The Complete EDU Guide - Discussion

[Aradan]

Hmm, when testing I once removed all garrison from one settlement and all buildings that enabled training of other units leaving only the RG unit option to the AI. They never recruited them in a period of 20 turns. They first built barracks and stables and only after that they started traing; for the record the first unit they trained was a heavy cavaly (RG was heavy cav too) with 10 times the recruitment, support and upgrade costs of the RG, needed twice as long to recruit and had half the men. All that on BI.exe.

[DimeBagHo]

I was wondering if anyone has managed to come up with any conclusive information about how unit sizes and stats affect auto-calc (other than just auto-calc sucks!) - is there anything you can do within EDU to help an AI faction with smaller unit sizes?

With regular cavalry units you can use the second value on the stat_health line to improve auto-calc performance. It has no effect on performance in a normal battle, it might have some effect on AI recruiting preference (it looked that way to me but I didn't test it rigorously), but it definitely has an effect on auto-calc. I have used this to improve the performance of horse archer factions in XGM with great success.

[Dol Guldur]

That's very interesting, Dime. Thank you. Something for Aradan to check out and update ;)

[Red Spot]

you may also have noticed that even though they dont use it, vanilla does set secondary armour stats for cavalry as well ...

stat_sec_armour  0, 1, flesh

Though I dont know if it may influence anything, I just use it everywhere or nowhere at all ...


G

[Dol Guldur]

Yes, I have noticed that. This is definitely something for Aradan and his army of reliable, committed beta testers to look into

[Aradan]

Here are the results of some of my recent tests. I give only the average percentages (fought some sixty-sth battles), because formatting the entire table would take a good while...
Difficulty is set to Medium-Medium, and there are no generals involved. The first row is using stat_health increase only, the second using stat-sec_armour increase only and the third is normal (both values are 0).
The first column is using 4 units of riders (2 groups of 2 couples of the same unit-type), the 2nd using just the first group, the third the other one, and the 4th and 5th using 1 unit of each troop-type.
The "*" sign means that I think the result here was so out of the 'acceptable range" that it shouldn't be taken into account as it is.

Increasing stat_sec_armour's second value from 0 to 2 didn't seem to have any significant result, that cannot be explained by the randomness of the results.
Increasing the second value stat_health from 0 to 2 might have some effect, but given the range of results I am not yet 100% certain. It might well be a fluke of luck, as auto-resolve seems to be very random; using the exact same armies I got results ranging from Clear Defeat to Clear Victory. Still, there is a decrease to enemy kills in most occasions that is significant and needs further research.

Other than that, the results *suggest* (though the number of tests is still quite small) that the auto-calc is using some sort of logarithmic function, that lacks balance when armies are very small of very big.

Dime, what values do u use for your horse-archers stat_health? 1,2 or way bigger?


EDIT: I tested some more using stat_health 1,10 for one unit type and 1,20 for the other. Indeed now the units did much better. Whether using all four units together, or just a couple of them or even a single unit, they always inflicted sth like 53% casualties to the enemy. It seems the auto-resolve has a cap somewhere there for this particular combination of armies. The big deal is that now my cavalry was taking far less casualties than before.

one unit 20 sec-hps: now 6% - 45% before
one unit 10 sec-hps: now 8% - 39% before
two units 20 sec-hps: now 9% - 35% before
two units 10 sec-hps: now 10% - 21% before
four units 15 sec-hps: now 5% - 15% before

So it seems that indeed stat_sec is used in auto-calc and it can make quite a difference in the amount of sustained casualties. And it actually makes no difference in real-time battle!! Now we just got to make sure that it doesn't affect AI-recruitment... :) If it doesn't then this can be a great tool for campaign balance! Thx DimeBagHo for spotting that!

EDIT 2: stat_sec_armour's second value seems to do nothing at all for horsemen and infantry. No idea why vanilla sets it as 1 for cavalry.

[Aradan]

Previous post updated, it seems we're on a good road here.

[Dol Guldur]

Well done to DimeBagHo for pointing this out, Lgk for spotting it originally and for Aradan for the research/confirmation. At last, a way to have some control over that darn autoresolve!

[Aradan]

It would be interesting to see if infantry can be affected by this... I doubt it, but who knows. If anyone has any info on that, it could save lots of time.

[DimeBagHo]

I can't take credit for the idea - it was suggested to me by Lgk a while back. I used quite large armies in my own tests and settled on a range of values from 1 for basic horse archers to 3 for elite.

