What is different in 1.3?

The things I have noticed so far include:

Unit upkeep is reduced.

Recruitment costs are lower at lower difficulty ratings.

Building costs are lower at lower difficulty ratings.

Research is slower at higher difficulty settings.

Trade is changed at various difficulty setting.

Skirmisher units have 90m range, and many have a gaggle formation rather than ranks.

You have to fight to keep trade spots. Navies are more important and some ship stats are changed, if not on the cards.

There is more but some of you may have noticed other things I have missed.

The battle AI seems a bit dumber to me, as I mentioned, previously I saw it occasionally attempt tactics, but now it just seems to rush. In one battle it did try to flank me with some cavalry, but since I turned an infantry unit to face them the cavalry just sort of ran a circle around my army, then rode off back to the main force, probably looking rather embarrassed.

Most musket armed units have reduced accuracy (-5 across the board except Russian line?). Infantry and artillery movement noticeably slower (makes cav speed advantage even more poignant). Howitzer artillery very inaccurate. Cannon roundshot slightly more accurate. Artillery caissons have significantly more HP. AI large-group movement improved.

The "gaggle" formation is the mob formation CA promised to give irregular units and pre-tech light infantry units. So now you won't have Natives marching at you in line formation, w00t!

There are significantly more ships of the line cruising around, so prep for that early on. You dont wanna end up 10 turns behind research and all your ports are blockaded.

@Sheogorath
That is an old AI behavior with the cav. They like to circle behind to take out your artillery/general, or charge into the rear of your infantry. Turning 1 or 2 infantry units to face them, as you did, and they will run back, as they did lol.

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Originally Posted by Sheogorath

In one battle it did try to flank me with some cavalry, but since I turned an infantry unit to face them the cavalry just sort of ran a circle around my army, then rode off back to the main force.

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This is what you would have done in the place of the cavalry commander is not it?

It would seem intellegent until you realise that the AI ALWAYS tries to do that. So in effect it has finally been wrong enough times for the proper situation to come up for it to get the right answer. To put it another way, it just bubbled in C for all the test questions.

I will however say that this is the first time that I have seen or heard of the AI withdrawing its cavalry instead of finding something to suicide them on.

Battle field range finder is red/orange, a small but staggeringly important change.

Cannons fire on a very low trajectory.

Getting a viable navy is a must.

Don't know if this is official but auto-resolve seems to be easier.

Autoresolve seems to give a LOT more weight to cavalry now. Does AR just automatically throw everybody into melee and skip over the ranged combat or something?

Line infantry does not use fire by rank against cavalry anymore, only the first rank fires as if you hadn't researched fire by rank, against infantry etc they still use fire by rank.
I guess it makes sense since you wouldn't want to kneel down facing a bunch of horses.

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Originally Posted by antisocialmunky

It would seem intellegent until you realise that the AI ALWAYS tries to do that. So in effect it has finally been wrong enough times for the proper situation to come up for it to get the right answer. To put it another way, it just bubbled in C for all the test questions.

I will however say that this is the first time that I have seen or heard of the AI withdrawing its cavalry instead of finding something to suicide them on.

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Fact is that the AI has fairly decent priorities when it comes picking a target for a charge. For example I noticed that native lancers always charge the moving units (even if it is on the other flank) and not the stationary ones (ofc facing the lancers). Also lancers avoid pikemen at all cost (which ofc can be exploited by the player). So just because an experinced player can outsmart the AI it does not mean that the AI is utterly dumb.
The real test would be letting someone fight the AI who never seen a TW battle. Actually, IIRC someone did that with the vanilla game and the player was trashed in all battles.

I'm fairly certain that the auto-balancer measure only takes into account the units, not the experience. With an experienced army, I've won several auto-resolves against bad odds and bad soldiers.

Edit: Hell, I think the measure is only based on the number of men, with a multiplier for cavalry and artillery. Six units of Desert Warriors does not equal 3 of line infantry, 2 Provincial cavalry regiments, and a 24-pounder.

