Posting fun Multiplayer battles (RTW Vanilla)

[fallen851]

That is an insult to anyone who has ever played RTW, to say that its all due to luck

Not every battle is decided by luck. But if I went for all archers and you went from a bit of cavalry with some infantry and some archers in a "low" money game, I would win. The "skill" in a battle like this is in the unit selection, which is totally blind and therefore the game becomes luck , much like a game of rock-paper-scissors. However, if we both picked armies of archers, opportunities for skill would arise.

I really can't speak to high money games, the fact that 75% of the units and nations become useless really annoys me, and speaks to the poor balance of the game.

Regarding the dialogue about an almost inherent trend toward fights between specifically composed armies that tend toward one unit type or another, I don't buy it.

We should play a game and post it here. And these comments in your very next post contradict the portion I quoted above:

Even in Rome the most simple of rule-sets call for limitations on certain unit types. This in and of itself prohibits a spamming of certain units.

Don't hate the player, hate the game. There is nothing stopping people from spamming any given unit except for "pre-defined" rule-sets which aren't part of the game. Fact of the matter is, if the majority of people who really understand this game were to play in a tournament for a large cash prize and the only rules were the ones the game itself forces upon players, there would be tons of spamming the same few units from a small pool of nations.

That is because the game is poorly balanced. End of story.

I do agree that diversity is rad (which is why I play low money games), I enjoy playing games with balanced armies, but they are simply not as effective as spamming certain overpowered units, and this is why people have to impose rule-sets. However, if you impose some kind of rule-set, it isn't Rome Total War, it is Rome Total War + your rule-set, which is now a different game (like saying that we are now playing basketball, except you don't have to dribble, dribbling is a part of basketball and without dribbling the game ceases to be basketball and becomes something else). Finally, stating the idea of rule-sets to limit spamming, is admitting that game is flawed, which I am arguing. The limits should be built into the game, or better would be to balance the units.

Again, we should play a game so I can show you in vanilla, but don't hate me, hate the game when I win with a max cheese army. Redharvest put it best when he said that Rome Total War wasn't a game, it is a do it yourself project.

[Lazy O]

99.999% of all battles I played are 15k CWB Rules. And I have never encountered a situation like yours unless it is a complete faction disadvantage/advantage. I really dont play 10k so Idk. 15k i dont think is considered high money since most games use it.
And btw I need an example of what you consider a "Cheese" Army.

[vartan]

fallen851, I wholeheartedly agree with your post (#20 in this thread). I don't blame anybody for the armies they choose in any war game online. Issues may arise for those of us actively interested in quasi-historicity in video gaming and this is why we make rule-set propositions. Ideally, as you put it best, the game would be built in such a balanced manner as to incentivize the diversity of multiplayer armies. No Total War game or mod of a Total War game that I know of completely incentivizes. There is an inherent partial incentivization in RTW that we must not forget. That the system was programmed to take a handful of unit types (e.g., heavy, light, spearmen, infantry, cavalry, missile) shows that there is some chess-like promotion of the syncretic use of differing types of force, if you will. Yet, you are right, Total War leans more toward the non-diverse end of the spectrum. This carries over into EB's multiplayer scene. This is why we don't play EB online, we play EB Online. For those of us, as yourself, who are rather keen on getting the semantics and the word-choice politically correct, sure, we may dub EB Online a different "game" from EB and, certainly, RTW. That's beside our issue. And yes, the game is flawed in more ways than one (I mean RTW and TW in general, not EB the mod), with our current issue at hand being one of the more particularly irritating issues. It is one of many reasons why some people, myself included, are seeking ways in which a battle engine such as Total War could have been approached differently from the design perspective in order to provide a more innately diversified atmosphere.