unit speeds for STW, MTW and RTWdemo

[Puzz3D]

Unit speeds walk/run

STW v1.12: inf 6/10 and 7/12 (charge +0), cav 8/20 and 10/24 (charge +0)
WE/MI v1.02: inf 5/8 and 5/10 (charge +2), cav 8/20 and 8/24 (charge +4)
WE/MI *15%: inf 6/9 and 6/11 (charge +2.3), cav 9/23 and 9/27.6 (charge +4.6)
MTW v1.1: inf 6/10 and 6/12 (charge +1), cav 9/20 and 9/24 (charge +2)
RTWdemo: inf 6/15 and 6/18, cav 8/30 and 8/36

Keep in mind that STW v1.12 multiplayer had lag due to network coding errors, and because not many people had wideband internet connections. The result was that the units moved slower, but the camera scolling and mouse movement was not slowed down, so you had some extra time to issue orders. Those coding errors were fixed in WE/MI v1.02, so the game played faster than the numbers would suggest. As I recall, it played about 15% faster due to those fixes, and I calculated a line for WE/MI showing that. This included the fighting speed being faster, so the cav was left relatively fast so flanking was possible before the inf combat was resolved. The cavalry also had very high charge values in WE/MI v1.02, and this contributed to a faster killing rate. WE/MI v1.02 turned out to be too fast for most players to handle, and the number of online players declined by about 50% over several months.

[hotingzilla]

The speed difference is more obvious in multiplayer combat in RTW. Since you cannot use Pause to issue orders, you must click pretty fast!

[Shahed]

Good job Puzz.

[shingenmitch2]

I don't recall anyone ever having a problem with the running speeds and killing rate of STW. I understand there was never anything to compare to, but it just felt right from the get-go. MI did seem too fast, though we grudginly adjusted to it.

If STW was the ideal (and the gold standard that all the players I know refer back to), why would CA stray from that? Why wouldn't they try to get back to that? It's what got us to RTW in the first place.

I understand map sizes have increased, but if increasing map sizes has forced them to alter game play so significantly, then they've sacrificed the core of the game for the superficial benefit of a larger map. (I know, they can squeeze in more units to be able to claim on the box "3,000,000" units battle at once -- which is funny, because on-liners have never played at maxiumum unit sizes so they obviously don't help game-play).

-------
Yuuk, just read your other comment on speeds. I hope you are correct that it artificially pumped for the demo. I'm still not comfortable with kill-rates which goes to the speed of the battle cycle -- maybe I just need to play the demo more (but I've kind of thought the battle cycle was fast since MI). Too bad combat cycle is not a moddable "speed" (AFAIK) other than through artificial means (i.e. pumping up a defense stat./ turning morale off).

[A.Saturnus]

An observation: walk speed hasn´t increased at all, for horses it has decreased relative to MTW. Run speed has increased significantly, though it is worth to make a little comparison. A normal walk speed for infantry would be about 5 km/h, while trained men should be able to run with 20 km/h, so it wouldn´t be implausible if men run 4 times as fast as they walk, of course we have to consider that they carry armour and that would probably reduce the difference. But for normal inf units we have in RTWdemo a ratio run to walk of 2.5. That´s surely not an unrealistic fast run speed. For horses it´s rather unlikely that a canter and even more carriere are only 4 times as fast as walk, so they should rather be quicker.
Of course, the question is whether the walk speed is realistic, but if it isn´t, it has been so in MTW.

[CBR]

I gave some details on movement rates here, post 28 and 32:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...5&page=1&pp=30


CBR

[Shahed]

Seems fair to me. Hell what can we do. Wait....and mod, that's all...or maybe request a change for 1.01 ? (whoops let out the "PATCH" word)

[Puzz3D]

Good idea Mitch. Playing at maximum unit size will probably introduce enough lag to bring a feeling of control back to the player, and it will make the units fight longer at the same time.

