new videos

[antisocialmunky]

The RnJ team did a good job :)

I'm still not quite sure how many people cycled through the team.

[PanzerJaeger]

All I see is a lot of insta-routing.

One of the (many) factors that, imo, made the STW/MTW engine superior in tactical game play to the current iterations was that you actually had time to fight tactically. Even if you sent peasants against - say - chivalric swordsmen, you had a solid 1-2 minutes before they routed to position other units and do other things. This lead to a lot more tactical game play instead of just throwing troops at each other with one side routing within 15 seconds.

It is hard to articulate what I am trying to say, but it made all the difference.

[pevergreen]

All I see is a lot of insta-routing.

One of the (many) factors that, imo, made the STW/MTW engine superior in tactical game play than the current iterations was that you actually had time to fight tactically. Even if you sent peasants against - say - chivalric swordsmen, you had a solid 1-2 minutes before they routed to position other units and do other things. This lead to a lot more tactical game play instead of just throwing troops at each other with one side routing within 15 seconds.

It is hard to articulate what I am trying to say, but it made all the difference.

It seems like S2TW troops need to have more morale?

[Togakure]

All I see is a lot of insta-routing.

One of the (many) factors that, imo, made the STW/MTW engine superior in tactical game play to the current iterations was that you actually had time to fight tactically. Even if you sent peasants against - say - chivalric swordsmen, you had a solid 1-2 minutes before they routed to position other units and do other things. This lead to a lot more tactical game play instead of just throwing troops at each other with one side routing within 15 seconds.

It is hard to articulate what I am trying to say, but it made all the difference.

I understand exactly what you mean. In a 3v3 SamWars game back in '08, our opponents launched a massive coordinated attack to one side. I was using an army consisting of four Yari Ashigaru, four Teppo Ashigaru, four Warrior Monks, and four Yari Cavalry. On the opposite side of the map from the attackers' focus, I sent my cavalry and monks to the aid of my ally there, who was quickly being driven off the field. My center ally also sent the majority of his army rushing to aid him. The attacker on my side of the field had innocently misunderstood the agreement not to use all koku (the game had originally been set for 4v4) and had some really good troops, including several Warrior Monk units he'd left behind in the woods. He sent these in behind us as we tried to help our triple-teamed ally. My lowly Yari Ashigaru and teppos bravely got in their way and held formation and position for a fairly long while, buying time for the stronger troops of mine and my center ally's to finish routing the majority of the attacking troops and return to do battle with the monks. What seemed like certain defeat turned into a squeak victory, and those ahisgaru were pivotal in preventing the monks from back-siding our counterattack before we could rout the main attack.

I certainly hope the morale system and game speed in the new game will allow for this kind of play.

[PanzerJaeger]

It seems like S2TW troops need to have more morale?

Well, it is difficult to make any real calls based on promo material because you don't know the circumstances surrounding the clip shown, but if the videos are indicative of real game play - yes.

In several of the engagements units begin to waver directly on contact (and sometimes before!) and rout less than 5 seconds later. Even if we assume the game video is sped up a bit for the promo, it hints towards the same issues we've seen since Rome. Once you get over the awesome graphics, there's not much there in terms of repeatably fun, challenging game play.

I certainly hope the morale system and game speed in the new game will allow for this kind of play.

Indeed. I've never been a big SP guy, but the insta-routing (among other things) really messed up MP.

In the newer games, you were rarely rewarded for tactical game play, such as getting a unit of cavalry behind enemy lines, as by the time you got them there, the battle was already decided one way or the other. Matches became about who picked the better army, not who played better - and the superior units always emerge soon enough, rendering everything else worthless.

In the old games, a better player was always superior to a better army. You actually had to work at being a good player, and it took a lot more than memorizing an uber army and rushing. It's chess versus checkers.

[antisocialmunky]

My feeling is that its going to be like melee in ETW with pikemen vs Natives(lol?). It takes long enough. Its a little better than Rome and about even with MTWII in routing.

[gollum]

That melee lasts less in TW titles past STW/MTW is part of the veteran's rhetoric against newer TW games, and not actually true.

In STW/MTW and Samurai Wars, MP or SP, the duration of the melee is determined by how well the player matches his units up. Match your spears to the enemy's swords in Samurai Wars or Shogun or Medieval and see how long the melee lasts.

In RTW it was all the same; match ups, and local outnumbering penalties determined how long melee lasted, as the morale part of the engine was at the core the same. There are MP games in RTW, many of them in youtube, that the melee lasts longer than in STW or MTW when match ups and outnumbering penalites are taken care of by the opposing sides.

