Game Balance, or the lack there of.

[Fisherking]

As the game now stands the only weapons that have an accurate range are the muskets. Everything else has been halved or more for balance. But it hinders how units were used and how effective different types of units actually were. This is being further skued for the sake of more balance. But actually it is more unbalance!

Of course “Balance” is a big issue! And what does it mean?

When you talk of "Balance" in single player it is about a faction being strong enough to make it in the game. With all its units and so on. If someone has a very strong unit that is available late that may make up for the crappy ones it has to make do with for most of the game.

In multiplayer "Balance" is fairness. Everything needs to be a clone of the other and a unit is seen as unbalancing if it is seen to be "too strong", in other words effective.

Too many people in multiplayer have lost sight of the fact that there were historical differences in units and war is basically unfair.

Tactics are about using your men and equipment to best advantage against the enemy, even when they are not as good in some regards.

Making everything a clone destroys the feel of commanding a faction and the shorter ranges and less accuracy is also disconcerting.

I prefer historical accuracy over “fairness”, an that is not compatible with those who are looking for clones.

In this era Prussian infantry was the ideal. Not because of melee, equipment, morale, marksmanship, or anything else but firing five shots a minute. (quick shots but low percentage)

Other good infantry fired three shots but standard infantry only got off two. Those who faced Prussia quickly saw the value of the rifle. It was slow and difficult to load but you could shoot them before they got near enough to shoot back.

We can’t do that in the game because of design considerations...rifles have too short a range and are not available until too late in the game. Also most men with a rifle could easily hit targets at 200 yards or meters for that matter... Exceptional shots could double that or more. The one rifle I know with graduated sights, the Ferguson Rifle, had marks out to 500 yards. But even a “Saturday Shot” could hit at 200.

Battle Columns were another counter to this. Two shot infantry could still charge in mass. A few others used marksmanship and, the Americans in particular, but others as well, used buck and ball to increase effectiveness when firing.

All of these tactical options should be present and the player should decide how his men fight best and which units to use.

Level the multiplayer “fairness with costs” and not with “clones”. Artillery should also have its devastating effects and not softened because some lack tactical skill to counter it. Battle is about surprise and if one commander uses a novel tactic that the other is not prepared for, he usually wins. That is what it is about and not everyone having the same men and skill. It is using what you have to greatest effect.

To my way of thinking units should be portrayed as accurately as possible for each faction and not be standardized for fairness sake.

[Prussian to the Iron]

i agree 100% percent about the riflemen; they should be able to fire from farther(as should the cannons) and more accurately than any other unit.

[Marquis of Roland]

I'd be happy if riflemen just faced the right direction....

[Nelson]

I prefer historical accuracy over “fairness”, an that is not compatible with those who are looking for clones.


To my way of thinking units should be portrayed as accurately as possible for each faction and not be standardized for fairness sake.

AMEN! Since Shogun, all I have ever wanted from CA are accurately modeled units. For good or ill, make them reflect reality. The rock, paper, scissors paradigm can frequently lead to bogus unit values.

Some units were good at several things and others poor at everything. Light infantry for example. It was better than line in every respect. Militia was weak across the board. That’s how I want them to play. When overbuilding elite units is to be avoided then a cap needs to be enforced.

[Prussian to the Iron]

i think elite units should just be dramatically more expensive; i dont want to spam elite britsh guards and steamroll some puny french force of militia and demi cannons in 1793!!!

[Owen Glyndwr]

Or, for elite units, you could make it as in reality. The concept of maintaining a large number of professional, extremely well trained soldiers would be outrageously expensive. The cost of training them alone would dissuade even the most reckless of commanders from using them except for in the most extraordinary cases (Such as Napoleon with his elite units in Waterloo)

I mean, you might not even have to put in place unit caps. You could make it so that they are so expensive that you really could only afford to maintain a few divisions of them on the field at a time. Or you could make it so it takes a larger amount of time to train them (to account for the time it would take to get them to that level of discipline.)

