EB/EB2 New Unit Thread

There has been a lot of talk that EB should have more regional and factional units, so I want to poll the EB fan membership and see what ideas everyone has. Now remember, make sure that any unit suggestions cannot be ones you made up off the top of your head. Please try to have some historical background to each. Also, feel free to suggest units that could possibly be factional in EB2 (for example, Belgae units are currently regional, but they will be factional if the Belgae are made into a faction). I have two possible units to suggest:

Sacred Band of Thebes: This was an elite group of homosexual hoplites from the city of Thebes. They were able to defeat Sparta several times. The only thing I'm not sure about is the historical accuracy. I believe that most (but not all of the band was wiped out by Phillip II of Macedon in 338 BC. I know that some of the Band survived, but I don't know if they were ever reformed after the death of Alexander the Great and the subsequent "rebellion" of such cities as Athens and Sparta. There have been some who have said that the creation of Sparta hoplites in EB was not quite historically accurate, because they were not as great as they once were. Maybe they can twist history again for this unit?:2thumbsup: If they don't I understand though.

Carthaginian Citizen Light Infantry: I was on Phoenicia.org yesterday (a website dedicated to all things Punic) and found references to this in the military and armor section. Apparently the Carthaginian citizenry not only fought in a citizen phalanx, but they also fought in units of skirmishers. They were armed with javelins and used a thureos shield ( the same one used by peltastai). No idea what kind of armor they used or what secondary weapon they had though.

Now lets hear your ideas!!!

Mada Asabara with the half cataphracting that you saw near the end of the Persian empire(can't spell that dynasty worth a ****.)

RTW units limit : 500
MTW2 units limit : 500

:juggle2:

"Twist history again"? To include a group of soldiers who died and whose city was destroyed - vs. having a group of soldiers who were serving as mercs and defending their city (successfully, for as long as was needed) against Pyrrhos in the year our game starts? Dude, there is no comparison. "There have been some that said" is a way of weaseling out of taking responsibility for the statement also.

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Originally Posted by russia almighty

Mada Asabara with the half cataphracting that you saw near the end of the Persian empire(can't spell that dynasty worth a ****.)

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Of course, I'm not going to say anything, but if you believe in Santa's existence and the joy that fat old guy can spread during summer, then perhaps.

Which means, "no" ~:joker:

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Originally Posted by Alexander777

There has been a lot of talk that EB should have more regional and factional units

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They can only add more factions in EB2, not units. I'm actually curious to see how they deal with it, so each faction would still have enough units :juggle2:

Rebel factions would be something that I would look into with all the extra slots and without extra units available...

It has been decided to that EB1 won't fill all unit spaces and save a small handfull for EB2, but it will still be difficult.

The team said all the faction slots will be occupied by playable factions.
But yeah this will be a challenge, I guess redundant units even though they are historically great to have will probably have to be cut in order for all factions to have decent variation in units.

But if eb2 is for kingdoms, prehaps there will be more units avalible then?

One can hope. Or at least that these units don't share models. That would be an improvement as well. Too bad the modding community does not have the power to suggest to CA that they double the unit limit for Kingdoms.

Well, the problem is to balance the number of regionals as you will have to cut down on something to be able to implement such an enlarged (50% more) number of factions without having vanilla sized rosters...

It would also be nice to know how many RTW code leftovers are in MTW2 and how much they could be used as stuff like shield wall and schiltrom could be nice but maybe also something like the old senate might be interesting to see and implement over the new system...

I heard alot of the RTW formations are still in M2TW such as shieldwall, but they lack animations. (I think it was Zaknafien that was looking into it.)

Yeah, it's kind of a pity that the EB team chose to stay on 1.5 as I sincerely think BI could have offered some interesting extras and new avenues for development but now with MTW2 the problem will be largely solved with its larger featureset available.

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Originally Posted by Pharnakes

But if eb2 is for kingdoms, prehaps there will be more units avalible then?

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There will hopefully be a higher unit cap, with 4 different campaigns with many different factions in each, I would hope CA has the foresight to go ahead and increase the limit.

But even without that I sure hope EB2 will be for kingdoms. The improved forts will be interesting. The more intriging thing will be the ability to command reinforcing armies though. That will certainly aid in creating larger battles, with more realistic sizes for the Classical period. With the ability to command 4+ armies at once you might just get those battles with 10,000+ romans against hordes of barbarians.

