Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire

[Yui108]

Do you mean v1.0 or RFRE 1.0? If you have Conquests v 1.00 you'd have to get 1.22... if you're using RFRE v 1.0 then the latest upgraded version, obviously, is better. Unless you're into self-tormenting

I have RFRE 1.00... For me due to some personal computer constraints downloading the new update would be a pain. I know it's probably better, but is it so much better I HAVE to download it?

 

[Takhisis]

Sorry for taking so long (nearly 2 weeks) but, well, you don't 'have' to download it, just that the latest version, 1.323 has numerous bug fixes, and, well... those bugs might prove troublesome.

 

[vmxa]

I suspect this is answered some place in the 200+ pages, but the Pedia does not say that the Cohortes cannot leave the city, but it appears it cannot. Will that change when upgraded?

 

[vmxa]

I put the orginal stuff back. I see the current patch seems to have the same dates for all the files I checked as the original, so I have no idea what is updated. One file is PE_all.pcx is is the same date on both rar files.

The BIQ is the same as well.

 

[D551]

Wow thats really impressive. and i was impressed with the conquests one this is intense! its like a combo of rise of rome and fall of rome. pretty tight!

 

[the_Monarch]

Hello to you all after a very long break! I've missed you guys and RFRE too so I decided to make a small contribution as a return. So I playtested v.1.323 (the latest to my knowledge). Of course, playtesting was never only observation as intended so I couldn't help "improving" certain aspects here and there. Minor things, of course, as the game balance is surprisingly accurate. So I’ve included some of my savegames (roughly one or more every 25 turns). As you can see, the game is on hard version and it's quite difficult to keep up with history in the beginning. Difficult in the term of conquests because, with a little sacrifice, science is always a couple of turns ahead. But even so, historical accuracy is astonishing. A few things I would change:
- Good job with Hannibal! Although I imagine he could be a little stronger still as he is desperately alone and is stuck attacking Pisae.
- Mithridates should come a little sooner and Sinope should have more defense before he comes (like Mediolanum and Carthago Nova)
- I haven’t encountered Cimbri, Teutons or Helvetii and the Germans NEVER BUILT Migratio Magna! But they built Incursio Magna and reached some 700 Incursors .
- something must be done to encourage the player to move out of Dacia by 270 AD.
- the Germans would rather attack the Goths than the Romans… BIG ISSUE!
- the Scythians are never any threat to anyone. Their Sagitarius Hunnicus should be greatly improved by 300 AD.
- One other BIG problem: the Goths sort of blocked the game for me when the Huns declared war on them in order to assist the Germans (MPP) so I had to make sure they never stepped on German soil. This, again, was kinda tedious.

What I have done is to add a little flavor in terms of graphics: a few more units (thnx to Sandris for his great job), cities (don’t you just hate it to see all Barbarians have the same city from Africa to Asia?) and filled in some leaders that were missing (the Seleucids were Greek too&#8230. So I’ve finished playtesting and implementing these changes at the same time and would like to share my work with you guys. Here’s a link to the patch:

patch v. 1.x

This is an unofficial patch as I haven’t had the time to coordinate the changes with Blitz and Pink or anybody else yet. I just hope there are a few C3C fans left who might enjoy this. All changes introduced are for graphical purposes (with the minor exception of editing an occasional terrain tile or bombard value here and there). I’ve only added a single nonflavor unit: the bombarding hidden nationality Roxolani rather than the defenseless raider. They would have the ability to kill most units in the equivalent of an air raid and remain alive, multiplying as the game unfolds and hopefully making the player give up Dacia and its huge revenue. After killing their units, destroying the buildings and farms and lowering the population to 1 I think it would be a normal action to just leave the city. A wonder causing a huge money loss would be even better but I still don’t know how we could implement that in Sarmizegetusa. Perhaps if it were prebuilt, available only in Principate (so it wouldn’t mess up Barbarians) and countered by another wonder that simply goes obsolete by 250 AD. Instead of losing money by the time of Diocletian I had huge revenues (the army was mostly non-support units, true) but I got to a record of 180k gold while having around 400 legio mercs, 250 miles auxiliaries and 150 cohortes urbanae. I also had roughly 100 cataphracts and 200 catapults by the end of the game so I imagine I could’ve declared war to the Germans on my own if I wanted to… But the game is quite challenging to the end with a huge border, aggressive Persians and Numidians and two Plague events…