The most significant difference is that trade spots are not safe harbors. The great indiaman-spam of 1700-05 is now a frantic game of trade-and-run.

Also, the AI will attack much more. My poor little Prussia is getting squashed between Hanover, Saxony, Austria, and Courland. However, the attacks are neither coordinated nor intelligent.

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Originally Posted by Cheetah

Fact is that the AI has fairly decent priorities when it comes picking a target for a charge. For example I noticed that native lancers always charge the moving units (even if it is on the other flank) and not the stationary ones (ofc facing the lancers). Also lancers avoid pikemen at all cost (which ofc can be exploited by the player). So just because an experinced player can outsmart the AI it does not mean that the AI is utterly dumb.
The real test would be letting someone fight the AI who never seen a TW battle. Actually, IIRC someone did that with the vanilla game and the player was trashed in all battles.

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I agree here; The AI has some decent basic tactics down, that most TW players know how to deal with/exploit, or at the very least predict. Most of my friends don't play this game (because of the system requirements, no surprise there), but when they do play a battle unsupervised, it usually ends very badly.

I didn't predict a half stack of Streltsy appearing 'as if by magic' in the forests north of Muscovy (20 years after I conquered it) and nicking my beloved Moscow the minute my back was turned. All Sweden was outraged by this blatant cheating! My attempt to recapture it unleashed another video memory CTD :furious3:

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Originally Posted by Cheetah

Fact is that the AI has fairly decent priorities when it comes picking a target for a charge. For example I noticed that native lancers always charge the moving units (even if it is on the other flank) and not the stationary ones (ofc facing the lancers). Also lancers avoid pikemen at all cost (which ofc can be exploited by the player). So just because an experinced player can outsmart the AI it does not mean that the AI is utterly dumb.
The real test would be letting someone fight the AI who never seen a TW battle. Actually, IIRC someone did that with the vanilla game and the player was trashed in all battles.

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Well I do agree with that. The AI isn't terrible unless it bugs out, sits in a ball, and dies or something stupid.

I've just never liked the fact that the AI sends cav in piecemeal and has tunnel vision when it finally picks a target. Suicide runs are annoying.

Pre-patch playing as Prussia I faced stacks of predominantly line infantry from Austria and Poland and had some really epic battles. Post patch playing as Sweden I have fought Poland to extinction and am facing a huge bloated Austrian Empire. Both have built almost nothing but pandours with their annoying extra long range muskets and silly garden gnomish attire. Their melee defence and morale are so bad they run away too easily and are easy prey for Swedish heavy cavalry out in the open. Has the increase in range caused the AI to over-value them and thus spam the pesky Pandoras? :inquisitive:

Austria already spammed pandours in 1.2.
Conquering Vienna as Prussia was a walk in the park when it's defended by nothing else than pandours and citizens.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Cheetah

Fact is that the AI has fairly decent priorities when it comes picking a target for a charge. For example I noticed that native lancers always charge the moving units (even if it is on the other flank) and not the stationary ones (ofc facing the lancers). Also lancers avoid pikemen at all cost (which ofc can be exploited by the player). So just because an experinced player can outsmart the AI it does not mean that the AI is utterly dumb.
The real test would be letting someone fight the AI who never seen a TW battle. Actually, IIRC someone did that with the vanilla game and the player was trashed in all battles.

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Well the problem I have with the battlefield AI is that it doesn't always get proper units by the strategic AI, if it actually employs line infantry in a line then yes, it can be very challenging, but often it doesn't have access to decent units and then when it does, i often see it park some of it's best infantry in buildings....
Since a lot of battliefields have buildings, that can ruin a lot of battles for the AI...

Oh and then it sometimes shuffles units around like a bunch of scared rabbits, hides some far away behind a fence too far away from it's main force etc. so I can just takes them out piecemeal or how you say. Those new features are nice but they also ruin the battlefield AI in way too many battles I've seen, I think I lost a lot more naval battles than land battles and find the naval part way more satisfying in general.

