FAQ and historical inaccuracies: some odd comments

[antisocialmunky]

Ah hold up here - this argument is oft used but it's based upon bad logic. I through my purchase have paid CA to program the engine. I don't like the engine so I complain. CA has delivered to me a product which at best barely falls within tolerances so I complain. If you pay someone to do something and they do a sloppy job do you complain, simply because you couldn't do better?

Ah no again, nobody is ridiculing them for not getting it right the first time. People ridicule them for not accepting the errors in the engine (how long/how much effort did it take before the save/load was accepted as a bug?), and for not correcting proven issues with the engine.

No I haven't - on the otherhand I've never designed a house from the ground up. I pay people to do that, like I pay CA to design a game from the ground up. That doesn't stop me from pointing out that none of the doors open in said house.

The bugs you point out are NOT as simple to correct as replacing the doors. These bugs is like someone buying an old house in California that won't withstand earthquakes and being angry that it isn't earthquake proof. Well poot. The only way to fix that is to rebuild the house yes? Alot of the big problems would take too much time to fix because it would require parts of the engine to be rebuilt. Plus, it's a comercial project with deadlines. If you've ever worked on comercial projects, you know that you can rarely deliver everything or go back and fix things. This is because the cost to benefit of functionality ratio is going to be too big. It's simply not practical to rip out half the engine and rebuild it if it doesn't seriously hamper the fuctionality of the final product.

If it was a few guys doing this in their spare time like the Click and Create game community or Free Game Community or the RTW modding community then you could probably get 80% of everything fixed. Even then, there would still be limits to fixing a old game and just making a game from scratch.

Basically, alot of the problems aren't worth fixing in this generation of the TW engine and is better left for TW4. If you find the game unplayable, then goto your local gameshop and trade it in for Empire Earth 3 and wait for TW4.

I appreciate you probably spend your days frustrated and wacky, unsupported theories inspired by popular culture which have germinated in your students' heads, but with respect, you shouldn't fall back on the source as the be-all and end-all of historical inquiry.

Hey, I'm just saying to keep an open mind. Hell, look at black holes, no one thought they existed because there was no evidence, that's not to say that they were wrong in believing so. As long as there is reasonable doubt in something, there's room for positive speculation. Do you think in 2000 years if someone dug up information about the use for C4 plastic explosive, that it'll detail Marines in the Pacific Theatre in WWII using it to heat coffee? Probably not. What I'm saying is that you should keep an open mind. Just because someone says something, it doesn't the only truth.

Seriously, why doesn't someone just freaking build one and experiment with it?

What I'm saying about a potential use of a wagon with a repeating ballista is as a supressive fire unit. Yes, it's main purpose would be a fire and move weapon(which you could mod easily if it uses the HA logic), but to say it was used in every single instance as a sit and shoot weapon is silly. What if people or cav were chasing you over flat terran. Would you not have the guy on the ballista shooting at them since you have no time to stop? What if you were skirmishing?

That's where I'm coming from, I'm not saying that BI super sniping donkey wagons are right, but I'm saying it's stupid to think that just because it was meant to sit and shoot doesn't mean it wasn't capable of moving and shooting. A moving shooting penalty really needs to be a coded for horses and chariots.

On a side note from what I've seen of Replica Roman repeating ballista, their range didn't look too spectacular. They were more like crossbows than the lesser cousins of the heavy siege ballista that's seen in Gladiator. The bolts were only about 6 inches long, though this could have varied depending on model.