Grrrr...saving during battles

One feature I've wished for since STW was the ability to save during a battle.

Just this morning I fought the most spectacular and hard-earned victory I ever experienced in any TW game. Playing VH/VH, my 3/4 stack beseiging Julii army got crunched between two nearly full stack German armies, one with a 6 star general whereas my guy had only four stars. Outnumbered more than 2:1 and relying mostly on barbarian mercenaries and barbarian cavalry (plus 4 principes, two archer auxilia, and two general units) for my army, I nevertheless managed by the hair of my teeth to cause a rout.

My merc infantry were reduced to 1/3 strength, my generals were down to 4 and 5 men respectively. My two merc cav units had a total of around 21 men left out of 108. My 320 principes were down to about 150 when they killed the enemy general and started the stampede. Then...

Crash to desktop!

:furious3:

I tried to reload and play on, but I was so disgusted I couldn't stand the thought of it. Would it be that difficult for CA to implement an in-battle save system?

It's not so much the technical ability, rather CA do not want gamers to abuse an in-battle savegame function. I sympathize with you, but you must realize that such a savegame function might take much of the challenge out of the battles. Not that the AI is giving much of a challenge at the moment, but that's another story.

If you look at the bright side, the end battle is going to end up with an inevitable crash for whatever reason, and you happen to overwrite your most recent save game file with that battle save... ~D (maybe this is the dark side... ~;))

I feel your pain about CTD during a battle. It's one of the few times the word disgusted is used to full effect. The screen drops black, and the first thing through your mind is how that battle probably isn't going to be replayed the same. To top it all off, the AI seems to have a "random disappointment algorithm" in the code, because every time I have a CTD during a siege defense, I reload the game to try again, and the AI refuses to attack the city again, even though they spent the last 4 turns preparing for it! Weird, huh?

Sometimes I have only 20 free minutes more before go out or something, it's annoying have to stop playing because you know that there are a couple of large battles waiting your end of turn.

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Originally Posted by KiOwA

rather CA do not want gamers to abuse an in-battle savegame function.

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Why is it CAs concern? If the above is the true reason for not putting in a save ability into the battles then to me that is a BS position on their part. CA should never ever take the position of "but it's for your own good cause we don't trust you".

There should always be a save system for ANYWHERE in the game due to the fact that PC games have a tendency to CRASH at the most inconvenient time. More then once I have slicked a game from my hard drive and broke the CD in half due to one to many CTDs. If I want frustration I either go to work or come to the forums. I don't need or want frustration in a game.

So far this game has not CTD very often and never in a place that would cause me to go temporarly insane and thus break the CD in half. But it could happen.

Well the bright side of the matter is that battles are'nt as long as MTW. How often do you have more than 1 stack in a battle for RTW

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Originally Posted by oaty

Well the bright side of the matter is that battles are'nt as long as MTW. How often do you have more than 1 stack in a battle for RTW

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I was just thinking about my last 2+ hour battle in MTW. What was funny was that I was so absorbed in the action that I thought it only lasted 30 minutes.

As for saving during battles themselves, might it be unavailable because of a savegame stability issue? Not that I have any evidence to back this up, I just remember (from many years ago) that the games which allowed saves at any point were often more prone to savegame corruption. This was long ago, and the problem may have been eradicated since then. My brain just happened to retrieve a deeply buried thought about this topic ~:) .

I imagine saving the game in the middle of the battle would be quite difficult-you'd have to record the positions of each man, what he was doing, where in the air projectiles were (imagine saving the exact positions, speed and trajectory of 300 arrows!) , if people were in the middle of an attack round, and so on. Maybe it could be done but it might be a tad hard, or slow, and so on.

Aren't battle maps generated 'on the fly', as well? They'd have to come up with a way to store and re-load the huge area of land visible in the battle.

Like I said..maybe they could do it, but it just wasn't deemed worth the time, when there are better things to be doing.

