Initial Patch Thoughts

[Red Harvest]

Aetius,

I think the quick fighting is due mostly to low morale on the units. The combat cycle itself seems to be much longer than it was in MTW. CA seems to want a large range on morale from very low to very high in order to leave lots of room in the system for upgraded units, battlefield upgrades and effect of the general's command stars. You could raise morale on the units by modding the unit descr file, and I think that would make the fighting last longer especially with large unit size rather than normal unit size. We've been asking for a morale slider or at least a 4 or 5 step selectable level in the options for 4 years now, yet the game, now in its 5th incarnation, still only has a morale on/off option. We are up against a philosophical difference of opion regarding more options in the game settings with CA. Their objection is that too many options would make the game overly complex for the average gamer.

If CA would explain what morale does in RTW it would help. If morale increases both defensive skill and attack then it should offset in melee. If however, it just increases attack, then that would produce faster kills. Increasing combat speed alone (or effectiveness of strikes) would tend to produce faster kills. One thing I notice is that custom battles tend to be slower than in the campaign. So I wonder if it is because of the lack of an experienced or otherwise pumped up general to influence morale. And I don't know how any of the morale boosts work for generals being near (range based?)

My suspicion is that CA set the increment too high for attack. For example, if you set missile attack to "1" it will still kill at a substantial rate at full range vs. unarmoured opponents. And that is the absolute lowest you can go with the value (anything less is treated as zero, no missiles available.) To my way of thinking the absolute worst missile units should be no worse than flies at long range. Yet we have archers built with 14 missile attack and with upgrades and experience they can easily hit 18 to 20. I suspect the same sort of problem is happening with combat values.

[Nelson]

Something cool:
During a battle near Caralis I noticed that I could see ships sitting in the water where the AI fleet was. And all the extra trees and such visible in the distance is a nice touch. I am looking forward to fighting near wonders or volcanoes (especially during an eruption.)

I happen to control six of the wonders in my current Seleucid campaign. They can be seen at anytime on the battle map,f rom a distance at least, by zooming in on the nearby cities. From Halicarnasus you can see two of them well and a third far off on the north west horizon! The lighthouse looks great from Alexandria.

[Ar7]

Does anyone know what this means from the patch readme:

Bribing settlements and characters is now a transgression.

So what, do we get penalized for doing that now?

I believe it means that when you bribe an army then it is treated as declearing a war on the country that previously owned the army.

[Nigel]

Rosacrux redux,

I think the quick fighting is due mostly to low morale on the units. The combat cycle itself seems to be much longer than it was in MTW. CA seems to want a large range on morale from very low to very high in order to leave lots of room in the system for upgraded units, battlefield upgrades and effect of the general's command stars. You could raise morale on the units by modding the unit descr file, and I think that would make the fighting last longer especially with large unit size rather than normal unit size. We've been asking for a morale slider or at least a 4 or 5 step selectable level in the options for 4 years now, yet the game, now in its 5th incarnation, still only has a morale on/off option. We are up against a philosophical difference of opion regarding more options in the game settings with CA. Their objection is that too many options would make the game overly complex for the average gamer.

Just wondering if having "standard options" and "advanced options" could be the solution - same as many other programs have standard setting for people who "just want to get on with it" and an advanced setting for those "expert users" who want/can spend time tweaking and optimising their personal settings.

Just a thought
Nigel

[CBR]

IIRC the benefit from a general goes only to added attack. So custom battles with no generals would mean fighting lasts longer as units dont have so high attack values.


CBR

[screwtype]

Does anyone know what this means from the patch readme:

Bribing settlements and characters is now a transgression.

So what, do we get penalized for doing that now?

I think "transgression" means the faction will declare war on you if you do either of those things.

[Colovion]

A couple other things:

1. the computer AI for diplomacy + campaign map seems much improved - the Gauls were messing with me for a bit so I took one of their cities and they laid back for a while and didn't even put an army into the field but hid in their settlements near me. I brought my largest army yet assembled to take down their settlement and was caught off gaurd by two Gaulish armies converging on my spot to intercept me before I reached the city - very cool. Also, Carthage is doing poorly... which I'm guessing because I took over their settlement on Sardinia and that gave the Scipii the edge on Sicily. A few turns later Carthage sent a diplomat up to talk to me in Sardinia. They wanted trade rights and a ceasefire - I counter offered that they would ALSO pay me 2000 or I would attack... They accepted! I was so suprised that threatening attack on a weaker faction actuallly gave me a believable response.

