So, I mess around with this game a lot,and I decided to test out what happens if I increase the influence cost of armies. Via dnSpy:
It worked, so I gave it three test runs out to exactly 20 years (using the "campaign.move_time_forward 40320" command; twenty years on the dot) and checked the results by way of counting settlements (two points per town, one per castle):
It turns out it works to help some of the snowballing, although I still got unrecoverable or dead factions. But on the plus side, the largest faction was never more powerful than the next two largest combined, which was what typically happened by year 1100 in a playthrough.
Going through my save of the third test (the only one I have since I was unaware how autosaving worked across multiple characters (it doesn't)) I checked on the armies to see what they looked like:
Fairly small, especially for twenty years of game time, when clans have plenty of influence and loads of influence-generating policies and buildings up and running. But still reasonably capable of sieging down a serious settlement in a few cases. But mostly modest armies that basically are good at defense and not much else. Because throwing less than 600 dudes against a settlement with level III walls is like throwing a watermelon at a tree.
So yeah, unless I ****ed something else up, I think this might be a reasonable band-aid for snowballing, keeping in mind it took twenty years of game time to play out.
Thoughts? Questions? Comments?
Test 1 | Test 2 | Test 3 | |
Aserai | 24 | 17 | 22 |
Battania | 34 | 26 | 26 |
Khuzait | 40 | 40 | 34 |
Northern Empire | 13 | 0 | 1 |
Southern Empire | 18 | 31 | 30 |
Sturgia | 13 | 1 | 6 |
Vlandia | 30 | 23 | 26 |
Western Empire | 3 | 37 | 28 |
It turns out it works to help some of the snowballing, although I still got unrecoverable or dead factions. But on the plus side, the largest faction was never more powerful than the next two largest combined, which was what typically happened by year 1100 in a playthrough.
Going through my save of the third test (the only one I have since I was unaware how autosaving worked across multiple characters (it doesn't)) I checked on the armies to see what they looked like:
So yeah, unless I ****ed something else up, I think this might be a reasonable band-aid for snowballing, keeping in mind it took twenty years of game time to play out.
Thoughts? Questions? Comments?