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Originally Posted by HicRic

I imagine saving the game in the middle of the battle would be quite difficult-you'd have to record the positions of each man, what he was doing, where in the air projectiles were (imagine saving the exact positions, speed and trajectory of 300 arrows!) , if people were in the middle of an attack round, and so on.

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All utterly trivial for today's computers, or indeed any computers from the past decade. Several tens of thousands of sets of precise coordinates and facings and actions would probably take up several hundred kilobytes tops, nicely compressed. RTW saves tend to be one or two megabytes as-is, so what's the big deal of adding ten or twenty percent? Processing speed isn't an issue, either, since the stuff is already stored in RAM during the battle, so you'd just have to make it a bit more compact—try compressing a smallish file in WinZip if you want to see how quick that is.

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Originally Posted by HicRic

Aren't battle maps generated 'on the fly', as well? They'd have to come up with a way to store and re-load the huge area of land visible in the battle.

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I'm not quite sure how the computer comes up with its maps, really. The maps for custom battles range from around 100 KB to 8 MB, at least the ones I have. Still not the end of the world. I'm not sure what accounts for the huge difference—a file called map.wfc takes up 2-8 MB where it exists, but Carrhae and Bibract don't seem to need it (I have NinjaCool's mod, packaged in with RTR).

In any case, if the maps are randomly constructed, you could probably reconstruct the entire massive map in every detail with the seed, which could be preserved easily enough (and is very small—the current time on the computer clock is often used, no more than a few bytes). Maybe the seed is actually prestored for every square in the game, in fact, so two battles in the same place will look the same. Just the coordinates might serve as a seed, really (plus the terrain, obviously).

-Simetrical

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Originally Posted by HicRic

Aren't battle maps generated 'on the fly', as well? They'd have to come up with a way to store and re-load the huge area of land visible in the battle.

Like I said..maybe they could do it, but it just wasn't deemed worth the time, when there are better things to be doing.

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Are battlemaps generated randomly? I dont think so, but i could be wrong. Anyone know for sure?

I have to agree we dont know how difficult it would be to implement. But i would gather that CA felt other features deserved the coding time. Not to say its not a good feature request, but we dont know how this feature rates, comparatively, in their dev schedule.

I could have sworn that I've defended the same battle map turn after turn, so either only certain areas of the map are randomly generated, or the game remembers its randomly generated maps pn a campaign by campaign basis. Very unlikely. Wasn't the original idea of RTW to make the entire map out of thousands of smaller maps, instead of provinces? And aren't there several map files that you can use to change the campaign map entirely? I thought the game generated the maps from those files.

I am braindead and should not have made my last post. ~;)


Yeah, I don't know why I thought storing the information of a few hundred arrows would be difficult..err...I guess I'll just put it down to foolishness. Seeing as, you know, the computer has to know where all the arrows are anyway to make them fly and kill and stuff. D'oh.

As for my comment about the battle maps, yeah, that was a load of rubbish as well. If you fight in the same place twice, the battle map is the same.

What I would be interested in is if you edited the campaign map, or made a new one entirely, is if the game generates the (fixed) battlefields from this data, or whether you have to make a battlefield for each map...

I'm heading off-topic.

What is ironic about saving and battles is that MTW:VI did it much better than RTW. In Rome (and Shogun), if you have many battles to fight at the end of the turn, you have to do them all beore you save. MTW allows you to do a save before each battle, on the pre-battle screen. Even having that feature in Rome would have been nice!

Ah, no. Actually, you can save between battles. 'Cntrl S' will quick save for you, enabling you to quit and come back later to the fight. You can do this at any stage during your turn on the strategic map.

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Originally Posted by HicRic

What I would be interested in is if you edited the campaign map, or made a new one entirely, is if the game generates the (fixed) battlefields from this data, or whether you have to make a battlefield for each map...

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It generates them automatically. There's no way everyone who adds on to the map makes dozens of new combat maps, particularly since we have no combat map editor. This lends credence to the idea that the maps are generated pseudorandomly based on seeds tied to location.

-Simetrical