2. The battles turn into meat grinders. On battles where the enemy routs first they're prettymuch all dead; I suppose that is realistic as the side that routed first would get the majority of the casualties, but I guess it's the kill speeds which throw me off. Anyway one thing that was awesome to see last night was the Gauls had their fancy Swordsmen put on the front of their troupe as they barrelled into my Hastati. We clashed and fought for a bit - both sides piling soldiers on their side - then once they stared actually fighting I heard the enemy enable the "Warcry" feature and WOW! they started cutting their way through my guys like nothing! It was as it should have been from the beginning.... kinda.

[Red Harvest]

Carthage is making lots of useless town militia in their stacks...and Numidia is making lots of javelinemen rather than cavalry. Carthage really takes it in the shorts with respect to infantry because the next level up is Iberian infantry (7 attack, 8 defense, 4 morale) at which point Rome has hastati (7 attack, 14 defense, 6 morale.) They will get absolutely slaughtered early in the game in autocalc. Then it is libyan spears vs. principes. I think I'm going to have to mod Carthages secondary cities with better barracks so that they at least can build low level Iberian infantry in a few places, rather than hordes of useless militia. Also, the Iberian stats deserve some slight adjustment--they are being short changed relative to hastati with respect to armour and shield when you compare graphics. (Or consider their armour vs. the desert axemen.)

[GFX707]

Personally I'm glad they didn't change the kill speed. If you want the battles to last longer bring more men to the grinder...

Sorry, that comment was just stupid.

[Red Harvest]

IIRC the benefit from a general goes only to added attack. So custom battles with no generals would mean fighting lasts longer as units dont have so high attack values.


CBR

That would fit. And supposedly CA has VH adding only to AI attack. So in combination we have extremely high kill rates in the campaign. If only they had granted split the bonus between offense and defense...as in previous TW games.

It is ironic that those of us who most want a tougher game and better AI also are the ones who most dislike the killing speed of the vanilla game. So we get double whammied.

[Ar7]

I think general's stars added to attack, defence and moral, not just the attack.

[Bob the Insane]

I think "transgression" means the faction will declare war on you if you do either of those things.

A transgression is a basically carrying out a diplomatic no-no and getting caught at it...

Stomping your troops around other nations lands can do it, dogdy diplomatic deals can do it and now bribing does it...

Basically it sends the other faction's (and possibly their allies) opinion of you down the scale...

So bribe enough of a factions troops and not only will you rapidly run out of cash now you will also actually really piss them off... (no allying with someone and then slyly bribing their army away to nothing with no consiquences...

My only problem with the changes to bribing is that it make picking up those rebel generals that turn up not really worth the money...

Additionally - I can't believe no one else has mentioned the minimal UI... Full Screen RTW... It is fantastic...

[Old Celt]

It says right in the manual that generals add to your troops morale and detract slightly from the enemy. I know from many hundreds of battles that having any general is better than a captain led army, and morale is much better with a general.

[CBR]

Yes morale too sorry.Was just thinking about combat power only. By adding to attack only it changes combat speed compared to MTW as generals added to both attack and defense.

edit: Im pretty sure Jerome mentioned it in a post that it was attack only and nothing extra on defense.

CBR

[Spino]

A list of issues/items that really make me take notice...

THE GOOD:

- Friendly Fire Fixed - Missile troops are much more careful with their targeting and as a result there are far fewer FF casualties than before! Great!

- Missile units - Missile troops now take less time to prepare and fire their missiles. This is especially noticeable with javelin/pilum equipped units who can now get off a round in the face of an advancing/charging enemy.

- No more weapon switch animation 'pause' for pilum equipped units when ordered to attack. This is GREAT! I noticed this in a few custom battle last night. Sent an early Legionary Cohort which had expended all its pilae earlier on in the battle to take care of an advancing Seleucid Pikemen unit, they charged as soon as I gave the order.

- Phalanx units - Aside from their increased turning efficiency and the elimination of the phalanx shuffle I could swear that units in phalanx formation march faster now. Phalanx units are much more dangerous in 1.2.

