Realistic Warfare Plus
A Total Combat Overhaul for Imperator: Rome
v0.3.15 beta — Compatible with Invictus 1.11
Vanilla Imperator: Rome features long, grinding wars decided more by occupation and attrition than by battlefield outcomes. Armies are vast, battles are forgettable, and the late game crawls under the weight of hundreds of cohorts shuffling across the map.
Wars should be shorter, more decisive, and more costly — and armies should be small enough that losing a battle matters.
Battles resolve in days of game time, not weeks. The phase clock is compressed to a single day per combat phase (vanilla: five days), and morale damage is tripled — battles end when morale breaks, not when everyone is dead. When a superior force meets an inferior one, the outcome is felt immediately: in warscore, in cohort losses, in the morale of survivors.
- Battle phase clock compressed — engagements resolve in days, not weeks
- Battle result scale nearly tripled (8 vs. vanilla 3) — victories generate much larger warscore swings
- Morale damage tripled — battles decided by morale collapse, not attrition
- Strength damage significantly increased — losses are permanent
- Poor tactical decisions punished: late deployment and out-of-position reinforcements take morale hits
- Overall damage multiplier nearly doubled
Every element of army size has been reduced in parallel:
- Cohort size halved (250 men vs. vanilla 500)
- Starting armies halved
- Starting navies halved
- Mercenary availability sharply reduced — hired swords cannot paper over smaller armies
- Land maintenance doubled — large standing armies are expensive
- Naval maintenance doubled — ship spam is penalized
- Manpower reserves capped at half the vanilla ceiling — losses hurt immediately, not after years of recovery
The result is that armies feel like armies, not migration waves. Losing 5,000 men in a battle is a crisis, not a rounding error.
Starting and sustaining a war now carries real political and economic weight:
- No-CB wars cost more aggressive expansion, more war exhaustion, and now require political influence — unjustified aggression has a price
- Claim fabrication costs significantly more political influence and now generates AE
- Occupation, blockades, and marching through enemy territory all generate more war exhaustion than vanilla
- War exhaustion reduces ruler popularity, drains political influence, slows manpower recovery, and makes your population unhappy — the longer a war drags on, the less capacity you have to hold your realm together
- Internal rebellions during wars no longer receive a loyalty buffer — empires under pressure can crack
In vanilla, losing a general is a minor inconvenience. In RWP, it is a crisis.
When a commander dies in active battle, their country suffers an immediate morale shock — all land armies are weakened for the remainder of the campaign season, and the ruler’s popularity takes a political hit as a loyal patron is mourned.
- Commander deaths now trigger a country-wide land morale penalty lasting 180 days
- Rulers lose popularity when their generals fall — dead commanders are dead political allies
- Generals are now more likely to be captured or killed — the escape roll is less forgiving than vanilla
- An army that loses its general mid-campaign is in genuine danger
Choose your commanders carefully. Keep them away from hopeless engagements. A good general is worth more than the cohorts they lead — and when they fall, the whole realm feels it.
(Suggested by @alex_belgium 10o7 in Feature Requests)
A new battlefield mechanic: when a defeated army retreats into a province completely surrounded by enemy forces, impassable terrain, or water, every cohort in that army takes severe additional strength damage.
Encirclement is intentionally catastrophic. An army that cannot escape is destroyed. Choose your campaign routes carefully.
The AI has been tuned to match the mod’s smaller-army philosophy:
- AI recruits in smaller, more deliberate batches
- AI keeps armies concentrated rather than splitting them
- AI prepares for wars longer before committing (36 months vs. vanilla 24)
- AI invests more in fortifications
- AI responds decisively to war exhaustion — seeks peace when losing, presses harder when winning
- AI maintains a professional legion core (minimum 2 legions vs. vanilla 1)
- AI spends more aggressively during active wars to reinforce and sustain its armies
Field battles are fast and violent. Sieges are not.
Fortified positions take longer to reduce than in vanilla — the longer siege phase is intentional. If you want a short war, win it in the field. Unfortified provinces fall quickly. Walled cities hold.
When a force has seized every territory in a region, the state flips to the controller automatically — no need to individually chase down every hamlet after the fighting is done. But every territory must fall. A single holdout, fortified or not, keeps the state contested.
- Designed for and tested against Invictus 1.11
- All defines verified against vanilla and Invictus to avoid conflicts
- Fully compatible with Invictus’s subject types, wargoals, satrapy system, mission content, and new subject types (march, temple state, kushite client, indian client, fiefdom)
- Note on the "Chaotic AI" game rule: If you enable Invictus’s Chaotic AI option, major powers will ignore much of the war exhaustion cooling that RWP enforces. Expect continuous conflicts with little breathing room between wars. This is a supported combination — just a significantly harder experience than RWP’s default.
- Reanimāta — not compatible. Both mods modify occupation logic and warfare pacing in ways that conflict directly.
- Invictus (first or near the top)
- Content mods that don’t touch combat defines (missions, events, map)
- Any other combat or AI overhauls (stacking two combat overhauls is risky regardless of load order!)
- Realistic Warfare Plus (last, or near last)
Realistic Warfare Plus is inspired by and builds upon work from several community sub-mods: Improved Warfare 1.5, Army Encirclement, Empires Collapse, Vae Victis, Short & Bloody Battles and Smaller Armies. The region cascade occupation mechanic is adapted from Agamidae’s Occupy the whole province.
