Campaign map - TW is now a real wargame!

[Lord Ovaat]

Everyone always complained about "teleporting" armies and such in MTW, but, guys, that was actually more realistic. Remember that it still took a YEAR for you to float troops from one place to the other. That's more realistic than sailing them from Wales to Rome in five years or so. Don't you thinK? I mean, Braddock "axed" a road from Cumberland to Pittsburgh, through rugged mountains, in two months, taking troops, baggage, artillery. Same basic tools the Romans had: axe, shovel, pick. If it actually took five or six years to get from Rome to Egypt, Caesar would have been far too old to have ever made the trip. Maybe moves should be quarter instead of half years?

[Spartiate]

I agree with Lord Ovatt on the ship movement issue.Personally i enjoy it from a gameplay point of view but it IS very unrealistic.Moving around the Iberian peninsula is particularly vexing(always wanted to use vexing in a sentence)

[Tamur]

This would be a nice improvement for version 2.0 --- break the game down into month-long turns. Benefits:

-- realistic unit movement
-- weather could be something besides an occasional add-on to battlemaps

Downsides:

-- economy slows to a crawl
-- every trained unit takes multiple turns (except maybe peasants and town militia). Both realism and the economy would demand this.

An implementation could work around these problems, though. For example, you could ramp up the economy a bit (more denarii per turn), and then penalise the player if they over-train by making their population, and therefore their economy, plummet.

[Doug-Thompson]

The more I think about this, the better the new map seems.

Yeah, I've done some "uh-ohs" too on the movement. I once started a war with Egypt that way when somebody was talking to me at a bad time. I thought the port I was blockading was rebel. Definitely had to re-start that one.

However, I have to weigh that against the sheer pleasure of finding that mountain pass that lead to the heart of the Selucid Empire for the first time.

[Kraellin]

frankly, i'd hate to see an 'undo' on the campaign map. that's basically a cheat in a game like this. you could scout a territory, see the enemy army that was hidden before, then 'undo'. no, i dont agree with this one. you move, take your chances and that's it. sorry if you dont like the outcome. if you want to 'see ahead' and avoid nasty circumstances, send in a spy or diplomat first. an undo command just makes no sense in this game.

as for turn time of a 6 months, yeah, you could do quarterly or even monthly, but the 6 month thing doesnt really bother me for some reason. sure, it's a bit odd at times, but not like the year thing in mtw. remember, an army lives on its belly and has to camp every day when marching and hunt and feed itself. it takes a while to feed 2000 men on a march each day, so the 6 month thing doesnt irk like the year thing did. but, if CA wanted, quarterly or monthly would be ok too.

what bugs me is, there is no good way to keep track of all your units and make sure you've moced them all, particularly the agents and ships. yes, you can see a list of all these but there is nothing that shows on that who has moved and who hasnt, and if you use the arrow keys to cycle through the units, it skips around if you move a unit and then repeats on units that have already moved, but doesnt show the ones that havent all the time, unless you cycle through everything twice. quite odd at times. and, the more units you own, the worse this gets.

K.

[Tamur]

what bugs me is, there is no good way to keep track of all your units and make sure you've moced them all, particularly the agents and ships. yes, you can see a list of all these but there is nothing that shows on that who has moved and who hasnt,

Couldn't agree more! I'd love to have some sort of button that finds units not yet tasked during that turn.

[Morindin]

They could always implement an undo feature like other turn based strategy games.

1. Each army only gets one undo per turn.

2. If a new enemy unit is spotted your move instantly stops, and there is no undo feature. You can however keep moving.

The RTW system while great for a TW game, is quite primative compared to other strategy games in this respect. An undo feature is essential, sometimes you double right click to speed up the awefully slow movement and find your army wandering off somewhere else, sometimes you accidently move one unit out and attack a full blown enemy army, etc.
Its also highly tedious moving your units in little bits - especially when you have hundreds of them.

While the strat map is awesome, I really do miss the major scale battles you got in MTW. Im getting towards late game now in RTW and I was hoping for some major battles, but because armies can easily avoid each other you never get the large epic MTW battles. Instead of one battle between 5 stacks you get 5 battles between 1 stacks.
I would be nice if a feature was implimented so when a battle has been joined, every available army that has enough moves to make it to the battlefield joined as reinforcements.

[Red Harvest]

frankly, i'd hate to see an 'undo' on the campaign map. that's basically a cheat in a game like this. you could scout a territory, see the enemy army that was hidden before, then 'undo'.
K.

I agree with this. I've had the exact same observation and I don't see how an undo is feasible because of this effect on play.

There are a couple of problems though that should be addressed since we lack an undo. I've seen some non-obvious paths taken by armies, that were 2 turn moves when I was trying to send them on a flanking move to engage. I've also had boats appear to be capable of engaging, but be one turn short. We need some sort of prompt to warn us that these are multi-turn moves, rather than waisting all our movement points... I load saves for this. I don't reload if some unseen unit is blocking the path (and I wouldn't want a warning about it in the move count either.)

[barvaz]

frankly, i'd hate to see an 'undo' on the campaign map. that's basically a cheat in a game like this. you could scout a territory, see the enemy army that was hidden before, then 'undo'. no, i dont agree with this one. you move, take your chances and that's it. sorry if you dont like the outcome. if you want to 'see ahead' and avoid nasty circumstances, send in a spy or diplomat first. an undo command just makes no sense in this game.

I see your point and I haven’t thought about this before. I must disagree though:

- You can still “cheat” this way with saved games, it is just less convenient.

- This is a single player game we are talking about, it is up to each player to choose how they want to use this feature. The temptation to cheat is higher, yes, but this still doesn’t “unbalance” anything. You can also easily make it optional so players that consider this cheating or don’t see the value can easily disable it.

- I wouldn’t even consider the need for such an option if the interface was designed better and the chance for mistakes was lower. I find myself too many times slapping on my forehead saying “But I didn’t want to do that! Get back there!”. If I could see my moves before I make them, see the exact path, number of steps and turns etc, then I probably wouldn’t need “undo”. If you ever played “Heroes of Might and Magic”, for example, pretty similar gameplay, I never needed “undo” there.


- barvaz