RTW AI same as MTW AI

[ToranagaSama]

Is everyone paying attention to Simon?

You've GOT to play with RULES!

[econ21]

Is everyone paying attention to Simon?

You've GOT to play with RULES!

Not sure if you are pulling my leg, but here are the house rules I've found make RTR 6.0 fun. Something similar might work for vanilla, but you are short of allies. This is a post I just made on the Rome Total Realism forum:

I had the problem of zero challenge in my first RTR v6.0 Roman campaign. I think identified two problems:
(a) missiles just cut down unarmoured troops (most of your early neighbours). 3 funditores in a stack will tend to kill around 300 enemy per battle and ruin the enemies morale in the process.
(b) Roman infantry vastly outclass their neighbours. Just compare principes (let alone triari) to Gauls or Greeks. The defence stat is the killer - they just don't die.

However, reading Adrian Goldsworthy's book "In the name of Rome" gave me the idea of some house rules that would be historical and make the game more challenging.
(1) Only half your army (stack) can be Roman. The others should be Italian allies if in Italy or Gauls, if in Gaul. (I have not made enough progress in Greece, Africa or Asia to know if the Romans get any AoR troops there). For Italians, I would go for proportions: 1 skirmisher-1 sword - 1 spear; for Gauls, 1 warband - 1 sword - 1 auxiliary.
(2) Your Roman half of the army (stack) should be two "legions", in the historical proportion - 2 velites, 2 hastati, 2 principes and 1 triarii. I deploy them in the manipular formation for fun - it's actually rather useful for its flexibility.
(3) You can have only two cavalry per stack and one slinger or archer (when I get to Asia, I stretch to 1 of each).
(4) You can have only two mercs per stack and mercs cannot be used to garrison towns.
(5) Never exterminate a city population.

The above house rules make a really challenging game.

The Gauls put up a fight but are eminently beatable.

I kicked the Greeks out of Italy easily, but now they are back having taken Illyria and have many many full stacks of experienced decent troops. I lose 200+ men per battle to them and after a couple of battle, my army is rather weak to fight again.

The Seleucids were getting close to 40 provinces so I launched an invasion of Asia. They are very strong - multiple full stacks like the Greeks but better troops (love those 2HP units). Progress is particularly slow because the towns you capture are big, of alien culture and far from home.

Its around 244BC, I have around 30 provinces but its still one of the most challenging TW games I've ever played.

[Feanaro]

But the first two rows wouldn't be able to see either! They are standing right behind a bunch of spearmen yet there is no accuracy penality for them.

I am not totally sure but I believe archers behind a unit(if they are not on an elevated position) do get a penalty to their accuracy. It always seems that way to me.

[Puzz3D]

I am not totally sure but I believe archers behind a unit(if they are not on an elevated position) do get a penalty to their accuracy. It always seems that way to me.

CBR and I tested this in MTW/VI, and the results were inconsistent. Sometimes archers which had a friendly unit standing in front of them killed 40% less of the target unit, but at other times they killed just as much as an unobstructed archer did. It was unclear iin these tests what condition was turning this 40% effect on an off. The test was archers in 4 ranks on flat ground firing at spearmen in 5 ranks who were exactly 2 tiles away. We saw the 40% reduction in kills in two tests, each using 8 archers, when friendly spearman in 5 ranks were placed a distance of about 5 ranks in front of 4 of the archer units. We didn't see any difference in kills in two other runs. So, it seems to be an on/off effect, and we don't fully understand what triggers it.

[ToranagaSama]

No, I'm not pulling your leg, those are a VERY nice rules! If you recall, in the MTW days, I authored a set of rules I called "the HARDCORE RULES". I always play with them and was in the process of incorporating them to RTW, when I just lost interest in RTW.

(1) Only half your army (stack) can be Roman. The others should be Italian allies if in Italy or Gauls, if in Gaul. (I have not made enough progress in Greece, Africa or Asia to know if the Romans get any AoR troops there). For Italians, I would go for proportions: 1 skirmisher-1 sword - 1 spear; for Gauls, 1 warband - 1 sword - 1 auxiliary.
(2) Your Roman half of the army (stack) should be two "legions", in the historical proportion - 2 velites, 2 hastati, 2 principes and 1 triarii. I deploy them in the manipular formation for fun - it's actually rather useful for its flexibility.
(3) You can have only two cavalry per stack and one slinger or archer (when I get to Asia, I stretch to 1 of each).
(4) You can have only two mercs per stack and mercs cannot be used to garrison towns.
(5) Never exterminate a city population.

