Grrrr...saving during battles

[Drewman]

One feature I've wished for since STW was the ability to save during a battle.

Just this morning I fought the most spectacular and hard-earned victory I ever experienced in any TW game. Playing VH/VH, my 3/4 stack beseiging Julii army got crunched between two nearly full stack German armies, one with a 6 star general whereas my guy had only four stars. Outnumbered more than 2:1 and relying mostly on barbarian mercenaries and barbarian cavalry (plus 4 principes, two archer auxilia, and two general units) for my army, I nevertheless managed by the hair of my teeth to cause a rout.

My merc infantry were reduced to 1/3 strength, my generals were down to 4 and 5 men respectively. My two merc cav units had a total of around 21 men left out of 108. My 320 principes were down to about 150 when they killed the enemy general and started the stampede. Then...

Crash to desktop!



I tried to reload and play on, but I was so disgusted I couldn't stand the thought of it. Would it be that difficult for CA to implement an in-battle save system?

[KiOwA]

It's not so much the technical ability, rather CA do not want gamers to abuse an in-battle savegame function. I sympathize with you, but you must realize that such a savegame function might take much of the challenge out of the battles. Not that the AI is giving much of a challenge at the moment, but that's another story.

[Maltz]

If you look at the bright side, the end battle is going to end up with an inevitable crash for whatever reason, and you happen to overwrite your most recent save game file with that battle save... (maybe this is the dark side... )

[Sin Qua Non]

I feel your pain about CTD during a battle. It's one of the few times the word disgusted is used to full effect. The screen drops black, and the first thing through your mind is how that battle probably isn't going to be replayed the same. To top it all off, the AI seems to have a "random disappointment algorithm" in the code, because every time I have a CTD during a siege defense, I reload the game to try again, and the AI refuses to attack the city again, even though they spent the last 4 turns preparing for it! Weird, huh?

[a_ver_est]

Sometimes I have only 20 free minutes more before go out or something, it's annoying have to stop playing because you know that there are a couple of large battles waiting your end of turn.

[snake0606]

rather CA do not want gamers to abuse an in-battle savegame function.

Why is it CAs concern? If the above is the true reason for not putting in a save ability into the battles then to me that is a BS position on their part. CA should never ever take the position of "but it's for your own good cause we don't trust you".

There should always be a save system for ANYWHERE in the game due to the fact that PC games have a tendency to CRASH at the most inconvenient time. More then once I have slicked a game from my hard drive and broke the CD in half due to one to many CTDs. If I want frustration I either go to work or come to the forums. I don't need or want frustration in a game.

So far this game has not CTD very often and never in a place that would cause me to go temporarly insane and thus break the CD in half. But it could happen.

[Oaty]

Well the bright side of the matter is that battles are'nt as long as MTW. How often do you have more than 1 stack in a battle for RTW

[Sin Qua Non]

Well the bright side of the matter is that battles are'nt as long as MTW. How often do you have more than 1 stack in a battle for RTW

I was just thinking about my last 2+ hour battle in MTW. What was funny was that I was so absorbed in the action that I thought it only lasted 30 minutes.

As for saving during battles themselves, might it be unavailable because of a savegame stability issue? Not that I have any evidence to back this up, I just remember (from many years ago) that the games which allowed saves at any point were often more prone to savegame corruption. This was long ago, and the problem may have been eradicated since then. My brain just happened to retrieve a deeply buried thought about this topic .

[HicRic]

I imagine saving the game in the middle of the battle would be quite difficult-you'd have to record the positions of each man, what he was doing, where in the air projectiles were (imagine saving the exact positions, speed and trajectory of 300 arrows!) , if people were in the middle of an attack round, and so on. Maybe it could be done but it might be a tad hard, or slow, and so on.

Aren't battle maps generated 'on the fly', as well? They'd have to come up with a way to store and re-load the huge area of land visible in the battle.

Like I said..maybe they could do it, but it just wasn't deemed worth the time, when there are better things to be doing.