Lives! LIIIIVES!!!

[Del Arroyo]

I just had an idea, and I'm interested in what the rest of you think of it.

If one was modding with the object of making combat a bit slower (just hypothetically), wouldn't it be possible to, instead of increasing defence values, just to give everyone move lives? Like 2 or 3 per man?

Has anyone tried this? Any thoughts?

DA

[Del Arroyo]

Wow, this sub-forum is super-dead, isn't it?

[zukenft]

Extra HP is only possible in RTW

[EatYerGreens]

I have to agree that there is an element of what I call "time compression" in the battles - the rate of castle wall demolition being the most staggering example.

I remember the battles in Shogun being breathtakingly fast, if you allowed a mass-meleé situation to develop but had read (STW manual or other background notes) that this is what it was actually like in Japan, in that era and simply accepted it. So I was initially taken aback to find the MTW casualty rate being equally rapid.

Perhaps we're all too used to seeing the cinematic representation of battles, where individual (sword vs sword) combats take a dozen or more thrusts and parries to resolve? ('Combat cycles' is the terminology I've come across here, in relation to the game's mechanics).

It's easy to forget that, in films, the action mainly focuses on the main protagonists and having the hero kill 8-10 men per minute would only serve to make him look like a bloodthirsty butcher of incompetent combatants, not someone worthy of respect or sympathy. In other words, the character has to be in genuine peril, yet win through, thanks to having right on their side (and all that guff) or by being just that little bit 'special', when it comes to a fight. Lots of artistic licence involved and, by some contrivance, they inevitably get to fight on-on-one with the villain (yeah, right) and that has to last nearer five minutes, for maximum dramatic tension.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that we have to think carefully about what our preconceptions about medieval combat actually are and also what those were founded upon.

Fair enough, the average gamer does not have sufficient free time in the day to be able to spend time noodling around on the strategy map, for as long as it pleases them to do so AND fight out huge battles in 'real time'. The real thing was fought with thousands on each side but we get limited to 16 units, 960 men per stack (default), making the battles something of a 'scale model' representation of reality. The "time compression" factor makes the rate of killing seem slightly silly but it's necessary in the interests of keeping the game playable within an evening, instead of having to book a whole day off for every fight.

All the same, I did enjoy the "Time Commanders" TV series and got the overall impression that the combats were taking many minutes to resolve, with only the programme editing redicing the overall completion time. The participants could debate with one another over what to do and, meanwhile, a unit v unit fight continues in the background.

Alterations to MTW unit stats which came close to replicating that slower pace would be interesting to try out - more time to maneuvre other units about the field and realistic chances of 'rescuing' units in trouble, instead of seeing them evaporate in seconds.

Only trouble is, I suspect things like the battle time limit will not be moddable by the user, as it's the sort of thing I'd expect to be embedded in the main program code. We know it already scales up according to the sizes of armies participating but ramping up the factors to make fights last longer by too great a factor will surely increase the incidence of time-limit victories and defeats.

What I am about to suggest would involve a huge amount of editing and basically every single unit will need to be altered to preserve the combat balance.

The attack/defence scores etc have to be integer values but increasing them uniformly by a factor of 10 would give you the luxury of fine-tuning subtle differences between units, as if you now have the luxury of a decimal point.

Some caution is required with this. If the details of the combat equations are commercially sensitive information, known only to CA programmers, then the best we can do is treat them like the proverbial 'black box'. Numbers go in and a percentage chance to kill comes out. Cylcles of "soldier A strikes, soldier B parries" and "soldier B strikes back, sldier A parries" alternate until one is dead. Pumping integer values less than 10 in, produces a decimal value (probability) which is less than one.

Increasing the factors by ten could mean the output is always greater than one, so whover gets to strike the first blow will always get the kill and the attrition rate could even speed up!!!

I'm now going to speculate that a Peasant v Peasant fight might actually last longer than FMAA v FMAA, for example, because their stats are so weak that their kill probability comes out very low on each cycle and the fight therefore lasts a long time - against their own kind, at least.

The problem that immediately presents is that making the attack/defence scores smaller for all units isn't really possible, thanks to integer limitations. You can't make the differences between units types any smaller than they already are.

The one glimmer of hope is that I have seen some units actually have negative values for their attack/defence rating - eg archers' meleé stats. There may be scope for shifting all values uniformly downwards, placing more units into the negative range and reducing kill rates across the board but I imagine this will only magnify the odds for the likes of knights vs peasants even further than it already is.

It would not surprise me to learn that this is ground long since gone over by CA during testing and they settled on the final values with the 'average consumer' in mind. Slower combat may be workable but simply not to everyone's tastes.

Got to be worth a try though.