I would say the increased number of units, the weapon and armor upgrades, units of varying size, the different factions and the discounts for ranged unit upgrades all make balancing the game a lot more difficult.

[shingenmitch2]

Hehe, we'll just call you Captain Sarasm

I'm not suggesting the lag of STW was good , but the pace of battle seemed about right. Obviously all the new variables make balancing difficult (impossible?) but that's kind of a different issue from combat-cycle rates (how fast each unit takes to make an attack) or how they adjust run speeds to cope with a larger map or finish battles faster (assuming that's why the run has increased so radically)

[CBR]

Dont worry Yuuki, I still got my 33.6 modem.


CBR

[SpencerH]

An observation: walk speed hasn´t increased at all, for horses it has decreased relative to MTW. Run speed has increased significantly, though it is worth to make a little comparison. A normal walk speed for infantry would be about 5 km/h, while trained men should be able to run with 20 km/h, so it wouldn´t be implausible if men run 4 times as fast as they walk, of course we have to consider that they carry armour and that would probably reduce the difference. But for normal inf units we have in RTWdemo a ratio run to walk of 2.5. That´s surely not an unrealistic fast run speed. For horses it´s rather unlikely that a canter and even more carriere are only 4 times as fast as walk, so they should rather be quicker.
Of course, the question is whether the walk speed is realistic, but if it isn´t, it has been so in MTW.

20km/h is too fast for a run speed for troops carrying their fighting order (weapons, ammo, helmet, etc, no rucksack). As I posted in the same thread as CBR, in my experience as a former grunt, experienced inf units can run about 10km/h down a road for 10 miles in fighting order and still have something left at the end (thats not wearing body armor BTW). Cross country, and staying in formation, the speed would be considerably less. I would guess that the charge speed cross country would not be much above 12-15 km/h especially for anything over 100m. Lightly armed irregulars would, of course, be much faster probably 2x.

[Ellesthyan]

Also, has anyone else checked out the maps on romemod v1.12? They're HUGE! Seriously, it takes half the battle to even reach your enemy. In such maps I did not have any problems with the speed, actually not in any battle except for Trebia proper. Fatigue has a lot of impact on the game* and you will want to preserve your troops as long as possible. That forces you to march at regular speed.

*Tested on a map from the romemod: a unit of principes could not beat a warband after having marched (normal speed) to them, which caused their fatigue to drop to winded. Including throwing javellins, tested about 5 times.

[shingenmitch2]

Elles,

It's not so much the walk speed -- which you'd use to reach your enemy. It's the run speed as the armies close. Once the armies get in range, the units start to fly and become rather uncontrollable, and u have little time as a player to react and click to counter flanking units (cav). Kill speed then comes into play as center line troops can disintigrate before one can even attempt to shift a reserve unit to help out.

[CBR]

I posted this one Com a few days ago:

Just did some MTW testing and reading some old comment made by CA about mapsize:

In STW/MTW maps are made of tiles of each 40 x 40 meters. It takes one minute to march 2.5 tiles (100 meters)

CA said RTW maps should be 2 x 2 km (50 x 50 tiles) and if the red zone/border is still 3 tiles as it was in STW/MTW then we have an effective mapsize of 44 x 44 tiles.

It will take about 18 minutes to march the 44 tiles and that is also what I got from my RTW test.

So from the tests and what we know of mapsizes we can conclude that marching speed is the same: 100 meters/minute.


CBR

It took a FMAA about 8 minutes to walk from one mapedge to another on a standard sized MTW map. So RTW maps will have around x 4.8 the area of a MTW map (20 x 20 tiles v 44 x 44 tiles)

At least thats what my tests and flawed logic has come up with


CBR

[shingenmitch2]

CB,
Okay, but that still doesn't change anything except my thinking as to why the run speeds may have been exaggerated -- i.e. to deal with chasing off routed units at the end of a game.

However, the control (and thus playability) during contact is still negatively effected by the run speeds.

