Features the EB team wants to see in R2TW

[ray243]

Despite the fact that there are many mods around that change the gameplay, there are still some gameplay features and hardcoded stuff that cannot be modded in without changing the exe file.

I feel that it will be interesting to hear stuff from the perspective of modders. Would you guys want to see features like being able to push ladders off the wall? Being able to have a region of interception in the campaign map?

Being able to recruit AOR units, that is able to change its AOR region? Meaning you can set up the base camp or HQ for a legion, and recruit units directly in the field as opposed to recruiting units in the city?

A campaign governing system that allows you to change from a republic into a monarchy?

A supply line system, where armies can be destroyed by cutting them off their supplies?

Door to door fighting in siege battles?

What features need to be added in by CA as part of the game engine to ensure that the next Rome total war game will be more reflective of the Roman era?

[Krusader]

Unlimited provinces, cities, factions etc. With a clear warning that adding too much will make the game unstable

But other than what you described, I'd love to see:

Option to give minor skin alterations to units recruited from specific province or provinces. Like Rhodian motifs for hoplites from Rhodes and Athenian for hoplites recruited from Attika.

Rivers can be customized for width (the Nile river looked like a stream, well all rivers did).
Cities can be placed on top of a river, with city area on both sides (Memphis for example) or just one.
Coastal cities that are besieged will have no turns to surrender if their harbour is not blocked and there is a nearby friendly city trading with them (representing food being shipped in).

Think there are many more features I'd like to see, but this is what I can think off right now,.

[/Bean\]

I know I'm not in the EB team, but maybe this thread should be a wider range.

I'd like to see the ability to scout the battlefield, would be nice. Actually taking a first hand look at the terrain tiles to find the best place to fight a pitched battle. Like you can take a look at cities and stuff with people wandering around.

Supply lines is another thing I'd like to see; wagons, etc. Armies can cut of supplies or raid them if unprotected.

More villages...theres very few of these, especially random ones on the battle maps.

More will come, I'm sure.

[SwissBarbar]

Option to give minor skin alterations to units recruited from specific province or provinces. Like Rhodian motifs for hoplites from Rhodes and Athenian for hoplites recruited from Attika.

Yes, and the most cool thing about it would be, that when you retrain a unit in another town, the new guys have the skin from the region they've been recruited from ;-)

[BozosLiveHere]

An SDK. by the time of the game release or soon after. With M2TW, by the time peple finally cracked the model and animations files, a good sized portion of potential modders had already moved on to other platforms.

[antisocialmunky]

Yeah, I'veh eard M2:TW modding in the early days was rough. Atleast the ETW team is giving the modders stuff like this to help them out:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=114757

And an afformentioned mod development kit.

[oudysseos]

Number One wish: ability to create new settlements during the game.

[Jolt]

Number One wish: ability to create new settlements during the game.

oudyssea, oudysseopolis, oudysseum, etc. The oudysseos empire. :P

[Cambyses]

You know I actually rather liked the gaming board concepts of the original MTW or shogun, where the defender always has the option of fighting a field battle before hiding in their fortress. I would love to see that option returned, ideally with the defender chosing the ground for the fight.

Also, if the game's concepts were to change and develop, I would like to see some kind of cultural border control /influence along the lines of how its done in Civ 4.

Temporary forts, the defender should be given the option to leave before the seige, ie without getting stuck with the choice of having to sally or starve!

Lastly, would want the bigger rivers to be more of an obstacle and various tactical options for crossing them made available, possibly in the same sort of format as a seige

[chairman]

So many...

Confederacy: the function of having several mini-factions (think city states or tribes) work together under an umbrella faction (Koinon Hellenon, tribal confederations, etc.). Each would be autonomous from each other, but would have similar or unified foriegn policy and such.

The ability to command allied armies or units in battle. For example, Achaian and KH forces gather in battle against the Maks, and the highest ranking general takes charge, all allied forces under his command.

A realistic representation of nomadic factions, without the need for settlements. Nomad "camps" would move with migrating populations, adding "buildings" and loot, with the ability to found a new city if they choose to settle down in one place.

As mentioned above, actual supply lines and the importance of foraging and looting.

