So, is Combat Turbo-charged?

[Tamur]

All I've got to say is, the flaming pigs are seriously underpowered.

[Bob the Insane]

A simple question for RTW...

I have just run a few quick tests in MTW with a french peasant unit against an english peasant unit both 0 valour with no armour or weapon bonuses... clean attack, both units in the same formation, charged into each other on level ground head on...

The fight lasted anywhere from 45 seconds for the shortest to 2 min for the longest (average of about 1 min 30 secs) before one side or the other broke and ran (I discounted any where the unit leader/general died early)... Also each side would have about 40% casualties every 30 seconds (i.e. 100 men at start, 60 at 30 secs, 40 at 1 min, 25 at 1 min 30 secs, etc)...

These are rough averages done with a very limited set of tests, but I am only looking for a rough comparison...

Can the same be done on RTW???

Additional: This was on Normal difficulty so no bonuses for anyone...

[hoom]

Ok, I just did a bunch of little custom battles (not exactly scientific or anything) & killing rates head to head between unupgraded, similar unit types is not exactly what I'd call fast.
Boringly slow even?
Even 2 units of elephants took quite some time to resolve.
tried peasants, armoured elephants, vanilla legionarys, militia hoplites, levy phalanx.
Battles were very close & lasted definitely in the minutes.
Off to try some flanking now

[Colovion]

Yeah I tested the peasant battles - they last about the same amount of time - usually 1.30 or so

[hoom]

Played a battle of just loads (~15 huge size) of phalanx vs other loads of phalanx & it was pretty much tediously slow.

[Colovion]

The battle speed isn't that bad when you have your lines setup properly but if there is even the SMALLEST break it is exploited immediately and your whole line buckles. To my utter humiliation I've now used the Pause button twice in one battle to redeploy troops which had begun chasing routing units half across the map - which just barely got back to the main fight to turn the tide in my favour. I think that there should be a "don't chase routers" kind of button. I guess the Gaurd mode would do that in a sense but if you ever clicked to attack a unit it would null that and the unit would begin to just attack the unit until it was gone.

Overall the battles are awesome with small amounts of troops but once you get over 800 or so on either side it gets rather sketch trying to keep control of your units - but it isn't as bad as I thought it would be as you fight a lot of small scale battles.

I've yet to autocalc any land battles or seiges, which I think is a testament to the battle engine and the work which was put into it; in MTW I would autocalc almost every seige or would starve them out and small bands of brigands I would always autocalc.

[Red Harvest]

It is way too fast. Even legionaries will run in a few seconds if outgunned. Cavalry is the biggest problem. They move too rapidly to issue orders. Heavy cav will often run *through* and around your legionairy's in a head on charge without taking losses???

Kill rates are too fast. Even if you flank some one (in real life) it will take a while to finish them. The routs are nearly instantaneous when flanked.

I've played about 50 battles so far in a campaign (more, but I can't remember the count), and not a single one has resulted in a prolonged clash of lines. Melee combat is all on turbo. In real life the hand-to-hand could go on for hours. That is why they had armour and shields and used formations. Kill speed in battles represents naked men with semi-automatic weapons at 20 paces.

Don't even get me started on the elephants...

Hope they come up with a half speed setting.

[Bob the Insane]

Thanks to those who tested RTW...

MTW basically had a animation cycle rate of 1 second, mean that every second a random number was generated (between 0 and 100) for each soldier and if that was lower than the kill chance number for that soldier (worked out from the attackers attack rating minus the defenders defence rating) then that soldier would kill his opponent... After the maths these results where diplayed in the next animation cycle...

Or at lest this is the impression given by the MTW Strat guide..

I think (as someone how has not got the game yet.. ) that they use the same system in RTW but have changed the modifiers quite alot. Checking the strat guid the worst case for a unit, say Feudal Sergeants charged in the flank by early royal knights (in wedge formation), the knights should get the max kill chance of 76% for the first impact...

Guess we will have to wait for the strat guide and hopefully it will have this kind of stuff in it....

[Thoros of Myr]

Even though I never use pause and I've only lost 4 battles out of 39 in my Julii campaign I still would love it if the battle speed was slowed by 15-20% and running/routing infantry brought more to scale. Right now they are just slightly slower then sprinting horses..? :(

[Del Arroyo]

A single cycle could not possibly have been as long as one whole second, could it? I mean like oooooooone-miss-iss-ipp-i. In STW at least I seem to recall different guys dying off at different times within the space of a second. If it were as long as a second, death noises would take on a distinctly slave-galley feel (if you can imagine what I mean-- one, two three, STROKE! one, two, three, STROKE!).

..

In a tangentially related point, I have heard anecdotally that the little buggers have hitpoints now. Interesting? Heck yes.

..

But to reveal my own position, I was always an advocate for slower battles way back with STW: MI, and distributed a Mod with this as a feature. I decreased killing speed and decreased morale, and IIRC it would take two Yari Ashigaru (peasant) units about 5-7 minutes, and they'd run off with 40-60% still alive.

I liked the feel of it. But of course even that was alot faster than actual combat.

Thinking about it now, I am not so sure that my previous positions were correct. It seems that speed would have to be somewhat accelerated, and thus Player Control inhibited, to realistically represent Command and Control (in the absence of any other constraints). So for me, the Jury is out on RTW.

Though from what I hear, I am leaning toward the opinion of it being too fast. It seems that the decision was made to balance Strat-map time vs. Battle time, and to make battles fit into the attention spans of a wider cross-section of the populace. Things in STW/MTW were probably already fast enough to simulate problems with C&C (just listen to all the people who were compulsive pausers in THOSE games).

..

But anyway, with me running off to Mexico in less than a month this is not a very good time for me to be buying and immersing in the game. I am very interested in hearing what other people think about it and seeing what other people do with it, though.

DA