AI marketability

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Originally Posted by sunsmountain

Now i know Jerome is not part of this discussion, but did you read the comments above he made in private messages?

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Yes, and it confirms my impression that they aren't going to fix most of this stuff in M2TW. They hardcode things that should be adjustable. Why isn't there a tag on the general's unit? It certainly needs one.

Also, mods can't fix most of the AI issues nor can they put features in the battle engine that aren't there. Even a simple thing like charge, run and walk speeds was coded in such a way that you can't change them independently. Movement speeds are extremely important to the gameplay. A mistake was made in the ratio of the walking to the running speed, but CA said they won't change the movement speed because the animations would have to be redone to prevent the units slipping or sliding.

Movement speed is basic to the gameplay, and you can't just go changing it with the terrain settings because that alters the effect of fatigue and the effectiveness of ranged fire. If you notice, fatigue rate is something you can't mod.

So it certainly appears that the game is being marketed to people who don't care about these things. If that wasn't true, RTW would have had a slower speed setting for all those customers who liked the speed of MTW/VI. I was told directly by a CA developer that they don't see anything wrong with the movement speeds. Incredible Sidekick also posted here at the org that the speeds were motion captured so are correct. He didn't say what they motion captured to get these speeds.

I think it is important to point out the following:


We were told in this thread that in an ideal world, the game design would be finished first, leaving the programmers to work on the AI without complication.

The community has been recently told that the game design is essentially finished. The release date is a few months away. What will they be doing for the next few months?


I find this promising.

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Sunsmountain, not sure what your beef is, but your tone is rather unpleasant. Unnecessarily so, I would say, as we only seem to agree. I did read Jerome's comments and one of the points I was trying to make is that unduly time pressure in the last phase of production may be (in part) cause of some of those issues I described. And would not adding more resources to AI development alleviate that pressure somewhat?

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parceIt, no offense, but i did feel you were exagerating there and responded to balance things out. More resources is of course good for any game, but you only have so much.

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Just seems to me you're very eager to defend even RTW's obvious weakspots. Why not highlight them so they can be analyzed and improved?

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Both sides of the story need to be heard, else there will be no dialogue. I hear and see the negatives too often. CA will change nothing unless they see our point of view, which they certainly won't if we deny to at least consider or know their point of view. It's their game after all. They designed it this way for a reason, you can disagree, but if you don't want to know their reason for designing it this way, why should they listen to your reason for designing it that way?

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After two handfuls of patches and a zillion mods out there, these issues have still not been 'tweaked' to full satisfaction. It can't be done as it concerns inherent flaws in the game's design (above you noted yourself how rigid this can make things). I will not even touch upon diplomacy

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I was talking about the tweaking a programmer can do, not necessarily a modder. Do you know about inherent flaws in the game's design? I'm not asking you to name the effects of this, i'm asking you for the causes. See, you can say that the design is bad but you know nothing about the design. How can you give CA constructive feedback then? Just because those barbarians didn't accept your Ceasefire + 10000 gold + map information + etc., doesn't mean they designed it wrongly...

I am still dead certain that a better weighing of offers by the AI, and a better taking into account of relative army strengths, can fix most issues in diplomacy. I don't know the issues you're having, but as of patch 1.5, the number of inconsistencies in the diplomacy AI have dropped, in my experience. It's still hard to get a peace with a faction you have been at war with for quite a while, even if you decimate them, unless they offer it of course. But perhaps that's only logical, and asking for "full satisfaction" is perhaps a little too much.

Declaring war by the AI also seems random to some, but is actually quite similar to the match ups the MTW AI made, and therefore predictable. If you defend your cities (more specifically: regions) with large armies, the large armies of the AI will not in general move into those regions. If you also have trade rights or alliance it helps, but the AI will still attack you if you defend your regions poorly. If you block the path to your city with a single unit, a path finding bug (which is still there, i agree) will almost always force the AI to move away from your cities, as it tries to reach your city via the other, longer way around.

The decision to go the other way around is perhaps an "inherent flaw in the game's design", but i'm sure they will fix it in MTW2. Well, I hope so...