An improved mercanary system. (no clear ideas)

I wholeheartedly second Krusader's idea for region recruitment based unit skins!

The ability to have multiple family member trees, with intermarriage between them. Also, the ability to intermerry with other factions.

Adding a new character class between family members and agents: beaurocrat/military officer. These characters are professionals in their fields, serving as city and provincial governors, government ministers, captains, generals, admirals, tax/agriculture overseers. They allow your "family members" to carry the important business of politics, dynastic continuation and overall military strategy without the burden of dealing with the bothersome masses.

The ability to have mixed-units: sword, spear, and axe tribal forces in Europe; shield-bearers and archers in Persia. This would include allowing individual stats for each soldier in a unit, so that if one soldier has more armor than another, he has more armor defence points.

The ability to construct walls on the campaign map (eg. Hadrian's Wall or the Long Walls of Athens). These would range from simple moat/dyke combos ala Offa's Dyke to masterpiece defensive fortications complete with supporting towers and forts like the aforementioned Hadrian's Wall.

Sorry for the long post, but there are so many possibilities when you ask this kind of question.

Chairman

[bobbin]

Number One wish: ability to create new settlements during the game.

I would like to see some kind of cultural border control /influence along the lines of how its done in Civ 4.

I second both of these along with the option to destroy a city as well, even the abilty to just sack cities like in BI would be welcome.
Also perhaps make resorces more important/valuable to your economy as with the exculsion of mines and elephants they don't seem to effect the gameplay much. You could invade a neighbouring region and capture the part of it that contains the resorces you want without having to conquer the whole.

[ray243]

The ability to coordinate with AI on a strategy in the campaign map will be nice as well.

[SwissBarbar]

Nomad "camps" would move with migrating populations, adding "buildings" and loot, with the ability to found a new city if they choose to settle down in one place.

Seconded. Actually it would be nice to have 1 great steppe-region, with several spots which would be good to build a town/settlement/village. If you do, a part of the region becomes a new "region" , which is controlled from this new settlement. If you build settlements on all spots, you have many regions to govern...not populated territory is nomansland. And you could abandon your settlement...

[desert]

These are big ones:

• Men die while marching/on campaign, to starvation, sickness, desertion, raids, disease, etc.
• After too much of this, units can abandon you for the enemy, just abandon you (dissolve), and maybe even kill the general of the army
• Units can be bribed to assassinate their general or side with the enemy (as opposed to whole armies)
• If you defeat an enemy in battle, and certain criteria are met (like maybe many of the survivors are mercenaries), then some of the remaining enemy troops can join you (big with elephants and successors and maybe Romans in the Social Wars and civil wars)
• Much more siege variety, especially with siege times

[Cambyses]

[*]Men die while marching/on campaign, to starvation, sickness, desertion, raids, disease, etc.

I think if you did this, then in EB at least (due to AOR system) you would also have to look closely at travel times and re-training abilities. Attrition works great in a game like Victoria because you can retrain troops in any friendly territory. But if its going to take several years to recover from two seasons' campaigning in hostile territory, it might be more difficult to implement.

Would be great to have supply issues implemented in the game in a realistic manner though.

[desert]

But in EB, things are artificially time-consuming. Distances that take turns to cover in reality would only take weeks. And it doesn't take a season to recruit a few hundred men. All this can easily be solved by

a. Increasing movement rates by two or threefold AT LEAST
OR
b. Making a year = 8 turns/12 turns

c. Making use of 0-turn recruitment times (which is already being done in EB II).

[Owen Glyndwr]

I would love to see realistic city layouts (I know, people are working on this for EB II), but this is something I've really wanted to see since M2 come out. What would be cooler than marching through the actual Jerusalem of Rome. If CA doesn't do this, I hope they at least make it easier to mod in.

[desert]

I just noticed that I put "disease" and "sickness" in the same line.

[Cambyses]

I just noticed that I put "disease" and "sickness" in the same line.

Heh, dont worry, they are two different things really. Sickness is where you would get ill from eating or drinking something bad. Disease is, well, nastier in the most part, and includes things like cancer etc

[geala]

Nice ideas already. I would support more or less all. But some should be done only if it could be done rightly. Otherwise it could be a great annoyance.

