Hey guys!
I have great news for you today!
Remember this thread? Well, now I'm here with answers for you! Sorry this took a while but I had been sending all your important questions to the appropriate developers. Then I got the flu and well, things got delayed. In any case, I must thank you for your patience. Without further ado, here are the answers to some of your burning questions!
Why does testudo formation (offensive) seem pretty weak against front attacks (missile)? It remains a testudo after all.
Testudo provides a bonus to the shield armour value, which reduces the damage a unit takes from missiles. In the launch version of the game quite a bit of damage from missiles was armour piercing damage which ignores armour and is always applied. That is why it was weak then. Patch 4 featured a rebalance of missile damage which reduces armour piercing damage and switches more to normal damage, so testudo will be more effective. Then combined with a change in Patch 5, where there is a new missile block chance for shields, you will see a real difference between units in testudo and units outside of it.
We will continue to examine the balance of testudo going forward, as we do want to ensure it is working properly.
Why does it take 1 year to build 1 siege equipment?
The reason for delays in building siege equipment is to give value to walls and towers, and we don’t want to undermine that too much. Historically, sieges often lasted a long time and in the setting of a turn-based game the mechanics need to fit with starving out defenders and the movement of reinforcing armies around the campaign map. This is something we’re always looking at though.
Why did you (CA) think every troop carrying flame torches to burn castle gates was a good idea? In Shogun it worked, but it seems strange to completely devalue siege equipment for this.
The intent behind burning gates was that this action would be a last resort for the attacking army, a last ditch attempt to breach the walls at great cost when all else fails. Siege equipment should always be more effective than attempting to burn the gates. But we didn’t want a huge army without siege equipment to have literally zero chance of capturing a city (especially a near-defenceless one). What’s more, we didn’t want to allow players into a siege if there could be a quick ‘game over’ situation where their siege equipment were destroyed – especially if their army was much more powerful.
It’s fair to say that the balance of ‘burning gates’ at release wasn't as we wanted it. We adjusted the balance of the mechanics involved in patch 4, and will continue to do so.
Siege mechanics in general remain a focus for the team, future patches will contain continuing tweaks and updates to how they play out.
A few factions, particularly Averni and Epirus and a few others, lack unit diversity. Can we expect some units to be added in updates or unit pack DLCs for these factions?
Their units reflect the units those nations fielded at the time. Averni have a good mix of melee and spear infantry supported by strong melee cavalry. Epirus has a standard Macedonian style army.
It may be that we add in units via updates and DLC at a later date, but the core idea is that different factions offer distinctly different ways to play and strategic challenges that come with them – see the recently released Nomadic Tribes. You can always hire mercenaries to fill tactical roles you might lack, but the incurred cost also represents the kind of penalty you’re assuming for operating out of the faction’s comfort zone.
In Multiplayer we are considering adding more mercenary or auxiliary unit options though, please send us your suggestions via the official MP forums.
Is there a bonus for fighting on higher ground, if so, what is it?
The soldier uphill should get an advantage in the underlying combat mechanics but this wasn’t always working correctly at release – this is now fixed in Patch 4.
Is there a range bonus when firing from a hill?
There is no range bonus for being on a hill, but missile units on a hill will do more damage to soldiers on lower ground.
Does terrain influence morale?
The morale system is very sophisticated and takes in many different variables including terrain. For example there is a morale bonus for being on a hill, and this triggers if the unit is at a higher altitude than all enemy units in the nearby area.
What exactly is the difference in stats between normal arrows and fire arrows? With the missile rebalancing in Patch 4, normal arrows do more damage than fire arrows, but fire arrows provide a bigger morale hit to enemies and can also cause elephants to run amok. In naval combat they are important in setting fire to enemy ships.
Why do Roman generals have a tendency to go insane? Could we have a more thorough explanation of the trait system?
This wasn’t originally working as intended but has now been tweaked; we have reduced the qualifying trait list for various "Mad" traits (such as "Not quite right" or "Unhinged") for generals in campaign modes.
Why only 1 hexareme to a fleet? Even in custom battle mode? Could this restriction be mentioned on the hexareme unit page in the encyclopaedia?
Some units are capped because of how powerful they are. We will look into mentioning this on the encyclopaedia.
What was the reasoning behind cutting the family tree system?
It’s important to note that because a feature was in a previous TW doesn’t mean it’s automatically included in the next; some naturally make way for other features, others don’t fit the design or the period. In ROME II, the design intention was to make more of the politics system which would better suit the large variety of ruling systems e.g. party affiliations in the senate, rather than focus on strict nuclear family heredity. This would help create the legacy overview and sense of personal character that the family tree may have supplied in previous games.
It is certainly fair to say this feature didn’t turn out 100% as we would have wanted it and as part of the on-going game balancing and tweaking we are looking into this.
It is interesting to see how passionate people were about family trees though and that’s certainly something we will consider for future titles.
How does House of Julia bonus "Founding Fathers" work?
Depending on the local culture distribution you can get up to +4 public order if Latin is present:
a. 1%-25% = +1 public order
b. 26%-50% = +2 public order
c. 51%-75% = +3 public order
d. 76%-100% = +4 public order
Shown as "Faction: +x" in the public order information panel.