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They hardcode things that should be adjustable.

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In a team of programmers, you have to make some ground assumptions so you can get to work. Now that the work is done, you can go back to those hard coded parts of the program and change them. But know full well that for each and every parameter you change, all the other numbers in your program can suddenly start to become buggy, resulting in crashes etc.

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Movement speeds are extremely important to the gameplay. A mistake was made in the ratio of the walking to the running speed, but CA said they won't change the movement speed because the animations would have to be redone to prevent the units slipping or sliding.

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See, I didn't know this but it does explain why the ratio will stay that way. Nobody wants slipping and sliding (would be funny though).

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If you notice, fatigue rate is something you can't mod.

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They obviously thought that, if these things were right, they wouldn't have to be modded. They got the balance right in the past, perhaps they became overconfident. Or, given the initial motion captures, the other stuff like fatigue and ranged fire parameters simply followed from that.

But we can't ask CA to do all the motion captures all over again, that would cost too much money while only catering to the few. What can we ask them to fix this? Perhaps change the terrain modifiers for cavalry and infantry separately, would that solve it? Or would the animations look really dodgy?

It's really hard to make an automobile. It's really hard to make a printing press with 10,000 moving parts. It's really hard to paint a masterpiece. It's really hard to create a vaccine. It's really hard to write a good novel.

and I am sure it's really hard to make a computer game with good AI. But, that's CA's job and why they earn the big bucks.

Now let's say we sat down and wrote down on paper what rules we would want a computer to follow when fighting a medieval or ancient battle. What's on top of your list?

Don't suicide your general unit.
Don't melee attack with missiles.
Keep missile units behind spear units.
Attack in formation (i.e. in a battle line not unit by unit.)

Now, maybe it is truly hard to program this, so be it. (In Madden football does the quarterback perform QB Draws for most of the game?) If it is so hard, why do the game companies keep jumping the gun by creating Campaign Maps that they KNOW the AI can't handle. (Though, admittedly players can make good use of it.)

In fact, CA even shipped RTW with the load-save bug, which admits they think their AI is so poor they don't even need to let it have a memory - hell, just let the AI work from scratch each turn! Okay, that's harsh - the alternative explanation is that they shipped RTW with a major AI bug that they didn't even know existed. (ouch.)

However, I think we can all admit that many game companies, not just CA, focus on graphics, graphics, graphics. Pointless Waste of Time had an excellent essay on this point. Some company was extolling their graphics to the point of being able to see the sweat roll down the players' arms. ooooooh. This means that either all game companies are dumb or that, yes, graphics sells enough games to make it profitable to improve them.

What's weird to me is not working on MP, which by a stroke let's players play against superior AI without needing any actual AI programming.

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Originally Posted by sunsmountain

But we can't ask CA to do all the motion captures all over again, that would cost too much money while only catering to the few.

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That's a good one. I will tell that to my customer the next time they require me to re-work an entire order of product because it doesn't work properly.

BTW, software is the ONE industry where replacing faulty product relatively cheaply is possible.

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Originally Posted by HarunTaiwan

In fact, CA even shipped RTW with the load-save bug, which admits they think their AI is so poor they don't even need to let it have a memory - hell, just let the AI work from scratch each turn! Okay, that's harsh - the alternative explanation is that they shipped RTW with a major AI bug that they didn't even know existed. (ouch.)

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The load/save was what you say it was, a bug. A bug that took around 6 months of thousands of players playing this game alot to notice.
The AI did have a memory, it just wasn't working properly.
Ever since the bug was discovered I only had 4 seiges broken total, the rest of the seiges during the pre 1.3 patch worked fine.
I doubt CA shipped RTW knowing the bug existed.

But denying the load/save issue exists alltogether, and claiming that it's actually a "feature" allowing the AI to reconsider its moves? :inquisitive:

Not exactly class customer service.

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Originally Posted by Kralizec

But denying the load/save issue exists alltogether, and claiming that it's actually a "feature" allowing the AI to reconsider its moves? :inquisitive:

Not exactly class customer service.

