Moving units from one city to another - general always out in the cold?

[Ow-Chi]

Hola - so I understand the idea of transfering troops between armies and that generals can not be transfered. What is confusing to me is I keep running into this type of thing:

General A is at a city, General B rides over and transfers some troops over.
General B is now stuck, by himself outside the city. I cant move him into the city and a lot of times do not have enough movement to get back to the original city.

Am I missing something here? It seems odd to me that the general that just gave all his troops to another general just has to sit outside the city walls to rot - but I have tried six ways from Sunday to get the poor guy out of the cold and am coming up empty/

[Emmental]

He's basically an army of his own, just with no troops. You can only have one army garrisoned inside a settlement.

[Teh_Diplomat]

If you have two armies in neighbouring settlements and need to merge/switch units to another army, then I suggest to move them equally to split the movement points of both armies. In most cases you can get back (you may need forced march).

But take note that your army's movement range will be affected by the new units, or any units with reduced movement - like Onagers, that move into your target army.

[Ow-Chi]

Ok thanks, at least I know there is no way to allow one man into a town when there is already one there :) Doesnt make a lick of sense but guess I need to work around it.

[Werecat101]

I must admit I prefered the way it was done in Napoleon or Shogun 2, units are created at a place that can make them they then travel to the general that ordered them.

[Metadragon]

Armies are basically their general. They can all those extra units sure but the army itself is the general. Ypu cant have two generals/Armies inside the city like you could in previous games. You cant have two generals in one army either. You can have special units like veterans in the army.

The notable exception to this is I think you can have an Admiral and a General in one city at the same time.

Um it deoends on faction and playstyle but geberally speaking two half stack armies are better than one full stack imo. That extra general can really make the difference.

[Mile pro Libertate]

Originally posted by steve:

I must admit I prefered the way it was done in Napoleon or Shogun 2, units are created at a place that can make them they then travel to the general that ordered them.

Definitely.

Attila is great in many ways, but the Rome 2 army and recruitment system was a huge mistake that CA should have scrapped for Attila.

Not only can you not stack generals, but we can't detach forces from the stacks either, making raiding and reconnaissance a big headache for no reason.

It's also funny how generals insta-travel if they have to replace a dead commander or something, but then take like a whole game year to become available again when you dismiss them 😒

You also can't take a reinforcing stack and do something like split it in two, sending half to one front and the other half to another front.

Or leave a few units to besiege a place while the rest of the stack reinforces for a battle.

PS: It also makes cheesing easier because if you can gauge the imperium of a faction, you know the maximum amount of stacks they can possibly have running around.

It's just a very stupid system.

[Metadragon]

I wouldn't say its stupid but it was a needlessly simplied one. I think the idea is that there isnt anything to really raid worthy except the default chill in the corner of a province and collect money or conquering the city way. It also stops people from gaming the system. When you can send 4 units to raze or raid a settlement. I mean can you imagine doing the M2 style cheesing in Attila? Send an Army to pin your enemy's only army and then you have a dozen tiny armies just constantly raiding and razig their settlements? It wouldnt work. Or the infamous one unit navy blocking all trade from one of their ports.

They could have had the general only (or rather leader only) army system without limiting it the way it was but I can certainly understand why they made the changes.

I really do miss the system of captains getting promoted or adopted for exemplary service though. But it wouldnt mesh correctly with the clan/politcal systems. After all if a loyal family is wallowing away at home beig statesmen while rando captains are hogging glory it wouldnt make sense.

[Mile pro Libertate]

Originally posted by Metadragon:

I wouldn't say its stupid but it was a needlessly simplied one. I think the idea is that there isnt anything to really raid worthy except the default chill in the corner of a province and collect money or conquering the city way.

By raid I meant fast strikes on infrastructure, like ports, lumber yards, farms and such a la Shogun 2. But that was something else that they removed for Rome 2.

Originally posted by Metadragon:

It also stops people from gaming the system. When you can send 4 units to raze or raid a settlement. I mean can you imagine doing the M2 style cheesing in Attila? Send an Army to pin your enemy's only army and then you have a dozen tiny armies just constantly raiding and razig their settlements? It wouldnt work.

