What does armor do?

[econ21]

The overall nerfing of the spears came as a result of a couple of long threads where some people argued that historically spears were not highly effective vs cav knights. This nerfing of spears hurt the multiplayer game a lot since a whole component of the RPS system was no longer useful.

Puzz3D, we're going a little off-topic here, but can you explain how spears were nerfed overall? I know at some stage during the patch swords got a implicit +1 against spears and cavalry got a greater ability to penetrate infantry formations. And I seem to remember you saying something about unit cost, but I am vague on the details.

I've never done MP and find the spears vs cav knights balance in SP pretty close to what "feels" plausible/historical. In MTW v1.0, spears seemed a little too strong. After patching/VI, knights are dangerous in the hands of the AI and can often prevail against vanilla spears through superior morale. But they still can be easily contained by better spears. Swords, even AUM, can't be relied up to contain them nearly as well. If anything, I think knights are a little too secondary to infantry in SP (at least as I play it) and would prefer them to have a little more of the clout heavy cavalry acquired in RTW. I wonder how/why MP is so different.

[Del Arroyo]

For me in SP (which is all I've played so far) Heavy Cavalry is definitely very scary. Like seriously frightening. I never go in against a stack of all Medium or HC without a hefty numbers advantage-- even if I've got spears.

The weakness of spears actually does tick me off, though. I mean, these guys are basically used to absorb punishment and never kill anything on their own, and are always defeated easily by sword infantry. As if somehow by taking AWAY a soldier's big-ass spear and forcing him to fight only with his sword, you are giving him a huge combat ADVANTAGE.

And spears have a lower attack value than pikes-- again, as if a 7-foot thrusting spear is going to be more defensively-skewed than a honking 20-foot wobbly-ass one.

Common sense seems to have been lost somewhere in here. "Spears" (meaning hoplite/Fyrd-style spear-and-shield-and-sword-armed infantry) seem to have been put in their current role purely as the result of a game-balancing technique.

..

But anyway, please do continue with the inside story

DA

[econ21]

Yes, I never liked the spears vs swords distinction in the first place. I think the distinction - at least among the Catholics - is ahistorical in this period and introduced solely to add another rock-paper-scissors dimension to the gameplay. In doing this, they also conflated weapon type with troop quality, so that the Catholic spears are lower quality troops whereas the men-at-arms and knights are better quality. In reality, I suspect the men-at-arms and knights when dismounted used spears (or lances) as well as swords and other secondary weapons. At least that's my reading of Agincourt and other engagements involving English troops in the period.

But I'm not sure it matters too much - if we regard the Sergeants as lower quality troops, maybe the game reflects their capabilities fairly enough - providing bulk to the army and being good at holding off cavalry. The sword armed men-at-arms could be regarded as the more aggressive skilled troops who are better at killing. The only substantive difference would be that the men-at-arms should be even better than the sergeants against cavalry. There was a time when I was thinking of modding this in, but I did not follow through partly as it introduces tricky game balance issue (making men-at-arms better than sergeants at everthing).

[Puzz3D]

Puzz3D, we're going a little off-topic here, but can you explain how spears were nerfed overall? I know at some stage during the patch swords got a implicit +1 against spears and cavalry got a greater ability to penetrate infantry formations. And I seem to remember you saying something about unit cost, but I am vague on the details.

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longjohn2
Programmer

Posts: 1065
From:UK
Registered: Nov 2000
posted 11-08-2002 08:31 PM

In general I made it much easier to push spearmen back in combat. They were a bit too much of a brick wall before. They now depend on having rear rank support to have good stopping power. Keeping them well formed, and avoiding turning just before going into combat is important now, especially for pikes.
Secondly I gave a 1 factor bonus to non spear infantry fighting spears/pikes with supporting ranks, unless they were charging. ie you get the bonus after the initial impact.
Thirdly I made some changes to make pikes better against spears, and to make them better at pushing back when they have supporting ranks.
I make some changes to how men form up in combat, which ought to help spears/pike keep closed up and supporting each other.
I made spear units more expensive.
I made all the expensive units cheaper.