The thing that was turbocharged and impacted badly gameoplay in RTW was the unit speeds. Infantry on charge speed could catch heavy cavalry in RTW. This was the primary factor that made battles feel "short" and "over in a minute". Most mods changed the speed modifiers for the various terrain types and sorted that out this way. The other problem the Rome engine had was that the relative speeds between cav and infantry were set in the engine and were not given out as parameters as in STW/MTW (where you could set any speed and hence any relative speed between unit classes).

In M2TW, melees lasted far longer than RTW on average and longer than the older games due to the individual melee animations, so that should have made people who were having a problem with it cheer. But they didn't then and they don't now, because they stick to the "veteran's retoric" more than anything else.

Having said that, there were differences between teh original and newer TW engines and plenty of them were important. Some of them include the responsiveness of units (that was independent of animations), the melee cycles (that were better coordinated with the animations), the tracking of the engine of missiles with a no drag physics engine that gave more realistic casualties on volleys (less casualties for moving units), the better for gameplay set up values of relative infantry to cavalry speeds, the more realistic in the old engine turning redii of cavalry, the more realistic charge results due to the lack of cavarly charge animations/mass and many others. Some of these points have been rectified in NTW, or are available for being fixed as modifiable parameters.

It's no doubt important to point out the superior/inferior points of the various TW engines, but its equally important to do so on actual grounds instead of just restating before every new TW game comes out other peoples' same rhetoric all over again.

[CBR]

Melee was on average faster in STW than in MTW as units did not have as much in defense. STW did have the highly defensive Naginata Infantry though.

In RTW there could be a big difference between factions, so one could have Roman infantry that fought just like Men-at-Arms in MTW and then a lot of lowly armoured barbarian infantry. IIRC RTW also introduced the concept of morale shocks where lower quality units took a big morale hit from being charged. That could cause some massive chain routs at the moment of impact or shortly after.

[gollum]

It seems that units/battles in RTW were made faster for 3 reasons, and all are SP related, imo.

The first was that, with the new map, there would be on average far more battles (even if only one counts the trivial ones against bandints) to play in the course of a campaign, as there were far far more meeting spots for armies, than just the very few ones (that amounted to the number of provinces) in the old "2D" engine. Since there would be more battles though, the overall time to play the campaign would tremendously increase if battles would be as long to resolve as in MTW.

M2TW on the other hand while it also had the 3D map that gave more battles was more unforgiving economically and there were less stacks on average around, and so less battles, speaking always in a vanilla context.

The second reason was certainly that CA wanted the game to be more accessible to younger players at the time. Its no accident that RTW broke TW to the mainstream.

The third, imo, was that the RTW battle AI was less competent than the MTW equivalent one, especially before patch 1.3 (for RTW) and the higher speeds can hide that better. The MTW AI can change in the middle of the action row configuration for units, but i've never seen teh RTW one being able to do the same. Also the RTW (and M2TW) AI cannot coordinate reinforcements, hence they will come to the player from 2 or more surrounding stacks piece meal. The RTW AI could not tell the difference between spear units and phalanxes and so used the latter as the former which made battles against AI phalanxes much easier than they would have been.

STW melees are indeed as CBR says generally faster than MTW, as there is less armour around.

STW battles did not have pavise units that made mp games too long, as they prolonged the shootout phase by much, mostly unecessarily. Also the maps in STW are smaller and more coordinated with the fatigue of units. In MTW the maps were far too big for the fatigue rate of units and that also made battles longer especially for lower unit settings that gave more stacks and so battles with lots of reinforcements in SP.

[Togakure]

From RTW forward, is there a significant morale bonus for units being in close proximity to each other? In the example I gave, there were three monk units, which were countered by 6-8 ashigaru units (yari and teppo). I had them grouped together initially, and I think this had a lot to do with them lasting as long as they did. The monks also lacked the "fear" bonus from STW, as this was an MTW-VI mod. Even in STW, I don't think this bonus applied to MP.

When a player hovered the cursor over units on the field in STW and MTW, it would give information about their attitude, "happy that flanks are covered," "worried about so many enemies," etc.. Is this the case too with the newer releases?

Edit:

In RTW it was all the same; match ups, and local outnumbering penalties determined how long melee lasted, as the morale part of the engine was at the core the same.

Ok, so in RTW this was true at least to a degree. What about the subsequent releases?

[antisocialmunky]

I dunno if it is true or not but there is still flanking penalties + bonii. There are 'attacked in the flank' and 'attacked from behind' penalties in RTW as well as locally outnumbered ones.

[gollum]

M2TW is practically the same engine as RTW. I played ETW far less than these two and i haven't bought Napoleon, but ETW was certainly recognisably the TW battle engine as far as core morale workings are concerned.