Carthage: A bug story

[Maltz]

2. (Bug) Reinforcements should not be delayed when an enemy sallies to break a siege. They should have all been available on the map.

Jupitar always has his plans, which is best for you. Let's say you did see the reinforcement on time. So... your family member, with lots of stars, lead the reinforcement, controled by the AI...

He charged to stand beside some arrow tower, and got shot to bee hives. Now you know how lucky you are. (Just kidding, you are extremely unlucky to experience so many adversity in a row.)

I have not personally experienced any reinforcement delay, but I have seen AI with missing reinforcement. It happened to be a similar situation. The main attacker was the smallest among the 3, and I tried my best to rout them in 2 minutes, and I won the battle. There is no damage on the no-show reinforcement.

IMHO reinforcement delay is a good feature, because it happens all the time in the real world, often resulting in catastrophy. It might be a "bug" if the hidden factors controlling the delay is broken, so you get unreasonable chances for getting the delay, though. This I am not sure.

3. (Bug) Sallying units should have to face the strongest army besieging them, not choose to sally against the weakest

Sorry, I have to disagree, because I would have done exactly the same thing if I were the AI.

However, you are absolutely right that it is super annoying to have your weaker army sallied by the garrison. Many players lost family members because the AI would control the reinforcement.

So it might be good to avoid this like hell in the future - just combine the troops into a best-20. That's all you can have on the battlefield, too.

4. (Bug) To lift a siege, it should be necessary to defeat each of the besieging forces

Yes, indeed. I have not experienced it but I know what you mean.

5. (Bug) Battle time limit is far too short for capturing cities.

Indeed. But everytime I fail, I could find out something I did wrong, so I could avoid it in the future. Here are a some tips I learned from my own stupidities:

- Breach multiple openings to spread the defender out
- Don't try to fight melee unless I can rout the enemy fast, say by overpowering them preferrably from multiple directions
- Arrow towers are killers, keep away at all cost
- If there are quite a few garrisons on the wall, I send my men on the wall not to kill the defenders, but to open the key gate that I will rush everybody in. After I rush in those units on the wall will go down, and sometimes I can intercept them on the street
- Don't charge my general to city square until I know it is safe or totally necessary - enemies units there never rout, so they will stand a lot longer. There is a higher chance that they will kill my general by luck.

I tend to think it is ok to give some advantage to the defending site, though. If daylight is short, then it is our own bad luck. Hopefully you are lucky next time to get 35 minute battle.

My best record is about taking a 7-8 garrison, regular stone wall city in 20 minutes. So I would expect to fail for anything worse than that.

6. (Bug) Cavalry (and other units?) cannot handle moving around corners in cities, because they have to complete their formation before moving on to the next waypoint. If the AI pathfinding wasn't so poor, this might be less of a problem.

First I found pathbinding sucks, so I tried a little more micromanagement. Here is what I do, and since I start to do that, I never experience any trouble.

- Go to the place you want them to go, drag out the final formation there, and hit "run" (on the bottom right. hit again to "walk").

- 2 turn is about the safe limit that AI can handle for good pathfindings.

7. (Bug?) I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. I was expecting to win by holding the square for three minutes, but maybe the design decision was that the overall time limit trumps city control.

Yes, overall time limit has the first priority, then the 3 minute town square thing. I failed a few sieges for this, too.

8. (Bug) Soldiers defending city walls should not fight to the death if they can escape down the tower behind them.

Good point! Even more strange is that when the start to fight to the death, they just freeze there. If you don't kill them and just leave them there, they will remain frozen and broken for the rest of the battle.

[Owen]

...Indeed. But everytime I fail, I could find out something I did wrong, so I could avoid it in the future. Here are a some tips I learned from my own stupidities:

- Breach multiple openings to spread the defender out
- Don't try to fight melee unless I can rout the enemy fast, say by overpowering them preferrably from multiple directions
- Arrow towers are killers, keep away at all cost
- If there are quite a few garrisons on the wall, I send my men on the wall not to kill the defenders, but to open the key gate that I will rush everybody in. After I rush in those units on the wall will go down, and sometimes I can intercept them on the street
- Don't charge my general to city square until I know it is safe or totally necessary - enemies units there never rout, so they will stand a lot longer. There is a higher chance that they will kill my general by luck.

I tend to think it is ok to give some advantage to the defending site, though. If daylight is short, then it is our own bad luck. Hopefully you are lucky next time to get 35 minute battle.

My best record is about taking a 7-8 garrison, regular stone wall city in 20 minutes. So I would expect to fail for anything worse than that.

Well, part of the reason I consider the time allowed for assaulting huge cities to be bugged, is that I understand all those tactical considerations, but I had to ignore all but the ones that helped me beat the time limit.

First I found pathbinding sucks, so I tried a little more micromanagement. Here is what I do, and since I start to do that, I never experience any trouble.

- Go to the place you want them to go, drag out the final formation there, and hit "run" (on the bottom right. hit again to "walk").

I'll try that, thanks.

- 2 turn is about the safe limit that AI can handle for good pathfindings.

Ouch. That's a lot of micromanagement. The reason I had enough time to get my cavalry to the square on the last go was that it "only" involved four corners.

Good point! Even more strange is that when the start to fight to the death, they just freeze there. If you don't kill them and just leave them there, they will remain frozen and broken for the rest of the battle.

That may have been happening. I have to admit I was concentrating on my non-moving cavalry most of the time.

[Maltz]

Thanks for the fast response. First sorry for the many typos and grammar errors (I was in a hurry so no time for proofreading). I forgot to mention that during a siege, if you issue order to "groups" (more than 2 units grouped as I, II, you know), say "group I charge this unit", "group II run here", then they always screw up. Usually they run backwards to wait outside the wall.

I guess this happens because when you hit "group", the program remembers the relative positions and since the city streets are too narrow, the closest place the program could find to obey your command & to maintain that formation, is to go outside the city wall.

So the only solution is to give out orders to individual units. A lot of pause for micromanagement is not very enjoyable, but it also drags a 20-min. battle longer...

[NicSO]

Battle time limit is wayyyyyyyyyyy toooooo short.....and u cant use any strategy because u must battle with the time also...I switched of damn time.

I quess people from CA never heard for BETA TESTING!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Medieval Assassin]

Some people never heard of english class...

[Owen]

Some people never heard of english class...

How's your Croatian doing? ;)

[bmolsson]

I think that the time limit is valid since the battle result is decided rather early anyway......

[Medieval Assassin]

How's your Croatian doing? ;)

PPPPPPfffffffffffft..........He's doing fine.

[Maltz]

Regarding short battle time limits:

First I totally agree that time is short. In many occasions I ran out of time and left in frustration.

I guess it is good to allow more time to larger castles. For wooden forts 20 minute is reasonable, for 30-35 minutes for stone castle, 40+ for epic stone walls, etc.

Switching the timer off is quite bad, though. There was a time I turned the battle timer off after a frustrating assault, and it made everything so easy - I feel like an idiot commander. I can issue one order every 1 minute or so, watching 1 unit of archer march foward and shoot, the back off, then the next... it feels even more unreal. I think it is even more devastating than the frustration of timer running low - this makes me think my brain is running low.

So I would recommend not to turn the battle timer off, instead try to fight with timer on and see how much you can improve. Timer off is like a tavern, making you "unsharp" (-1 command, -1 management, -1 influence).