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The cost of cavalry knights was lowered by 25%, and the cost of spears was increased by 15%. Those cost adjustments alone would have had a big impact on multiplayer, but they were coupled with changes to the combat engine. In fact, originally the combat changes to swords was greater and during the MTW v1.1 beta testing sword armies easily blew away everything else. The bonus to swords was toned down as a result of that testing before the v1.1 patch was released, but after playing MTW v1.1 multiplayer for two months from Dec 2002 to Jan 2003, it became clear that spears did not perform adequately in multiplayer.

I've never done MP and find the spears vs cav knights balance in SP pretty close to what "feels" plausible/historical. In MTW v1.0, spears seemed a little too strong. After patching/VI, knights are dangerous in the hands of the AI and can often prevail against vanilla spears through superior morale. But they still can be easily contained by better spears. Swords, even AUM, can't be relied up to contain them nearly as well. If anything, I think knights are a little too secondary to infantry in SP (at least as I play it) and would prefer them to have a little more of the clout heavy cavalry acquired in RTW. I wonder how/why MP is so different.

Because there are no generals with command stars in multiplayer. That means you have to buy valor upgrades to raise morale. However, valor upgrades were increased in cost from the 50% they cost in v1.0 to 70% in v1.1. Couple the increased base cost of spears with more expensive cost of valor upgrades and the low morale of spears, and you can see that the actual cost of fielding an effective spear unit in multiplayer went up a lot more than 15%. On top of that, spears have to contend with cheaper cav knights which can now push them back and swords which get a 20% combat advantage against them. These are swords which also get more upgrades than spears because they are cheaper than spears. So, if the money is spent on effective spears, the overall combat power of the army is much lower than one which doesn't contain spears. In VI, longjohn decilned to make any cost adjustments to spears.

You can avoid the upgrade issue by playing at low florins of about 5k which helps the spears in combat, but the battles then become massive routs and most players don't want to play like that so they raise the florins to at least 10k. We did get longjohn to increase morale in VI v2.0 multiplayer by +2, but it wasn't enough to allow playing at 5k florins without the easy routing. Later we discovered that +4 morale was the right amount of boost to compensate for the fact that we purchase units at valor 0 in MTW instead of purchacing them at honor 2 as was done in STW. I thought longjohn would automatically add in the necessary morale increase for MTW v1.0 multiplayer to keep it at the same level as STW, but he didn't do that.

[econ21]

Fascinating post, Puzz3D - seems I knew about the "nerfs" but did not appreciate the point about morale in MP. I've noticed that in SP, armies without command stars are fragile and can sometimes unexpectedly rout within a few seconds of a decent AI charge from a strong AI army. So I think I can understand the problem in MP now. A +4 morale bonus sounds about right.

But I think the SP model broadly matches my intuition - when it comes to cavalry vs infantry, who wins will depend on how steady the infantry is.

[CBR]

Although I havent played much SP I found the spears to work ok. MP is unfortunately very different. The upkeep cost is IMO the most important factor anyway and that wasnt changed.


CBR

[Puzz3D]

But I think the SP model broadly matches my intuition - when it comes to cavalry vs infantry, who wins will depend on how steady the infantry is.

Yes I agree. Spears in SP seem fine. They were too much of a brick wall in MTW v1.0. In Oct 2002, you could see MTW multiplayer devolving into a spear rush with a few swords and one or two alan merc cav to chase routers. However, since longjohn ended up making changes to the combat engine in MTW v1.1, we didn't need the cost adjustments. The spears should have at least been returned to their original MTW v1.0 costs. We requested that several times during VI, but it didn't happen. You wouldn't have felt that at all in SP.

I'm not sure we need a hidden +1 attack bonus for swords vs spears either. We didn't have that in STW, and the RPS worked fine. It all comes down to pricing the spears at the bottom, the swords in the middle and the cav at the top, and having enough of an anti-cav bonus on spears. In MTW/VI, the swords that get used in multiplayer are priced below the spears that get used. I know there are cheap spears, but they are useles in multiplayer because we asked for the increase in cost on valor upgrades. This was done to prevent the weak units from becoming stronger than the elite units via upgrades which could happen in MTW v1.0. It's case where the cost adjustments that the multiplayers requested combined poorly with the combat engine changes that the SP players requested. That's why this game requires several passes at playbalancing. I think this game system would benefit from more than 3 passes at balancing, and players should carefully think about the full consequenses to the gameplay of any changes they request.