FAQ Message from the Shogun

[Captain Fishpants]

It's fallen to me, as the Shogun's Earthly Representative, to see if members of the .Org are interested in supplying questions to be answered on our weekly FAQ updates. Why me? The Shogun has recently taken a vow which involves him communicating only through clicking noises and waving flags of a colour visible only to bees.

However, levity aside, this is a serious offer: put up your TW questions, and he'll try to get them answered.

The simplest way of organising questions would be for people to add questions to this thread and then for some noble and upstanding individual (such as one of the moderators?) to volunteer for collation and editorial duties. Once a goodly number of questions have been organised and sent over to the Shogun, the answers can begin.

Captain Fishpants/MikeB

[Mongoose]

Hurray!


Q:Are there any plans for making auto resolve sperate from regular difficulty settings?

[BobTheTerrible]

Q: Will there be any additions to the vanilla campaign? i.e. Viking Invasion introduced new units etc, will there be anything of the sort for RTW?

[YAKOBU]

Great news

Question: Will there be further restrictions on creating troops such as the RTR zone of recruitment. I feel it is very unrealistic to take an enemy capital and then start producing high level troops straight away.

Thanks for any reply.

[Mount Suribachi]

[Montgomery Burns] Excellent! [/Montogomery Burns]

1 (a) Will RTW be coming down in price soon? (can't find it anywhere in the UK for less than £25)

1 (b) Is the quoted price at various online retailers for BI of £25 correct?

[sik1977]

1. Will any of the missing features from RTW, such as the Egyptian and Greek Walls (which are partially there in the data files), will be added back (or activated) in the original campaign?

2. (Related question) What improvements, if any, are planned for RTW main campaign, such as additional features and units, bug fixes (such as fixing the huge list of issues and bugs listed in the Ludus Magna Thread - excepting already released info on save/load issue), which will act as an added insentive for buying BI (e.g. VI added the reinforcements to the original campaign as well and was the main reason, for me, to get VI)?

3. Are there any plans or possibilities for adding a 'Stats Sheet' or something similar which can keep a track of total losses inflicted and incurred during the length of a given campaign, as well as other interesting statistics, such as the most successful General, Most kills by a Unit, Kill-to-loss ratios, etc. (IMO, it is a must for a serious strategy game)?

4. Will diplomacy in RTW and BI be improved, such that there are more diplomacy options, requests, responses, etc., available to factions (also please comment on any general improvement in AI's handling of dipomacy)?

5. I understand that for BI rebel uprisings will be changed to civil-wars like MTW, but what about RTW and its post patch 1.2 rebel brigands nuisance (i.e., too many rebels popping up every turn, which are no more then a nuisance and actually detract from actual and meaningful gameplay, as getting rid of them becomes a chore not a challenge), will it be improved or an option (perhaps a modable option) to exclude/reduce rebel brigands uprisings?

Thank you.

[Duke John]

Q: Will AI missile troops use their missiles on full range or at 2/3 range as in R:TW (1.1/1.2)?

Q: Will AI missile troops still charge my lines before their fellow melee infantry as opposed to actually using their missile weapons?

Q: Will AI generals continue to charge suicidely into my lines while the AI infantry tries to catch up?

Q: Are attacking AI infantry capable of launching a single coordinated attack, instead of feeding me units piecemeal?

Q: Are AI cavalry still coded to immediately charge the players missile troops?

If you reduce the above questions to: Has the AI been improved? Then don't bother asking or answering and I won't bother buying BI.

Currently the AI cavalry charges my missile troops but are so outnumbered that they flee immediately after a short melee.
the AI missile troops either charge or shoot at 2/3 range allowing me either easily crush them easily in melee or crush them in a missile war as I start shooting at full range.
Then the AI infantry comes, one unit at a time, which are again outnumbered and thus flee after a short melee.
I am capable of winning battles without doing a single thing, simply because the AI is incapable of attacking coordinated.

[ChaosLord]

Q: Will any of the hardcoded modding limits (such as faction limit) be removed in BI or future expansions?

Q: Has granting units titles and that sort of thing been considered again for BI or future expansions(the extra command stars/management could really helpt he AI as well as creating more generals to lead armies)?

Q: Is there any plans for a built-in mod management function with BI or future expansions?(Switching/unistalling mods and the like)

I could probably go on for awhile, so i'll stop now. I also think its great CA is taking an active interest in the .ORG again.

[CMcMahon]

Q: What's the deal with not being to kill wardogs/hounds after their handlers have been killed? Can that be fixed?

[Divinus Arma]

Q: What's the deal with not being to kill wardogs/hounds after their handlers have been killed? Can that be fixed?

