Feedback on BI

[Puzz3D]

If the replay desync has come back, that's unfortunate because it's difficult to track down the cause. At this point, I'm far more interested in whether or not RTW/BI multiplayer is worth investing the time and effort required to play it. Once you get away from Total War multiplayer, you realized how many other things you gave up doing in order to play Total War online.

To me it's important to be able to use a distributed formation. If you have to keep your units compacted into a small area to prevent them from being routed by a frontal rush, it's very limiting geometrically because you can't set up different angles of attack or even effective counterflanking moves. At least you should be able to utilize several groups of units that can be positioned with substantial separation between them. You don't want to be able to come from a great distance to assist a unit or group of units that are in trouble, but you want to be able to come from "some" distance. Identifying that distance, which varies for various unit matchups, is an interesting part of the game and allows you to set traps and ambushes etc. If that distance is compressed to nearly zero by the game mechanics, an interesting part of the gameplay is lost. The same is true on a larger scale for whole armies in team games if it's necessary to concentrate all the teams armies in a single area as fast as possible.

The upgrade system has actually kept moving in a good direction. In STW, you had 9 levels of honor and each level gave a 40% increase in combat power. In MTW, that was cut back to 4 levels. In RTW, it's cut back to 3 levels, and each level only gives a 20% increase in combat power. In practice, the upgrade system tends to compress the differences between the low end units and the high end units because you get the same combat power increase for less money on low end units. That was addressed in MTW by inflating the cost of the upgrade over what it was actually worth. I don't think that's the case in RTW.

Uneven upgrading can also alter the role a unit plays in RPS which I don't like, but some players do like. To the extend that CA balances the units, it's done with equal upgrades and a particular morale level. As I recall, Longjohn said it was balanced at zero upgrades. Uneven upgrading and different levels of morale alter the balance of the units. So, the optimum balance will be found at one particular morale level which you can adjust in steps of +2 by using uniform upgrades. This optimal morale level in MTW was higher for team games than it was for 1v1 battles due to the way the outnumbered morale penalty worked. We don't know if there is an outnumbered morale penalty in RTW. I could find out a lot about morale penalies by doing tests, but it's a lot of work and I'm not highly motivated to do it for RTW. Besides, I'd have to buy a 2nd computer to do the tests.