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But even without that I sure hope EB2 will be for kingdoms. The improved forts will be interesting. The more intriging thing will be the ability to command reinforcing armies though. That will certainly aid in creating larger battles, with more realistic sizes for the Classical period. With the ability to command 4+ armies at once you might just get those battles with 10,000+ romans against hordes of barbarians.

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Don't think we don't know about this.
I drool over kingdoms, and my only wish on improvents on it is the BUMP UPWARDS of the units cap.

I seem to remember Alpaca maybe, set up a thread for suggestions, has greater unit limit been mentioned? and more provinces would be nice while they're about it, too.

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Originally Posted by BigTex

With the ability to command 4+ armies at once you might just get those battles with 10,000+ romans against hordes of barbarians.

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And for a lot of guys even in slowmotion!

By the time EB2 is done I think most people will have rigs capable to run these types of huge battles, maybe not with details set to high but still good enough.

anyway...the reinforcing armies can only be commanded as a whole unit block...unlike your main army.

this means the "reinforcing" armies should/could be specialised like only cavalry o r archers for harassing the enemy´s back oder flank.

at least this would help to prevent allied commanders to die by cavalry charge ahead of his troops.

my 2cents
AADD

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Originally Posted by Zarax

Yeah, it's kind of a pity that the EB team chose to stay on 1.5 as I sincerely think BI could have offered some interesting extras and new avenues for development but now with MTW2 the problem will be largely solved with its larger featureset available.

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BI's interesting extras solve exactly none of the development issues we have behind the scenes, and taking advantage of them creates some new problems. Beyond this, BI is owned by less people than RTW. It's not an option for us to make it BI-exclusive.

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Originally Posted by Pharnakes

But if eb2 is for kingdoms, prehaps there will be more units avalible then?

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Originally Posted by d'Arthez

Too bad the modding community does not have the power to suggest to CA that they double the unit limit for Kingdoms.

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Originally Posted by Pharnakes

Has a greater unit limit been mentioned? and more provinces would be nice while they're about it, too.

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To be honest, guys, I'm confused - why set limits in the first place? I'm a complete technology noob, but why would CA want to deliberately hinder modders by imposing limits? Surely it's not hard for CA to change a few numbers and hope people have good enough PCs for it?

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Originally Posted by blacksnail

BI's interesting extras solve exactly none of the development issues we have behind the scenes.

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What sort of problems are you having, if I may ask?

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Originally Posted by I Am Herenow

To be honest, guys, I'm confused - why set limits in the first place? I'm a complete technology noob, but why would CA want to deliberately hinder modders by imposing limits? Surely it's not hard for CA to change a few numbers and hope people have good enough PCs for it?

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The max unit/faction/province limit determines the amount the resources (CPU, RAM) that the app uses. Raising the unit limit regardless of whether you use the slots or no raises the workload on your machine.

If raising the cap pushes the resources needed to reasonably run the game above the min spec CA won't do it.

You are correct though, the actual changes in the code are relatively easy.

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Originally Posted by I Am Herenow

What sort of problems are you having, if I may ask?

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As always, hammering the round EB peg into the square Vanilla hole. ~:)

I recently paid a long overdue visit to the RTR forums at twcenter.net...

I'm certain the idea is not new to the EB team but they (the RTR team) seem to have gotten around the problem of limited faction slots using emerging factions and batch files, to be honest the whole description was somewhat confusing and I don't really understand it.

I'm curious what the reasons were for the EB team dismissing this approach, were there certain untenable side effects, or perhaps it was a workload issue?

Or is there another thread that covers all that information, I did do a cursory search with the keywords "batch files" but couldn't find anything specific.

As for new units, I would like to see an expanded roster of baltic and protoslavic units. There are albeit fantastical accounts of the nature of the people living in the area during the timeframe of EB afforded us by Herodotus (I think it was him), but certainly the archeological evidence could be used to bridge the gap between fact and fiction?

As is, the vast geographic area represented by these people lies underused. Stronger representation of baltic and protoslavic people would also make for an interesting environment wherein steppe peoples, germans, and thracian elements would have greater reason to contest these areas for locally available troops to use in foreign expansion elsewhere. It may also serve to check these peoples expansion so far from their homelands. At least in the case of the germans and their tendency to thunder across the east let them waste themselves a bit in the wilderness of russia and the baltic forests :smash:

In terms of general composition ideally they'd be cheap, of relative poor quality, but great ambushers and with certain habits of behavior distressing to more cultivated peoples?

As an aside, it would be nice to have an economic incentive to expansion in this area. Nothing on par with the southern trade routes but perhaps an increase on the income available through control of the amber trade or through more river port type options?