I like very much! *My* rules pretty much got me to 2 and 3, and I never use Mercs as a rule of thumb, as I think it Cheesy to *buy* your way out of trouble. (1) is really interesting, as it never occurred to me. I would usually *fill* with Hasti, but your view is BETTER! When I decide to return to RTW, probably to try out the EB mod, I'll incorporate (1). Right! Extermination shouldn't be used to bolster the Treasury, not to mention that Romans weren't quite Mongols!

What's your basis for (5)? History? I think the penalty for Extermination is a good one. If a player plays with some economic restrait, the Extermination could be rather costly, as one waits and waits for the Population to grow so you can upgrade and build *good* buildings, etc. With some cities, *Order* might require Extermination, but you pay the penalty.

[antisocialmunky]

@antisocialmunky

Just read your sig:


Who is the author of the quote? Sounds like Sun Tzu.

I love it, that's precisely the way I approach the Campaign.

Well, that's actually is one of my quotes. I know for a fact that people have stated that in so many words though.

[Deus ret.]

What's your basis for (5)? History? I think the penalty for Extermination is a good one. If a player plays with some economic restrait, the Extermination could be rather costly, as one waits and waits for the Population to grow so you can upgrade and build *good* buildings, etc. With some cities, *Order* might require Extermination, but you pay the penalty.

I'm not sure about Simon but if he decides so on a historical basis he is correct.
There were good reasons to be afraid of the Huns and later the Mongols you mentioned, mainly their relentless pillaging of entire kingdoms. This is also what dominates the common memory of these invasions. The Western Roman empire collapsed because of many tribes fleeing westwards (thereby pillaging themselves), away from the invading Huns.

That said, although wars were at least as cruel back then as nowadays, invading armies looting repeatedly and systematically were a rather rare sight.
Extermination of whole cities was rarely conducted, and most occasions are still memorized today, e.g. the destruction of Troy at the hand of the Greeks around 1100BC (?) or the burning to the ground of Carthage in the "3rd Punic war" 146BC.
Cities were looted, but generally not exterminated (something I miss in RTW). The Gauls plundered Rome in 387BC but the city state wasn't thrown back too badly. Rome was looted again in 410AD but lost its real splendidness only gradually due to repeated maraudings in the course of the 5th century....

In RTW, extermination is often too good an option to be left out; that is why it is wise to restrict yourself for gameplay's sake. It may even be really useful to keep a city intact: If it just passed a population threshold so that you can instantly build the next government building, thus largely eliminating culture penalties after a few turns of suspense.

[econ21]

(1) is really interesting, as it never occurred to me. I would usually *fill* with Hasti, but your view is BETTER! When I decide to return to RTW, probably to try out the EB mod, I'll incorporate (1).

Yes, I don't know about EB, but in RTR - and probably vanilla RTW - Roman heavy infantry is just very powerful compared to most neighbouring ones. I suspect that this is historically accurate, but if you have a lot of them in a stack, it just makes the battles dull. From Goldsworthy's book, it seems a common Republican army was two legions and two alae (sp?) of allied troops, often Italians or Gauls. Filling out your stack with these makes your Roman units seem precious and also gives a reason to bother with the nice AoR system of RTR. Battles are more tense, as half your army remains good true Romans but the other half is - if anything - inferior to your enemies (at least the Greek type enemies).

What's your basis for (5)? History? I think the penalty for Extermination is a good one. If a player plays with some economic restrait, the Extermination could be rather costly, as one waits and waits for the Population to grow so you can upgrade and build *good* buildings, etc. With some cities, *Order* might require Extermination, but you pay the penalty.

It's a mixture of history and gameplay. It just does not "feel" right to be exterminating every captured city - if that was what was done, surely the Romans would have been universally detested? However, from Goldsworthy's book, there do seem to have been occasions in which the Romans did massacre everyone in a city if it had bitterly resisted a siege - apart from anger management and looting, it had the side effect of terrorising other cities into not resisting.

