Pace of battles to fast

[total relism]

One thing I always hated in TW games [after medevil 1] is that, the battles end way to fast. units tear throw each other. After 1 minute of skirmish one of the units is 60% dead and running off the map. I also dislike that full armored units can run like speed racer. What are your guys thoughts?.

[GFX707]

I agree.

[Ishmael]

It's a bit of a dilemma - on the one hand longer battles allow for much more tactical manoeuvring and the like, but then if you have to fight lots of little battles all over the place long battles can get very annoying, very fast. I seem to recall them stating somewhere that the focus will be on fewer, larger battles, so that gives them the possibility of making them longer. That would entail fiddling with fatigue, move speed etc, which would hopefully address your second issue.

[Kocmoc]

Ah well, that comes up from time to time.

Actual the game is pretty slow, at least if you look at S2 and the previous versions.
Its pretty important to take the speed of your mouse and camera into account. This actual the major mistake of most people.
Also I want to mention camerafreedom, since this has a huge effect on your play-speed.
To put this in some numbers:

If you have your army bunched up as one big "unit", you need less than 60 cpm to have full control.
I speak here about the peak, where tons of things happen.
Most of time you have around 30-40 cpm

If you split your army, lets say around your allied army (This means 70% on one side and 30% on the other)
you maybe get up to 100 cpm in peaks.


Now thats nothing, thats just some nice smooth micro here and there. In TW as it is right now, units hold quite some time, they moving slow and the game itself forgive you
tons of mistakes.


Lets get back for a moment and have a look at the original STW. Now boy, that was some real speed. Id loved that speed, since you really had to work, to keep control.
I would say, that you needed at least 140-150 cpm to keep full control.


Actual the battles last quite some time, if you dont play brainless you can have skirmishes here and there and at some point you have a big clash.
Good player will have a shootout, nice maneuvering and some good movement with changing power of sides.

The speed of the game is actual the very least thing I would worry about, there are tons of real problems. Speed isnt one.


Koc

PS: To help you out at some point. Grouping, camera, shortkeys, are very important and most new player seems to not give those aspects much of attention.

[quadalpha]

I use the pause button.

Also, it would be really nice if they put in in-battle saving, which would allow some epic battles.

[total relism]

Well I disagree 100%. i am not new at all to the game. I loved medevil 1's pace, it was perfect. medevil 2 and even empire were good as well. than it became arcade style. You may enjoy it. I sure did not.

[ReluctantSamurai]

If you took the time to read through some of the threads in the Scriptorium, you would have enough information on how to change things to suit your style. I, personally, have made many changes to my vanilla version of RTW, and changing the "speed" of the game was one of them. It's really rather simple

[total relism]

If you took the time to read through some of the threads in the Scriptorium, you would have enough information on how to change things to suit your style. I, personally, have made many changes to my vanilla version of RTW, and changing the "speed" of the game was one of them. It's really rather simple

when rome 2 comes out if your willing, please link me to how to do so, when you find out. Thanks

[ReluctantSamurai]

Pretty sure that won't be necessary

[Kocmoc]

Well, the point is, that just because a few people have problems to click more than 20 times a minute, CA wont make the game slower.
To have 40-60 cpm isnt asked too much.

I just see, that younger people tend to not wanting to work or work hard for something. They ask for "easier" things all the time.
If my kids would ask something like this they wouldnt see the sun for 2 weeks! :D

Anyway, good thing is, that treads like this wont change anything.

[Myth]

The whole nature of battles should be changed to be more historically accurate. In RTW/M2TW we are used to seeing the AI attack with a few militia/peasants/veites or some such trash units. Rebels with a few muddy peasant units inside spawn on the map regularly and annoy the player without producing any challenge, just a loading screen and 2 minutes walking towards the AI that is hill camping.

Less frequent annoying little skirmishes and more decisive battles are needed. I think they managed to fix that for S2TW since the AI frequently attacks with stacks of elite samurai units, though the autocalc is broken in that game.

[total relism]

I vote for slowing down both unit speed, than kill rates.

[Kocmoc]

The whole nature of battles should be changed to be more historically accurate. In RTW/M2TW we are used to seeing the AI attack with a few militia/peasants/veites or some such trash units. Rebels with a few muddy peasant units inside spawn on the map regularly and annoy the player without producing any challenge, just a loading screen and 2 minutes walking towards the AI that is hill camping.