[NihilisticCow]

MP isn't exactly about fairness, it's about being able to counter what your opponent is doing whatever army he takes; some things should be harder to counter than others. Units don't need to be clones (though there are minor differences between lines, and more noticable between rifles, I think this is due to CA trying to keep the balance simple), they can't be unstoppable killing machines either, and there does need to be balance between factions, otherwise weaker factions just won't be used, and challenging games will only consist of the most cost effective units from the most powerful factions, which in itself just gets repetitive in playing against the same armies from the same factions all the time without a sense of variety or not knowing what exactly you're going to be facing.

The rock-paper-scissors idea is about giving people more than one option in how to play so enhancing creativity and making the game more interesting. Yes it does tend to be less historical, but I tend to see historical accuracy is what mods are ultimately for. MP has to be played on the vanilla version of the game, as there never has been any real wide consensus to play a certain mod online (excepting certain areas such as NTW) as different people have different ideas on what constitutes balance.

Arty has always been a bit of a mixed bag, make it too powerful and games come down to who wins at the random number generator, which is rather unsatisfactory. Yes of course this is somewhat different in SP.

Ultimately I see ETW as a game based on an 18th century historical background and CA's focus should be on gameplay itself not full historical authenticity. People will inevitably mod the game (or play mods created by others) for greater historical accuracy for single player anyway if that is what mainly interests them. It's not however something that greatly interests me. It's always a hard balance between all the people that play a game wanting different things.

[Fisherking]

I understand why they limit the cannon ranges in the game and I doubt that will ever be made longer.

Rifle range should be long enough to at least get off two shots before they need to pull back.

Skirmishing units should be made to face the enemy they retreated from and give them another volley. They did this in the other TW titles I believe.

As the game now stands units are quite expensive enough without making select units more expensive and the term “Elite” applies to such a wide verity of types you might not like that outcome. I would say that maybe the top guards and cavalry units might need a longer time investment in their creation, say two to three years (4 to 6 turns). I don’t think the men were paid much better than standard units you know, and most equipment was basically the same. Time is a more accurate portrayal of the making of an elite force than just buying it outright.

As to the balance of artillery and its accuracy, to my way of thinking I have not found it so devastating. But then again if I expect to face artillery in strong numbers I deploy my troops differently to minimize casualties.

I think that a lot of the complaints have been shortsighted and knee-jerk reactions to being pummeled by the enemy when they deployed their troops in a mass.

If you don’t develop tactics to counter a threat it is not unfair to loose.

I think that some people are have an idea of standard doctrine of the era and think that it is “the way” instead of thinking tactically and reacting to the situation they find on the field.

Artillery and breach loading rifles put an end to massed line infantry doctrine though it took about another 150 years for it to sink in. With weapons ahead of their time on the field, not using tactics dictated by their presence might cause you to loose.

When something has an accurate portrayal, rebalancing to make it less effective is not the proper way to deal with the subject.

Or at least that is my opinion.

[Durallan]

ummm... patch comes out tomorrow?

I'm gonna wait till the patch and start a new game before I once again start criticising CA. Fingers Crossed!

[Fisherking]

I am glad some people from the MP point of view have posted.

I don’t want this to be an us vs. them sort of thing and the input is valuable.

I don’t see accuracy and who gets played because of balance in the same light.

The Cost points may be what needs adjusted more than the units themselves. I know it is not so easy to put a price on quality but it is better than making every unit like every other unit. Then everyone is just playing the same guys and only the uniforms change.

This is not a direct criticism of CA.

After all they keep trying to give us what they perceive as what we want.

[AggonyDuck]

When you talk of "Balance" in single player it is about a faction being strong enough to make it in the game. With all its units and so on. If someone has a very strong unit that is available late that may make up for the crappy ones it has to make do with for most of the game.

In multiplayer "Balance" is fairness. Everything needs to be a clone of the other and a unit is seen as unbalancing if it is seen to be "too strong", in other words effective.