Sorry for the long post

 

[the_Monarch]

If, for some reason you encounter an error with the labels (my game showed dec. instead of the actual gameyear), I've included two versions of labels.txt which you will find in the "text" folder of RFRE. Chose whichever works for you. Enjoy!

 

[Tigranes]

I really admire the effort that went into making this mod, however the long wait times between turns (starting from 100 BC) nearly kills all the fun. Is there any way to shorten the wait time? The number of units is just enormous, perhaps thats the reason?

 

[jfby]

The way I fixed the long time between turns was to upgrade my system. I know this isn't a great answer, but the number of units in the mod is gigantic, and it's really the only reasonable way to decrease the time. You could make sure autosave is turned off, and then make sure all your other programs are turned off.

How long is the wait between turns for you at 100 BC?

 

[mysterio_7]

I really admire the effort that went into making this mod, however the long wait times between turns (starting from 100 BC) nearly kills all the fun. Is there any way to shorten the wait time? The number of units is just enormous, perhaps thats the reason?

Correct, lot's of units slow the turns down considerably. If it is really slow at 100 BC, you will find it unbearable at 250 AD and later. If I remember correctly, that's about the time Germania and the Goths start producing massive amounts of incursors. I played this mod on a 2.3 Ghz P4 processor with 600+ MB RAM and the turn times fluctuated between 20 mins to 4 hours on the last 100 or so turns in the game.

I would play my turn and go eat lunch or play PS2 and come back to check on it. It was worth it though; the mod is very interesting in the end.

 

[Tigranes]

My system is pretty good 2.2 GHz Dual Core Pentium and something like 1 GB RAM. 20 to 4 hour? For the last 100 turns? How come people post win screens for only 107 hours spent on game? AI does not count in that final report?

For example AoI mode is very big one too, but the pace is great. I am sorry, but I simply cannot afford to wait 2 hours -- that's my entire playtime for the day ! I can see that sea trade has been eliminated (which must speed things up). How bad does Air trade slow things down?

 

[mysterio_7]

My system is pretty good 2.2 GHz Dual Core Pentium and something like 1 GB RAM. 20 to 4 hour? For the last 100 turns? How come people post win screens for only 107 hours spent on game? AI does not count in that final report?

For example AoI mode is very big one too, but the pace is great. I am sorry, but I simply cannot afford to wait 2 hours -- that's my entire playtime for the day ! I can see that sea trade has been eliminated (which must speed things up). How bad does Air trade slow things down?

I should also mention that my hard drive is on it's last leg too; although I would not attribute the slow game speed very much to that. I also noticed that when Germania or Goth were at war (at worst case with each other), the turn times were even slower; evidently it takes the AI longer to move units than to just leave them idle. One thing you might want to try if you haven't already is to change your preferences to not view enemy moves.

I can't answer why it is much faster for other people. I still remember one of the slowest turns... I waited for an hour and finally gave up. I went to sleep, came back 8 hours later, and it was still waiting. It finally finished a couple hours later after I was done getting ready for work.

I agree with AoI, it is much faster for me too.

I'm not trying to discourage anyone from playing this mod; it was the best Civ 3 mod I have ever played by far. Just be aware that the turn times are slow especially towards the end of the game.

 

[Stazro]

It may sound strange, but war can help you reduce loading times in the long run. If there are too many units in the game, kill them. It also helps considerably for the endgame, if your opponents have been weakened in earlier wars.
Also, low difficulty, of course, though not as much as in other scenarios, because most AI units are autoproduced and the autoproduction is not affected by the game difficulty.