Less frequent annoying little skirmishes and more decisive battles are needed. I think they managed to fix that for S2TW since the AI frequently attacks with stacks of elite samurai units, though the autocalc is broken in that game.

It cant be done, at least not with the average computer recourses of a normal human. To have anything close to smart AI is simply not possible with a engine like TW use.
Alone if you look how the AI react to your cav… well, its amazing.

I said that 12 years ago and I keep repeating it, TW will never see any good, smart and reactive AI controlling more than 10 units.
You would need hundreds of people to program it an you would need some a ton more of hardware than you can effort.
And since the battles are only a part of the big game…



Now to the kind of battle. I totally agree with you. The battles the AI is fighting are a big joke, in S2 you saw almost the same kind of "tactic" you already saw in S1.
I repeat myself, the basic idea of the whole game didnt changed since 12 years! The graphics got better, but the basic system kept same. instead of silly abilities, we should get more
momentum and things like Fog of war, scouting, better hidingsystem and a much better bonussystem… Its all there, the stats for scouting are in the game already, all what you have to do is, adjustments.

FOW is different, but would change a lot. In the End, you want the AI play smart and not just burn your time, while waiting (you put it probably on fullspeed) for you sitting on the hill.

[Kadagar_AV]

I think Rome had the perfect balance...

I honestly don't think I ever enjoyed the battles as much as I did in Rome TW. Medieval 2 was just way too buggy, Empire was just a bad game generally, and Shogun 2 was too repetitive.

Rome is still the game that stands out in the series. And most def if you talk about multiplayer. MP in Rome was 100x more fun than in any of the other releases.

[caravel]

Rome had lightening fast battles with cavalry which moved like a flock of birds/school of sardines... it certainly wasn't balanced. Battles were stupidly easily and I would get worn out purely through fighting one tedious battle after another...

This is why Rome was extensively modded (more so than any other TW title - and that's before we even get into the historical accuracy side of things). If Rome hadn't been so easily modified, it would easily have gone down in history as the worst TW game ever and would not have been even half as popular as it was. I agree as regards M2TW - the same rubbish as Rome. At that point I gave up and still play the first two games from time to time...

[Kralizec]

Speed is not the only problem. Rome's battle pace was pretty fast, but the problem was made worse by the crappy unit balancing. You should not be able to cost-effectively win battles by a series of frontal cavalry charges in under 3 minutes.

I like the EB mod for RTW, but in all honesty battles are sometimes too long, and because the overall kill-speed is so slow you have plenty of time to execute difficult moves. I'm currently considering wether to raise the lethality stats in my EB folder to make it a little more challenging.

In MTW original, killrates were faster than in EB (allthough still slower than RTW original). Hammer & anvil tacts were absolutely necessary, but it's not uncommon for your line to crumble before you can circle your cavalry around the flanks, whereas in EB you have plenty of time to do so. On the other hand; if I'm attacking with a slight disadvantage in troops in MTW, I carefully manage my missile units to cause as many casualties as possible, and opportunisticly pick off enemy units for easy kills. Those battles can last pretty long indeed.

It took some getting used to when I started playing MTW again, but I think that game pretty much nailed it.

[caravel]

Speed is not the only problem. Rome's battle pace was pretty fast, but the problem was made worse by the crappy unit balancing. You should not be able to cost-effectively win battles by a series of frontal cavalry charges in under 3 minutes.

The problems in RTW started back in the STW/MI days and were repeated in MTW (to a lesser extent) and VI. The fallacy has been in giving players "novelty" units which are only good in the hands of the player and which the AI cannot cope with (either using them or facing them). MI had it's battlefield ninja, kensai and mongol units, VI had the infamous huscarles and RTW had the roman units, the phalanxes, overpowered missile units, etc, etc, etc... The CA's philosophy with regards to some of these later titles seems to have been "these units were historical super men, which is why they should be 'designed to win' from the start...". In other word imbalances are there by design to give the player access to a constant binge of "toy" uber units - as opposed to actually balancing the game.

[andrewt]

I agree with Rome's unmodded version easily being one of the worst games in the series. They pretty much got the historical feel all backwards, as melee infantry was considerably weaker than cavalry and missile units.

As for the thread title, I think lowering both kill rates and move speed would be pointless. The point of reducing kill rates is to make more maneuvering possible. Reducing move speed would be counterproductive to that.

