Great Invasions, so far

[Palpat]

All right, time for some feed back.

I bought the game four years ago and quickly left it on the shelves, because of a low end computer and the early ill-fated versions.

I gave the game a new try since August.
Well, I'm quite happy with it! But let's see what needs improvement.
Hey, Ageod guys, it could be usefull for any patch :dreaming: or gold version, GI2 or whatever.

-Slow engine, but hey... aren't we supposed to plays 5-6 nations at a time? No boring peace like in P'dox games. So, not so much of a shortcoming. But games are somewhat slow all the same.

-Crashes/freezes. Well, almost a future of the game indeed. But if crashes are "not so" painful, freezes are.

-Independent provinces: it bothers me when some land conquered by barbarians all of a sudden become empty, leaving huge part of land empty, sometime in the middle of Empires. Also, Roman Empire colonizing empty Poland is somewhat overstretched. Something could be changed there. Perhaps some sort of colonization system...

- Proscription Edict: Seriously, what the heck?! I had several time WRE using this thing and emptying whole provinces. Clearly, the AI don't know how to use it. I'm planning to start a thead about it.

- Hun's settlement to early: it's 410 and they are a Kingdom? All right, they ruined Persia and ERE, but what about WRE and my Catalaunic fields battle?
It's also true for other barbarians.

- Barbarians strength: Well... Vandals failed, Ostro and Wisigoths failed... It's one or two game indeed, but apart from the Huns dooming ERE, the invasions are for the moment not that great and borders are moving along one or two provinces in the Limes in what is today Austria. Perhaps my germanic emperors are better at preserving the Empire than romans.

- Western Germanic Emperors: well, quite funny. But come on...

- Conversions too easy or at least to fast. Playing the church, I made Christianity ultra-dominant in 50 years. I think Paganism should somewhat be more resilient. It was still a common issue in the 5th century... I'm only slowing now, around 430, because of Pelagianism heresy.
I'm also ultra-rich as the Church...

[Gjergj K.]

Largely agree, the game is not perfect. Starting in 450 the Catholic church becomes dominant. Even the AI is largely able to manage to make Christianity dominant, even if it largely chooses to send missionaries to the middle east.

In regards to Barbarians, their performance is largely random. Sometimes they grown big, sometimes they just die. They probably grow too big too fast.
Best way to improve this, not sure.

As for barbarians just losing territory, I'm not sure how else you could model the way in which barbarians just moved about. The Vandals go from East Germany to Africa, and so on.

AI seems to use strategems randomly- a player is much more cunning.

Anyway, I like the game, but yes, it has its flaws.

[Franciscus]

Are you using the "official" mod ?
I am not sure, but IIRC it is supposed to make AI play more historically ?

[Palpat]

I am.
But to make justice to the game, I've -and is- only played one game, due to time restraint. So, it's more a feedback from my current game observations. I will be able to play more in weeks to come, so to confirm or not these feedbacks.

[Brendan]

I do agree with you all.
Another feature that could be addressed is the "PAF" code which should manage absorbtion by dominant ethnic group versus the minorities...the fact is that EVERY single month starting a GC as RED I see minorities fly away and then my provinces soon becoming populated by a single ethnic group, so that by a couple of years game, they get ALL popolated by a single ethnic group; this shouldn't be the case to be historically e realistically true IMHO... I read a post where it was said patch 1.7c had adressed the problem but this is not seemingly the case despite the fact I've installed it succesfully. I've even then modified the GameRules.csv file and overwritten the value from 120 to 3600 (considering expressed in days instead than months) but I haven't got any different behaviour : it seems that this code is not even keept in any account by the AI engine.

A further question is about the levies calculation: as RED I see that levies to start from 1/1/351 become very high in all the provinces I control as WRE, while they are much less for ERE (a part from the fact that there is a max numer of Land units (50) each empire may build up as this is a feature of the mod I've installed)...it seems me strange that they are grow so much from a year to another; maybe this is also linked to the same fact above about the disappearance of the ethnic minorities in the provinces that seems to migrate VERY fast to somewhere other place, but where exactly???? This make the stratagem Proscription even totally unuseful!