I'd say then that CA was designing nice big maps with the best of intentions, but then ran into the problem with length of time to march/chase around it. The solution was to increase unit speeds either without knowing (or in spite of knowing) what that does to the actual fight.

To those of us who like to command our troops and historical accuracy, I have no problem with doubling the length of a battle... however, I'm sure they calculated that this was unacceptable to many other "casual gamers" and thus the speed solution. But this just brings me back to having 2 (at least) different play settings. And, who knows, they may have done just that in the full game. (but I'm not holding my breath )

[Steppe Merc]

Who cares about the casual gamer? Before they buy it, they wont know the batles are too "slow". It's the hardcore people that would calculate these kinds of things that would potentially decrease there money.

[Colovion]

I'd say then that CA was designing nice big maps with the best of intentions, but then ran into the problem with length of time to march/chase around it. The solution was to increase unit speeds either without knowing (or in spite of knowing) what that does to the actual fight.

Yeah, that seems plausible..... if you have monkeys doing your play testing for you.

[Colovion]

Who cares about the casual gamer? Before they buy it, they wont know the batles are too "slow". It's the hardcore people that would calculate these kinds of things that would potentially decrease there money.

As well as reducing their online market to nothing

[Aymar de Bois Mauri]

Elles,

It's not so much the walk speed -- which you'd use to reach your enemy. It's the run speed as the armies close. Once the armies get in range, the units start to fly and become rather uncontrollable, and u have little time as a player to react and click to counter flanking units (cav). Kill speed then comes into play as center line troops can disintigrate before one can even attempt to shift a reserve unit to help out.

I'm in total agreement. I've verified that many times myself. Walking speed IS too high. Running and charging are just ridiculous. Have you noticed that the battles are VERY short?

That is not my idea of what happened in Historical Trebia.

Are they trying too hard to solve the problem of the long battles in STW and MTW?

[Ellesthyan]

I still think that the running speed isn't that bad. It takes some getting used to, that's all. A more valid point is the killing rate; I did'nt test anything specificly, but it seemed quite the same to me on vanilla mode with common units. Missiles arent too effective, and besides the front of a phalanx, I had no surprises. The elite troops of the factions are quite Elite with a capital E but the regular men like Iberian infantry or warbands are quite balanced imo.

But that's all personal I guess!

[Tamur]

Has there been even a peep from CA on this issue? I don't visit the .com at all, so there may have been something over there. But from game sites and here it seems like this has been quantified, put in the bag, wrapped up, and delivered to CA's doorstep.

Does anyone know if any official or unofficial response from the dev's?

[Orda Khan]

Walking speeds seem ok....I think the huge map has a lot to do with that. Infantry run speeds and battle speed is a problem and I can't see how people can say it's not. As ShingenMitch is saying, if your front line creaks there is precious little time to send in reserve.

I have set up a battle on 1.12 Mod, Gauls v Julii, Hard setting. The march is nice and you have time to survey terrain etc. I have found archers and skirmishers to be very nasty. Then of course the battle proper begins. The Romans have one very serious army and nothing I have tried has broken them yet. I honestly feel this would be different if the whole charge/fight cycle was slowed down. Tough as they are, with units holding longer there is time to issue commands, as things are the whole experience is frantic. Use of pause is one way of countering this but what do we do in a 4v4 Multi?

Long battles is what I expected, even back in STW, I certainly don't want to see things resolved in minutes. This game has the potential to be the best yet and I still haven't given up hope that these speeds have been adjusted

.......Orda

[Armchair Athlete]

I really think we will have to wait for the full game to accurately say whether the new speeds are bad or not. First of all due to the new way the strategic map interacts with the battle map. If using MTW speeds ambushes would be much reduced in impact, as you would probably have time to sort out your troops being ambushed into a defensive line by the time your enemy has snailed across the map. Ambushes are supposed to be hectic and with not much time to react. Same with unexpectatly bringing up another army from the rear to attack the enemy (or the AI doing it to the player). If using the snail like speeds of MTW, you would fairly easily be able to form a new defensive line quickly. As with Multilayer, well that would be a bit of a tougher one, I agree it may be too fast, but the enemy will be under the same pressure as you so it sort of balances out.

