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Has this already been discussed? Sorry if it has.
Sounds great to me :grin: A real improvement. I think this will add a whole new aspect to total war which should be great.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dan Toose (CA dev)
The only thing I might add to a system like this is the recruitment of temporary units, or levy, who are recruited very cheaply, but last a limited time.
This is good info. I like it. It sounds pretty limitting and that elite units will actually matter. In fact, even peasant units will have a place. Good Job CA. :2thumbsup:
I was wondering if I'd missed this, but i don't think anyone's brought it up yet.
And yes, agreed, I think this is a great addition. It's a nice way to take the abstraction out of a unit needing two turns to create, or whatever. It may take two turns for the recruiting pool to fill up instead, but just a single turn to generate the unit.
Ooh Yay :D
This is a very promising prospect
Very good - it will force realistic army compositions (excellent for modders too!)
I fear it becomes like HoM&M..
(It has been brought up, and I have brought up that "fear" of mine as well)
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The way we did that was to introduce recruitment pools, the idea being that in a city there are going to be a number of able bodied men that could be trained into service at any time, and these pool sizes vary from unit to unit, so for example there's always plenty of men who are ready to be trained as a peasant, but there's not so many men who are ready to be trained into like, eliet cavalry.
I can't imagine how serf's armies were in reality...:dizzy2: Serfs (trained peasants) in charge.:charge::laugh4:
Sounds like an improvement over the old system, but it doesn't impress greatly as a concept.
I'd prefer a system like Imperialism II or LOTR II, where you can recruit as many units as you like per turn, based on the amount of money, material and men available, and how big an army you can afford to support.
But of course, doing it that way would require some careful play balancing, and CA has never shown much of an interest in working on that aspect of a game.
I like the idea, provided that the AI actually tries to build some elite troops, instead of deciding to build 10 units of peasants every turn: in MTW1 the AI often only had huge peasant armies and the only challenge came from the Golden Horde, and the re-emerging factions who appeared with good armies.
The good thing about this system is that the AI won't have lots of little armies like in RTW - it can build an entire big army in each city
Hopefully the AI will make a point of keeping its forces together.
That sounds exactly the same as:Quote:
Originally Posted by screwtype
Only without the fact that with the M2TW system you can't train a pesant to be noble cavalry, which seems an improvement. I'm not really sure what you mean seeing as I haven't played Imperialism II or LOTR II but isn't it the same principal with a little more elaboration?Quote:
Dan Toose (CA dev)]so if you've got the money and the men you can get the troops
I think it's a very good idea. I like that there is a use for cities to be above a certain size - which will mean that core ones will have more of a use than just income generators.
"As many troops as money allows" is a ridiculous abstraction that IMO is far worse than this method.
~:smoking:
I think this is the best feature announced so far, and if the AI can live up to the probably delicate handling between building an economy and recruiting/maintaining military forces, then it'll be a great step forward in the strategical game.
in LOTR II you had to make the swords, spear, shields etc yourself. And based on the amount of equipment you had (and men and money) you could train units. I don't see how this system is better then the MTW2 system. First off all creating weapons and armour doesn't fit in the grand scale of the TW games, and it certainly isn't realistic that you ("the king") create the equipment yourself and then give it to your servants for free, thus turning a simple peasant in a heavily armour knight. With a few exceptions soldiers always took care of their own equipment.
On the face of it, it does sound somewhat similar to the system in LOTR II but I very much doubt it will have anything like the same level of sophistication or careful balance of that game.Quote:
Originally Posted by Myrddraal
In LOTR II, you could recruit up to half the total populace from any one province into your army in any one turn, providing you had the money and the arms to equip them and pay for their upkeep. But there were no limits on the number of troops of a given type you could recruit, it just depended on your resources.
More importantly, every 50 soldiers you recruited cost you 5 "hearts" in that province. Hearts in LOTR II are basically a measure of the happiness of a province. If the province went under 5 hearts in total it would almost certainly rebel, with devastating consequences.
So, you might have 25 hearts in total which means you could recruit 200 soldiers without risking revolt, but because of random events each turn, you'd be pretty reckless to go that low so you might recruit 100 leaving you with 15 hearts. So there were real limits, and real consequences, for recruiting too many soldiers. Happiness management was a concrete skill you had to learn in LOTR II. It hardly exists in the TW games.
Also, in LOTR II money and equipment are really hard to come by, which again puts practical limits on the size of your armies. One of the biggest problems with RTW is that after a short time you have so much money it becomes almost a total non-issue. That's poor play balance.
Basically with LOTR II the military system was fully integrated into the economic system in a very elegant way that forced you to master a set of skills and carefully balance every aspect of your kingdom. In RTW there's very little in the way of real integration, or skill required. It's mostly just a big, empty micromanagement chore.