For MP to be balanced it doesn't require every faction and unit to be identical, but it does require that they can bring an army that has an equal chance of beating any army that the opposing factions can create. If some factions are superior to others, then those factions will get considerably more use, making other factions very rare, thus robbing the game out of a lot of variation. You could even end up with only one faction being used, which would make for a rather boring game.

[Zenicetus]

For MP to be balanced it doesn't require every faction and unit to be identical, but it does require that they can bring an army that has an equal chance of beating any army that the opposing factions can create. If some factions are superior to others, then those factions will get considerably more use, making other factions very rare, thus robbing the game out of a lot of variation. You could even end up with only one faction being used, which would make for a rather boring game.

That design paradigm can work for a game designed from scratch, without constraints. For example the Warcraft and Starcraft series. The Total War series has, or should have, realistic constraints based on the history of these factions. Otherwise why are we playing this game instead of Warcraft?

As someone who only plays single-player (at least for this type of game), I have zero interest in perfect balance. In fact, I want seriously unbalanced factions. I want some easy, powerful factions (like Spain in M2TW), that I can use for my first campaign to learn the ropes. Then I want to play progressively more challenging factions -- ones that are underpowered in tech and economy, or with terrible starting positions -- as I get better at the game. That's the only thing that keeps me playing a TW game for a year or more. There is no replay value in a single player game, if every faction is equally powerful. I'm not going to start a new campaign just to see different colored uniforms.

You can't have the same game both ways, unless there's some kind of handicapping system for multiplayer. CA could easily turn off a big portion of their player base for future TW games if they go too far down this path.

P.S. I'm not trying to bash MP players here, just pointing out some basic incompatibilities. We all have our priorities. From my perspective, I'd rather see realism with handicapping for MP, instead of compromised realism and zero replay value in single player campaigns.

[NihilisticCow]

That factions physically have units in their roster that enable them to compete effectively online doesn't mean they're any weaker or stronger in SP. The strength of factions for SP is much more determined by their starting positions and economic issues. It doesn't matter if a faction has powerful units if they're not able to afford to maintain them or tech to them. This is kinda where I see the single player balance and challenge.

People seem to be missing the point though, for MP differences between factions are good, otherwise why bother having them, but factions still need to be able to be competitive and to have more than one option so as to not be predictable. This has nothing to do with starting areas, surrounded by enemies with a poor economy.

[Prussian to the Iron]

i think every faction needs a different roster. even if you just edit names/stats a little, it goes a long way. i'd rather have Russian Cossack Line Infantry -with boosted accuracy, attack, and hiding skills and lowered reloading and defense skills- than run-of-the-mill russian line infantry with roughly the same stats as just about every other euro line infantry.

every country needs different units, stats, and appearances. no one faction controlled the whole of any continent during the 18th century; the balance is already there. all we need to do is copy the 18th century units and stats, and we have an already balanced game!

[Sheogorath]

Napoleonic Total War certainly wasn't balanced, but it sure was fun. I recall that the British, Russians and Prussians had a major advantage, and the French...well...The French were quite nasty, although they nerfed them a little in later versions.

The point, though, is that every faction was different. Most Russian infantry couldn't hit the broad side of a barn from inside the barn, but if you put them in melee they could outfight anybody. The British were deadly accurate, but their line infantry cost 100 points more than anybody elses. And so on.

You had to figure out a different way to play as each faction, because NONE of them were identical. If you tried to play a French army with Prussian forces, you'd get your butt kicked, because Prussian cavalry wasn't so hot next to the shiny French Horse Grenadiers. You would CERTAINLY lose if you tried a conventional, stand-up fight against an equivalent force as Spain, but I do enjoy telling people about the time I routed two armies with a single force of Spaniards though sheer, ballsy, cleverness. And grapeshot.

Anyway, not all factions should be equal. This is true. Some factions should be better than others at some things.

Rock, Paper, Scissors is the ultimate in strategy-game stupidity and should die a horrible, horrible, death.