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And I wonder if Activision wasn't behind that because as soon as they moved to SEGA they suddenly confirmed it and fixed it.
The same with Vampire: Bloodlines(also Activision) where the devs responded to the reports and proof of huge memory leaks and unoptimised engine by simply that the people's computers was under the minimum specs while ignoring the fact that the people's computers was way over the recommended specs.
Also the "feature" bit was a misunderstanding I think. CA wasn't trying to pass it off as a feature but merely trying to explain how the AI was programmed. They however took no stance wether it was a bug or not.

Fair enough, I retract my statement.

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Originally Posted by TB666

The load/save was what you say it was, a bug. A bug that took around 6 months of thousands of players playing this game alot to notice.
The AI did have a memory, it just wasn't working properly.
Ever since the bug was discovered I only had 4 seiges broken total, the rest of the seiges during the pre 1.3 patch worked fine.
I doubt CA shipped RTW knowing the bug existed.

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Actually, CA said it was a design decision not a bug. After players started complaining about it and their attempt to surpress that complaining failed, they changed it. I've always wondered whether they said it was not a bug to save face. If it was in fact a design decision, then someone at CA knew about it from the beginning.

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Originally Posted by sunsmountain

In a team of programmers, you have to make some ground assumptions so you can get to work. Now that the work is done, you can go back to those hard coded parts of the program and change them. But know full well that for each and every parameter you change, all the other numbers in your program can suddenly start to become buggy, resulting in crashes etc.

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If you use top down design, you don't have that problem of changes in one subroutine breaking another subroutine. If you've written spagetti code, then you have a big problem when you make a change. But you missed my point completely. I was responding to your suggestion that modders can fix the game. Well modders can't fix it because of the hardcoded stuff, and CA won't fix it because they are serving the new market not the market that comprises the experienced players. CA has stated that the lack of multiple adjustments on fatigue, ammo and morale is intentional, and the reason given is that they don't want to confuse new players. Apparently, they are obsessed with catering to these new players, and you can see why. New players buy the game. New players become experienced players at some point, but they've already bought the game by that time. So, tough luck if after becoming and experienced player you find that ultimately the game is a shallow experience because it doesn't play well. The problem for CA at that point is to deflect the complaints of the experienced players so that those complaints don't lower future sales.

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Originally Posted by Puzz3D

Actually, CA said it was a design decision not a bug. After players started complaining about it and their attempt to surpress that complaining failed, they changed it. I've always wondered whether they said it was not a bug to save face. If it was in fact a design decision, then someone at CA knew about it from the beginning.

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But wasn't that term a part of the same post where they explained how they AI was programmed ??
I wouldn't be surprised since that post caused alot of noise but as I said before I think it was a simple misunderstanding.
I think they were simply trying to tell us how the AI was suppose to work.
But since the post took no stance wether there was a problem or not it could seem that they tried to brush it to the side.
Also as soon as they moved to SEGA it became a bug and I wonder why *coughs* activision *coughs*.

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Originally Posted by TB666

But wasn't that term a part of the same post where they explained how they AI was programmed ??

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As I recall, they said the AI was reassessing it's options on a reload. I think the problem was that it takes the AI two turns to decide to siege a city. You could find instances of the AI not breaking a siege on a reload, but it was rare.

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Originally Posted by Puzz3D

As I recall, they said the AI was reassessing it's options on a reload.

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Ok then it is the same post I'm thinking of. As I said, think it was a misunderstanding.

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Originally Posted by Puzz3D

I think the problem was that it takes the AI two turns to decide to siege a city. You could find instances of the AI not breaking a siege on a reload, but it was rare.

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In my games it was never rare.
In fact the AI breaking a seige after reload was the rare bit here.

I think the reason why the save/load-bug was so difficult to confirm, was that the AI behavior on the campaign map seems so random all the time. In all that senseless shoving around of armies the systematicity of breaking up sieges wasn't easy to note.