For example the "desease and die" feature. Realistic. But not in all circumstances. It should be connected with the faction, the area, the supply lines, the time frame. I don't think that a Roman army in the 1st c. BC with good supply lines should face the same rate of non-fight casualties than, lets say, a Germanic or even Greek army on a longer campaign. (That is just a crude example, I don't want to start a "best medicine" discussion.) So, please no simple percent norm of soldiers that will die each turn regardless of the circumstances.

Or supply lines. That would be the feature that I would desire the most. It would allow small scale warfare and would bring light troops really to shine. It's a shame that ETW has it not although 18th c. warfare was totally connected to magazins and supply. Ancient warfare less so imho but it would still be an important feature. But it should not affect every army type the same. A nomad horde for example should be less affected than an army of a conventional faction. Unless the horde perhaps moves in areas where fodder is not easily obtained. A supply route on a river should have other results than one on land. Roads should matter. Supply performance should be affected by a form of tech tree and by the numbers of units you are able or willing to attach to supplying. And so on.

So I would like to have such more realistic micromanage features only in the case that they were realistic and differentiated in itself. Otherwise I would prefer not to have it in the game.

A feature I would like to have: it should be possible to supply towns and fortresses under siege by force. It could be a small fight on a map or just automatically calculated. If successful the siege would last f.e. a turn longer. That would imply also a different model for sieges. It should f.e. not be possible to surround a big city with (too) few units. If the supply lines of an attacker were cut by a release army the attacker should also suffer casualties.

[ray243]

Seige battles need to be reworked from scratch, such as allowing the troops on the wall to pour oil onto people climibing up the walls, or push troops down from their ladders and etc.

It will really make seige battles harder for the attackers, and the attackers having a need to bring more men than the defenders to properly win a seige battle.

Which reminds me, the need to remove the unit stack limit. With a 20 unit limit, the attacker would easily lose a seige battle due to both sides having an equal amount of men, and additional troops can only be controlled by the AI.


Allowing a player to form a stack of 60 units stack(although logistic issues like supply lines, movement points and the amount of money needed to maintain that army for several seasons ) will change the gameplay by a lot.

Other than that, you can finally have an exciting battle with an AI if it outnumbers your army. Rather than giving the AI bonus, if the AI managed to outnumber you in a field battle, and can be commanded decently, you will have a pretty challenging game.

[/Bean\]

Think just how big your computer would have to be if several armies each with 60 units joined in a battle...

[ray243]

Think just how big your computer would have to be if several armies each with 60 units joined in a battle...

Unit size settings? Or even a optional limit on units in a stack. Bear in mind that modders who has mod ETW manage to run the game smoothly, even when he is commanding over 20 units.

[Feyr Tehl]

Still... Imangine real sized battles! I would be in heaven, drooling about how much could be done.

[desert]

Siege battles should cost money per turn. Small sorties and such should also be allowed (ie. cavalry raids, etc.)

This would be a huge incentive for keeping a siege train. Of course, the economy needs to be reworked, because at the moment you need an empire just to maintain 2 guns. And instead of firing on the battle map, stone throwers should damage walls over time.

And wall size should be variable. And so should build times (if you allot more workers to the project, the workers are motivated). Also, you should be able to build several things at once.

[JRG]

I'm confused. Did CA announce that they were making an R2TW, or is this thread about what the features of R2TW would be if it were to be made?

[bobbin]

The latter, well more precisely what features people want there to be in R2TW.

[Feyr Tehl]

If it is made.

[JRG]

The latter, well more precisely what features people want there to be in R2TW.

Okay then, I guess I would love, in addition to what everyone else has said, real succession crises. For example, if the younger, more capable son is the heir, then the older son might stage a revolt and perhaps even start a civil war. Non-succession related civil wars and rebellions would be great too, like if the Seleukid king is campaigning in the west an imposter might set himself up as king of the east, or something like that.

[Jolt]

Realistic Familly trees and succession isn't asking too much is it? Meaning brothers and sisters marry in Egypt, and normally in most factions, the eldest son of the Faction Leader gets automatic choice as Faction Heir. That way, we don't get dozens of disenherited throughout the game.