Re: Europa Barbarorum 2.04 is released!
Just to clarify, I do see the AI retreating its cavalry and charging again. They're not necessarily very judicious in deciding when to retreat and most of the time charge the same unit again (not always a bad thing, of course), but they do try to break away and charge again after a while in melee. Of course, some of the time the unit gets stuck due to one guy not making it out of melee, or breaks formation trying to charge, although those aren't problems specific to the AI.Originally Posted by z3n
And while they're usually charging in the centre, at least they're supported in EBII. I remember in vanilla M2TW (and mods like Broken Crescent or King or Country) the AI would litterally suicide its heavy cavalry FM into my centre. It was like the AI was trying to loseso you've taken it a long way from that :)
I'm sorry but you misunderstand: it's not that they're easy to deliberately assimilate, but that their culture is at risk of vanishing on its own. It's not too bad while they remain rebels (it declines, but slowly in my game as Saba) but as Pontos with an allied government and client ruler their culture is collapsing fast, 2% a year or more it seems. As I understand it, being bordered by a lot of Eastern Tribal and Hellenistic provinces has an influence on culture as well, though from what you say perhaps not using the client ruler would slow their cultural loss?
As an aside, it's a nice touch that EBII assigns the correct ethnicity to client rulers. Although it's sad the ethnicity trait doesn't seem to affect cultural conversion (hardcoded limitation maybe?).
It's not a historical issue, though. Historically troops didn't die fighting very much, they were run down during routs, disappeared after a defeat (or just a long campaign), or died of disease much more often. Of these only the pursuit is shown is shown at all, and not very completely, in the game, so abstractions have to be made anyway. I also think you're way overestimating how overpowered cavalry charges would become; this is the M2TW engine still, with charges not always working in the first placeSomething you have to understand regarding kill rates is the huge amount of compromise involved from a number of different angles. In the RTW engine, every unit has it's own lethality setting allowing a lot of granularity. In their infinite wisdom, in M2TW, CA chose to abstract this down to a single number. For every kind of unit. There is just one number for melee kill rates, push it too high and cavalry charges become ridiculously overpowered. Too low and not only does melee take a long time, but cohesion suffers (because of course it's logical to tie cohesion to kill rates...). We've gone for a balance of cohesion, stable battle pace and not too overpowered cavalry charges.
You don't win battles in EBII by killing the other guys quickly. That's by design. As far as we know most kills in ancient battles tended to happen during a rout, not in the contested part. You win by breaking their morale. It means rather than insta-routs ending battles lasting a few minutes where most of the facets about a unit don't actually matter, instead stamina and morale come into play. Units with low stamina get tired - which impacts their morale. Units with low morale break earlier. You generally win by flanking and cavalry charges to the rear are especially effective - even with lighter units. It means you can actually change tactics, respond to crises, and have to deal with issues like shoring up wavering units, or having your general have to go off and rally those who have broken. Because they do often return to the fight if the battle isn't lost. With faster kills, that wouldn't happen either.
Unless I'm misinterpreting descr_projectiles it seems Toxotai are slightly more accurate than Cretans and just as deadly. The Cretans have 3 more arrows, which is not that much of an advantage, and they are less terrible in melee but uh, I'm not buying archers to serve as assault infantry. Certainly this is born up by my ingame experience: Cretans archery isn't better. They have longer range, but that doesn't stop the Toxotai from emptying their quivers.They might have the same attack value, but they use a different projectile with different ranges (and different amounts of ammo). Kretans and Persians can stand outside Toxotai's range and decimate them, especially because the latter are unarmoured. Kretans have armour which means any return fire from the Toxotai is much less effective, and they can actually fight in melee. What you pay for with Kretans is not only a Greek archer with an eastern archer's range, but a unit who turn into medium infantry when they've expended their ammunition. When you're only using one archer unit in your army, they're a much more efficient choice than Toxotai.
Toxotai are not as accurate or as deadly; and indeed a coming change will make levy archers unable to fire synchronised volleys, which will make the distinction even clearer.
Archery duels are only really relevant against horse archers and such. Even then, I don't see the point in Cretans when Eastern archers have the same range, and some have shields too. You need screening infantry for them anyway. Cretans will certainly do better on their own, but even the AI now avoids throwing unsupported archers around
Finally, I don't see a synchronised volley special ability in the gameif it's a passive thing, I'm not noticing much synchronisation from my archers and even less from the AI's.
So, I still don't find the Cretans (or even the Persians) living up to their reputations in-game. Certainly, historically, archery depended a lot on how many arrows you could put in the air, but quality of the archers seems to me to have been more important than I find it to be for most of the in-game archers (if only because of something hard to model in TW, but better trained archers could shoot faster and be less tired by it).
Also, I've noticed missile attacks don't scale with experience like they did in Rome. So you could possibly up them a bit without risking gold-chevroned archers getting silly strong, as was the case with EBI.
Oh okay, that makes sense, and is even hinted at in the description (although it could be made clearer)We've changed the concept of the unit, but we don't have a new card (or indeed a new model) for them yet. They're professionals in the ekdromoi (light hoplite) mould which is more flexible and better-suited to mercenary work (most of which was patrolling and raiding) than the much more heavily-armoured regular Hoplitai.
Since it seems there are plans for non-merc Ekdromoi, are there plans to reintroduce heavier merc hoplites? It would seem to me that in both cases, it was largely the same men who would lighten their gear for mobile actions and then wear the heavier armour if they expected a pitched battle, so it would make sense for the player to have the choice of which style to recruit. Besides, mercenary hoplites have always been useful in the game for factions with a hard time getting heavier line troops
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