One thing to keep in mind is that it is much easier to discover weird stuff in the graphics (though things like the British Legionaries left leg can still slip by) than to see that the ai works well as intended, since you can't test it thouroughly enough, so it can still do idiotic things. And even if you see the ai do some idiotic thing such as suicide charging with their general, it is also easier to see that there is a problem than to actually fix it in a way that works AND doesn't break something else.

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Originally Posted by Grifman

But as you note, each of these games only has half the AI requirements of the TW series, which has to have both a strategic and a tactical AI. As for Manassas tactical AI, you don't have multiple maps and terrain to deal with, and I suspect there are just a few unit type, infantry, cavalry, artillery. And BoA doesn't have near as many factions to play (each with their own unique map positions) as the TW series. Nor is there the economic/technlogical development of the TW series in these games.

You're really not comparing the same things here. Each of these games is much simpler than the TW series. Your comparison is simplistic and flawed.

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I don't want to come across hard on a old-timer with a join-date as respectable as your's, but I can easily provide an in-depth argument for you.

WARNING: Those of you who are squeamish about in-depth arguments from gorgnards about game's AI's may wish to look away now....

I'm comparing strategic and tactical AIs to the AI used in TW which has strategic and tactical AI. So, my argument is far from flawed, unless you can you show me any intelligent interaction between the AIs in TW? I haven't seen any. One uses the results of the other, but I'd be surprised to know the one provides substantive choice input to the other.

I agree my argument is simplistic as it stands, but that is easily rectified, just a bit boring for those who have played the games I'm comparing. Which you obviously don't considering you only "suspect" TC2M has three unit types. It actually has more, including the officers and supply wagons. In addition, all units can be easily modified, and melee-only units are already being modded. Cavalry can also be mounted or unmounted, and artillery limbered and unlimbered (as well as choosing a number of ammo types). Units can also have a number of formations, including those that result from battle/morale effects.

In each way the games I highlighted are more complex than TW in the areas they deal with. You are correct TW does have a tactical and strategic AI, but I wouldn't say just having both makes the AI better than only having one. What I've said is there are games out there with better AIs, tactical and strategic, because I see no direct connection between the two. I would hope the strategic AI was called during a tactical engagment to ensure quality troops aren't squandered, but I don't see any evidence of that in TW.

The TC2M AI has much more unit information and map information to deal with than TW. The maps include a much greater variety of terrains that effect both movement and fire for units diffenently, and all that can be modded on much, much larger maps. The AI from TW doesnt have much in the way of terrain modification to consider, particulalry when it comes to movement.

The AI from TC2M has to deal with a diverse number of unit attributes that can of course be modded in a large number of ways, including everything TW deals with, but with many more numbers of units on the larger maps, with large numbers of hierarchical leaders, routes for communication, time and weather, LOS, supply, ammo tracking and reinforcements. The player or AI can even request aid in play, which the AI handles, not as scripted events mind you. I don't see the TW AI doing anything like that.

The units positions on the map and relationship within the larger division or corp is also critical to the AI, and how it interacts with units of a different type. Lines are maintined, supply is protected, artillery is set up intelligently. Reserves are kept and used by the AI wisely. Terrain is used to advantage, surprise is possible. Roads are kept open to allow communication between corps, objectives are achieved on map in time and space.

In addition, you can adjust the AI with regard to a handicap for the computer (allow the AI to use bigger and better units), and the amount of CPU processing time you wish to allow the AI to use.

How complicated do you think the tech tree/upgrades/economic model are for the for the strategic AI? I'd suggest they are laughably simple.

If all that happened was for TC2M slapped any old strategic AI on top of thier tactical AI, it would beat TW hands down. As for the numbers of units, as they can be modded at will, the number of unit types is meaningless. TC2M lets you mod at will, including movement (with regard to terrain mods too), does TW let you do that? It all deals with ranged fire, melee, movement, morale, leadership and more.

See how easy it is for me to give a far from simplified, logical, set of statements in support for why the AI for TC2M is much better than the AI for TW? Do I need to do it for COTA and BoA as well?

As an aside, I reckon CA is starting to show up to defend thier product, because they rightly fear the hammering they will get in grognard forums if the AI isn't up to sratch. It's probably not necessary, as someone rightly pointed out the grognards are a small market (although they have some buying power = look at the ASL spending for pristin/unique sets).