[Aradan]

*MAJOR UPDATE: It has been known that the second value of the stat_health attribute is not taken into account during battle for non-animal units, hence it was set to 0. However it has been discovered that this value *IS* taken into account during auto-resolve, despite making no difference on battle-map mode. This applies to ALL units (bar elephants, chariots, wardogs and pigs of course, that already make use of it) and essentially means that units can be given specific bonuses or penalties during auto-calc that will not affect their behaviour on battle-map at all; which means we may have at last found a way to partially balance (or unbalance ;) ) auto-resolve. Research and community feedback has shown that certain unit types are overpowered / underpowered, so here are some rough suggestions on how to make things more even for everybody:

• Animal units stay as they are.
• All other units are given 5 secondary hps.
• If a unit has 2 or more prim hps, it gets -1 sec hp for each extra prim hp.
• If a unit is ranged with low-medium missile attack, it gets 1 extra sec hp.
• If a unit is ranged with medium-high missile attack, it gets 2 extra sec hps.
• If a unit is mounted with low-medium charge, it gets 1 extra sec hp.
• If a unit is mounted with medium-strong charge, it gets 2 extra sec hps.

So a horse archer with 1 primary hp, strong charge and strong missile attack gets 9 sec hps, while a foot archer with 1 hp and low missile attack gets 6 hps and an infantry unit with 2 hps gets 4 sec hps and so on…

Thx to DimeBagHo for spurring me to look in that direction and to Lgk for making the first step.

[Dol Guldur]

Superb work on expanding this. Now the campaign as a whole will be much more balanced across the factions (player and AI!

[Red Spot]

now all I need is to remove the autoresolve button and I can make a double balance so Romans on autoC will destroy barbarians but on the field will get destroyed, making life for the player so much more ... er ... brutal .. ..

nice find guys


G

[Aradan]

When you get to do that, it'd be grat if you had some feedback - you usually have. ;)

[Red Spot]

guess a more realistic (read; more accepted) method would be to *somehow* reinforce the AI-army as I dont think most players would like to/appreciate completelly loose the autoC button/option ... do like the idea of double-balance but somehow without it aplying to the player ...


G

[Scundoo]

Is there a limit to the value that the mount effect can have? I mean, can a unit have mount_effect horse - 100?

How does the mount effect work? I just subtract that value from the unit's attack value to see how it does against horsed units?

If so, can a unit have a negative mount effect with an absolute value that is equal or greater than the units attack value? (e.g. mount_effect horse -12
stat_pri 10 ?)

does the charge value play any role?

Thanks

[Aradan]

I have tested up to +-30 and it works, but I am not sure about the cap. You can experiment if you want, and let us know about your findings. The mount_effect is a direct addition/subtraction to a unit's attack when fighting against the particular mount type/class. If a negative value is greater its attack value, then I believe the overall attack will be considered 1 by the engine. No, I don't think charge is connected directly to with mount_effect (though they both affect attack while the unit is charging).

[Scundoo]

Thanks for the reply.
The thing is, I've given a unit 25 melee, and a -30 in mount effect. They still kill with ease any mounted unit. Both units have the same lethality, both have a sword skeleton and no other attributes that would affect his.

Ok, sorry, just made another test. Giving the unit a -100 against horses has quite an effect. They barely kill any mounted units, so apparently rtw doesn't just subtract the mount effect from the attack value that the unit has, and if negative or zero considers it a 1.

Of course finding an exact relation wont be easy, but if I do notice any linear behaviour while balancing the units I will post about it here.

[Aradan]

OK, I see. An additional test would be to make some tests using a specific unit against a specific mounted enemy, find the average result of te battle after, say, 20 times, then give the unit +5 attack and a -5 mount_effect. See if you get a similar avergae to the one you had before.

Thx for the feedback!

[pdemon]

Any chance some information regarding the ship line, which appears if category is ship, could be added to the guide? I'm interested in weather or not it is a defined list of possible ship types, and what all of them are as well as their effect on the game.

[Aradan]

The ship line uses info from descr_ship.txt, and the header of that file has quite a bit of info on various ship types. It seems that CA was trying to make naval battles a litlle more complicated than they are, but they abandoned the effort. I will try to find time to get some testing done on naval battles, but I don't know how soon - I'll update the Guide when the info is enough and adequately tested.

And welcome on the forums!

[Bardo]

SINGLE SOLDIER UNITS

-------------------------------------------------------------
EDITED
Note it only works for campaign, only for mount-type units, and only when they are used as general bodyguards. You just need:
1- to change the number of soldiers of the unit to 20, 1, 1
2- to give to the unit the attribute "general_unit"
3- to give to the general a trait with a big penalty to personal security (I use -100)
-------------------------------------------------------------

Finally, some years after I tried to achieve it the first time... I have been able to make a unit with a single character that do not appear duplicated when you increase the unit size settings.
Since it is possible to do it mainly modding the EDU file, I think this is the better place to explain it so you can add it to this wonderful guide, if you want.

