Unit Balancing!

[Slaists]

I don't know what is behind some of the changes but so far we have had several units rendered useless by this crap. And yes I mean crap.

Mortars were accurate because they had no real recoil that required them being repositioned. Now you are lucky if they can it an army on the field, but you know they usually miss.

The Steam Ships were turned into carronade frigates without explanation. Several of the Infantry have been nerfed and Austria's Grenzers need rifling to be built but they are not riflemen.

Now the Naval game is undergoing a rock ,paper ,scissors balancing job that it doesn’t need.

I have no trouble with changing ships guns’ range but not for the light guns! Sloops and Brigs already have some unrealistic advantages in speed, other than upwind. Many of the guns are underpowered and have too short a range.

From what I read in Lusted’s update he is making all the ships guns more accurate but the SOLs will have the least accurate and shortest ranges of the three classes of ships. (excepting carronade vessels, I assume) This just is not so and it is an advantage that doesn’t need to be portrayed. Sloops(cutters) and Brigs were to harass trade ships and cutters were used as curriers because they could sail near the wind. They took to their heals if a real fighting ship showed up.

Most of the things done in the name of balance need undoing! It is stilting the tactics and making it into I don’t know what...

The general statement that it is done for game play is bogus. The game played well other than for bugs when it started and now it is just turning to crap.

How can you justify making mortars so inaccurate they have trouble hitting a fort? Their shots are off by hundreds of meters! All indirect fire weapons are turning in to big losers!

If it is all for multiplayer than give them a separate unit set and stop fouling up the single player units!

Mortars: as stated above, I believe, they were meant to be siege weapons for most part. However, another fact is worth mentioning: the 'accuracy' (damage versus troops) of indirect weapons improves drastically at larger unit sizes. Which I find historically accurate too. If you have a field swarming with troops (on ultra sized setting), that mortar will hit someone almost with certainty. Maybe not the guy (or spot) you were aiming for, but surely someone standing next to the original target. On the other hand, you have to be quite lucky for it to hit anything on small unit sizes.

Bottom line: the smaller the unit size, the less efficient indirect guns become in the game.
That's not new to TW games either. Even in RTW, missile (archer) lethality went through the roof on huge unit settings whereas it was quite weak for small units.

That having been said, I still find mortars and howizters useful for 'directing' the AI troops towards your straight guns in the middle. 2-4 howitzers behind your lines, can easily 'squash' AI's flanks (by creating 'no-pass' killing fields), making them bunch up in the middle (where your straight guns can rake up killing scores).

As for the naval changes: sigh... I wished they fixed two things only:

1. Ships SHOULD NOT be able to sail against the wind. But that 'thing' they're stubbornly leaving in the game for the sake of 'playability' and speed of battle resolution.
   
2. Ships shouldn't be able to turn as fast as they can in the game. I've seen it suggested in some naval topic posts that one should always make sure to "swing the ship to the other side" so both sides have a go at the enemy (single target). One can do it in the battle, but that's nonsense in real life tactics terms.

[Zenicetus]

As for the naval changes: sigh... I wished they fixed two things only:

1. Ships SHOULD NOT be able to sail against the wind. But that 'thing' they're stubbornly leaving in the game for the sake of 'playability' and speed of battle resolution.
   
2. Ships shouldn't be able to turn as fast as they can in the game. I've seen it suggested in some naval topic posts that one should always make sure to "swing the ship to the other side" so both sides have a go at the enemy (single target). One can do it in the battle, but that's nonsense in real life tactics terms.

The second problem is a consequence of the first one. If they had modeled sailing more accurately, then ships would turn fairly quickly with the wind astern, and much more slowly when moving the bow across the direction of the wind. A ship with major battle damage to the sails wouldn't be able to get up enough headway to turn across the wind at all, but could still turn with wind astern. The "weather gage" advantage of starting upwind from the enemy would then be tactically meaningful, as it was historically. You wouldn't be able to do these silly turning-in-place tricks to maximize broadsides.

There's another, deeper structural problem that hasn't been mentioned much (I don't think). It's the way the naval battles start out just like the land battles, with the player fleet and enemy fleet heading directly towards each other from opposites sides of the battle space.

In a real sailing environment that would seldom happen. The fleets would be sailing for wind advantage on similar or adjacent tacks (square riggers especially). With the current design, there isn't an opportunity for a traditional "grand battle" to develop with parallel lines pounding away at each other for extended periods, or taking opportunities to break up the battle line (i.e. Trafalgar). The way the battles start out with fleets approaching head-on, is more like the way a fighter plane dogfight develops. It's an initial head-on pass, then maneuver for position, devolving into a chaotic furball.

I don't know how the modders can fix that one, since it looks like a hard-coded aspect of the game design. In a better (IMO) design, there would be sighting of the enemy fleet at longer range, and you'd have time to draw your ships up in whatever formation you wanted, relative to the wind direction, and you'd have some idea of what the enemy fleet could or couldn't do, again relative to the wind direction. It would probably require a larger area for the battles, for one thing. The current design is either a direct copy from the land battles, or just aimed at getting the action started and over with as quickly as possible, so the "action gamers" won't get bored.