This is a feature, not a bug. If someone kills you, does your pet die?

[Mikeus Caesar]

Hurrah! Nice to see CA taking interest in us again! we may be the Unofficial Total War site, but you still care! Anyways:

Q. Will we finally be able to merge Admirals? It is rather annoying, when you can merge all sorts of things together on land, but if an Admiral has just one star and he commands just one ship, and you want to put him in another navy, it's rather annoying.

Q. Will there be fantasy units? I can accpet a few fantasy units, but the amount that were in RTW was ridiculous. And will factions be historically accurate? After all, we've all come to love Egypt for it's wonderful accuracy...

Q. Will there be less rebellions? After all, it is impossible to control a city once it reaches 30000+, which is a tad unrealistic, considering real-life Rome had 1,000,000+ and they didn't decide to start rebelling.

Q. On the subject of rebellions, will they be more realistic? After all, i don't think your wonderful army of Spartan Hoplites and Cretan Archers would be kicked out of a city by a bunch of peasants would they? They'd make a stand in the city center, with all the marauding peasants trying to kill them and sack the Government buildings.

[Red Harvest]

This is a feature, not a bug. If someone kills you, does your pet die?

Yes, but if the owner's dog is in my yard chasing my cat, I target the dog and make short work of it. In RTW I don't have that option. There is the rub.

[Divinus Arma]

Will CA do a TW on the imperial gunpowder era? Please. Colonisation. Please. World map. Please.

[player1]

Hurray!


Q:Are there any plans for making auto resolve sperate from regular difficulty settings?

To expand on this question:

Or better yet, why is currently autoresolve difficult tied to campaign difficuty?

It gives weird results. For example good Civ3 player wants to play RTW, and gets VH campaign (so AI is more developed) and Easy battles (since he doesn't play RTS).

Then to his horror, every autoresolved battles is losed badly, while doing same battle manaly gives easy wins, effectively inreasing micromanagemnt, since such player is forced to play every battle manualy, even against small patch of barbarians.

Using Battle Diff for autocalc instead seems more resonable, since if AI gets bonus in battle, it should in autoresolve too.
Doesn't it?

Althouhg having it as seperate slider could be good option too if you ask me (BI request).

[Uesugi Kenshin]

Q: Will BI allow mods to add more factions to vanilla RTW or just another campaign similar to what RTR did?

Q: How will religion and loyalty be represented in BI? It has been mentioned that they will be included, but will they be included a la MTW or in a new way?

[Little Legioner]

Yay! That's it What a great news! Those are my questions!

They have discussed (133 replies 3,253 views - 06-24-05- PM 21.44) on my own created "Bad news from CA about Battles" topic.
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...t=49485&page=1

- - -

Q. Will there be any improvement for battlespeed? Do you think lowering the speed of kill rate?

Q. Will there be an option for battlefields? Big / huge or or your preferred term for usage? or simply you'll make them big? (please do not dig my question)

Q. What do you think about to do for tightening the tactical deepness of the R: TW BI besides swimmable units and night battles?

Q. Will there be any improvement on geography in the game? River crossings, cliffs or valleys?

Q. Vanilla R: TW and BI will use the same 3D campaign map? or Will you create another map for the expansion... ( I preferred the same because any improvemets on map directly affects vanilla R: TW too)

Te Salutare
LL

[Conqueror]

Q: In RTW 1.2, attacking a faction that is allied to your protectorate will cause the protectorate to renounce it's status as a protectorate. Is this intentional? Could it be changed?

[Myrddraal]

My first question (and my second actually), not surprisingly, is based around modding and is quite important to me and a hell of a lot of modders:

1. Will we be able to add more factions (as in VI)?

2. Will you be releasing your campaign map editor? (We know you have one)

[IceTorque]

Q. Is the RTW engine good for more than two games or should we expect a long wait between a new game as in MTW to RTW.

[Epistolary Richard]

It's fallen to me, as the Shogun's Earthly Representative, to see if members of the .Org are interested in supplying questions to be answered on our weekly FAQ updates.

Hmmm... I think you can probably take that as a given.

You may have seen some of these before, but the thread on twc seems to have gotten a little sidetracked:


Question
Will you be releasing a list of the script and console commands that function with RTW and RTW:BI along with the parameters that they use? If not, what's your reason for not doing so?


Question
MikeB mentioned an auto-run feature that can be used to run a game without player intervention. This would be very useful for mod testing. Is there any way we can activate it now? If not, will we be able to in the future?


Question
There's a mention in the documentation of a file called available_ui_element_ids.txt
Can we please have a copy of it?