I'd love it if CA took a leaf out of LOTR's book and developed a fully integrated system. But I just don't believe they will do it. My guess is that the latest changes in M2TW will be a modest improvement but will not address the fundamental imbalances or the lack of integration between one area of the game and the other that RTW in particular, and all the TW games in general, have suffered from.
Oh, and as for Imperialism II, the main difference is that you don't have separate recruitment facilities for each province, you have a handful of master screens from where you control every aspect of the game, which again cuts down hugely on tedious micromanagement.
That's only half right, you could also buy the arms and armour directly from a trader, but it would cost you a lot of money to do so.Quote:
Originally Posted by [cF]Adherbal
In other words, you had a choice about what type of economy you wanted to run. You could run a cash economy, where you concentrated on making stuff you could sell to buy arms, or you could run a labour economy, where you had your peasants building the weapons themselves. A lot would depend on what type of province it was. Try finding that level of sophistication in TW.
You could say exactly the same thing about TW, the king pays for everything in that too. What's the difference?Quote:
Originally Posted by [cF]Adherbal
And as to your comment about you not seeing how the LOTR system is better, it was better in so many ways I could hardly list them all here. Suffice it to say that everything in that game was finely balanced in such a way as to make a real and continuous challenge from start to finish. TW is just an accumulation game where after a fairly short time you have so much of everything that the result is a foregone conclusion.
I like the idea. Makes things more realistic
What I particularly like about this is that it makes larger castles/cities strategically more important, aside from the constant upgrading to produce higher class units.
How will this tie in with the castles/cities system. Does this mean that castles will get large populations?
I'm not sold on this, I think it might be better to have cities in general, and then castles to be build like forts in RTW, but which stay forever and have the same recruitment options as they are suggesting. That way they would take their population from the city of the province in which they are. But still the question I have is:
Will castles and civillian cities have similar populations?
I like the new system in M2TW.
And no, I don´t want a system from LOTR2, if I would, I´d go buy LOTR2...
I think that the seperation of castle and city is, in part, to make it harder for you to expand very easily at a ridiculous rate: keep having castles on your fronts (which will be continuously moving) and you'll not have enough money to expand; if you have cities on your fronts, you'll be easily conquered, and you'll have to move armies from the heart of your empire, but you'll be able to pay for new troops.
If you have your city and castle in the same province, the tactical aspect is moot.
As for population numbers, I reckon castles will have fewer people (can't attract people due to trade, wealth etc.) but not so few that it affects the recruitment pool much.
I would guess on a no.Quote:
Originally Posted by Myrddraal
CA has said that cities will have large population thus have to deal with squalors and stuff while the castles will be military only.
I think they've said castles can recruit some high grade feudal type units (e.g. knights). I would expect cities can pump out more low grade units ("urban militia" types) as well as better late game stuff (guns, pikes). I assumed this would be implemented through building restrictions, but it may mesh with a recruitment pool system too.
Guns counts as missile troops I think and according to this screen
http://70.86.3.237/screenshots/00165474.jpg you won't be able to recruit missile units or cavalry in a city.
Interesting - maybe the cities give you artillery? I remember CA saying they open up some good units for the late game.
Well, traditionally the cities were the ones that allowed the mass production of firearms, and the Italian city states were the ones to implement most effectively this new style of warfare . Same thing with crossbows to an extent.
Thus I believe that guns aren't just missiles in this respect.
A bit odd missile infantry isnt allowed in cities. If anything it was cities that had large amounts of good quality infantry, missile or non-missile.
Overall its a nice feature but Im still worried about seeing lots of peasants, as such a unit (with absolutely horrible stats) has no role in an army.
CBR
I think the new system is great, offers a good deal of realism to recruiting, and of course implements great with the city/castle aspect of the game
Sounds like an interesting approach. I just hope these peasants are at least partially equipped for war with a basic spear and shield at least. I don't want to see armies consisting of thousands of stupid looking dagger wielding fodder anymore. It didn't feel right when you're just up against AI armies armed with daggers or sticks. Who would bother to summon a levy with that lot? For a last ditched defense perhaps, but otherwise they'd need some equipment before being sent to war.
Regarding the city/castle recruitment thing, I assume castles get the better troops initially, and the recruitment pools refill quicker, but later on cities will provide the funds and better troops needed later on, with recruits available faster as the city gets larger.
It's good to see they're trying a few different things this time around. Does anyone know if civil wars are back though? I can't recall hearing anything about this.
I agree, but I am optimistic as that was one area where RTW improved over MTW. RTW had peasant units but I very seldom saw them in AI armies. By contrast, they blighted the early period of MTW.Quote:
Originally Posted by CBR