But more importantly, I find that there is not much of a penalty in gameplay from extermination - big conquered cities often have most of the buildings you want and you only need a few cities to recruit from (in RTR, you can only recruit your best troops from older cities, not newly captured ones). If you lost the extra upgraded buildings with extermination, there would be a genuine trade-off. But extermination gains you a docile in tact city and allows your army to move on to the next battle. By contrast, even enslaving a faraway, alien city of 12,000, I find I still have to leave virtually an entire stack there for several years to keep it loyal. It really slows down conquest - and eats into your treasury as you need many more stacks - making the late game more of a challenge. A slower expansion is also more historical, I suspect.

[screwtype]

But as far as everything else goes: RTW wins hands down.

I totally disagree. I will probably never play RTW again, there's so little challenge it's boring and pointless. On the other hand, I can definitely see myself playing Shogun again. I almost fired up a new campaign just a day or two ago.

The interface, the sound, the graphics, the empire management "tools", etc. The map change is way, way better than MTW. While the "risk style" movement of MTW isn't all that bad, the operational movement afforded by the RTW map is, IMO, totally superior.

The interface in RTW is worse. It's big, bulky, ugly and dysfunctional. The group commands don't even work.

The sound is definitely not better. Shogun had by far the best sound of all three games. Great music, great atmospherics. All RTW has got is a bunch of boring speeches at the start of every battle that soon do nothing but irritate. (Is there a way to turn the speeches off? I'd like to know). Oh, and the silly voices in the battle itself stating the obvious.

And the operational movement on the strategic map serves no purpose, indeed the new map creates game problems that didn't exist in the earlier games. It's a pretty good example of bad design.

The one thing I wish they would add (since STW) is a simple city/general overview screen. For example: all the citites listed on one screen that you can sort by income, population, unrest, corruption, etc. Manage your recruitment/construction queues, etc. It's rather tedious to individually move through each city. An overview screen for generals/family members would be awesome as well -- sort it by command rating, influence, management, age, location, etc. As with cities, it's somewhat annoying to have click all over the map, hand examining every person, etc.
-V

That feature is already extant in RTW. From memory, just right click on the cities tab and you will get a scroll listing all your cities on the LH side of the screen. You can sort them in any order you like just by clicking on the column headings.

You can also bring up an individual city scroll at the same time by right clicking on a given city row in the LH scroll.

A lot of people miss these features of the game, I missed them myself for weeks, they are a bit obscure. The one thing that is missing IIRC is a field in the city list telling you what level each city is being taxed at.

[screwtype]

CA could move away from an AI that tries to make individual unit matchups, and plays in a more grand tactical style which is actually more realistic. Have the army maintain the battleline, flank in force with a group of units that are suitable for that task and use a tactical reserve to block breakthroughs or exploit gaps that develop in the enemy line. Get rid of the low morale so the fighting can last longer. This means you won't be able to win with 10:1 or 20:1 casualties inflicted unless you have a much, much better general than the enemy.

Yes, I'd like to see that too. The individual matchups paradigm doesn't work very well at all. IMO, the AI should keep its army in some sort of formation until just before it engages the enemy, and then do its individual matchups.

The easy routing hurts the Strategic Campaign by allowing the human player to inflict massive attrition with practically no loss to himself, and in multiplayer it causes players to increase the money available so they can boost morale with upgrades, but that has the disadvantage of damaging what little RPS the units have in them.

Yeah, but it's not just the easy routing it's also the fast kill rates. I played RTR for a while which has substantial increases in morale, so much so that with a good general even my humble militia pikes would almost never rout, even if they were beaten down to one or two men. But they take casualties so quickly, it only takes a moment or two and an entire unit gets wiped out. Both things need to be fixed to make this a playable game again.

[Geoffrey S]

Just to bring back an earlier point, if CA decide to make the game more accesible to new players that's fine; but it would be most welcome to craft the difficulty levels so they actually make the AI more challenging and intelligent rather than using an absurd system of morale penalties or bonuses for enemy armies.

[player1]

But the thing is that good player is always better then any AI made, especialy after while when all tricks beacomes known.

Only way to increase difficulty after that is to make AI troops feel tougher, by adding bonuses.

And that is good enough way to make a challenge trust me.

Only problem is that it's bugged with 1.2, so VH battles are not really more difficult then M.


P.S.
Reminds me of Civ3.
That game can be tough for begginers, but I won my middle difficulty game (no bonuses), from fist time and never looked back.

