Loyalty

[Yarpen]

Another question, maybe lame, but I don't quite get how you win loyalty in conquered regions. I had an impression that seizing military control or individual regions, even more securing province's capital ect. should result in gradual rise of loyalty. Afterall, we're talking here about civil wars when loyalty shifted IRL very quickly towards winning sides. I would understand problems with big urban centers, but when I march through Raetia, seize it's capital, crush all Othonians in a whole province and after several turns still every Raetian wooded shithole without a settlement even shows 0 loyalty, something is counter-intuitive here. Am I expected to garrison every piece of wasteland to rise loyalty up?

[Sir Garnet]

I have noted regional decisions that affect loyalty.

[Yarpen]

I have noted regional decisions that affect loyalty.

Indeed, but they're EP costly and it would be illogical to spend so many EPs (impossible anyway) on every unimportant region within a province (unfortunately, important in an aspect of producing supplies on which loyalty IIRC has an impact). It's just hard to imagine i.e. some village communities in the Alps caring much about who considers himself emperor in Rome at the moment and stubbornly loyal to a loosing guy despite the fact that his winning opponent is just traversing their homeland with a 30-thousand army.

[Boomer]

That's one aspect where the Caesar civil war scenario plays out well historically. When Caesar marched on Rome, just about the entire rest of Italy went over to his side and offered up tribute and support. However, this should actually happen more frequently in the game than it does. In the ancient world, simply showing up with a large army and a charismatic leader was usually enough to sway lots of towns and cities, with only hardcore holdouts and the occasional enemy garrison offering resistance.

But this constant switching of sides, while historical, would be madness to implement in a game engine that has to model not only armies and leaders but hundreds of individual cities, supply lanes, and AI behavior. Really the best way to keep cities as important objects of conquest is to use the objective ratings/EP point system that the game currently uses. Region loyalty COULD be done differently, but I don't know how with the AGE engine.