- Shipbuilding Fetish Cured - The strategic AI now builds far fewer ships, the result of which is the presence of healthier army stacks roaming the map in the early game. Personally I'd prefer it if even fewer ships were built by the not-so-wealthy factions but it seems to ok so far.

- Tactical AI - Haven't played enough to really get a good idea of just how much it has improved but it does seem a tad wiser in some areas. I could swear enemy generals aren't as suicidal and enemy cavalry in general seems to take greater care so as to not frontally engage your front line (especially if they're spear equipped units). I've seen heavy cav chase my skirmishers running back behind my pike units only to stop and head back to the flanks! Really good news is enemy AI armies keep a respectable distance from city walls when fighting sally battles!

THE BAD:

- Minimal UI option is good... and bad. The only reason it's bad because now the Orders and Formation buttons are at the top which means unless you know all the keyboard shortcuts your eyes and your mouse has to travel farther to see what you're doing and get things done and that means longer delays in battle. I would have preferred it if the orders/formation buttons were stacked directly on top of the single row of unit cards at the bottom. Not a big deal though. I'm sure it won't be long before I memorize all the hotkeys and enjoy the less restricted view.

- Elephant units are still way overpowered.

- Roman cavalry is still overpowered, especially the Marian reform era medium and heavy units which are HUGELY overpowered!

- Insufficient consolidation of AI army stacks on the strategic map. I think CA improved on this but I don't think it was enough. The same kind of consolidation tweaks that were applied to AI fleet behavior should be applied to army AI behavior. As a general but not all encompassing rule army stacks should instinctively seek to combine with others in the immediate vicinity whenever possible.

THE UGLY:

- Unit cards still do not auto sort by type and experience on the strategic map. The haphazard stacking of unit cards makes armies look messy. How difficult would it have been to incorporate an auto-sort routine?

- The tactical AI still needs schoolin' - It's still pretty bad at handling Roman legions and still loves to break up an imposing wall of pikes. For whatever reason the tactical likes to put its less effective Auxiliary Infantry in the front row instead of on the flanks or in the rear! Part of the problem is the AI's reliance on the the multi-row formation for Roman armies. If it would only spread the line out into one or two rows it would have a much better chance of overlapping and outflanking your line.

- The tactical AI can still be too reluctant to commit fully when attacking and is a tad too passive when defending with an attack oriented army (read 'european barbarian'). Gauls, Britons, Germans, Dacians, Thracians are laden with impetuous, high attack/high charge, low defense units and to see them stand around getting impaled by arrows or javelins and waiting for your units to engage them can be frustrating. The worst thing the AI can do with units like those is sit back and play defense, especially on relatively level ground!

- Phalanx units still break formation and give chase to skirmishers and cavalry units... in phalanx formation!

- Marian Reforms date trigger - Well we now have a 'never before' date for the reforms. That's good.... then again maybe not. According to Obake Date at the Com...

...the trigger for the Marian event is the building of an Imperial Palace in Italy. My take on that is that it must be on the penninsula, and not just by a Roman faction. In other words, that Imperial Palace MUST be built in one of the STARTING Roman provinces.

In addition there IS a date trigger that has been added to the Marian event. The Reforms of Marius now should not occur any EARLIER than 220BC. So even if you are able to build an Imperial Palace in Tarentum by 250BC, you've still got another 60 turns to wait before you can start using Legionaries.

My personal preference was to have the Reforms happen no earlier than 150BC to keep it more in line with historical reality, but I got blatantly ignored on that one!

220 B.C.?!? Who's bright idea was it to use such an early trigger date? Modding alone can prolong the Marian reforms for some time simply by requiring the presence of additional buildings before an Imperial Palace can be built! What a terrible decision!

[Jace11]

Grey squares around coastlines....

Yuck, they look horrific, how did they miss this. Would it have been so hard to test the patch before releasing it?

A temporary work around is possible by moving settlements away from coastlines e.g Lilybaeum > 1 pixel on regions.tga in Base folder, but you will need to move occupying forces in desc_strat also...

