Feedback on Naval Blockade and City Siege Anims

[oudysseos]

I have to say that I don't find the new campaign map animations for naval blockades and city sieges up to the normal EB standard. If they're work in progress then I'm sorry for bitching too soon, but I think they're going in the wrong direction. The city siege anim with its tents and siege works and stuff- I can see where you guys are coming from but in reality it just looks messy and cluttered. Maybe tone it down a bit, reduce the number of tiny little siegeworks?
I have essentially the same comment about naval blockades, but I think that for navies the multiple ship deal isn't working out. I often think that navies cruising about on the EB campaign map look like catamarans instead of groups of ships, and the naval blockade anim looks like a couple of catamarans next to each other. Again, I think that I know what ye were trying to do (i.e. move away from the idea of single ships) but the artwork for it just isn't there. And after all, an army stack is still just one guy on the campaign map- think how it would look if you replaced that with a bunch of really little guys. It wouldn't look great, and it doesn't look great applied to ships. Maybe change the unit cards to show a fleet of ships but leave a single ship as the campaign anim?
Don't mean to be negative, just trying to give some feedback. Love the patch- if the patch is only 65/70% of the finished product (I'm just guessing here) then the final release is going to be ueber-affen-titten-geil.

[QwertyMIDX]

Haha, we're planning on replacing the current army icon with a colum of soilders and maybe a pack train anyway :laugh4:...sorry.

[oudysseos]

It's not the concept that bugs me but the execution- the anim for sieges is just too much of a good thing, really- it would be more graphically effective (IMO) if you toned it down. The thing with the ships just doesn't work, though.

[QwertyMIDX]

We'll we don't have anyone working on map graphics at the moment, but when we have someone we're certinly not adverse to touching them up (this attitude is one of the reasons nothing gets finished at EB).

[Cheexsta]

I've actually kinda grown fond of the new besieging models. The naval blockades aren't quite as good, IMHO, but the right idea is there.

It's great news that you're replacing the monstrous characters with a small army. I've always wanted to see someone implement that into RTW ~D

Question, though: how would you represent agents? It might look a bit strange to have armies be really small but have agents really big...

[Teleklos Archelaou]

I hope we would still have the "monstrous" characters as an option though. :grin: I like having easy to recognize differences in the factions' armies and the big godzilla guys roaming the provinces.

[Trithemius]

I've a slight nitpick - although its more about naval science than animations...

Did blockading happen a lot at this point in history? Or does a "blockade" represent 'commerce raiding' in and around the area?

[Sarcasm]

Naval Blockades would probably be used in conjunction with a land encirclement to completely seal off a city.

The land element would also serve to secure places where a great part of the fleet would be beached, a common practice with ancient warships.

A few partrol groups would probably be organized (no more than a few ships), that would catch any ships that attempted to run the blockade (into or out of it). Any organized move out of the port by a sizable number of warships is a time consuming task, allowing the blockading fleet to man its vessels and get in formation.

[Simmons]

Naval Blockades would probably be used in conjunction with a land encirclement to completely seal off a city.

The land element would also serve to secure places where a great part of the fleet would be beached, a common practice with ancient warships.

A few partrol groups would probably be organized (no more than a few ships), that would catch any ships that attempted to run the blockade (into or out of it). Any organized move out of the port by a sizable number of warships is a time consuming task, allowing the blockading fleet to man its vessels and get in formation.
Am I right in thinking that a smaller fleet could keep a lager fleet at bay by blockading ie not letter the enemy use its superior numbers due to a confined space??

[Dooz]

I too hope there is an option for using the single characters on the campaign map in the end. Although the alternate idea sounds really cool, options never hurt anybody.

A question regarding sieges: what did the tens and thousands of soldiers do for months and years while laying siege to a city in those days? I can't imagine spending years in a tent outside a city, with nothing to do but wait and have arrows shot at you every once in a while.

[QwertyMIDX]

Seiges usally involed countless small engagments, not to mention detachments from the army laying the seige going out to gather supplies from the surroding area. RTW does an awful job of portarying seige warfare and city assult, both were far more of a process than an event.

[Malrubius]

The big problem with our siege model, from a gameplay standpoint, at least, is that it takes up a huge area around the city, even where there's no visible parts to the model. You can't just move somebody right up to the city under siege. I have a screenie somewhere...

[Avicenna]

I too hope there is an option for using the single characters on the campaign map in the end. Although the alternate idea sounds really cool, options never hurt anybody.

A question regarding sieges: what did the tens and thousands of soldiers do for months and years while laying siege to a city in those days? I can't imagine spending years in a tent outside a city, with nothing to do but wait and have arrows shot at you every once in a while.