At one point, highest difficulty level become too easy for some players (Deity), so developers made ultra-hard difficulty in expansion called "Sid", so those that beat deityy could play something.

[sunsmountain]

Well, you can be sure they're saving siege status in the 1.3 savegames, and you can be sure the positive attack modifiers will be gone for the player on Hard/Very Hard.

Other than that, expect nothing in the AI department, so you cannot get disappointed. You have been warned. :(

On a positive note though, RomeTW still has awesome potential.

[Red Harvest]

But the thing is that good player is always better then any AI made, especialy after while when all tricks beacomes known.

This isn't really true. In certain situations a decent AI has a big advantage. Heavy Fog/Snow/Forest battles in STW/MTW for example. You had to work hard to compensate for this--because the AI was effectively seeing more and reacting faster. Same has been done in RTW to a degree by making the game so fast ALL the time. The pause button gives you time to actually issue commands. RTW is masking the AI's relative incompetence.

Another aspect where the statement isn't true is in some similar unit matchups in other games. The AI in Civil War Bull Run does a very good job of placing and using its artillery. A good player has a hard time matching the AI because the AI can *see* the best positions more easily, and will halt when it finds them, rather than going too far and hunting for the right position (like the human.)

The AI should be better at skirmishing if properly programmed. It should know to automatically withdraw when attacked. This is an area that shows weak AI, since the skirmishers often don't behave like skirmishers. Anything that requires constant re-evaluation should be in the AI's advantage.

The AI can respond more quickly to flanking moves...if properly programmed. In fact, 1 vs. 1, you will see phalangites reverse facing rapidly vs. cav, etc. Where it is having trouble is in ANY higher level situation.

A proper AI should execute the simplest situations nearly flawlessly, whereas a human should be prone to basic error. Watching RTW, it is clear this isn't the case...watching the AI charge elite archers into infantry for example.

[conon394]

Red Harvest

CA hamstrung their own AI with the smaller relative battle fields in RTW when it comes to skirmishers. May just be my perception, but it seemed like you needed at least one horse archer and one good light cav to hunt down a single AI horse archer in MTW (and most of the battle time). In RTW, by contrast it takes a not half so long to trap skirmish units in ‘corners’.

[edyzmedieval]

Red Harvest

CA hamstrung their own AI with the smaller relative battle fields in RTW when it comes to skirmishers. May just be my perception, but it seemed like you needed at least one horse archer and one good light cave to hunt down a single AI horse archer in MTW (and most of the battle time). In RTW, by contrast it takes a not half so long to trap skirmish units in ‘corners’.

Because the units went in the corner. Stupid AI.

The AI in Rome sucks.

[Puzz3D]

Because the units went in the corner.

It's not that the AI unit goes to the corner. It's that you can chase them there fairly quickly. The maps in RTW are physically smaller than in MTW, but also the temporal size is smaller because it takes longer to travel the same distance in MTW than it does in RTW. In addition to that, you will incur more fatigue in MTW, and the recovery rate is slower as well. Chasing a horse archer is usually not a good idea in MTW. Chasing anything in MTW is a decision that has to be carefully considered because your army can easily become so dispersed and fatigued that it's no longer and effective fighting force.

The entire RTW game has been accelerated to attract a group of gamers who have a low attention span. It seems like a classic case of the audience driving the product in a particular direction. It's a very common effect in the entertainment industry. I think there are a lot of people out in the world now who have a low attention span and need a constant barrage of action and quick changing images, so it's a very big market.

[Zenicetus]

Just to bring back an earlier point, if CA decide to make the game more accesible to new players that's fine; but it would be most welcome to craft the difficulty levels so they actually make the AI more challenging and intelligent rather than using an absurd system of morale penalties or bonuses for enemy armies.

Agreed. In a good combat flight sim, changing difficulty levels will alter the way the enemy pilots fly. Higher difficulty gets you more advanced pilot AI's who will challenge you with vertical maneuvers, instead of just horizontal tail-chasing. This is a much better approach than just using the same AI for all difficulty levels and then juggling the stats for gun accuracy, damage per hit, etc.

Of course for that to work, you need a reasonably challenging AI program to begin with, so you can dumb it down for the easier levels. That's what seems to be missing from RTW.

[edyzmedieval]

It's better than in RTW, the pace of battle is faster.

But some ideas from MTW could have been taken, like the units hidden in forests, and you couldn't see them only when you came near them.