Pretty quick to do, but there are a lot of settlements affected by this, though the real problem would probably be an easy fix in adjusting tile size or layer order etc, however a mini patch for that would probably take CA another 6 months :)

Is this fault ubiquitous or are somepeople not seeing it, in which case a graphic setting moght solve it...

[Spino]

Carthage is making lots of useless town militia in their stacks...and Numidia is making lots of javelinemen rather than cavalry. Carthage really takes it in the shorts with respect to infantry because the next level up is Iberian infantry (7 attack, 8 defense, 4 morale) at which point Rome has hastati (7 attack, 14 defense, 6 morale.) They will get absolutely slaughtered early in the game in autocalc. Then it is libyan spears vs. principes. I think I'm going to have to mod Carthages secondary cities with better barracks so that they at least can build low level Iberian infantry in a few places, rather than hordes of useless militia. Also, the Iberian stats deserve some slight adjustment--they are being short changed relative to hastati with respect to armour and shield when you compare graphics. (Or consider their armour vs. the desert axemen.)

Is this just for one campaign or have you noticed this in a few different campaigns? Call me crazy but perhaps the AI is spending most of its money on improvements and whatever's left over on whatever infantry units it can afford for as many cities as it owns? I recall seeing a similar situation in a few modded campaigns with the 1.1 patch; the occasional Brutii army comprised almost entirely of Velites or Light Auxilia or Macedonian armies comprised almost entirely of Lancers. Other than to unlock the other factions I haven't explored the descr_strat.txt file yet so I couldn't tell you what AI variables are affecting Carthage's build & recruiting queues. Keep in mind these definitions...

balanced - biasses towards growth, taxable income, trade level bonusses (roads), walls and xp bonus buildings
religious - biasses towards growth, loyalty, taxable income, farming, walls and law
trader - biasses towards growth, trade level, trade base, weapon upgrades, games, races and xp bonus buildings
comfortable - biasses towards growth, farming, games, races, xp bonus and happiness
bureaucrat - biasses towards taxable income, growth, pop health, trade, walls, improved bodyguards and law
craftsman - biasses towards walls, races, taxable income, weapon upgrades, xp bonusses, mines, health and growth
sailor - biasses towards sea trade, taxable income, walls, growth, trade fortified - biasses towards walls, taxable income, growth, loyalty, defenses, bodyguards and law

These are then combined with a troop production personality, as follows:

smith - exactly level
mao - biased towards mass troops, light infantry
genghis - biased towards missile cavalry and light cavalry
stalin - biased towards heavy infantry, mass troops and artillery
napoleon - biased towards a mix of light and heavy infantry, light cavalry henry - biased towards heavy and light cavalry, missile infantry
caesar - biased towards heavy infantry, light cavalry, siege artillery

[The_Mark]

So... We all know that AI gets humongous bonuses to attack and defence on VH. Not anymore. I have tried fighting 1v1 with triarii against AI on VH, won three times in a row. Apparently AI is only smarter on harder difficulty levels, but without bonuses. At last..

[Wishazu]

no one seems to have mentioned multiplay so i`ll have a go. i never had any problems with multiplay before but now its just shit im afraid. the new chat options all seem shagged, if i host a game and decide to cancel i get kicked from the lobby by gamespy, if i host a game and we all load up i get dropped by gamespy again and so the other players are all left in limbo wondering what the hell has happened to me. this has happened to everyone in my clan by the way, we havnt managed to play a single multiplayer battle since downloading the patch. another chat thing is when i log off and log back on if i host a game nobody can see what im trying to say, especially the idiots who join a 2v2 ant cant see me yelling at them to switch their team number to the same as their prospective allies!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[The_Emperor]

I happen to control six of the wonders in my current Seleucid campaign. They can be seen at anytime on the battle map,f rom a distance at least, by zooming in on the nearby cities. From Halicarnasus you can see two of them well and a third far off on the north west horizon! The lighthouse looks great from Alexandria.

I had a battle in Rhodes today and I could see the top of the Halicanasus wonder from the other side of the water...

I didn't see the colossus, but I was at the wrong end of the island with a hill blocking any possible view.

Oh yeah Minimal UI rules... Suddenly everything is back to classic TW, with the F keys to hide the icons!!

Excellent job on that CA!!