Question
I understand that you have been asked about whether the save/load prohibition could be lifted from campaign scripts - that is, a script activated from within the descr_strat file and you said it was not possible. That is not a problem for us as we now use show_me scripts activated through the advisor which do allow loading & saving while they're running and we have written scripts that work effectively when they are manually activated after a game has been reloaded. The difficulty we face is that there is no way of automatically running these show_me scripts (that we call background scripts) when the game is reloaded. Is there anything that can be done to help us?

If nothing can be done to auto-activate them could Guy please add another event called Reload that would activate when a game was loaded? Then at least we could trigger the advisor consistently at game start so that the player would always be reminded to reactivate the script.

[Catiline]

I'm notnoble, and by the end of the evening will not be upstanding with a bit of luck. I'll do my best to collate the questions however. What's the deadline?

[Epistolary Richard]

There's no deadline, just whenever there's a worthwhile number. Similar threads on other sites weed out the questions that have already been asked and answered in previous instalments of the FAQ.

[mfberg]

Will there be a battle speed bar (a la MTW) or just the current three speeds?
Will we still be able to stack multiple units into the same area to get the dreaded stack bonus or will there be a limit or limiting factor to the number of units/men in one area?
Will there be battle replays/campaign reviews?

mfberg

[Princeps]

I wish a medium (30-35 cities) campaign for the old imperial campaign. The short campaign (15 cities) is too short and the long campaign (50 cities) is too long.

[Refnulf von Holland]

Hi guys, I have a few questions I hope that they have not been asked yet.

Q. Has the square beach effect that started poping up in the 1.2 patch been improved or fixed in BI expansion?

Q. There are some new features that appear in the Demo, the bubbles when a unit swims and a sparkle effect that appears on a unit when it levels up in valor. Will there be a option to disable these features?

Q. Will there ever be blood in a totalwar game, or a least the ability for the mods to add it fully.

Thanks guys

[Shaun]

Q- i heard that putting the right files in to the campaign folder adds a new campaign, can you tell me more please?

[SomeNick]

Haven't had time to read all the posts but here's my 2c worth. Q's and Critiques :)

Love the game btw :)

Q1. Will there be some sort of modification to the time it takes for units to reassume new orders? I lose way too much cavalry to phalanxes :(

Q2. The mouse speed in the game should have some sort of option to modify it in game menu. I've been playing RTW for 6 months with a very poor mouse speed :O I have a good pc but...

Q3. A map editor like in MTW ? That'd be fun :)

Q4. Some sort of option on multiplayer server to restrict the spamming of cavalry etc. Maybe an optional setting of a maximum for unit type and for allowing/disallowing seige weapons that could be viewed in the game server list. Bet a lot more would play then.

Q5. I saw on the official Total War site new units being offered for download. However there is only one and can't find any others released if any. Is there a link to these units? The spartan one looks very cool btw :)

Q6. Might sound a bit trivial but could there be some way of altering the colour scheme of the standard factions. Parthian pink is a bit jaded. heh. It would make the battles a lot more realistic looking too. I mean this as an option in the game. I know a mod could do it, but I'm just pointing it out as a purchaser of 2 games in Total War series, who has trouble with mods. (fantastic as they are)

Q7. I know there was a post on the shogun forum about flame affecting terrain costing to much pc resources but could it be added as an option in game menu? It'd be kinda cool seeing a forest alight with infantry getting trapped.

Q8. Could there be a custom faction option where u can create ur own army types from the ones available for fun.

That's it for now. Thanks for reading. Once again some may seem trivial but I haven't had the time to read the other posts so sorry for double posting etc.

I'll read the rest later and maybe post a few more q's, critiques and suggestions in 1 more post.

Brother Victor!

[Epistolary Richard]

Okay, this is from the last FAQ:

Q: The one faction I'm most excited about in the demo is supposed to be unplayable. I was so looking forward to fighting off the saxons and saving the native britains from thier enventual absorbtion by the saxons. Will the Romano-British be playable as easily as the unplayable factions in the RTW?

A: We did debate about making them a playable faction, but they could only be said to exist from around 410AD (when the Emperor Honorius sent them a "Dear Brits... don't bother me... yours sincerely..." letter when they asked for help). With a starting date of 363 for the campaign we would have been pushed to include them so early - and it would have weakened the Western Romans inappropriately. As the Romano-British are an emerging faction (controlled by code to emerge when a certain set of conditions has been met), its not simply a case of making them playable in the same way that you would a faction in RTW. In the not-too-distant future we plan to make a Romano-British save game available for download.

Question
This code of which you speak (the code that controls the emergence of the Romano-British and other emergent factions) will this be editable or will it be hard-coded ?