Balance in Kingdoms - myth or reality

Zaher, calm down. Perhaps its your broken english, but you're getting hard to understand. We understand that you prefer certain ways of playing the as everyone does. As I understand, your gripe isn't with the actual balance perse` but with the AI's passive/agressive behavior. Well, welcome to the club. The AI is idiotic because its the hardest part to program for the game.

No one WANTED TO make the AI do that because no one wants an AI that bad. They did that because they wanted to spend time BALANCING the game(too busy in some respects - Shield Bug + Animation Bugs) and polishing it to be as visually awesome as it is. Just wait for Patch 1.4 and hope for the best or Empires.

Well empires is a sailing game and I am not interested in sailing.

I am sorry Zaher if i offended you but I am hot headed and often I say things and think later hence all the edits on my posts. We'll never get a real good AI cos 95% of buyers will want graphics and that's what they'll get. This time we got lot luckier than RTW so I am happy if lusted can help to make the game more like the community here wants which he is a part of, then it is great he joined the team. As he said he didn't rebalance the game just had it in his mod to testit so let him live ... for now.Now get your butt online so i can make you my BIATCH.

Varro and Antisocialmunky, you got me! At least i have somebody who understand me despite my broken English ! I can have my point of view anyway, but at least now i can see, that may be it was too hard for me to get what i dont expected. Nevermind then.


I duno about Empires, but after i played Corsairs: Return of legend ( Russian version only! ), i cannot expect serious naval battles in other games ( not including simulation ). What mashine we will need to run it? How much free disc space? lol. Different ammunition for ships? Using wind? Uhhh.... But we will see.

I think cavalry is currently a little underpowered in many situations. They also have some very annoying habits/bugs.

1) Charging speramen - Yes the cav should lose but it would be nice to kill maybe a few of the spearmen. This crap where the cav comes to a complete stop and doest cause a single casualty is nonsense, especially when it is a full cav unit against a heavily damaged spear unit.

2) The Magnetic spear effect - Your heavy cav is charging the flank of the enemy line... the battle is at a impasse... your glorious charge approaches the knights... its impact will crush them and then the enemy line will crumble! Unfortunately, Bob the the spearman has managed to poke Sir Fatnslow as your knights pass by. YOUR ENTIRE CAVALRY UNIT STOPS and attacks Bobs spearmen. This is the most irratating thging I have ever come across in TW. One spear attack draws all a cavalry unit to attack like moths to the pointy flame.

3) Charges in Cities - I cant seem to get my cavalry to charge in a town. They always attack with melee ragardless of how long they run in a straight line.

4) The Rear Attack stall - Everyone keeps saying "attack from the rear" ... OH! how many times have I done this and the enemy infantry has foiuled me by walking forward 16 feet. My cavalry stops it's charge and basically comes into contact with the enemy at a walk.

Ivarr, cavalry in Kingdoms cannot correctly charge moving unit at all, even without lances, they still everytime stopping on impact with first men in unit they hit. They just remind me unpatched MTW2. With 1.2 patch they did much better. On other side AI knows this and use it, so, be sure, it will move unit before charge. I duno how is on easy or medium difficulties, but on VH it exactly what i get. May be they reduced speed too?

I agree that the balance is rather poorly done in Kingdoms. I remember having the exactly opposite ideas on how to balance some things from those most vocally advocated on the forums, but they made sense for me and eventually after a lot of modding work I was able to enjoy my game. However, now with the structure of the expansion I would have to do four times as much work (actually five times if I count grand campaign), and I really wonder whether I have the will to do it...

For the cavalry charge issue - try reducing the charge distance for all units. This should help with the horrible anti-blobbing effect where the unit cohesion falls apart during the charge. I have some screenshots where I ran an entire unit of knights through the gap that formed between the charging front row of a unit and the rest of the men in that charging unit. In addition to unit cohesion, this should also help with other charge issues as less random things will be able to affect it.