Making Rebels acting like any other faction ?

[romy]

Hi there,

I wondered if it was possible to make the Slave faction more powerful instead of being abused by every faction. I mean, I do love historical accuracy and don't like games where every rebel settlement has been conquered, making every faction as an empire instead of a kingdom/duchy. Is there a way to make Rebels a real threat ? The idea behind this is to prevent big empires and save "historical borders".

By the way, I use the campaign AI of the previous version of the mod (0.8) and I have to say it's much better IMO. What do you think ?

[Jurand of Cracow]

The only way to beef up the rebels I'd seen in the M2TW mods was to add to the initial army. In some cases the player would have to wait many turns to gather forces big enough to attack, for instance if he lacks access to heavy troops when the garrison is composed of the heavy troops. But besides - I don't think so.

However, I perceive the SSHIP usurper system as a way to make the rebels more important. I've seen AI factions ripped by the internal wars and rebel settlements existing for many years (BTW - I think it's actually the problem for the gameplay because it prevents AI from creation of really big empires). I was careful enough not to let it happen in my kingdom, so I don't know how does it look for the player. The system could perhaps be harsher for the players, but how would we react to not being able to craft big empires? I think most of the players do want to create big kingdoms (even though Alavaria might be an extreme case) and making players to struggle for historical borders wouldn't taste well. For me, personally, I'd be happy if the game would be about historical borders, I like playing many turns just to take one settlement, and I play for role playing. But I doubt it would fit the others.

[Used2BRoz]

Another way to boost the rebel faction is to give it more money. IIRC the rebel faction can only trade with itself, which after the initial stage of the game makes it very weak economically. The rebel faction gets quite a lot of small armies from various units /characters going rogue but never gets extra cash to pay for their upkeep. (You can make pirate ships free upkeep but dunno if there's any other rebel faction unit that would work with.)

Another problem with slave faction is that it doesn't function well in the campaign AI. Rebel units usually stick to one region - unless they get defeated and can retreat into another. Also its geographical dispersion makes it difficult to make any co-ordinated moves. What I have seen (in vanilla M2TW) are pirate ships spawning in the Baltic and sailing all the way to cause problems in the Mediterranean. But armies - not so much.

[Lifthrasir]

In addition, the rebels factions have been already improved a bit in SSHIP. Now, they are a bit more "agressive". If you leave a settlement with a weak garrison close to a rebel one, you can expect to see a rebel stack coming soon or later to besiege your settlement.
Also, unless I'm wrong, they are able to replenish their stacks or to recruit units. MWY knows more about them than I do

[MWY]

The rebel AI already gets a money boost according to the number of settlements they own. They can build buildings and recruit units. However, they are a special faction with severe AI limitations and special abilities.
F.E. their settlements cant rebel (obviously), but they also can not really attack. They sometimes do, but I think those are the wandering spawned rebel stacks. Not the ones coming from a region. The rebel faction is set to attack everything in their AI label, yet they somehow can't. So to make a rebel faction feel like a real one, you would have to create a second one without the rebel label basically. So one less faction on the map.