Pros and cons of killrate modding alternatives

**hrvojej** · 03-22-2005, 04:05

I have changed several things.

I have decreased frequency of attacks, while leaving it higher for phalanx pikes and chariot launching attacks (which makes them more effective than if everything was balanced, and I feel they need to be). This has no effect on charges, but it does in prolonging the ensuing melee. And so far I haven't found the way to decrease the frequency of ranged attacks (stat_fire_delay doesn't work as far as I can tell).

I have decreased lethality for everybody but phalanx pikes. This dulls down the effect of charges a bit, as well as prolonging the ensuing melee. Pikemen however are way more effective than they are if everything was equal. Again, it has no effect on missiles.

I have upped the morale by 3-5 (mostly 4-5, only missiles and placeholders get +3). This gives units more staying power, allows for a bit more tactical thought, and generally feels better. Units don't fight to death more often, only when they're surrounded as usual. It however means that the enemy won't rout as soon as they touch my line, or even before that. And the differential addition means that e.g. archers will still break from cavalry charge, yet they won't do so from a breeze that cavalry causes when they are a mile away. Despite the pitfalls of possibly losing the balance and ratios of morale, I just cannot stand those 15+:1 casualty ratio victories any more, and watch all those beautiful enemy stacks run away before I even managed to get a good look at them.

I have also decreased the movement speeds, and added no horse jumping skeleton file.

All this results in a relatively enjoyable brawls for me on medium/hard. It still isn't quite perfect, but it sure as hell feels much better than before. Maybe dabbling with the defense/armor would make it even better but I don't think I'll be trying because 1) I could again lose the interesting ratios etc. between units, and this time even more seriously than in the case of morale, 2) I don't think it will really change much, and 3) I can't be bothered to edit all of that and test it to satisfaction as well. The only thing I can think of that could really make it better would be having some knowledge about combat calculations (so that I know what I am doing exactly), and even better yet being able to mod all morale modifiers and combat parameters per se.

Unfortunatelly, the end result of it all is that I did all this work only to realize that the loadgame bug makes all my effort quite pointless. Yipee.

**Simetrical** · 03-22-2005, 05:18

Originally Posted by Epistolary Richard

HP - I don't like so much, it leads to soldiers being cut down then standing up again, dusting themselves off and fighting normally.

This happens to all troops. I don't know if the frequency is greater for more HPs. Regardless, wounding is important for realism; more men should die on the second volley than on the first, and this is what increased HP accomplishes. The main problem is that it nerfs elephants, what with the 15-HP cap.

-Simetrical

**lt1956** · 03-22-2005, 07:47

I thought the cap was 29-20 on HP?

Lt

**Louis de la Ferte Ste Colombe** · 03-22-2005, 09:23

I guess I ought to have made it clearer; I'd like to reduce kill rate without affecting too much balance.

It is obvious changing killrate will somehow affect balance; the question is really, what kill rate reduction solution has the least impact on balance?

Red harvest, my experience with lethality is it's not really linear when compared to lenght of fight. Reducing lethality by 20% does not change fight duration by 20%. It looks like it works per plateau, and one plateau might be around 40% reduction....

I guess I got to try a few more things

Thanks for your feedback, does anyone feel like one stat has been overlooked that could possibly affect killrate? Or do we got them all, and just need to find a good one, or a combination of good one?

Louis,

**Kraxis** · 03-22-2005, 18:37

I'm certainly for lethality rather than any of the others.

Even if what Louis is right it is better than the others. Red pretty much said it all. Especially better than Morale and Def ability.
Morale because it seems the penalties for large stacks are significant, but if we get down to individual units duking it out there will be a lot of fights where the loser will fight on until about 95% losses. Not cool.
Def ability of course only works forwards and to the right. So tweaking that will create odd battles where certain units will get crushed while other equal units win out easily.

Armour is my second choice. But since we are not certain how that impacts fatigue (if at all) it can't become my favourite.

**Red Harvest** · 03-22-2005, 19:26

Originally Posted by lt1956

I thought the cap was 29-20 on HP?