Sallying out and retreating and all. For more details about that, I suggest you read Homer's Iliad.

[Sarcasm]

Am I right in thinking that a smaller fleet could keep a lager fleet at bay by blockading ie not letter the enemy use its superior numbers due to a confined space??

Of course it depends on types of ships, and a series of other variables, but sure.

Let me see...

At the siege of Salamis, in Cyprus, by Demetrius Poliarcetes, a naval battle was fought at near the port entrance as the Ptolemaic king attempted to bring in a relief force.

The Ptolemaics had 140 ships coming in from the outside and a further 60 inside the harbour, being blockaded by 190 galleys.

As the blockading fleet assembled to meet the oncoming Ptolemaic fleet (getting into formation, putting down the sails, etc...), Demetrius assigned 10 ships to keep the ships inside the harbour, out of the battle.

:captain:

[oudysseos]

Thing is, the 'monstrous guy' army makes it easy to identify where your army is on the campaign map- changing that to a bunch of small guys with a logistics train might be counterproductive from a gameplay point of view.
It's true what Malrubius said about RTW being a very poor model of siege operations: I'm afraid that this applies to all army operations. The only kind of battles we have in the game are "set piece" battles which were actually quite rare in history, compared to raids, skirmishes, patrolling and other small scale operations. There are no civilians in either the cities or on the farms, so there are no non-combants to get involved as they so often did in history. Battles start with both armies already drawn up in position and there is almost no strategic element of manoevuring for the best position- the campaign map is not detailed enough to be able to plan your battle position accurately and by the time you get to the battlemap it's too late. No one ever gives up fighting before a rout and no prisoners are ever taken. The AI is notoriously bad creating very unrealistic situations.
The point that I'm trying to make is that viewed as a real-time simulation of historical battles, RTW is deeply flawed at a hardcoded level. That doesn't mean that it's not a highly enjoyable game, because it is, but I do think that its limits as a sim should provide some perspective on modding.
Applied to the 'monstrous guy' question, my opinion is that neither the 'monstrous guy' nor a different animation of a group of smaller guys enjoys any advantage in realism, as both are unrealistic.
So, the question is, which method best facilitates game-play?
Personally I liked the 'Risk' style flag markers from MTW and if it were up to me I would trashcan the entire walking army concept completely. Keep the Diplomat and Spy, but use MTW flags for the armies on the campaign map. Ditto for the naval units- that way you could have some really nice illustrations of multiple ships and different styles of army units that wouldn't clutter up the campaign map but would gracefully confer the notion of more than one ship to a fleet, more than one unit to an army. The markers could be faction specific and quite detailed, with different kinds of flags or standards to convoy their size. They wouldn't need to be animated at all- or am I they only one who always hits the spacebar and skips the long walks?

Whaddya think?

[Teleklos Archelaou]

I would stop playing RTW in a heartbeat if we had static flag markers. blech. But that's just my opinion of course. :grin:

[Trithemius]

The idea of the strategic map in RTW is good, I think, although some refinement might allow for some positioning at a level between the overall map and the battlemap. I know that I always try to wait until people are away from mountain slopes before attacking them, or try and circle around to besiege a city from the high ground, I don't know if this has a lot of effect in the battles, but it makes me happy when I get to fight from atop a nice big hill.

I'd really like some way of having simultaneous strategic movement, but the game would have to move away from the RTS-style recruitment system for that I think (which is not a bad thing if you ask me...).

[QwertyMIDX]

I have come to feel that optimally a game would have integrated start and battle maps. As you zoom out you get a more strategic picture, and as you zoom in a more tactical one, when fully zoomed out your army would just be some sort of icon/counter (whatever) and when zoomed in it’s actually the army itself, whether fighting, marching, camping, etc. RTW obviously isn't quite at this level though. Of course this level of complexity would require either lots of AI control over your forces, or massive micromanaging. Still, I think taking the player out of the god-seat would be fun.

[oudysseos]

A quicker fix to the campmap-battlemap gap is simply to have each army start in marching order on opposite edges of the map, without any knowledge of eithers position. You'd have to play without time limits, but then you could march/manoeuver for the best ground, and as a bonus you would finally be able to use light cav for its true purpose: scouting. Battles would be much longer of course (the fast-forward function helps out here) but they would also be much much more realistic, as long as you could force the AI to keep its troops together. Actually I would really love to see a feature like this in the game as it mught make battles a great deal more challenging. Selah.

Still think the multiship thing isn't working- delenda est catamaran-o :2cents:

[Elthore]

Blockades did happen during the Peleponesian war(400BCis)...most cities used natural harbours as their ports, and it was common practice to blockade the entrance to them. I believe that smaller fleets did also, on more than one occasion, stop the movement of larger fleets by bottlenecking them in narrow passages.

