What are the main things you want to see fixed from EB1 in EB2???

[Ichon]

There are enough mechanics in place that if you don't want many siege battles that are decisive there are quite numerous ways to avoid them in MTW2. AI likes to station an army outside walls which can draw out enemies, etc.

Though it would be nice to have the length of time a city can withstand a siege be dependent on more buildings than just the walls. Basic walls should give very limited extra time to a siege defense before forcing surrender. Higher port facilities, grain, and water storages that can be built should make more of a difference. Even with how slow armies move sieges over 12 turns being common to force a field battle is too much. 3-6 turns should be more than enough without concentrated building program of storages.

Many of the regions being represented as a single city is also misleading when the battle for the province actually takes several fights. Playing on VH with the AI getting decent bonuses the majority of decisive battles occur outside of cities for me. Of course that is by my choice sometimes where I simply don't attack well garrisoned cities unless absolutely necessary but that means having to destroy the AI in the field. In most cases that also means meeting attacking enemy armies in the field and not waiting for them to lay siege where I find the mechanics greatly favor the player. Siege battles for attacking AI are greatly unbalanced in favor of the player.

[FinnishedBarbarian]

Concerning siege battles/open field engagements ratio on eb1, the mechanic which gives rationing/starving trait on enemy territory should be applied also to the armies on friendly territory. Supplying armies with thousands of men and animals is great challenge even on friendly territory. Armies on friendly province should lose well supplied trait after 2 turns rationing should come after 4 and so forth (stainless steel has this feature).

Problem with sieges lies also in (hardcoded?)mechanics which don't take into account the size of the besieged army, for example the Caesar's victory in alesia might have been utter defeat had the besieged gallic force been smaller and the roman's unable to defeat the garrison and the gauls besieging themselves.

Assaulting city was dangerous game which rarely led to success this has been mentioned about 1 billion times, but in total war games it's something of a necessity, therefore defenders morale should be greatly reduced and towers made even deadlier to simulate the great losses but also giving attacker a chance to succeed on assault given that besieger has usually numbers/quality edge.

Now the situation favors sieged side (well atleast human player) whose troops morale remains as high as in field engagement. Assaulting cities should usually be pyrhic victories where you gain territory but risk losing great part of your forces and at worst case scenario being besieged in city you just took with great losses!

[Populus Romanus]

Hello FinnishedBarbarian!

[FinnishedBarbarian]

Oh forgot to mentioning that being my first post, so hopefully it had some value to discussion.

More what I hope to see on eb2:

Hopefully team has considered implementing some mechanics which would cause unrest in certain recruitment cases for example machimoi and over recruitment of regional troops. Although the recruitment pools are going to be great help in stopping spamming elites the restrictions shouldn't be applied to aforementioned cases, both machimoi and regional levy troops were raised in great numbers, but at cost of unrest when they were used to other than defence of their homelands. So you should be able to still raise great numbers of these un-reliable units, but at cost of risking a revolt in regions from which they are recruited.

Well there's about 10 bigger problems I'd like having different from eb1 (which is modification masterpiece even with those faults that are mostly caused by hardcoding). I have high hopes that majority of problems will be solved, but being realistic I expect that couple of annoing features can't be fixed.

Hello FinnishedBarbarian!

Thanks for the welcome!

[vollorix]

Don´t know about MIC´s in EB2 on MTW2 engine, but won´t happieness/law penalties to "auxilla" buildings do the job? The AI will recruit units, doesn´t matter how you punish it; also, if those punishments aren´t implemented in the game engine, but simply scripted, the AI won´t "understand" why this is happenning, and therefore continue to do as programed.

[FinnishedBarbarian]

Don´t know about MIC´s in EB2 on MTW2 engine, but won´t happieness/law penalties to "auxilla" buildings do the job? The AI will recruit units, doesn´t matter how you punish it; also, if those punishments aren´t implemented in the game engine, but simply scripted, the AI won´t "understand" why this is happenning, and therefore continue to do as programed.

Yes, I thought about the option of adding happiness/law penalties to auxilia buildings, but that wouldn't really fix the problem 'cause it makes no sense to give penalties for mere ability to raise local troops. Unreast caused by recruitment happened more often in ancient times after the locals had seen some service in conquerors armies and achieving necessary skills to resist forced recruitment/trying to free themselves from oppressor.

Good examples would be batavians and machimoi who revolted only after gaining skills necessary to attempt overthrowing ptolemy's, batavians revolted after romans disbanded some veteran batavi (emperors bodyguard unit?) and romans started to demand more auxilias than the arrangement they had made stipulated the batavi had to provide.

If mechanics prevent unrest caused by recruitment I would suggest script which would create rebel troops (maybe even fullstack next to city) in provinces where regionals have been over recruited this would way both player and AI would be punished from recruiting fullstacks of regionals.

Well maybe the recruitment pools are enough to address this problem, although I suspect then the problem would be goverment system which would need to recognize difference between client kingdoms abilities (clients would be more willing to raise armies than occupied locals whose lands are being distributed amongst settlers) to recruit locals compared to direct governing of province.

Also the garrison bonus to cities happiness should be raised if anyway possible, apperantly it is hardcoded feature 'cause of the way the bonus is determined (how many % garrison is of city's population). This is only problem in recently conquered provinces which are occupied (not reducing population) and have huge population/high squalor/belong to different culture, extermination was quite rare in antiquity and cities didn't need to be garrisoned with tens of thousands of troops. One way to address this problem would be adding trait to general conquering city which would help to stabilize the province.

[Kleitos]

* the giant Trees.
maybe my concern is anyway not a problem with using the M2TW engine...don´t know M2TW and only would buy it for running EB II - and i´m soo curious about it.

but will those dense forests with those giant trees (bigger than horses) dissappear in EB II?
..i know there is an interesting way to get rid of them for EB 1.2 too - from Centurio Nixalsverdrus - but again started a campaign and dont want to try this out in the middle of a campaign.

* another thing which i find a bit annoying: (e.g. in my last KH campaign) when i had to ship important Generals to somewhere - the travel time was on sea extended to such an extent as well as on land. (winter campaigning restricted for all KH family members) ..so the duration of sea travels was really much to long. don´t know now if this is resolvable.? ..dont no nothing about programming and whatnot.

besides - EB is the greatest pc game i ever played - and can only thank you guys for this great work.