[Aelwyn]

I understand map sizes have increased, but if increasing map sizes has forced them to alter game play so significantly, then they've sacrificed the core of the game for the superficial benefit of a larger map.

To me, the better solution would be to slightly increase walk speed, so you can slow down the charge speed to a more acceptable rate. This doesn't make practical sense, but I don't care much about that. Of course you could ignore both and slow down kill rates, but that imo would just promote some types of camping, and dumb things down a bit. It'd be a lot like the tests people ran back a while ago where they never moved units, and they still did much better than they should have, if you know what I mean. So all 3 speeds may need some tweaking, but like Yuuki said, this ones gonna be tough to even semi-balance.

[econ21]

Puzz3D - are you more worried about unit speeds or killing speeds? As a SP-only person addicted to the pause button, I am not sure the differences in unit speeds you document are large enough to cause a problem. However, I find Trebia is still far too quickly resolved and hard to control. I wonder if it is the killing speed that causes this, rather than the unit speed?

In MTW, attack and defence factors were low - around plus or minus 5. Here, we seem to have a range of around 3 to 22. Remember, each difference of 1 in attack and defence changed the kill rate by around 20%. If the old formula for kills is used with the new numbers, it is no wonder we see units slicing through others like butter.

[A.Saturnus]

I think the main problem is killing speed. The movement speed is at least approximately realistic. But fights shouldn´t resolve so quickly.

[Puzz3D]

Puzz3D - are you more worried about unit speeds or killing speeds? As a SP-only person addicted to the pause button, I am not sure the differences in unit speeds you document are large enough to cause a problem. However, I find Trebia is still far too quickly resolved and hard to control. I wonder if it is the killing speed that causes this, rather than the unit speed?

In MTW, attack and defence factors were low - around plus or minus 5. Here, we seem to have a range of around 3 to 22. Remember, each difference of 1 in attack and defence changed the kill rate by around 20%. If the old formula for kills is used with the new numbers, it is no wonder we see units slicing through others like butter.

I'm more concerned with the running/charging speeds, and I think it's impacting other parts of the gameplay besides your ability to coordinate units. For head-to-head fighting, I don't think the killing speed is any faster than MTW for spear to spear and sword to sword type matchups. CBR timed some of those matchups, and got similar times to MTW. However, the increased charge speed has increased the momentum of the charge. That would make the charge last longer thereby increasing the number of charge kills unless the charge threshold was raised. My theory at this point is that the speeds were increased without changing other parameters. For instance, the fatigue for running seems relatively low, and I see some gliding effect on the cavalry animation when running despite some slight slipping when walking on the snow. Also, the infantry slips when walking on the snow, but not when running. These things would happen if all you did was increase the running speed. That extra killing will trip a rout sooner, and the rate that routers are killed is quite high. In the Trebia battle, as soon as you rout one or two units, all the Romans tend to rout and their whole army evaporates. I think that's why the battle ends so quickly. Increased running speed also reduces the effectiveness of ranged units on advancing men. A lot of things besides ability to coordinate units are impacted by changing unit movement speeds.

The larger attack/defend values could mean that the resolution of the combat system has been increased. The 20% steps in the previous games were rather large. It could also mean increased differences between units, and that would increase killing rates in uneven matchups. That would give you less time to correct a bad matchup or bring in a supporting unit, and many players want that type of gameplay. Increasing the rock, paper scissors would do a similar thing by resolving that type of mismatch faster than you see in MTW.

I think doing well by not moving in MTW is an indication that fatigue rate is too high in that game on the large maps. If fatigue rates are set high in RTW it's going to be very hard on the attacker, but it also deters rushing. I'd like to see rushing detered by a combination of fatigue rate, ranged unit effectiveness and tactical control of units without any one of those factors able to do it by itself.