[Colovion]

Still problem:

Enemy STILL doesn't have Generals in their big stacks! They also still have many small bands of troops wandering around (not as much, granted, but they're still there). I have so far fought 3 full stacks of Gauls invading into the Italian Penninsula that were leaderless! This wouldn't be such a bad thing if my spies hadn't noticed that there are settlements and stacks of units with simply the General and maybe one or two other units. This is unacceptable, I thought it was one of the main things on the list...

>:(

[GeWee]

Personally I'm glad they didn't change the kill speed. If you want the battles to last longer bring more men to the grinder...

Sorry, that comment was just stupid.

Wouldn't it be better to explain why you think it's stupid instead of making a stupid comment of your own?

[Colovion]

Oh I guess I should say the things I noticed while playing today that were pretty cool:

1. Saw my first storm over Southern Italy :D

2. The Computer on the Strat map seems to be much more intelligent as in knowing when you're outclassed by other factions; they go and find allies to repell invaders etc. Such as when the Brutii usually walk all over Greek Cities - this time those Greeks allied with the Macedonians and now the Brutii have been steadily halted in expanding that way - they've had to head a little north and are now pestered by the Gauls and Dacia while Greece and Macedon build up their strength (Greece also found and allied with Egypt). Remember how quickly the Seleucids would get knocked out? At the moment they're the richest faction!

3. Numidia sent an expiditionary force from Iberia all the way into Northern Italy, where I setup some trade rights and an Alliance with them, before they kept heading North East and I don't know what they're doing now - some strange family member that was...

[Colovion]

Wouldn't it be better to explain why you think it's stupid instead of making a stupid comment of your own?

If you don't know the reason for it being an ignorant comment then there's more problems here than your comment being overused and thoroughly disproved.

[GeWee]

If you don't know the reason for it being an ignorant comment then there's more problems here than your comment being overused and thoroughly disproved.

There are more problems? Like what?
Besides, feel free to quote the post where my comment is "disproved". One would think you'd be hard pressed to "disprove" someone's *opinions* but maybe that's just me...

[Colovion]

Ok let's look at the facts here - obviously bringing more men to a battle will extend the fight... kinda. The problem is that I have yet to see a battle take place that had any kind of tactics in it. Basically both sides are rushed at eachother, a bunch of death takes place in less than ten seconds and the other side is running for the hills. The chain rout thing is a double-edged sword. For one it is nice ot see that units will rout when the rest of their army has decided it's a worthless cause - but it makes for extremely short and boring battles. Once you have superior forces, the enemy can't beat you. All you need to do is pinpoint a weakness in their line - send your elite troops there and suddenly you've won the battle. If there was more time the teh enemy AI to show that they can do more than rush at your troops, then perhaps the enhancements CA says they've made to the Battlefield AI would show through.

It doesn't matter a whit if you have more troops on the field, as battles with 200 men end 3 seconds after initial melee begins, and battles with full stacks end with 10 seconds into melee. More time? Yes. But enough time? Not in the slightest. Your comment doesn't address the problem, it just tells us something we already know. The 10 seconds is not enough time to fight a satisfying battle.

Honestly, I can't see why anyone would enjoy the way battles are currently in vanilla RTW, but if you do that's great.

[GeWee]

I do enjoy them. I'd enjoy them more if it was possible to fight 50,000 vs 50,000 battles that would last half an hour but until we have computers capable of that I'll settle for what I have. IMO it's better to have realistic kill speeds than to nerf them to simulate that each unit is 10 times larger than it is...

[Sheep]

220 B.C.?!? Who's bright idea was it to use such an early trigger date? Modding alone can prolong the Marian reforms for some time simply by requiring the presence of additional buildings before an Imperial Palace can be built! What a terrible decision!

Probably someone who realized that a full 75% of the people who play this game don't care (or even know) about historical accuracy and just want to build the best units they can and romp all over the Mediterranean.

If you are so concerned about historical accuracy AND you think it's so easy to mod... then do it!

[Quillan]

Not intending to hijack the thread here, but how many of your games have gone past 150 BC? Anyone? Rarely do mine make it that far. I think 220 BC is still a bit early, but I think 150 will result in many campaigns finishing before the reforms. I haven't had time to play with it yet, but that might wind up being better. We'll see.

[BDC]

I saw a flash flood!