Too few units and buildings? Obex says yes.

[Obex]

Having played the julii and scipii campaigns, i turned my attention to the egyptians. after a few years of crappy spearmen, i got desert axmen. cool, they kill well. i could hardly wait to see what infantry i got next. more spears, ok, next... nothing. i was shocked. they have around 17 unit types total. i suspect this is standard among the factions. in mtw, each faction could produce around double this amount. the limited unit selection may work fine for the short campaign, but i get bored in the longer campaign with too few units to build.

speaking of which, have you noticed how easy it is to tech out your cities? you can build everything in a city long before you reach the campaign goal of 50 cities/ take rome. then you have an empire of huge squalorous cities, too far away from the front to serve any purpose. great.

I for one would like to see the game stretched out a bit. i like to see more units available at each tech level. id like to see foreign technology learned by conquering factions. maybe the egyptians are capped at ship building level two, but after conquering a few roman towns, the idea should catch on. the idea that the barbarians occupying rome cant learn to build roads or stone walls is silly. or learn archery.

but wait! history shows barbarians didnt have stone walled cities, or have chariots! guess what, the minute the player begins making choices, history is changed. egypt never razed rome, and occupied the italian peninsula, but i will.

any thoughts on this?

[Tamur]

have you noticed how easy it is to tech out your cities?

Without using a financial cheat? Even though I do focus on economy in my games more than anything, I'm spending down to 500 denarii every turn until around 240 BC, and then scraping for cash because by that time I've got 16-20 provinces, all of which need upgrades. So no, haven't noticed any ease!


...id like to see foreign technology learned by conquering factions. maybe the egyptians are capped at ship building level two, but after conquering a few roman towns, the idea should catch on.

This is a very cool idea for gameplay. Perhaps it could be added to the diplomacy engine, a la Civ 3 -- though the impact to an RTW game would, it seems, be much more direct than in Civ3.

re: units, yes it is a drop from MTW's variety. But, barring the tech-learning that you just mentioned, giving factions all the unit possibilities in the game up-front would be a big no-no for the initial historicity. I totally agree that the point of the game is to rewrite history, but there needs to be a historically accurate base to work from in the rewrite.

Either that or we accept that the Egyptians probably used lasers for their quarrying of the stone for the Giza pyramids.

[Meneldil]

There are much more units than you can use in the whole game.
MTW's variety : all christians factions get the same units (swordsmen, spearmen, etc. + a few regional/factions units. Same thing for Muslims. Basically, the Byzantin and the Ottoman were the only factions with some kind of real variety).

[Trousermonkey]

I agree in theory. I actually haven't played the game for 2 weeks after my last session ended with my army suffering hundreds of friendly fire casaulties in part because of poor pathfinding in town, my infantry disregarding my commands for haste, and finally my missile units ignoring my commands to cease fire on that last egyptian jackie chan running around in my clump of sauntering infantry. I quit in disgust and decided to wait for a patch.

In that campaign (my first and on normal difficulty) I have nearly 2 million denarii, squalor is under control, and I'm a few years away from maxing out the tech tree in 2-3 provinces (in a few more years maybe 6-8 more provinces will join their ranks). I think the year is ~170BC

Slowing down the game would be good. Perhaps a good metric would be for a player to have the ability to max out everything and build every unit by the time 70% of the time span covered in the game has passed. This would only be accomplished if that player did everything right and built continuously to this point. Of course if they have some problems and there is a slowdown in production it will take longer.

I don't think just increasing the build times for units and buildings would resolve this either. Some MTW mods did this and they always seemed to engender annoyance rather than a sense of strategy...

[Sjakihata]

no no no...

there are too many units indeed. If it was just like in shogun problems like balancing and confusion would be dealt with.

[The Wizard]

CA said that they would push back the amount of units from MTW's 200. In return, they promised that units would be more faction-specific and unique.

Personally, I think they didn't give anything in return at all. Factions have a very small amount of units compared to MTW, and not only that, but many of the factions ahevt he same units, in different guises! Look at the Gauls, for Christs's sake! They have such a small unit roster, and none of their units are unique to them, even though the Gauls greatly deserve unique units and CA could have easily taken some from history.

Only the Romans have any good out of this, since they get a second unit roster when Marius reforms their army; otherwise, they'd be the same old story. It's a humongous pity, and gives you nothing to look forward to make your fighting more interesting.

Perhaps it would be more historically accurate, since Roman generals had to wait a long time to have anything new to command. However, this is a game, so we need some incentives to keep playing. One of those old TW incentives was the influx of new units as the game progressed, keeping combat interesting as new units keep turning up, creating new tactical situations. You just can't suffice with a couple of crappy generic units like the 'Warband' or the 'Phalanx' which remain in the game for all that time.

You see, in MTW, you had the same type of troops forming the main body of your armies all through the game. However, these units eventually got upgraded and the whole combination was spiced up by unique units. RTW gives you a couple of units early on, which is fine with me (hell, the Seleucid Empire had phalanxes of trained men in 270 BC, so it's only logical that I can be able to train them very early on), as long as some new blood troop-wise comes up every 40-50 turns, preferably unique, at least on the outside, for every faction.

The ancient period had just as varied a group of interacting cultures as the medieval; in other words: why would RTW have a less interesting unit roster than MTW, even if it did have less? Spread the units out better over the time of the game, perhaps taking some historical liberties, and (if need be) expand the size of the unit roster to make sure that the player is not bored by 400 turns straight fighting barbarian armies manned by swordsmen, warbands and chosen swordsmen with nothing but more swordsmen, warbands and chosen swordsmen...



~Wiz

[Obex]

I agree with this last post. While it is obvious that shared technology is not a popular choice around here, i would like to see more unit types. in mtw, you had 3-4 unit types in each series. using egypt as an example in rtw, id like to see desert axmen, then a nifty axmen, followed by super duper axmen at the highest tech level. i guess i could compromise on the exact names, but i think super duper axmen will catch on, being historically accurate.

[Longshanks]

I think overall CA did a good job with the units & buildings.

My main complaint is that the barbarian factions could have been a little more diverse in the unit selection. The Gauls in particular are rather bland. Egypt also could have used some Greek units. (while nerfing the native Egyptian units. The native Egyptian units should be the cheap cannon fodder, the Greek units the expensive powerful units)
Carthage should have also had a good faction bonus towards mercenaries. Perhaps having to pay much less than other factions in hiring them. It might give them a better shot at surviving (they were Rome's major rival after all) and would reflect the historical make up of their army, which was about 2/3 mercenaries.

I'm fine with the barbarians being barbarians and not having access to advanced tech.