs are reduced too much (what I dislike in the same way).

It would be a great feature to persuade the AI to resettle the desolated cities more and faster (after a period of time). Or an “auto-resettle” feature, that resettles the destroyed city after a couple of years automatically, but not with the former “owner”, I mean the faction/tribe that lived there initially.


But I suspect that this is not possible?!

[Maximus183]

Yeah it's probably not possible. It might be through scripting but that's not my field so I don't know.

[TWCassius]

I agree a 100%, raze is too crazy.. and a bit gamebreaking.

Do you guys believe it could be possible to make some factions less prone to raze (the sassanids are razing 90% of ERE provinces in my actual campaign which is nonsense as they should be occupying more... they're a civilized people after all) and others like the Huns, vandals etc more destructive (but still not that much as vanilla is atm)?

[Maximus183]

Yeah there appears to be different values for different factions/cultures. Like I've said, we'll be looking into this, so expect a much more balanced system in the future.

[Patricius]

Reducing the cost of colonising is the best and least contrived way to reduce the effect of razing.