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If you use top down design, you don't have that problem of changes in one subroutine breaking another subroutine. If you've written spagetti code, then you have a big problem when you make a change.

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No, that is not true. Rome's subroutines depend on numbers declared at the beginning of the program as constants. If you change constants into variables, there are suddenly a lot more configurations of said variables that can have subroutines interfering with each other. It will probably not crash but you have to check before you allow a number to be modded.

All I'm saying is that it takes them time to make a number you want to mod, moddable. Given the fact they were under time pressure, this could mean they haven't made all the numbers moddable yet that they want to make moddable. I do not believe that in principal, they do not want to mod certain numbers, except for: Unit size, number of units on map and in total, number of factions, stuff like that mainly because of resource limitations.

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But you missed my point completely. I was responding to your suggestion that modders can fix the game. Well modders can't fix it because of the hardcoded stuff, and CA won't fix it because they are serving the new market not the market that comprises the experienced players.

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I understand your point, but disagree: modders can modify overall unit speed, morale and ammo. Fatigue is hard coded, and they can't modify the ratio of cavalry speed to infantry speed, but other than that they can fix a lot. One prime example of this is darth formations, which tries to make use of what is hard coded as good as possible.

What you are implying with the word "fixing" is that they have to change the hard coded number according to your liking, and they're not going to do that. Would you? I think modders have given CA a clear signal on what to make moddable next. In particular unit speed. They might give us some AI numbers to mod. But don't count on it. Rome is very moddable as it. A battlemap editor wouldn't hurt though, in particular one that can set size.

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CA has stated that the lack of multiple adjustments on fatigue, ammo and morale is intentional, and the reason given is that they don't want to confuse new players.

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And how would you set fatigue then? To Tire Quickly, Tire Normal, Tire Slowly? Or Tire in 3 minutes, Tire in 4 minutes, or Tire in 5 minutes?
20 arrows, 40 or 80?
These options are useless unless you know how long a battle will last on average, so they would have to add an extra Estimated Battle Time.

I can see how that confuses new players.

Wow.

The mere fact that CA is absolutely aware that about 90% of the fans on these forums would buy MTW 2 if the AI was 10x better and the graphics werent changed at all. 10x improved in everyway, strategic and tatical, i would think that would be impressive. I would rate the graphics of MTW 2 as being about 5x. More than just being 'prettier' or 'higher res' it achieves its effect through increasing random detail, pretty amazing.


I havent really let myself become too excited about MTW 2, it really has ALL the parts to make a classic. Soooo many missed oppurtunities and mistakes and upgrades over the already amazing RTW.... But the glue that holds ALL these parts together is the AI.

As long as CA is aware of how close RTW came to truelly being a classic, in the same way as Shogun was a ground breaking classic in its day. MTW had superior tactical AI but it was really just a refinement of Shogun. Perhaps MTW2, as a refinement of RTW finally will see CA producing another true classic.

I have my fingers crossed.

One of the initial CA points was that there's no way to showcase the improved AI prior to release. Maybe I don't understand something, but it seems to me that's exactly what a demo would be good for.

Why doesn't CA release a demo with one battle, preset armies, and a map with many different terrain styles on it? It seems to me you'd get a lot of veteran player feedback, for free, rather than having to pay people to playtest the game. Plus, CA would (unless the game's crap) win approval from the vets because they'd feel like (and hopefully have) a real and helpful voice in the fine-tuning of the battle AI.

Again, maybe I've just missed something, but I really don't see the downside of releasing public betas. CA has a large pool of dedicated veteran players here. It just seems silly not to take advantage of that resource prior to a game's release.

Because most people who critise the direction of R:TW and M2:TW are not part of CA's targeted customer group? If you release videos with huge bombards, rockets, all kinds of flaming projectiles and fast running units, would you really care what a veteran thinks, or would you be bothered more about wether the video is flashy enough to get the cash from a teenager?

Well eventually even dumb teenagers have to grow up so the demographic balance should shift in favour of veteran players over time.