Similar negative traits work in the same way, such as the Arverni's "Internal Power Struggles" - a high proportion of your own culture will bring down your public order, effectively reducing your ability to control the people once you've Gallified the provinces.
How can we see bonus results on unit stats? Could it be possible to see how unit stats would be before unlocking some technologies or buildings (i.e. in-game or in the encyclopaedia)?
We do show currently applied bonuses in the game UI (coloured differently at the end of the bar). Showing potential effects due to upgrades is something we are looking into, but it isn’t currently a priority.
Are some technology bonuses stackable (i.e. Tier 1: +5%. Tier 2: +10%. Current bonus: +15%)?
They are stacking.
Do you have plans to incorporate client states and satrapies and the like into provinces so we can use edicts? If I have 3 cities under my control and the fourth under a client state of mine all in one province, I still can't use the edicts because that fourth city is not under my direct control. It really dissuades me from even having client states.
It is something we have thought about but can’t confirm at the moment that anything will be done to change this.
How do you upgrade roads? I've heard its automatic once your region becomes richer or something.. in my campaign I'm almost reaching 160 turns and the roads are still the same even in my richest province. What do I have to do?
Road development is tied to the settlements they route between. If the settlements on the endpoints of the road are well developed the roads will get upgraded after a time, allowing faster movement on them. Upgrading your main settlement buildings (orange), as well as your city centre chain (yellow) and trade ports (blue) drives road upgrades. Without upgrading your main settlement to higher levels you will find it difficult to get road upgrades.
Roads can also deteriorate if settlements are razed or stop prospering. Also roads going between hostile settlements will decline. However rich your provinces are, if you are bordered by hostile settlements you’ll find upgrades harder to realise.
Can you explain slaves and how exactly they affect the economy and public order in the game?
Slaves can be obtained when you defeat an army on the field or you are victorious in a siege. These slaves are distributed across your empire. Slaves increase economic output of the whole empire while causing public order problems, especially when there are a lot of them in a province (the penalty exponentially increases). If public order collapses specifically due to this, the resulting rebellion will be a slave uprising.
Will we ever get an in game option to change the turns per year or are we stuck having to re-mod the game after every patch?
The entire game is set over a 300 year span, based around one turn per year and we are happy with the balance of its design that way. It is very unlikely that we would introduce this as an option.
It may be that we can do more to help modders make blunt changes and to start with we can discuss this with those attending the forthcoming mod summit.
Why did you make the decision to remove seasons?
There are technical limitations in implementing seasons over such a large (and diverse) geographic area and this would have raised the memory budget (and required specs) to unacceptable levels. Depending on the design for future titles, and potentially DLC, this is certainly a feature we’d like to include.
When difficulty is increased, what actually changes?
Upkeep, recruitment costs, public order. On easy and normal the player gets advantages, on higher difficulties the AI does. Additionally almost every AI system taps into the difficulty setting (region and faction targeting, threat-analysis, task generation, construction, attitude towards other AI factions and the player, general "zeitgeist"; on higher difficulty the AI is less friendly and quite paranoid).
Why does it seem like we moved from a large amount of information on the settlement and settlement detail pages of the first RTW to a more simplified version that hides information? It also seems like very informative pages from previous total wars have been broken up and spread over multiple pages, panels, and tooltips.
The game systems are not based on RTW but continuation from SHOGUN 2. The pages were broken down into 2 separate panels. One is at-a-glance high level information (enough when you are browsing quickly through provinces) and the other is a details panel. Detailed information is deliberately "hidden" and broken down into categories so we can provide more on individual areas.
However, some tweaks to address feedback we’ve received on this are likely.
Are there any changes planned for how client states work, currently they seem to have little value?
They are meant to be semi-independent, serving buffer purposes. With proper support you can groom them into powerful allies. However, further tweaks to how these function will definitely happen.
It's hard to know how the food is actually consumed. We know how much each building is going to consume but could we have a more elaborated panel (list of buildings, units, etc…)?
It is planned to display more detailed information on this in a future patch.
Why do factions ask for money while asking for a peace treaty?
At that point, pursuing war for them is no longer a goal, but they still don’t consider it a bad idea – so need additional monetary persuasion to make up their mind.
Could we have some explanation of how exactly the political system works? It's not explained well via the manual or tutorial. For example, civil wars seem to trigger regardless of your party having low/high support. Additionally - some elements don't seem to make much sense logically, such as having poor support when your faction is thriving.
This actually requires a bit of a longer explanation, we are going to do a separate guide on this soon.
Are there plans to expand the diplomacy options, to include things like gifting/demanding regions, making/demanding yearly payments, making client states more user-friendly by 'resetting' their status with all other factions once they become your client (More than once I've had 2 client states war between them, asking me to join them against one or the other)?
There are general plans but we can’t commit to anything yet.
On the client state side: client states are semi-independent and not tools of the player. They can continue to act according to their agenda and this might involve declaring war on your other clients. Think about it as an asymmetric alliance and not vassalage. On the other hand, satrapies are not independent.
Are there any plans to rework the campaign UI? Specifically the construction report.
Complete rework no; tweaks, fixes, additions yes. We constantly iterate here.