Lt

I've see Jerome state it was 15 before (I can't remember where.)

**Red Harvest** · 03-22-2005, 19:37

I haven't tested lethality heavily enough to determine if it is truly linear. But I did test 1 vs 1 melee with 0.5 and 1. I measured how long it took to produce X number of casualties (about 1/4 losses if I recall correctly.) It took almost exactly twice as long with 0.5 as it did with 1. The reason for only using a fractional loss was to minimize the interference of shrinking sample size. When I've gone down to 0.2 battles take much longer and both sides are exhausted.

One other positive aspect of reduced lethality: fatigue. Units begin to tire before they kill. And when they tire, they kill more slowly. At the same time they become much more vulnerable to a fresh unit. In vanilla RTW fatigue isn't a big factor, except in the chase (or on uphill marches.)

**Crandaeolon** · 03-22-2005, 20:10

What about randomness? Does decreasing lethality cause end results to be less random, like increasing defense (and armour) does?

For example, when two units of unmodded Iberian inf clash, the results may differ quite a lot. But when you add armour the results tend to be less lopsided, i.e. the units will stay within a few kills of each other and fight for a long time.

Edit: Gave it a quick test. All methods seem to produce a similar end result; melees last longer and are less random. I guess the side effects determine which method is preferable. Did only a few tests, so these "results" are more like "feelings" than actual usable data.

Decreasing lethality has the side effect of making charges less powerful. Red Harvest stated that lethality has no effect on ranged weapons, so "precursor" weapons (such as pila) and archery should retain their effectiveness.

Increasing armour has the side effect of affecting ranged weapon effectiveness. Armour is also omni-directional; adding lots of armour would probably devalue flank / rear attack bonuses somewhat.

Edit: More precise testing indicates that the influence of armour to fatigue is actually very small or non-existent. That would make it a quite good candidate for lowering kill rates.

Increasing defense skill produces a bit more random results than increasing armour or decreasing lethality. This would seem to suggest that DS is indeed directional at least to some degree. However, in a typical head-on melee, both sides have roughly equal flanking opportunities, which does seem to result in a nice, slow, and fairly predictable result. Flanking charges would be an entirely different story...

**professorspatula** · 03-22-2005, 21:23

The tricky thing with trying to get a good kill rate balance in RTW is that there are two kinds of 'clashes' in any given battle. There's the small skirmish: maybe a couple of infantry units going at it alone; then there's the big melees with several units piling in from all angles.

If you reduce kill rate by too much, those small skirmishes tend to become drawn out tedious battles of attrition. The fact that I had 2 auxiliary units fight for 10 minutes before altering anything but morale highlights this, and adding hitpoints or lowering lethality would make the event comical. But then in the larger clashes where units are fighting on many fronts, without reducing the killrate, entire units can be wiped out in seconds.

Even with lowering lethality and increasing morale, a cavalry charge into the rear or flank of a unit will destroy it fast, as will a bunch of irate axemen or whatever. In RTW it is incredibly easy to flank the enemy, so you end up wiping out your foe pretty quickly. So do you compensate for this and end up with upsetting the balance of the smaller fights or what?

I really think one of the biggest problems with kill rates is something that is difficult to resolve. That is the silly rate that routing units die at. As soon as you rout a unit in close combat, you barely have to do more than just touch them to kill them. Tough elite units crumble like mere peasants and sending in several units to make sure you kill them off becomes a familiar sight. Because of this you try to over-compensate by making sure units don't rout too quick in the first place, even if it upsets the balance. Really CA ought to make killing routing units far more difficult so you are less willing to chase after them, which would also give them a greater chance of reforming and getting back in the fray.

When all is said and done though, I definitely think it's worthwhile tweaking morale and lethality and even movement speed by a bit, just to give a slight improvement over the vanilla battles if nothing else. Hitpoints and extra defensive bonuses are a possibility but are more likely to upset the general balance of things unless more effort is put into tweaking them.