Originally Posted by Puzz3D
Because the new engine is missing quite a few things that were in the old engine and they seem to revolve around the combat model for the individual men. Yes they added some new parameters in the new engine such as stamina and lethality and they added shoot while moving, but do these offset what was removed? I don't think so. In the old engine they did distance and line of sight calculations for every single man on the battlefield, and the game ran with faster frames per second on slower computers. Fatigue was also tracked for individual men then averaged over the unit, and I don't know if that's still being done either. I suspect that a lot of cpu power is being consumed by the animations since the move to the 3D men, and that came partially from simplifying other things in the combat model and partially by increasing the cpu requirement. It seems to me that the AI for the individual men is also simplified in the new engine because the men don't know how to properly gang up on a man when they have him outnumbered or how to pursue routers effectively, and they did both of these things better in the old engine.
The new engine is much more advanced in the animation of the men, and these animations now affect the combat results. It would be great if the 3D animations in the new engine modeled combat as well as the more purely statistical model in the old engine, but it appears to me the 3D has a long way to go before it achieves that. It is logical that a heavy weapon would be more cumbersome and couldn't be swung as fast as a lighter weapon, but you don't see lightly armed men making evasive moves when a heavy weapon is swung at them, so the model is incomplete and can't actually model what would happen in such a situation. Also, there is no modeling of different parts of the body being struck or perhaps a shield being destroyed so that a man has to continue on in melee without a shield. You never see a spear or lance get broken, etc. It did defy belief in RTW when a man would be running forward with a pike point against his chest, and he would just keep running forward like that. I don't know if this happens in M2TW. The analytical statistical model is actually superior in modeling combat at this point in the development of the game, and realistically I don't see how a 3D model could cover everything it has to in a game that's trying to field many thousands of men on the battlefield without driving the system requirements off the chart.
The combat cycle is simpler in the old engine, and therefore it's easier to balance the units. There do seem to be more situational combat factors modeled in the old engine which should give it more tactical depth. That tactical depth doesn't become apparent unless the units are well balanced. We learned this the hard way doing the STW/MI v1.02 rebalance beta testing where we ended up with overpowered guns, and I saw it happen again in MTW/VI with the overpriced spears and weak shooters taking away from the possible tactics. Introducing a variable combat cycle to the old engine for different types of weapons or level or armor would make it harder to balance. I don't think it would benefit the tactical play because you can account for different weapon types to some extent in the numerical stats for the units (i.e. anti-cav bonus, armor piercing bonus, attack, defend, charge), and you would balance out the differences introduced by the variable combat cycle anyway in order to provide combat results that met the designed gameplay objective. The key concept is to have a design objective for the gameplay, and the key requirement is to have a battle engine that allows you to achieve that objective. Of course, you also need the time and resources to do it.
I'm sure Creative Assembly has good business reasons for doing what they are doing to the game system, but better simply means higher sales to a business mentality. It doesn't mean the gameplay is better. They have now succeeded in attracting players to the game who believe that unbalanced gameplay is good. Bravo!