No, while they will indeed be the next generation of veterans, they will also be replaced by new teenagers with cash to spend. A target group never ages.

Well one thing you can certainly talk about from the movies are the movement rates. AI will have to wait for the moment...BUT...

if those moments speeds are actually how fast the game plays...

...then your going to need a G suit and a HUD, because it is like watching Apache Attack Helicopters moving around the map with 5 feet of ground clearance.

That will be the beginning of the end as far as I am concerned.

I really hope, in fact I pray that "actual" movement rates will be accurate and that the "Arcade Battle" button will allow the kiddies to play at warp speed.

I mean this is what I would have thought the "Arcade Battle" would be used for so that the actual game is set to realistic setting as a baseline.

Between having a "fast forward button" and the "arcade button", there is more than enough changes available to the "kids" if they want it.

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I really hope, in fact I pray that "actual" movement rates will be accurate and that the "Arcade Battle" button will allow the kiddies to play at warp speed.

I mean this is what I would have thought the "Arcade Battle" would be used for so that the actual game is set to realistic setting as a baseline.

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Now that's a good point. The slightly disturbing thing to me is that its also rather obvious... Am I missing something or wouldn't this be a very simple and feasible solution to a lot of the issues we've been discussing? If CA elaborates the concept a bit, it would allow MTW2 to be shipped almost as two games in one: of course, the fundamentals would be the same (e.g. graphics, AI, etc), but things as running/kill speeds make or break at least the tactical part of the game (I suppose this goes for both veterans as well as the speed-addicts).

If so required (for the marketing people perhaps?), they could even do it the other way around for all I care, and include a 'Realism' button instead of 'Arcade', which would be the baseline then (although I would personally take that as a sad, sad testimony of the downward direction towards Arcadicism the TW series has taken :shame:).

But what I wanted to ask upon reading AussieGiant's post, is whether anybody is aware (I am not) of any statements by CA regarding the use of an Arcade or Realism button in the way described above, i.e. to effectively cater to two very different styles of (tactical) play?

And could this not be further extended (in a sort of options menu?) to include issues on the strategic map such as diplomacy (e.g. complex or not)?

Hi parcelt,

To answer your question, I am not aware either. I made this statement because I went back and played Rome Total War the other night and saw the "Arcade" button just sitting there.

Then I started thinking about this whole "AI, realism, speed" theme I keep reading here at the .org

Some bright spark at CA had this idea in the first place so it can't too hard to make sure it is actually used to cater for the "two" precieved user groups.

That film clip looked totally "Hollywood" to me and it really has me worried.

As far as I am concerned if CA takes their eye off the "AI, Gameplay" ball too much, they will shoot themselves in the foot.

Graphics are out of date so fast that it would seem like a better investment to be a little off the pace on the graphics side but make sure the game play is still cutting edge.

CA have a wonderful combination of strategy and action in this series but the roots of this game is the "strategy", not the graphics.

Canon's mounted on elephants....I mean really come on:dizzy2:

Well, I just took a minute (actually 7, :laugh4: ) to check out the video/trailer.... It starts quite impressive, I like the look of the fortified town.

The battles, however, look like the opposite of what I want to see: knights run into spears, wipe them out in less than a second, repeat, repeat, knights seem unstoppable (and what horses they have, running at the speed of light!) until the other side calls in air support and have their Stealth bombers drop some cluster bombs that wipe out the knights completely (don't tell me it was that big gun, guns that fire something with that effect do not exist today) (that's where clusterbombs come in;).

Even if what some posters say is correct, i.e. that this is just a teaser and therefore not representative of how the actual game will play, the fact that they've chosen to depict a 'battle' at lightning speed says enough about who this game is aimed at. I say this is bad news.

Agree with your comments, AussieGiant. Let's hope CA picked up on this when designing MTW2, and that when shooting that video somebody had accidentally enabled the 'Arcade Extreme' mode....

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Originally Posted by parcelt

But what I wanted to ask upon reading AussieGiant's post, is whether anybody is aware (I am not) of any statements by CA regarding the use of an Arcade or Realism button in the way described above, i.e. to effectively cater to two very different styles of (tactical) play?