RTW should come out with good, balanced tactical gameplay in SP and MP given the years of experience CA has with the system.

[Aymar de Bois Mauri]

I'm more concerned with the running/charging speeds, and I think it's impacting other parts of the gameplay besides your ability to coordinate units. For head-to-head fighting, I don't think the killing speed is any faster than MTW for spear to spear and sword to sword type matchups. CBR timed some of those matchups, and got similar times to MTW. However, the increased charge speed has increased the momentum of the charge. That would make the charge last longer thereby increasing the number of charge kills unless the charge threshold was raised. My theory at this point is that the speeds were increased without changing other parameters. For instance, the fatigue for running seems relatively low, and I see some gliding effect on the cavalry animation when running despite some slight slipping when walking on the snow. Also, the infantry slips when walking on the snow, but not when running. These things would happen if all you did was increase the running speed. That extra killing will trip a rout sooner, and the rate that routers are killed is quite high. In the Trebia battle, as soon as you rout one or two units, all the Romans tend to rout and their whole army evaporates. I think that's why the battle ends so quickly. Increased running speed also reduces the effectiveness of ranged units on advancing men. A lot of things besides ability to coordinate units are impacted by changing unit movement speeds.

The larger attack/defend values could mean that the resolution of the combat system has been increased. The 20% steps in the previous games were rather large. It could also mean increased differences between units, and that would increase killing rates in uneven matchups. That would give you less time to correct a bad matchup or bring in a supporting unit, and many players want that type of gameplay. Increasing the rock, paper scissors would do a similar thing by resolving that type of mismatch faster than you see in MTW.

I think doing well by not moving in MTW is an indication that fatigue rate is too high in that game on the large maps. If fatigue rates are set high in RTW it's going to be very hard on the attacker, but it also deters rushing. I'd like to see rushing detered by a combination of fatigue rate, ranged unit effectiveness and tactical control of units without any one of those factors able to do it by itself.

Great analysis. I agree that balancing those factors would be a solution, but will CA reach that balance in the final release? Hasn't the demo shown us that is not what Activision wants? Or this Demo was was just modified to lure the non-hardcore future buyers?

RTW should come out with good, balanced tactical gameplay in SP and MP given the years of experience CA has with the system.

Questions are: Do they want it? If so, does Activision want it? Or let's them make it? Has CA, with limited development time, focused too much on the strategical map and 3d battle system and not on the balanced gameplay? I know that sounds strange, but it's a possiblity...

[Puzz3D]

Has there been even a peep from CA on this issue? I don't visit the .com at all, so there may have been something over there. But from game sites and here it seems like this has been quantified, put in the bag, wrapped up, and delivered to CA's doorstep.

Does anyone know if any official or unofficial response from the dev's?

Yes. There has been a comment.

Dutch, a dev, today said,

"About the demo: however tempting it is to chat about CA's slick development process, I think I'll let that one stand, and let people form their own opinions as to how much the final game has changed from the demo. It's inevitable that some people will not be entirely satisfied with the way things have gone, but I'm happy that we caught just about all of the essential issues."

I take this to mean that the players who do not like the faster gameplay are the ones who "will not be entirely satisfied" since that was the major objection raised about the demo. The marketing strategy of concealing the true nature of the gameplay continues.

[Barkhorn1x]

Yes. There has been a comment.

Dutch, a dev, today said,

"About the demo: however tempting it is to chat about CA's slick development process, I think I'll let that one stand, and let people form their own opinions as to how much the final game has changed from the demo. It's inevitable that some people will not be entirely satisfied with the way things have gone, but I'm happy that we caught just about all of the essential issues."

I take this to mean that the players who do not like the faster gameplay are the ones who "will not be entirely satisfied" since that was the major objection raised about the demo. The marketing strategy of concealing the true nature of the gameplay continues.

He does say that they caught "just about" all of the essential issues". You can read into that anything you like IMO so perhaps this issue has been addressed.

Barkhorn
(Awaiting the release).