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Guys, those of you that are involved with other fansites should contact me about geting some questions here from your community. This latest batch is from the Org forums more from the TWC next week.
Q: Are there any plans for making auto resolve separate from regular difficulty settings?
A: Not in the expansion pack. This may happen in future products, but we have to consider how confusing it would be to the average player to have too many difficulty setting toggles and switches. It may be possible that we'll add in difficulty sub-settings as advanced options in future products. It can be argued that auto-resolving battles makes the campaign game harder because you are likely to lose more troops in an auto-battle than if you fight it out under manual control, and losing troops unnecessarily is tantamount to burning resources for no payoff.
Q: Will there be further restrictions on creating troops such as a zone of recruitment?
A: There are some restrictions on where troops can be hired already - the Spartans only being available in Sparta, for example. When playing a BI campaign you'll notice that it's now a lot harder to train Elephant units (when playing the Sassanids) simply because there are a lot fewer elephants around thanks to centuries of the elephant population being thinned out/exterminated for the amusement of the Roman mob. Other units are limited to specific areas of the game world too: specifically Romano-British types can only be raised in Britannia, Sughdians can only be raised in the East, Berbers in North Africa, Slavic units on the steppes and so on.
And as some of you may have worked out different types of mercenaries are already limited by geographical regions. This is continued in BI, so that you can't recruit particular mercenary types in the 'wrong' homelands - and it can even be worth sending out an expedition to see what mercenaries are available in exotic and distant parts of the world.
However, as to setting up 'zones of recruitment' for all troop types, that isn't how the game handles the troop restrictions. Actually, limiting troop training too closely would probably become very annoying for players very quickly. You can always recruit the basic troop types in any settlement after all, and the more exotic types are a nice bonus for a given training building constructed in the right region.
Q: Has granting units titles and that sort of thing been considered again for BI or future expansions (the extra command stars/management could really helpt he AI as well as creating more generals to lead armies)?
A: We assume by this that you are talking about the MTW concept of provincial titles being granted to unit leaders. There are two features that you'll see in BI that are similar to this, but not quite the same.
Firstly, you'll be able to recruit generals in the same way as other units: by building the right building in a settlement and then training them. A recruited general will come with a cavalry bodyguard, but he won't be part of the ruling family and won't be eligible to become faction heir or leader. They will age and die, so this is a temporary addition to your leadership.
Secondly, some factions have offices of state that can be given to generals, such as the 'magister peditum' for the Romans, an office that grants an infantry command bonus. You will be free to shift offices of state around between your generals over time, although loading every office onto a single uber-general won't be possible.
Q: Are there any plans for a built-in mod management function with BI or future expansions?
A: There will be a command line -mod function that allows you to redirect the game to use a different set of data without having to replace the original files and - with multiple shortcuts on your desktop all using different -mod redirects - have more than one mod on your PC at once *without* having multiple installations of the game. This will be fully explained in the readme documentation that will ship with the expansion pack. Overall, you'll find that modding support has been substantially improved, especially in the way that factions can be modded.
Q: Will you be releasing a list of the script and console commands that function with RTW and RTW:BI along with the parameters that they use? If not, what's your reason for not doing so?
A: There are no plans at present to make the full list of scripting and console commands public. Most of these are solely to do with development, and wouldn't help anyone mod the game or play it in any way. Besides, no conjuror likes to show how the magic is done! :) However, once work on BI is complete we may reconsider and release more information.
Q: MikeB mentioned an auto-run feature that can be used to run a game without player intervention. This would be very useful for mod testing. Is there any way we can activate it now? If not, will we be able to in the future?
A: MikeB was very naughty to mention that and will shortly be fighting the company bear to pay for his mistake. :) This is a feature we use internally for debugging. Autorun is not something that we've openly advertised for released versions, and it's not normally something that a player would want to do, simply because they are *playing* the game rather than *watching* stuff happen. However, there's a -ai command line option that turns autorun on in release builds after the 1.2 patch. This doesn't work with earlier versions of the game.
Q: What do you think about to do for tightening the tactical deepness of the R: TW BI besides swimmable units and night battles?
A: Many aspects of the AI for battles has been worked on since RTW was published, and we think you'll find it gives you a better game. Then again, the cynics out there would expect us to say that, but short of making this an essay there's not a lot more to say other than it ahs been worked on.
Q: Will there be any improvement on geography in the game? River crossings, cliffs or valleys?
A: The battlefields in BI will look much like those in RTW, as you might expect. However, given that some units can now swim you'll find that river crossings are not quite the same as they once were, as simply waiting for the enemy to cross in one or two places may no longer work as a defensive tactic.
Q: Vanilla R: TW and BI will use the same 3D campaign map? Will you create another map for the expansion?
A: Both RTW and BI use the same map of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, which is hardly surprising given that the action of the game takes place where you would expect. What has changed are the provincial boundaries and some of the settlements. There are around 30% fewer regions on the new version of Europe as compared to the old RTW map.
Q: Are there are any additional attributes that can be affixed to buildings? Can they give more negative and positive bonuses, and how about certain buildings giving specific (ie not all) units different morale and cost bonuses/penalties?
A: Buildings can now have religious effects on the population. Some buildings will improve the quality of specific classes of troops trained in a settlement - shrines honouring Ull, for example, give a quality bonus to any missile troops trained in the same settlement.
If what you're asking about here is modding, then yes, it is possible to add effects to buildings by editing the tech tree text files for the game, but you need to be careful not to make any one building too extreme in what it does to a settlement.
Q: Will there be any new siege equipments?
A: No. Siege technology didn't really move on during the period and what you have is what you get. You either have to go over or through defences, and the methods of doing this: ladders, rams, towers or saps, weren't added to until the invention of gunpowder. Artillery will also still batter holes in walls, of course, and for factions without heavy artillery weapons there's always the chance of hiring mercenary artillerists to do it for you...
Q: Will more information and stats be included for the family members? For example, how they die, individual win/loss ratio, their achievements, all to help personalise them more. Likewise will there be more info/stats included for all factions - most successful general, most aggressive general, etc?
A: This isn't something that we're adding for BI. It is something that we're actively looking at for future titles, and we've had one or two ideas that we think you're really going to like...
Q: Will the exploits that mar multiplayer gaming, e.g. cavalry spamming/stacking be dealt with?
A: A number of exploits have been found and dealt with for the expansion pack. Cavalry spamming has been dealt with specifically, and the relative strengths of spearmen and cavalry have been rebalanced too.
Q: Will there be extra historical battles?
A: There will be at least one battle that ships with BI.
Q: What is the formula that generates kill probabilities in close combat from combatants' attack and defence stats?
A: Sorry, but at the moment this kind of information has to be treated as a commercial secret. We've spent a lot of time and effort developing these algorithms, and we don't see any reason to let any potential competitors have this kind of detailed design work free of charge!
Q: Is there any chance of being given an Excel file similar to the one provided with MTW that showed where unit stats came from?
A: See the previous answer. Again, we've invested time and effort in creating spreadsheet tools to help develop our games, and we don't feel the need to give our expertise to any commercial competitors at the moment. Sorry to the modders, but that's the way it is at the moment. We do, however, review what we're prepared to release from time to time, so this decision may be revisited in future.