First, I'll explain a secondary effect of the attribute "general_unit" that I recently discovered and that makes it all possible.

If you use an standard unit (no general_unit) as a bodyguard unit for a named character, the starting number of soldiers will depend on the number of soldier defined in the EDU entry:

soldier unit_model, soldiers, extras, mass (,radius,height)

The final number will also depend on the graphical settings you choose to play:
-large unit size: soldiers x2
-huge unit size: soldiers x4

The minimum number of soldiers that you can define is 6. If you write less than six, anyway they will appear 6 at normal settings, so the minimum is 12 at large settings, and 24 with huge settings. (I'll write it as 6/12/24 in the future)

The other thing you should know is how the "soldiers" and "extras" numbers work when the unit is a mounted unit (not cavalry, but elephant like).
-"soldiers" is the number of soldiers per unit
-"extras" is the number of mounts per unit
And so the ratio soldiers/extras defines the number of soldiers per mount. For example, this ratio is used to know how many mounts will appear in the battle map when the unit has lost soldiers in a previous battle.

In the case of mount units, the minimum number of mounts in each unit is 1, that will appear as 1 on normal settings, 2 on large, and 4 on huge. (1/2/4)

Example:

soldier norider, 20, 1, 1
mount sauron
;no attributes

This unit will start with 20/40/80 soldiers, and so 1/2/4 mounts.


Well, it seems the attribute "general_unit" changes the behavior of these minimum ammounts of soldiers (only when you attach it to a general). The minimum starting soldiers for a general_unit is 4 on normal settings, 8 on large and 16 on huge, BUT it does not depend on the number defined in the entry "soldiers" (this is the important thing).

Example:

soldier norider, 20, 1, 1
mount sauron
attributes general_unit

This unit will start with 4/8/16 soldiers, and since we have defined 20 soldiers per mount: they will appear 1/1/1 mounts on all unit size settings!!!


There is just another issue if you really want to see only one single soldier along all the game. The size of the bodyguard rise with the "influence" and the "personal security" of the character. You need to give him a trait with a -100 or so to "personal security" if you do not want to see more than one mount.

In the same topic, to finish sharing all the info I know, there is a parameter in the file descr_mount.txt named "riders" that defines the max numbers of soldiers per mount in the battle map. If the ratio soldiers/extras defined in EDU is mayor than the parameter "riders" defined in DM, the diference of soldiers are automatically killed when the battle is loaded.

In the same example, if riders=2:

type sauron
class elephant
...
riders 2

Then, if there are 20 soldiers when you enter battle, it will appear 1 mount, and the soldiers will be reduced to 2 at the start of the battle.
I used it to automatically reduce the bodyguard size of these special characters when they enter battle. (but it is not needed if you reduce their personal security).

That's all, I hope someone has understood something...

[Dol Guldur]

This is very interesting. I was not aware that the general_unit attribute had any such affect upon the minimums.

Good work - I think this could be very useful to many mods!

[Aradan]

Indeed, very very interetsing! Gonna test it asap - thx for sharing!!

[Squid]

Very interesting, the only thing I'll mention is that it's influence and personal security that affect bodyguard size, not command. You also probably wouldn't want to give -100 to personal security as this would make your general very suceptible to assassination.

[Bardo]

True, we use personal security because there are no assassins in our mod.
Thank you for the correction about influence in stead of command, I didn't remember it right. In this case, other modders could be interested to reduce the influence of these characters and rise their law or reduce the unrest, that has similar effects.

[pdemon]

Just a quick question, isn't power_charge a BI only trait? If it is you might want to fix that in your guide as it is not marked.

By the way thanks for the clarification on the ship line.

[beatoangelico]

Just a quick question, isn't power_charge a BI only trait? If it is you might want to fix that in your guide as it is not marked.

By the way thanks for the clarification on the ship line.

well I've not fully tested it, but from what I seen in other mods many BI things seems to work well with RTW 1.5...not only power_charge but also legionary_name and spear_bonus_x

[KsatriyaDharma]

Hello to everyone,very helpful discussion,thank you all..
One small question that is bodering me;how to make general unit(with general) hide on battle map?I mean is it possible at all?
Thank You

[beatoangelico]

Hello to everyone,very helpful discussion,thank you all..
One small question that is bodering me;how to make general unit(with general) hide on battle map?I mean is it possible at all?
Thank You

nope, not possible