[Trithemius]

Blockades did happen during the Peleponesian war(400BCis)...most cities used natural harbours as their ports, and it was common practice to blockade the entrance to them. I believe that smaller fleets did also, on more than one occasion, stop the movement of larger fleets by bottlenecking them in narrow passages.

By chaining together ships? Because I believed that the problem was that its hard for rowed vessels to maintain their station indefinately, because of the physics of rowing and the limits of the rowers endurance.

Sarcasm's comments make sense to me though - having troops coordinate with the ships so that the ships hunt the enemy by day, and then the troops deny the enemy a place to beach and rest by night.

The result is a functional blockade, but not a literal blockade of the port facilities as the graphic suggests.

[Danest]

I think I have some mixed feelings about the EB naval system. I like the idea that the AI no longer randomly spams have the ocean with single ship fleets that seem to be just sitting there doing nothing. I used to play vanilla, and wonder why those 10,000 carthie ships didn't, you know, blockade all my roman cities 50 times over... but no, usually they just sat along some empty coast. I assume others have had the same experience? :) But on the other hand, just getting a little transportation is an extremely expensive option in EB, and I'm not sure navies or naval battles are all that important or common (maybe I don't have the right tactics to see it, I suppose). If anything, expensive fleets reigned in some of the AI's stupidity, but at the cost of being able to build small cheap transportation, or fight in important naval battles against a "sea power" - it's really hard for there to be a sea power at the moment, at least as far as I can tell.

[oudysseos]

Teleklos doesn't seem to like my idea for a static marker- but I think that a couple of mini soldiers parading in column won't look very good- but there is a third way- The campaign map animation for armies on Battle For Middle Earth is pretty cool looking (based on the film shots of the orc legions marching out from Isengard I think)- something along those llines would do very well for EB I think. What I mean is not have individual but very very small soldiers marching around the campmap, but have an anim that looks like an army from very far away where the individual soldiers can't be made out. Check out BFME to see what I mean. It would be even cooler if you could do away with the flags and indicate the size of armies with smaller or larger anims so it would be as if you were really looking down from on high. They could raise clouds of dust or maybe when you stop moving they could have little points of light sprinkled through them to represent campfires.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

True, that could look nice, but it would require a lot of individual tiny units - and I think it would possibly lead to a lot of lag (possibly very severe) for the campaign map. If lots of individual units (even if they were simplified) were used, it would certainly not help matters. I don't do any modelling or skinning though, but maybe other opinions on that aspect could elucidate it more.

[Malrubius]

You'd make a model that looks sort of like an army, instead of of combining a bunch of unit and soldier models. It would basically be a long box with some bumps that bobbed up and down and some dust clouds--probably not any more polys than the current models, but we'd need someone to model and animate it. I like the idea, FWIW.

[QwertyMIDX]

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

[oudysseos]

I'm glad that Mal and Qwerty like the idea. If an animated cursor is developed along these lines then it will essentially be a square or rectangle shape that is animated to look like an army viewed from on high.
I'm sure that it would look very good (personal value judgement) but it would necessarily have a larger 'footprint' on the campmap than the 'monstrous guy' cursor that we have now.
There would therefore have to be some way of determining what point in the animation repesents the army's actual location. No matter what the size of the army anim is it won't be to scale with the landscape. Go to google earth and see what I mean- zoom in to italy until it's the same size as on the EB campmap- you won't see any people, not even a very large group of them. An army would not be visible to the naked eye from that height.
I hope no-one takes this as a contra-argument- I just want to point out that it would have to be clear where the army actually is.

[Zenith Darksea]

Frankly, I'm happy with the large characters. I wasn't terribly pleased at the siegeworks, because, as it has been said, they are too much of a good thing. The point about the campaign map is that it is representative, and though I like accuracy, going into such enormous detail just doesn't look very nice. A siege of Chalcis results in the works spreading out into the Aegean and the Euripus Straits! I implore you, don't take away the large characters! I find them delightful to look at.

[paullus]

I think the seige anim looks nice, I like the detail myself. My main problem is that sometimes it cuts off reinforcements. Try besieging Thermon and then moving troops up from the western Pelopponesos, you can't do it, unless your army is in the bottom square.

And with the army model, it probably shouldn't be larger than a single square, so that you don't have to, say, march through half of the model to attack it.

EDIT: A dust cloud would be awesome, especially if there were a way to have it do the job of the flag, where the size of the dust cloud indicates the size of the army. Or just having a dust cloud would be cool too.