I'll look into how supportable the idea is from a historical standpoint as soon as I have a book or two available to me :book:

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Originally Posted by Lowenklee

As is, the vast geographic area represented by these people lies underused. Stronger representation of baltic and protoslavic people would also make for an interesting environment wherein steppe peoples, germans, and thracian elements would have greater reason to contest these areas for locally available troops to use in foreign expansion elsewhere. It may also serve to check these peoples expansion so far from their homelands. At least in the case of the germans and their tendency to thunder across the east let them waste themselves a bit in the wilderness of russia and the baltic forests :smash:

In terms of general composition ideally they'd be cheap, of relative poor quality, but great ambushers and with certain habits of behavior distressing to more cultivated peoples?

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I agree on this plus the Sweboz usually conquer that area and just spam at least a couple of stacks of Kirisilinkas, no variety (maybe 1-2 baltic archers tops) maybe they should get more of their troops there or more baltic units should be implemented.

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Originally Posted by Lowenklee

:smash:

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What does that damned waving-a-briefcase smiley mean?! People keep using it in their posts, but I can never understand what they mean by it!

And as I'm on the subject of stuff that bugs me because I don't understand it, what does "IIRC" mean?


P.S.

Lowenklee, as for what you actually posted, I agree with it :beam:

Dude, it's a hammer "smash"

The RTR batch files approach works by essetially them making 20 different mods. They make different mods based on each faction and you run a program to replace files in the RTW folder. When you start up their game you can only place as, say, Aedui or Arverni, but if you exit and run the Rome batch file, you can play as only Rome and there is no Arverni anymore. The Arverni slot is replaced by Roman Rebels.

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Originally Posted by I Am Herenow

What does that damned waving-a-briefcase smiley mean?! People keep using it in their posts, but I can never understand what they mean by it!

And as I'm on the subject of stuff that bugs me because I don't understand it, what does "IIRC" mean?

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It is a guy with a hammer smashing stuff. IIRC = "If I recall correctly"

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Originally Posted by I Am Herenow

To be honest, guys, I'm confused - why set limits in the first place? I'm a complete technology noob, but why would CA want to deliberately hinder modders by imposing limits? Surely it's not hard for CA to change a few numbers and hope people have good enough PCs for it?

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As Philipvs Vallindervs Calicvla said, mainly hardware limitations. But also, think for a second about this: if there were no limits to how far RTW could be modded, and modders could add increasing amounts of factions and units as computers improved, wouldn't that rather hurt sales of future TW titles? They'd be creating their own competition.

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Originally Posted by MarcusAureliusAntoninus

It is a guy with a hammer smashing stuff. IIRC = "If I recall correctly"

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Oh right, because he was talking about the Sweboz rampaging through somewhere - I get it now :) Cheers!

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Originally Posted by Geoffrey S

Think for a second about this: if there were no limits to how far RTW could be modded, and modders could add increasing amounts of factions and units as computers improved, wouldn't that rather hurt sales of future TW titles? They'd be creating their own competition.

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To be honest, I disagree with you for several reasons:

1. Even if the limits were infinite, you would only want to add so much "stuff": after a certain point, the game would get ridiculous and unfocused (e.g. Rome is not MEANT to expand into China).
2. No matter how good a mod for "xTW 1" got, when "xTW 2" or "yTW" came out, its features would be better, so:
   • People would buy the new game.
   • The mod would get transferred to the new game, most probably, to take advantage of its new features.
3. Mods help to extend the life of a game - they are, in effect, free expansion packs - and some people might actually buy "yTW" not to play the game itself, but to play the latest version of their favourite mod!
4. The actual games are obviously advertised far more than their mods, and so casual gamers would only know about the actual TW games, and then possibly stumble upon a mod.
5. You need to buy the game in order to play the mod.

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Originally Posted by I Am Herenow

Mods help to extend the life of a game - they are, in effect, free expansion packs - and some people might actually buy "yTW" not to play the game itself, but to play the latest version of their favourite mod!

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for me this is a main reason why the game publishers/developers should make their game as mod-friendly as possible.
a lot of companies recently discovered this, as there are games still in development and have mod´s for them already in production.
even more...the developers invited the mod-makers to use the game´s SDK.

this brings a community to a game....and a community makes more people to buy the game....

so it would be very smart for CA/SEGA to help the best modding crew´s with improved/open game code.

on the other hand, CA´s xTW engine is very advanced. so giving away the code could spawn more competitioning games....but even this might be an advantage for the gamer....competition improves products...