Light infantry and grenadiers should also come in units equivalent in size to standard line. That annoyed me right from the start.

Get to work, CA!

Oh, wait, I'm not a screaming MP fanboy who's only other strategy game experience was Starcraft. Curses.

[Yun Dog]

I seem to recall we've had this discussion every title and each time come up with the same solution.

MP needs to be detached from SP

In an MP game you really do want two similar armies so that the only difference comes in how you use the armies.

you dont want it to become a competition to see who can spam the cheesiest units

MP needs to be able to be 'balanced' independently of SP.

in SP you want different rosters and elite forces etc

But in MP the whole philosophy is different

I dont want to have to know every unit of every roster so that if my opponent picks a certain nation I need to know hes going to spam head throwing amazons or flaming pigs

Yes if you want MP to become about who can spam cheesey tactics to win, hey who knew those US rifles could hips before someone used it to ambush your general. Then everyone is doing it, need a new cheezy tactic

To some extent you want to eliminate the units as a factor, have a level playing field. In STW you could count on a certain army makeup, the only factor was did you think it would rain which if you brought guns could ruin you, that and the obligatory monk rush army. Progressively the Mo units crowd has been the one heard and the game ceased to become about tactics and became all about cheezy unit spam.

This results in a short lived MP community, you try it out, find out everyone is using some cheezy tactic to win, and soon leave for another game - this is the result of pandering to the insta gratification vocal mob.

Bottom line

SP and MP are totally different games and need to be treated as such

MP needs certain tweaks to make it compeditive and balanced so anyone feels they could win or stand an 'even chance' - this would wreck SP and visa vie changes to make SP better will destroy MP

GAH

[A Very Super Market]

Couldn't you just use the same faction for an MP game? There, completely balanced.

[Didz]

To my way of thinking units should be portrayed as accurately as possible for each faction and not be standardized for fairness sake.

I agree....otherwise all we are playing is Halo 3 with muskets.

[Prussian to the Iron]

halo 3 with muskets? how does halo 3=standardized clones?

[johnhughthom]

He means it takes away a lot of the tactical elements of the battle simulation.

[Durallan]

I would like it if factions were historically accurate at the start of the game from 1700, and maybe faction unique units, research or advantages included that you couldn't trade would be good (become general knowledge after everyones researched the tech above it unless its something truly unique to one people) but from that point on it should be up in the air. We know whats historically accurate, we call it history, if we make everything down to the little buttons on their uniforms (granted I'd like accurate uniforms) well there'd be no suprise. Britain rules the north seas, spain rules the carribean until they invent frigates and galleons become a joke, france kills king louie and declares a republic, the english settlers tell george to stuff it, a couple of people try taking over the world but they end up failing miserably and the people of europe group up together to form nations left over from the ashes.

What we want in this game is like sliders (if you've seen that show) maybe napoleon won the battle of waterloo, or france didn't help the american republicans and it became the largest english colony in the world, or our reinforcements arrive too late to help our army successfully attack another nation, or by stroke of luck a king dies suddenly and we can lay claim to his kingdom, or the republicans want to free the repressed of other monarchies, stuff like that I spose, where you can craft an empire with it seeming like its exciting, other nations react to your decisions and it taking alot of effort to carve an empire, enemies attacking you because you farted in their general direction and the game telling you that. At least thats the kind of things that make movies great, or games great if you can make it work.

[Fisherking]

I guess I am missing something in the equation.

I would think that the reason for playing against various factions was to face a different tactical challenge.

If all of those factions are basically the same, where is the verity?

But if you look at it with historically correct units there is wide variance. If the Prussians are firing 5 shot a minute with 35 or 40% accuracy you are not going to stand and duel when your troops are firing 3 shots a minute even if they have 65% accuracy. Of course the Prussians took longer to train and so would cost considerably more to acquire.

The wider the difference in units the wider the verity of tactics needed. If this leads to some factions being less popular with some people it is only natural. Some troops took much more thought and preparation to be employed effectively. But that is a part of the challenge.