[Kocmoc]

What people tend to not understand is, that many of these thoughts are based on the idea of 1v1 (unit vs. unit).

People come along and if they are smart enough, they get some solid testing going ( I use 2 Computer and can test properly).
Now they start to speak about killrates, speed…. and so on…

I guess, that 80% or even more, never ever have a solid knowledge of stats and how they effect each other.
This said, the problem appears mostly, if a unit get flanked, reared and fronted. I remember endless discussion about these kind of
scenarios.

Alone if you look at this topic and how we go to speak about it:

One thing I always hated in TW games [after medevil 1] is that, the battles end way to fast. units tear throw each other. After 1 minute of skirmish one of the units is 60% dead and running off the map. I also dislike that full armored units can run like speed racer. What are your guys thoughts?.

Okay, what we can read here?

Units fight and die too quick. Wow! Now thats something we have to think about and should instantly change the game. Let a unit die slowly and may it stay about 2 minutes. Or better 3 minutes?
What happend? Did this guy just played bad? Has he no idea how this game works?

If you look at the S2 version before the patch, you clearly saw some problems which can be explained quick ( without going too deep into detail).
We had units which had skyhigh routingpoints, which let those units fight till end of days. You probably can remember monks, fighting till last men, gathering 4 or more units around.
This was fronted, flanked (both sides) reared, outnumbered (1:10+), still the unit (or lets say the last few mens) kept fighting.

When a unit should rout? Thats the real question and how quick it should rout?

Imo a unit should rout in less than 10 secs, if it gets hit badly. I want to mention STW and the addons. That was the way. The idea of the game is/was, that if you get reared, your unit dies quick.
Today you already see many units, which can easily hold up, some even win, by fronted and reared. If you think about the today cav, you clearly see a big problem.

The speedadvance of a cav (compared to melee) has to be so huge, that the standard cav are not holding up long enough to give you the opportunity to get your melee into the fight as well.
Unless the cavskirmish is next to your melee ofcourse…

Today the whole idea of mobile parts of your army is more or less gone. The only battles I could rip off some enemy cav, without involving melee coming from somewhere on the map, was vs. pretty bad player. In this example you can see the problem of the static gameplay. Today the cav shines more because of the walk-trough bugs, than by smart movement.
Its also not a big problem to move your cav somewhere in, they dont really die quick, unless you run into heavy missle.

Back to the routingpoints and moralsupport. With the first S2 patch, we go the moral changed. It was a big impact, since the moralcircle of the gen got a huge nerf. Same goes for some of the negative moraleffects. This made monks run a lot earlier.
I dont get into the fatigue problem here…


Now lets get a small summary.

You have 2 ways to look at this:

1. you want a hardcore realistic historically correct game. You wont have much fun. This is a game, these kind of ideas should never have any big impact.
How boring it would be, if you would play a static Rome army with more ore less frontal infantry clashs and cav flanking with safeties…

2. you want entertaining gameplay with lots of fun. Now thats what I want and expect.


Mistakes should hurt. In STW you was able to rout a bad player in less than 2 minutes. And it was good, since people who makes mistakes should lose quick.
Why you have to waste about 20 or 30 mins, to slowly kill some bad player?

Today you have to make sure, there is some kind of fatigued enemy units. You dont want to rush someone and hit him with you being fatigues.
You have tons of defensive bonuses but what bonus you have from attacking? The only bonus you had, was the speed of killing, ripping a flank of quick and save your other side with very less units.
The slower the units get killed, the more static the game will be.

I clearly understand why people ask for this kind of stuff, thats common today, in many games. The younger player want easy games, where they dont need to think or even worser, learn something. They play the game, dont know anything, but wonder why units get killed "too quick". The topic starter, probably never heard about a routingpoint, nor he knows how many effect he met.


Imo its pretty easy. If units just fight frontal, the units should fight for quite some time, let me mention the old "hold" order. In the very fast STW game, this made units stay for a real long time.
If such a unit got reared, it did rout in about 10-15 secs.

Thats the effect we need to keep a tactical momentum and a good gameplay. You let the enemy get in your back, panic will break out and the units which got sandwiched will die in no time.
Dont let units get in your back! save your flanks!

If you played good player, you had most of times very long battles, if you had bad player, it was over in a few mins. That was the magic of the old TW games.
Today its more about how to use bonuses, how far your units can shoot and how good you can stuck effects.