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Back when the demo of RTW was released, a CA dev answered my criticism of the fast running speeds by saying they had taken a look at the speeds and didn't see anything wrong with them. This was at .com, so the post is long gone. RTW v1.0 had the same movement speeds as the demo. Clearly, the running speeds are unrealistic, but my major concern was that it adversly impacted the gameplay by changing it into a "mastery of the interface" type of game rather than a "mastery of the tactics" type of game. However, eventhough you have more units to control in RTW than in the previous games, CA didn't see anything wrong with the speeds. That indicates they are not concerned that the player has less control.

You can't get anywhere with CA using realism as a reason for a change to the game. Remember, their reason for why the Egyptians are styled 1000 years before the time of RTW is that it's what people expect to see. "People" obviously means their target market. They have made a statement here at the org that gameplay is their primary consideration not realism. However, if they are not concerned about reduced control of the units, I don't know how to take that statement.

What could work to effect change is an appeal to gameplay by trying to show that a suggested change would improve the gameplay for the target market. I can't imagine the target market being adversly affected by fixing the walk/run speed ratios. The problem there seems to be that CA thinks the speeds are ok, and they certainly don't see complaints from the target market about that because the target market doesn't care about it. Just the same, the target market would benefit from the change even if they don't realize it now.

I see no chance of getting two "modes" of play other than what's already there with the on/off switches on fatigue, moral and unlimited ammo. It's simply too much work to balance two modes rather than one. This is also the reason given by CA for there not being more than one era in the game. It's interesting that the earlier games had eras (multiple campaigns), and now we see compromises being made such as "years to turns" to simplify the game into one era. You can't convince me that moving from multiple campaigns to one campaign constitues "improved gameplay" unless you twist the meaning of that phrase.

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Originally Posted by TB666

In my games it was never rare.
In fact the AI breaking a seige after reload was the rare bit here.

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Well it was scientifically studied over at TWC, and shown conclusively to affect the campaign. I even checked it myself with fog-of-war turned off. Virtually every AI siege was broken on a reload. AI factions were hindered in their expansion, and MikeB posted that he tested the campaign with the auto-run feature. He wouldn't see the problem testing it that way.

BTW,there was no misunderstanding. Every thread dealing with this at .com was closed or deleted and people threatend with banning. There was a definite attempt to put a lid on this by squashing criticism and declaring that the game was intended to work this way.

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Originally Posted by sunsmountain

No, that is not true. Rome's subroutines depend on numbers declared at the beginning of the program as constants. If you change constants into variables, there are suddenly a lot more configurations of said variables that can have subroutines interfering with each other. It will probably not crash but you have to check before you allow a number to be modded.

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Fatigue, moral and ammo are not constants. The arcade setting changes them. I'm not talking about making them modable. I'm talking about some ingame options besides on and off for these variables. Ca has steadfastly refused for 5 years to make these ingame options. It has nothing to do with them being constants.

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Originally Posted by sunsmountain

All I'm saying is that it takes them time to make a number you want to mod, moddable. Given the fact they were under time pressure, this could mean they haven't made all the numbers moddable yet that they want to make moddable. I do not believe that in principal, they do not want to mod certain numbers, except for: Unit size, number of units on map and in total, number of factions, stuff like that mainly because of resource limitations.

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Well you're wrong. They said they were not going to make these things modable on principle. They said it 5 years ago, and several more times since then. They've had 5 years to provide more settings on the arcade parameters. They haven't, and it's not because they didn't have time.

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Originally Posted by sunsmountain

I understand your point, but disagree: modders can modify overall unit speed, morale and ammo. Fatigue is hard coded, and they can't modify the ratio of cavalry speed to infantry speed, but other than that they can fix a lot. One prime example of this is darth formations, which tries to make use of what is hard coded as good as possible.

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Changing overall speed isn't enough. The ratio between walking and running is incorrect. They treated movement speed as an arbitrary variable, and there are plenty of indications that running speeds were increased after the game was balanced, and after the AI was set up for a different speed.

