Bring back tactics to the battles

[Brasidas]

From my experiences with M2TW (vanilla and best mods) it seems that the biggest regress in this game (in comparision with previous incarnations) is arcade-rts-orientated battle system. Graphical gimmicks brutally ousted tactics. It is very boring and frustrating to observe disorderly fighting mob by the most part of majority of battles.

Maybe is it only due to specific character of medieval warfare with its dynamism, decisive charges and lack of discipline? I don't think so.

What is Your concepctions how to bring back tactics (and playability ipso facto) to the battleground in EB2?

[antisocialmunky]

It wasn't too bad except for all those bugs, the lack of patches post Kingdoms, and the REALLY bad unit cohesion.

[beatoangelico]

the most simple thing to do is raise morale and defence of all units; increase the importance of fatigue and decrease the units speed helps too. It seems that the lethality ratio is hardcoded and this means most probably that the team will need to rebalance all only with defence/attack/charge values. The lack of unit cohesion I fear is hardcoded too, in some ways is more realistic than the disciplinated lines of RTW but I agree that is excessive.

[I Am Herenow]

What's the lethality ratio? And was it moddable in RTW?

[beatoangelico]

What's the lethality ratio? And was it moddable in RTW?

it's a value that influences the number of kills that a unit can do. The RTW combat system is basically a dice roll between unit 1 attack value and unit 2 defence value, if attack > defence than unit 1 kills a man of unit 2 (the exact mechanics are not officially know and are much more complex and obscure) and so on. In vanilla RTW lethality was set on 1, so every successful hit causes death (because nearly all of the units have 1 HP), but in EB it is modded to slow down the kills and point the differences between the various types of weapon. For example a tiny dagger, even if wielded with some experience (=somewhat high attack value) always had 0.04 lethality, when longswords usually have 0.225 lethality and are much more effective: this way a unit equipped with daggers when it scores a successful attack has only a 4% of killing a man of the enemy unit, and 96% of just knocking someone on the ground, so there is a second dice roll that make the battles in EB so long.

[antisocialmunky]

The set lethality probably has something to do with the various animations and optimization. You have to be able to predict when you kill the enemy and one comparison is always better than two. However, M2TW does seem to be able to do decimal point damage so lethality < 1 and seems to be about .3 as far as I can figure though the initial charge seem to be an instant kill sort of thing.

[mcantu]

From the EDU Guide:

Chance_to_kill (melee):
Code:

DLF * const1 * lethality * 1.1 ^ ( ATK - DEF + MDF )


Chance_to_kill (missile): [not 100% thoroughly tested, but a very good approximation]
Code:

const2 * (ATK - DEF - RNG/10 + MDF + DLF*10)


ATK is (missile)attack, DEF is the sum of all applicable defenses, MDF is the sum of all applicable bonuses and penalties, RNG is firing range.

DLF is the difficulty lever factor. It's 0.7 for Easy, 1 for Medium, 1.5 for Hard and 2 for Very Hard. This factor is what produces the AI combat bonuses for Hard/Very Hard and the AI combat penalty for Easy.

[Bellum]

REALLY bad unit cohesion.

This, I think, was the heart of the problem. Units simply don't do what they're supposed to.

[antisocialmunky]

This, I think, was the heart of the problem. Units simply don't do what they're supposed to.

Well, I managed to get a system worked out that pretty much revolved around "don't tell a bunch of doods to walk through another bunch of doods."