I have completed more than one game (you can find the link to one "presentation" in my sig) and the machine I was playing on is a 2003 low-end notebook. I don't remember the specs (I replaced it last year), but it really wasn't a gaming platform, yet I still managed to go the whole way through this monster of a scenario in somewhat reasonable time.

 

[Tigranes]

Stazro, your story made me to play this scenario, I am glad you still around ! Very nice thread. Did you ever play the hard one on Consul? Early in the game I always run into money problem (I try to keep 12 turn tech pace), even if I sell Roma to Carthage for 1000 gold at the begining of the game

 

[Stazro]

Stazro, your story made me to play this scenario, I am glad you still around ! Very nice thread. Did you ever play the hard one on Consul? Early in the game I always run into money problem (I try to keep 12 turn tech pace), even if I sell Roma to Carthage for 1000 gold at the begining of the game

Nice to hear that
I haven't played the hard biq. I'm not much of a micromanager and it would quickly become to hard for my taste (I have to admit I'm one of the guys who like winning ).

 

[mysterio_7]

Not sure if this is the best place to ask, but has anyone thought of re-creating this mod for Civ 5? (fingers crossed)

 

[Takhisis]

Wait until it comes out… pinktilapia ain't around the forums much these days.
(I would if I had the time and skill. Skill? Don't know until I've tried it. Time? Absolutely none.)

 

[Keroro]

There was a Civ 4 port attempted by Primordial Stew (I think it was him anyway). It might be better to askin a Civ 4 forum rather than here. The modding requirements between Civ 3 and Civ 5 are likely to be very different from what I've heard.

I'm certain that someone will make some Roman themed mods for Civ 5 regardless of whether RFRE is re-made or not.

 

[primordial stew]

Warlords is what it ended up on. Here is the FAQ: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=183804

While not officially "done" it is very playable.

There are some other mod in the same time, but with different perspectives, and those are for BtS. civIV RFRE is the closest to this in that the main historical events are present. It is a super-set of this version mainly because scripting is available. For example, to get the "Scipio legions" promotion you have to let Hannibal reach southern Italia. No more Hannibal running off into Gaul chasing hidden-nationality units! Instead, his army will quickly blitz through Italia. He gets a lot of special attention, I think because it was such a pain here, and in the end disappointing that there was no robust way in civIII to get it done.

As for civV RFRE.. well I can likely serve as the foundation of a team, but would rather not go it alone again. It just takes too long! In creating this I've managed some SDK changes, have written quite a bit of python, and obviously lots of XML. And those will likely be the same skills needed, so it would go much faster.

My biggest worry is the typical Civ model: initial release, mediocre expansion, exciting expansion.
eg) civIII, play the world, conquests!
eg) civIV, Warlords, Beyond the Sword

Jumping in right away might not make sense because the initial release typically does not have the necessary features. For example civIV was hard-coded to 18 civs whereas RFRE needs around 45 if everyone is to be available. So there was no way to do a decent job on vanilla civIV.

Still though, I would like to see this, so if no one else jumps I'll get around to it

 

[primordial stew]

The Civ5 SDK is out and it contains a much improved version of Worldbuilder (WB), which is similar to the civIII Conquests scenario editor. Like civIII it's back to binary scenario files.

Civ5 uses hexes, but WB can import civ4 maps and the conversion is pretty good!

At this point I don't know of a reason that building a civIII-like version (ie no scripting) can't be done. It might run really slow. It is a massive amount of work to import all of the data, but since it's already XML and tags are similar, perhaps some more scripts can be written to bring in big chunks of it.

As for scripting, Lua replaces Python as the language. The event sequence/dependencies from Warlords can just be ported to Lua, once the APIs + language are understood that is...

This will be my last post here about this. Once I get some basic stuff working I'll start a new thread in the civ5 forums. Am always looking for help if anyone is interested. It's difficult to find people who:
1) have played civIII or Warlords RFRE
2) know the history reasonably well
3) have civ5

I can probably do most of the modding, but will need lots of help play testing. civ5 combat is quite different. There are city-states now. Strategic resources are limited, so finally there will be a reason for the Romans to expand in order to acquire sufficient Iron