The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly thread.

Can a mod or someone post this on my behalf in the good/bad/ugly thread in the Colloseum. Im also posting some screenshots in my RTW is fantastic thread :)

The Good: we all know this, its in all the reviews, and plenty of it too!

The Kill Speed/Movement Speed issue:
If you actually zoom down and watch the guys running they run at a fairly realistic pace IF they were unarmoured of course. However zoomed out this looks pretty absurd. Units do tire quite quickly while running though and I don't see much of it until the battle is joined or units are fleeing. Tired units flee quite slowly too.
The kill speed so far is absurdly high ONLY if you are fighting low defensive units and hitting them from the flank/rear. For example, when I charge my cavalry into gauls from behind they get slaughtered, but the same does NOT happen to me when their cavalry hits my men.
Infact my infantry stand up to cavalry quite well (partly because I have a good general), but I believe defence ratings have a part to play.
Yes you can cut through unarmoured troops like butter. I havnt experianced my Histari being swept away to the same extent as the Gauls however.
Also if they have a good general they can put up quite a fight.

GROUP BUG:
This is a pain, and to make it worse sometimes the group decides its all going to sit on the same bit rather than keeping their spacing. You end up with 5 units milling around each other. A GOOD thing is when two units interfer with each other they dont go wandering off like in MTW. Units make space for other units which is really cool. I.E. your own horses running through a group of your infantry and your infantry will go loose formation to let them through then close up again. However in the thick of battle your own cavalry has a tendancy to take out your own guys.

ARCHERS AI GRRR:
In MTW your archers generally didnt shoot when they risked killing your own troops unless you told them too. In this game, especially when using fire arrows, your archers shoot no matter what cutting down half your own guys if their formation is mingled within the archers one. Also sometimes they like to ignore me when I turn off "fire at will".
With generals being as weak as they are my archers have given me some premature grey hair.

COMPUTER AI SUCKS WHILE DEFENDING
Cavalry sitting infront of the main force getting peppered with arrows, ignoring my skirmishers, and although your meant to be able to "enrage" enemy forces and tempt them out, they usually just sit there and die. I am playing on HARD. All other aspects of the AI however is brilliant.

CAVALRY:
Cavalry are cumbersome to manouver. When charging they like to take funny routes and they take a few seconds to 'kick into gear'. Wether this is intentional or realistic I dont know, if its realistic for Roman cavalry to be fairly awkward to control on the battlefield I can live with that. Also cavalry dont seem to suffer from any form of momemtum. They can change directon and stop like physics doesnt effect them.

Campaign battle timer: Any way to turn it off?

NO UNDO MOVE ON STRATEGIC MAP:
Be very careful before you move anything. This can lead to disaster.

Pathfinding in cities:
Troops seem to ignore orders, wont move through breaches in walls until their battering ram is destroyed, and other annoying issues.

PrntScn doesnt always work.

Now this is a truely wonderful game, but these are my gripes with it so far (and really im having a wonderful time playing the game, I feel like AOE has come out for the first time again ;) ).

Well i've fixed my frustratings with getting my troops through breaches. If they have a ram attached you have to use their special ability "drop siege weapon" before they'll go through the breech (some times).

I had a bug when I had won a siege and opted to continue. There was a lone enemy general sitting in the square crying out 'run away' but he was just standing there ignoring my forces and vise versa. I ordered my troops to attack and they ran out in circles confused.

It was as if he was there but he wasnt, he was invisibly fleeing the map or something.

I just had a LAN battle (siege) which was absolutely intense until we realised that our games were completely out of sync. What was happening on my screen was definately different from what was happening on the other players screen.

Another gripe:
Looking at the file export_descr_unit.txt it looks like you can mod many aspects about the game apart from unit speed. (You can make units tougher to fix the killing problem).
The only option in there seems to be "class" of infantry that "determines some predefined abilities" such as light, heavy, spear, etc.
There is no way to change a unit's speed in there as far as I can tell, be it charge, walk, or both.

I could be wrong though.

A very big bad

According to the manual +/- on the keypad are ment to adjust tilt of the camera without changing height. However they just move you back and forward, so if you want to look up a hill you have to go right close to the ground. Grrr!

Perhaps its a problem with "RTS" mode (which I quite like, makes more sense than MTW mode - I remember when I first played MTW I actually tried to change the keys to act more like RTW).