I've been checking units stats a bit in custom battles and I noticed Holland Guards have 5 more accuracy than any other guard unit (55 vs 50).
Also, for France, their Petit-Vieux infantry has 55 accuracy while their Vieux infantry defaults back to 50. Rather strange considering Vieux is supposed to be better than Petit-Vieux.

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Originally Posted by Husar

Line infantry does not use fire by rank against cavalry anymore, only the first rank fires as if you hadn't researched fire by rank, against infantry etc they still use fire by rank.
I guess it makes sense since you wouldn't want to kneel down facing a bunch of horses.

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Couldnt let that go by - it is, in fact, exactly what you would do if threatened by cavalry in Line formation and couldn't, (or so far in this game can't be bothered to), form a square.

As long as your flanks are secured then a line of kneeling infantry holding grounded muskets with the bayonet pointed up and out and another rank standing behind them would deter any cavalry. Unlike in this game horses will NOT charge a dense line of pointy things :charge:

Sig..

Round shot definitely is feeling more useful.
I've gotten in a bunch of magnificent enfilade shots that took out nearly the entire rank they ran through & thats on ultra unit size.

Isn't the pre-battle screen significantly different?! I'm pretty sure it used to be old style single screen over the top of the battle location, now its split out & you can see the actual location/armies in the middle :D
(Or I'm a bit thick & didn't notice this change previously...)

Noticed two more things:

1. With selected priest, you can now tell a region's religion rating (your own religion). Good that it finally got implemented from M2TW

2. Anti-cavalry stake barriers (deployment) are now completely invisible. In fact, I was wondering why my infantry were climbing stuff in the midst of nowhere. I found out the hard way what it was when my general went over it a bit later.
I think its problematic that they are don't become visible even after you impale yourself or your infantry walk over it.

I think it's just ENEMY anticavalry barriers that are invisible.

This patch REALLY needs a hotfix.


A few things I've noticed that have remained the same:
1. The AI can still bypass interception, apparently whenever it feels like it.

2. AI armies still retreat away from their own territory and, usually, into yours. This results in some extremely annoying chases where the AI traipses around your territory for years sacking everything in sight and, when it gets lucky on occasion, taking a city you didn't garrison because it was fifteen provinces behind the lines.

3. Agents still can't cross the Hellespont. Easy to solve, but somewhat annoying.

4. While the AI has stopped spamming singleship traide route raiders, there are still a lot of fleets from a single nation in fairly small areas. Fortunately the AI no longer parks ships in choke points.



Something else I've noticed, Scholars can't challenge other scholars to duels. I seem to recall that in previous versions gentlemen and scholars could both duel, but only with equivalents from other factions. As in: no Scholar vs. Gentleman duels.

Nope, scholars could never duel anyone. However, if you hover your mouse over scholars (at least when I was playing as UP), it will tell you that they can duel :grin:

And barbary states and savoy still single ship raid my trade route as spain.

Huh. Oh well.

At least they've fixed artillery's limber/unlimber issues. It's nice that they do what I tell them now :P

Most of the time, still borks up a bit when you do it in quick succession.
And of course they still fire parting shots, which may well decimate your own ranks.

Also, is it just me or does double click attack/run not work as smoothly as it used to do in 1.2? I find that my units always end up walking when I clearly double clicked.

Yeah, it seems pretty unresponsive now. I suspect it might have something to do with the performance issues. I just use the run button most of the time now.

On the issue of those issues...

It seems the latest Steam update screwed something up. I get horrible lag when exiting ETW and the only way to get rid of it is to contro-alt-delete and force Steam to quit that way. Rather annoying since it takes a few minutes during which nothing responds, or responds very slowly.

Anybody else having that issue?

Tried offline mode?

Yup. That seemed to help a bit, but not very much.

Since its heating up these days I also unplug my router when playing ETW, so not had these issues.

I suspect they are memory related though (used to have those on my old laptop with newer games)


Edit:
Is it just me or is Irish Brigade utterly useless? They have worse stats than Spanish Line Infantry and cost more to recruit and upkeep. And they also have a 1 unit limit (which you can circumvent by rebelling, which randomly managed to spawn 3 of those into the rebel stack).