[QUOTE=sunsmountain]What you are implying with the word "fixing" is that they have to change the hard coded number according to your liking, and they're not going to do that. Would you? I think modders have given CA a clear signal on what to make moddable next. In particular unit speed. They might give us some AI numbers to mod. But don't count on it. Rome is very moddable as it. A battlemap editor wouldn't hurt though, in particular one that can set size.
I'm not implying they make the values to my liking. I'm saying they should put the values back to what they themselves originally determined worked best. You can't change movement speed without messing up the whole system. I think someone at CA doesn't understand this. You can see how they work. They made the maps bigger in MTW, and then didn't adjust the fatigue rate for the larger maps. When we complained that fatigue was too great, we were told is was supposed to be like that so that the battles would seem to be taking place on a larger scale. Later, LongJohn admitted that they had simply forgotten to adjust the fatigue rate for the larger maps. The one concession he made was to reduce the fatigue rate of running cav by 10%.

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Originally Posted by sunsmountain

And how would you set fatigue then? To Tire Quickly, Tire Normal, Tire Slowly? Or Tire in 3 minutes, Tire in 4 minutes, or Tire in 5 minutes?
20 arrows, 40 or 80?
These options are useless unless you know how long a battle will last on average, so they would have to add an extra Estimated Battle Time.

I can see how that confuses new players.

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The reason we asked for ingame adjustments on these things is because CA was not balancing them. This request occured after STW/MI was released and we worked on the v1.02 beta patch. It was clear that CA was not maintaining the level of balance that they had in original STW. LongJohn had left when MI was balanced. Take a look at the power parameter for guns in MI. Someone increased that from power = 4 to power = 16. They obviously didn't know what they were doing because the parameter saturates at power = 8. Going to 16 doesn't produce any increase in the effectiveness of guns. LongJohn came back for MTW which was definitely better balanced than MI. I don't know who balanced RTW, but they did one lousy job.

You do have to know how long a battle lasts on average to do proper balancing. The purpose of ingame settings would be to allow the players to finish balancing the game since CA isn't doing it. Mods are not the answer for the online community. The options have to be part of the game, and they have to be more than on/off morale, fatigue and ammo adjustments. CA has to fix the running speeds. Every indication is that CA is not doing this, and they already declined to put in the options on fatigue rate, morale and ammo.

No matter how pretty the graphics to enhance the emersion, if the AI still does really stupid things, one will wake to reality and the fun will be ruined. I am all for bettering the graphics, yet I am crossing my fingers that when they say “improved AI” I hope they meant that it has improved as much as the graphic has.

I understand the inability to really show off the AI in their previews, but for the sake of the hardcore fans and just to quench all the negative posts out there that CA is targeting the “dumb/noobish” crowd, I wish for CA to put into words some of the fixes, departures, and improvements they have made from the AI we are all so familiar with in RTW.

When they say improved AI, what do they mean by that? Many are skeptical, yet giving the benefit of doubt, that finally we will have an AI that will at least do some sensible things. For example: will it still make ridiculous and unrealistic diplomatic decisions? Even the imperial Japan thought to offer terms of surrender when their survival was in serious danger. From the countless reviews I’ve read so far it seems the AI will still be suicidal unable to overcome how they feel about a player. Will it still not know that they can't beat a human player with half the amount of soldiers, let a lone with an equal amount? To cater to wide range of player skills out there the AI can remember it's own sucess rates and adjust the size and quality of its force accordingly. Lastly, will it still have suicidal generals?

We are all dying to see the improvement in this game to the level of our satisfaction in their series of games, which we are convinced, is the closest thing out there to making the players feel like he/she is making history. We are concerned however that after all our dying anticipation for their next game, we will still have something that’s put in a nice eye-catching package and yet lacking equal improvement in content, which the game so critically depends on since it is essentially a single player game, the AI. We shall see whether our long patience and loyalty to CA was overlooked for some fast money from new players that may come and go—so signing the end for their niche market in PC games to competing with the many immature market for console based games.