This wasn't a problem in Shogun 2 though. It could be a problem with Med 2's AI because it was so passive and inept, and didn't raise good stacks, in terms of both numbers and composition.

But with garrison scripts I don't see 4 units taking out settlements routinely anyway.

Even if captain lead stacks ran around, they wouldn't be able to replenish or recruit without generals in the old system. The new system means every stack is a recruitment center, like a mobile town, actually making it easier to cheese than the old system.

On a related note, if some regions are ridiculously easy to take in Attila, the fact that the vast amount of them have no walls definitely isn't helping, which was yet another design decision inherited from Rome 2 that they didn't have to make.

The ability to raze and sack to begin with is also an issue here, not just how you get your units there to do it. The old system of looting or occupying gave a choice between a large amount of loot instantly, at the cost of regional stability and long term town wealth.

Attila style raiding, in smaller stacks, probably wouldn't matter because the amount they took would be negligible, at least if the scripts for raiding were refined to reflect this possibility. It wouldn't be profitable to raid with a few small stacks, nor would it hurt the raided faction much. On the other hand, raiding with tons of little stacks would come at the price of having essentially no capable forces concentrated and able to deal with threats, so it would be hard to cheese it.

Originally posted by Metadragon:

Or the infamous one unit navy blocking all trade from one of their ports.

First, you can still blockade a port and halt trade with one ship even with the new system. Second, if garrison fleets alleviate the problem small fleets pose, that doesn't give credence to the new system: you could keep the old system exactly as it was and simply add garrison scripts for ports.

Originally posted by Metadragon:

...

I really do miss the system of captains getting promoted or adopted for exemplary service though. But it wouldnt mesh correctly with the clan/politcal systems. After all if a loyal family is wallowing away at home beig statesmen while rando captains are hogging glory it wouldnt make sense.

The thing is, generals are so easily replaceable now that losing them is not a major blow like it was in Shogun.

So it lessens the political or familial weight that generals hold. Aside from gravitas/influence, there really isn't any incentive to have them.

The political system is therefore easy to game anyway because you just send rival faction's generals to their deaths if their influence is inconvenient for you.

What is the incentive to keep a general with too much influence, or who causes too much political trouble, alive? His skill tree? They're all identical and small. His retainers? Your faction leader and family generals end up with oodles more than they can handle and you just trade retainers to a newly spawned general.

Completely taking away the ability to have captains is just forcing people to do something for its own sake. Instead, there should've been a mechanism to incentivize players to want to get their loyal family out into the field, as opposed to using captains, so that this became part of the political portion of the game.

There should have been a trade off between the advantages of using generals versus the simplicity of captains; instead they just scrapped captains completely, and turned generals essentially into captains with a tiny skill tree.

The bottom line is that I always feel like CA was trying to make things work inside a framework that was ill conceived to begin with. The gravitas system in Rome 2 just feels completely pointless and the entire Rome 2 political system feels unfinished and like CA had so many other intentions for it, but couldn't flesh it out.

But because that political system and gravitas existed anyway, it's like all these other balance problems arose and had to be addressed, so we end up with imperium tiers and army limits; this in turn meant that, since army count was set by imperium, the player can't create new armies by splitting forces; which then means you have to make the general characters into the all-important magical nexus for recruitment and movement.

It's a series of things that can be justified by the implications of the things before it. But ultimately, you trace it all back and it comes to this idea of "gravitas" and "faction civil war."

So I can understand what CA was trying to do, but I also understand that the new mechanics were a logical extension of that gravitas system. And it seems to me that it was a very poor system.

The influence system works better in Attila than gravitas did, but the sad fact is that CA painted themselves into a corner with the Rome 2 political system, and they had to change so much to try and get themselves out of it. And while Attila improved on a lot, they inherited the core of the Rome 2 mechanics in these areas.

Rome 2's political system was both fundamentally flawed, and flawed in its execution as well. Attila takes the same system and executes it better.