Reign of the Ancients: Download and readme

[Wizzington]

Is this save game compatible to the last one? If I overwrite with just the new exe, and then overwrite with the new mod files....? I've just invested quite a few hours into my last game so it would be nice to continue over. And it would also solve the number 1 reason I abandoned it (namely thousand minor member alliances preventing expansion in Gaul)

PS: It's been a really fun mod thus far, Thanks.

I'm not sure. I would say it's probably compatible, but I can't say for sure.

 

[Wizzington]

Please note: 2.35 introduced a CTD if you hover over the little question mark in an 'empty' character portait. I'm gonna see if I can implement a hack fix, but this is not caused by RoA so no need to report it to me.

 

[Wizzington]

Beta 3 is up. This will probably be the last beta for 2.0 since I've gotten most of the character events I had planned in and the bugs in the major mechanics have largely been ironed out. Please continue to report bugs and give me any ideas for events you might have, as RoA still only has ~250 char events compared to vanilla's 500+.

Note that beta 3 is not compatible with older save games due to the removal of some tags.

Changelog:

- Added 100+ new character events, with particular emphasis on friendships and rivalries.
- Disloyal characters with many loyal regiments can now start a civil war, even if they don't hold a command.
- Added cleanup code that should prevent the game from breaking permanently if the player saves and reloads with events on the screen. Nonetheless, don't save and reload when events are on the screen!
- It is no longer possible for republics to get an appointment event while another appointment event is pending. This should prevent duplicate appointments.
- It is no longer possible for characters to have friends and rivals from outside the country since the engine doesn't really support it.
- Made war horses a bit more common.
- Fixed some bugs with colonization and land grabs caused by duplicate event IDs.
- Implemented a workaround fix for the mouseover crash on government screen introduced in 2.35. This workaround disables the "jump to character" button for some positions, so you'll need to do an extra click or two to bring up characters holding the affected offices.
- Prisoners and envoys will no longer get the vast majority of character events.
- Tweaked Punic military inventions to better match up with history.
- Military inventions are now tied to tech group instead of culture group (roman tech gets roman inventions, etc).
- Colonies are now more expensive to build.
- Consolidated a number of OPM tribes into larger tribes in order to speed up the game. Further consolidations may occur if necessary.
- Numidia now starts the game as a tributary of Carthage, which will hopefully prevent Carthage from annexing them early on.
- Removed Phazania and Nassamones in the regular scenario. Numidia now holds their land.
- Fixed some localisation problems in events.
- Made incestous romances rare and added some rather nasty consequenses if they are discovered.
- Removed incestous marriages with the exception of ruling families under egyptian succession law.
- Increased the loyalty loss from unfulfilled ambitions.
- Increased the loyalty loss from being unemployed.
- Some events related to barbarians are no longer major (they were set to major for testing purposes).
- Increased the effects of court offices.
- Increased ruling party bonuses.
- The ruler's finesse no longer affects your global tax income (it still has a large effect on tax income in the capital region).
- Reduced the years of peace at game start as the AI is now better at finding allies.
- Increased loyalty hits for dismissing characters from offices.
- You can now shuffle governors into tech or command offices and vice versa without suffering dismissal penalties. You can not shuffle a governor whose loyalty is low.
- You can no longer shuffle characters between court/censor offices and other offices, as the engine doesn't quite allow it. To move a character between a court/censor and tech office for instance, you will first have to dismiss them from their court/censor office.
- Characters can no longer hold two major offices concurrently.
- Returned Cyrenaica to Egypt, but upped the chance of the Cyrenaican Independence event firing.
- Fixed a bug that allowed women to be censors.
- Tribal revolts will now occur with less frequency.
- Dictatorships can now form an Imperium.

Downloads
RoA 2.00 BETA 3 (GameFront)
RoA 2.00 BETA 3 (MegaUpload)

 

[Wizzington]

OK, I lied. I ended up wanting to fix the issue of the giant rebel stacks and so here is beta 4. Not savegame compatible with beta 3.

Changelog:

- Added a base stability cost so that even tiny countries have to pay more than a couple gold to raise stability.
- Your capital city now gets a bonus to pop growth.
- Population growth penalties are now handled as a direct factor of population size instead of being a modifier.
- Reduced population sizes in provinces to reduce the size of rebel stacks. Tax, manpower and RP from each pop was increased to compensate.
- Rulers should no longer get disloyalty events.
- Hid the character death icon to prevent it from showing up in all events.
- Republics with Gender Inclusion can now upgrade to a full Gender Equality law.
- Senate appointments to offices should now be better stat-wise.
- Made it less likely that wrong-religion characters are appointed to the Senate unless you have the Religious Tolerance Law.

Downloads
RoA 2.00 BETA 4 (GameFront)
RoA 2.00 BETA 4 (MegaUpload)

 

[Wizzington]

Marriage is by event only, unfortunately. There's a console hack to setup marriages I believe, but there's no way to turn it into an actual gameplay mechanic.

 

[Wizzington]

It's an issue with office-shuffling. The next version should fix it.

 

[Wizzington]

Yeah Shattered World isn't going anywhere, if its not there you did something wrong.

 

[Wizzington]

Just a minor thing. One can still build colonies in provinces that have one's religion and culture (even the capital). Could you change the potential?

Did you unpause the game? The mod needs to start to place already existing colonies in your capital and such.

 

[Wizzington]

Before the advent of modern bureaucracy, it wasn't uncommon for energetic officials to literally work themselves to death trying to maintain the myriad of vaguely defined responsibilities that came with an office. Energetic giving a health decrease is supposed to represent the effects of overworking while a lazy character takes it a bit more easy. Keep in mind people generally had a bit more active lives back then, no computers to sit in front of.

 

[Wizzington]

Anyhow it's a gameplay balance thing. Lazy has two drawbacks so it needs some advantages.

 

[Wizzington]

Unfortunately assaults are just plain bugged. I might be able to do something to force the AI to split its doomstacks.

 

[Wizzington]

That is the problem I just mentioned. I'll be releasing 2.0 final next week, it will fix the the bug.

 

[Wizzington]

Every once in a while, I load vanilla by mistake. Quitting and reloading RotA causes a CTD. Deleting the vanilla map cache and the RotA map cache does not seem to do the trick either. Re-downloading the RotA works, of course, but is there another way to get it working again?

I always manage to fix it by deleting the entire vanilla cache and re-extracting the ROA vanilla cache in its place. If that doesn't do it I don't know.

 

[Wizzington]

I've really been enjoying the 'Shattered World' scenario a lot. It gives the game a lot more replayability. One thing I've noticed though is that certain countries have negatively unbalanced starting conditions, which makes them too difficult to play as. Two examples I've noticed are Epirus, where you start with 1 army unit and almost no manpower and lots of nations declare war on you within a few months because of this. The other is Saguntum, where nobody in Spain will ally with you and you are forced to fend for yourself (usually ganged-up on unless you expand very quickly).

Not sure if this is intentional or not, I just thought it worth flagging in case you wanted to look into it.

Not every country is supposed to be balanced in SW really. There's a LOT to choose from, so not gonna worry about making every single one viable.

 

[Wizzington]

Here's 2.0 final. Should address all the major bugs remaining in 2.0. Future releases will focus mainly on adding character events and more depth to internal politics.

Not save-game compatible with any previous version.

Changelog:

- The AI will no longer shuffle around employed characters. This should prevent the crazy command switcheroo on AI armies and stop save-game ballooning from constantly switching titles.
- Fixed a couple bugs with the Ruler Finesse titles.
- Tweaked the power status calcs as it was too easy to reach Great Power and Hegemony.
- Changed the requirements for the rebellious tributary events so that they don't fire simply because your forcelimit got larger in war
- Fixed some accidentally positive benefits to unpopularity and negative stability to be not so positive.
- Changing the end date to 20000 AVC so that you can play however long you like (note that there is no start date history after 727 AVC though).
- Comets can now be sighted.
- Reunited Crete to get rid of another couple of tags (for performance reasons).
- Tyranny will now go away more slowly.
- The badboy limit is now fixed at 21.
- Reduced the forcelimit bonus that AI Rome and Parthia gets.
- Removed the option to bribe characters as this made it far too easy for large, rich countries to deal with disloyal governors and generals.
- Macedonia can now form Greece.

Downloads:
RoA 2.00 FINAL (GameFront)
RoA 2.00 FINAL (MegaUpload)

 

[Wizzington]

Thank you for all of your hard work!

Drat. I would really like to finish my current game. Would you mind explaining which lines of code (or which files) need to be updated to fix the AI shuffling employed characters bug? Please tell me that is not what makes it save-game incompatible!

Just grab common/titles.txt from the new release and replace the common/titles.txt in beta 4.

 

[Wizzington]

As long as you don't overwrite common/countries.txt it should be fine. The lack of save game compatability comes from axing the Knossos and Gortyn tags.

No guarantees though. Risk your save game at your own peril.

 

[Wizzington]

Works like a charm. The game is a lot more challenging now that bribing characters is disabled (I presume you did that on purpose).

Yep, it's in the changelog.

 

[Wizzington]

Just pasting any two mods on top of each other will almost never work. Especially not with a mod as large as RotA. You would have to manually merge them.

I assume you're playing a republic? Most offices in republics are assigned through elections, which are handled by events. You can veto elections to major offices, but the minor titles you have no control over.

 

[Wizzington]

If you're worried about a lot of guys being unemployed, thats intentional. It won't turn them towards populism the way vanilla does, it just reduces their loyalty and family prestige. You can't make everyone happy, no matter if it's a Republic or Monarchy.