AADD

P.S.: sorry for bad english

Teleklos Archelaou: "Twist history again"? To include a group of soldiers who died and whose city was destroyed - vs. having a group of soldiers who were serving as mercs and defending their city (successfully, for as long as was needed) against Pyrrhos in the year our game starts? Dude, there is no comparison. "There have been some that said" is a way of weaseling out of taking responsibility for the statement also.

First, I say what I say and mean what I mean. I do not "weasel" my way out of anything. If I did not like the Spartans in the game, I wouldn't be afraid to take credit for my statement. In fact, I think the Spartans are a great addition. I was simply refering to a few posts I read on other topics where people said they thought Corinthian Hoplites were more historically accurate than Spartans. Also, I stated that I did not know if the Sacred Band of Thebes would work in this game. It was just a suggestion. Since they obviously do not work, I will withdraw my suggestion. However, please don't attack my statements again and accuse me of being cowardly when you don't know what I mean.

Secondly, I hope that Kingdoms will increase the unit limit, since there will be several different campaigns. Even if there is no unit limit increase, I would still like to know everyone's thoughts on different units. After all, few of our suggestions will probably actually make it into the mod.

I also agree that there should be more Baltic units (if not a whole Baltic faction).

What is SDK?

SDK = Software Development Kit. I assume he means the source to the game engine, giving the ability to change that code rather than just the data the engine uses. We have no access to that with EB.

I see. Also, as we're on the topic of techy stuff, what exactly does a game engine do? In other words, if I had the C (or whatever) code for RTW in front of me, deleted it all, pasted in the code for DOOM or something, would it work? Or would you need to go even "deeper" and change the engine? Indeed, what is the difference between the engine and the source code for the program (or game, in this case) itself?

That is a complicated question. Wikipedia has a good article on the subject so my suggestion is to check it out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine

Well, if you intended to delete all the game code in the first place, you can do as well with the blank sheet that you have now. That question of yours really is quite meaningless...

But yes, you would need to go deeper, reading the code to understand how it works and then make the changes you want (quite like what modders have done with the exported data for traits, script, unit models etc btw). This is not a quick process, but can be a lot less painful if you have the documentation at hand.

Understanding the difference between source code and a game engine requires a bit of technical knowledge. Source code is human readable for those who know the syntax, while the game engine is compiled code. An example of source code could be:

Code:

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loop
start turn
if(player owns all cities in victory conditions)
  play victory sequence
else if(player has no cities)
  play defeat sequence
end if
allow user input
end turn
do computer movements
end loop

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This of course is extremely simplistic, and utter bollocks, as there is no interpreter that can make the computer understand what I want it to do. In essence, a valid source code can be compiled by an interpreter to create a machine readable program, in this case the RTW engine. There are lots and lots of programming languages, each with its own compiler.

I see, so for RTW, say, or M2, or any other game, do the developers have 3 separate files for the game's source code, the .exe itself and the game engine code, with the .exe and engine being released to the public?

Err... The source code is likely to be thousands of files, referencing eachother. The exe is the compiled code (including the game engine, code for showing menus, copy protection etc), sometimes along with DLLs (Dynamically Linked Libraries), JARs (Java ARchives), SO (Shared Objects), ActiveX or whatever it's called on the operating system and programming language in question.

Every other file is data, loaded by the executable. Taking RTW as an example, RomeTW.exe is the compiled code. Among other libraries it uses mss32.dll, which is the Miles Sound System packaged for inclusion anywhere (you'll see this in many other games too). It also has a number of configuration files such as preferences.txt and version.inf. And a whole lot of data files, which you can see under Data.

Anyway, the original question has been answered, and I won't explain more of the composition of computer programs. You can spend some time on online tutorials instead if you want to know more about how it works or learn how to do it yourself.

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Originally Posted by Redmeth

By the time EB2 is done I think most people will have rigs capable to run these types of huge battles, maybe not with details set to high but still good enough.

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You know, if M2TW was perfectly programmed for multicore(multithread) processing, like Half Life Episode Two, an Intel Core 2 Quad overclocked processor could probably play, easily, 100K troops, no kidding. Just do the math yourself.

3.5Ghz*4=14Ghz. Since these new processors do what older (Pentium IV for example) processors did, in half the clocks, that's 28Ghz by old standards.

Sorry for the offtopic, I'm just drooling over the potential of these new CPUs...:sweatdrop: