1.3 RTW Comments

[Red Harvest]

I've fooled around with a couple of 1.3 RTW campaigns so far, fought maybe a dozen large battles on VH/VH. I'll start listing some comments, and perhaps add to this later. I haven't looked at stats changes yet. Edit: Bugs/major problems in bold.
1. There are some apparent improvements in fluidity of the campaign map (wasn't giving me trouble before, but it is different now.)
2. Pirates are tough and abundant early on. They rule the seas making land invasions tricky (at least on VH/VH.)
3. AI still seems to do many of the same things on the tactical map. So the differences there are not vast. I haven't noticed the generals being as suicidal, though. Incremental improvement I suppose.
4. Spears do seem to work better vs. cav., and charging spears frontally with cav is now quite dangerous.
5. Still not seeing many storms at sea.
6. Strategic AI still leaving settlements less protected than prudent. I'm finding stacks of Carthaginians doing nothing in forts.
7. Still can't combine fleets sometimes? And then can combine the same fleets later?
8. Ships don't seem any more inclined to sink from combat than before.
9. Roman diplomacy might be more complex, if you ally with nations the Senate views unfavorably you might lose your Roman alliances.

Lots of things to check...haven't explored much at all yet, and no controlled experiments. I probably should try another faction.

Adding Items:
10. Archers still charge infantry at times without really firing. This became apparent when the AI threw its Cretan archers into my meleeing Hastati. I could see this if the Hastati had been alone on a flank, but my unit was backed by cav, etc. What a waste of a great missile unit.
11. The AI still won't skirmish very often. It can't seem to trade javelin volleys or counduct much of an archery duel.
12. Base archer power is still several times greater than it should be. I had forgotten how much better my mods to velocities, ranges, and missile attack made the game feel/look in 1.2. I'm really missing those changes now. I know CA pared down the elites, but they should have whacked the rest to about the level of base slingers.
13. There is a MAJOR memory leak that gets worse as a session continues. Difficult to shut down the game after a few hours.

More items:

14. Marius' Reforms now occur early again. I had them happen in 242. (I would have rathered that CA would have added a second starting period and map to the RTW campaign as part of BI.)
15. I've been listening to the speeches again. They are far more varied and colorful than when I started playing. There are several that I've never heard mentioned before (I had heard quite a few zingers, and some related here.) Something about slapping an ass (as in donkey I presume) comes to mind
16. Wardogs still pose absurd difficulties, because they still can't be targeted directly. Your men end up trying to charge after the handlers, so dealing with the dogs themselves is a passive affair. So on VH, where they have plenty of morale they just keep killing and killing in AI hands. Very annoying.
17. AI doesn't use its war cry at times. In defense it seems to, but when advancing/attacking it forgets to stop and do this.
18. AI archers often won't fire at units within range, even when the archer is stationary. It is most obvious with the longest range archers.
19. AI won't use its pila.
20. Pila can still stop an enemy charge cold--charge doesn't seem to register against them as they raise their weapons. Then they unload into the now stationary chargers point blank. Seems a bit wrong to me.
21. AI is having great difficulty launching naval invasions now. Scipii and Brutii stacks are building up instead, and not being landed.
22. AI still fails to use "overkill" numbers of troops to confront the player (when available.) For example, it might have two stacks within a few hexes of a city it will siege, yet it will send in just enough men to have superiority (based on autocalc.--so with Rome post Marius it might be using far too few men.) While much improved, it is still getting defeated in detail because it won't use full stacks when it easily could.
23. Two new horse skeletons (speeds) have been added. So now we have (fastest to slowest):
fs_fast_horse = light horse
fs_medium_horse = medium horse (and "generals horse") New!
fs_horse = heavy horse
fs_cataphract_horse =cataphract horse New!

[KSEG]

>9. Roman diplomacy might be more complex, if you ally with nations the Senate views >unfavorably you might lose your Roman alliances.

Isn't this supposed to be a bug?

[ChaosLord]

7: You still can't put admirals with stars in the same stack as another admiral with stars, really annoying. Its gotten so that even with the rarity of ships with stars if I have one or two already I just disband it.

9: I'm not sure if its a bug or a feature actually. They might have decided the fixed alliances hurt the Houses when expanding. IE Scipii or Brutii making an alliance with the Gauls while the Julii were waging war with them and then making them at peace by default and things like that. I think that even with losing the alliance you can't attack them and keep the line of sight view, so its not a big effect really.

[nameless]

7: You still can't put admirals with stars in the same stack as another admiral with stars, really annoying. Its gotten so that even with the rarity of ships with stars if I have one or two already I just disband it.

9: I'm not sure if its a bug or a feature actually. They might have decided the fixed alliances hurt the Houses when expanding. IE Scipii or Brutii making an alliance with the Gauls while the Julii were waging war with them and then making them at peace by default and things like that. I think that even with losing the alliance you can't attack them and keep the line of sight view, so its not a big effect really.

YOu know you could simply just bring that ship into port and build it into a fleet with warships.

[Red Harvest]

YOu know you could simply just bring that ship into port and build it into a fleet with warships.

Not a wise move when he has "zero or negative stars." Usually this is a problem with small units that get pounced upon during transfers etc. Better to disband a unit, than rebuild it and saddle it with a crummy admiral who you can't really see.

[Puzz3D]

3. AI still seems to do many of the same things on the tactical map. So the differences there are not vast. I haven't noticed the generals being as suicidal, though. Incremental improvement I suppose.
4. Spears do seem to work better vs. cav., and charging spears frontally with cav is now quite dangerous.

I felt these two things were major problems in RTW v1.2 battles, and make a big different in the RTW v1.3 battles. The AI will attack your cavalry with spears whenever it can so that's more dangerous now, and the AI flanking is going to work better since the front lines will fight longer without the suicide general. Even simply turning a unit to absorb a flanking attack is going to expose its flank longer to other AI units, and the AI tries to take advantage of those exposed flanks. The fixes to the charge and reduction in charge bonuses of many units also means units will not rout as quickly.

[Red Harvest]

I felt these two things were major problems in RTW v1.2 battles, and make a big different in the RTW v1.3 battles. The AI will attack your cavalry with spears whenever it can so that's more dangerous now, and the AI flanking is going to work better since the front lines will fight longer without the suicide general. Even simply turning a unit to absorb a flanking attack is going to expose its flank longer to other AI units, and the AI tries to take advantage of those exposed flanks. The fixes to the charge and reduction in charge bonuses of many units also means units will not rout as quickly.

Yes, battles are a little more costly, but even on VH/VH I'm not losing battles. Okay, I lost one, but it was a wreckelss siege attack against those stone walls of Syracuse trying to get the measure of how things were. I had no business even attempting it with 1 vs 1 manpower and them having greek hoplites, archers, and a higher star family vs. my hastati, some velites and two family members, but I nearly won. I actually would have won, but I let some guys get stranded in a bad spot and cut to pieces while attending the other end of the battle--so I came up a unit short of what I needed. I ended up losing my leader flanking the last full unit of greek hoplites in the square.

[Puzz3D]

Yes, battles are a little more costly, but even on VH/VH I'm not losing battles.

Something's not right. I'm playing on M/M and loosing battles, and I've been playing total War for 5 years. I won my last battle with 1000 men under a 2 star general against 1400 Britannians under a 3 star general, but it took over half an hour using many hit and run attacks on their skirmishers. I think I actually only won because their general was killed about 20 minutes into the battle. I killed 1000, but lost 500 men.

I'm at 170 BC in this Julii campaign with 28 provinces, and it's extremely difficult to expand due to the economics. I only just now got full control of the Iberian peninsula. I just established a 6k profit each turn, but I don't think it's going to last and Britannia has just started attacking me. I have several cities with 70% happiness and no way to improve it. Brutii attacked Egypt in Asia Minor, but there is no way I can take advantage and take a few cities because I can't raise the troops to go there. It might not be a good idea anyway because Egypt is strong and will kick Brutii out soon.

I don't know what's different about our playing styles, but I'm having a very interesting campaign. I play with no retraining.

[IceTorque]

I play on VH/M and I have found the battles in 1.3 to be fast and easy with my hastati being able to rout most units with their pilums before they even engage in melee.
I have only played a short vanilla campaign before quitting
and deciding to port my WarMap mod over to v1.3 which i found surprisingly easy to do thanks to alpacaa's HGT converter and the much improved -show_err reporting in v1.3. so no more vanilla for me.

[Puzz3D]

I play on VH/M and I have found the battles in 1.3 to be fast and easy with my hastati being able to rout most units with their pilums before they even engage in melee.

Why can't my hastati do that on medium? The only units I can rout with pilum are the low quality troops, and even then it takes more than one unit thowing pilums to do it. Maybe there's something wrong with VH.

[screwtype]

Something's not right. I'm playing on M/M and loosing battles, and I've been playing total War for 5 years. I won my last battle with 1000 men under a 2 star general against 1400 Britannians under a 3 star general, but it took over half an hour using many hit and run attacks on their skirmishers. I think I actually only won because their general was killed about 20 minutes into the battle. I killed 1000, but lost 500 men.

I'm at 170 BC in this Julii campaign with 28 provinces, and it's extremely difficult to expand due to the economics. I only just now got full control of the Iberian peninsula. I just established a 6k profit each turn, but I don't think it's going to last and Britannia has just started attacking me. I have several cities with 70% happiness and no way to improve it. Brutii attacked Egypt in Asia Minor, but there is no way I can take advantage and take a few cities because I can't raise the troops to go there. It might not be a good idea anyway because Egypt is strong and will kick Brutii out soon.

I don't know what's different about our playing styles, but I'm having a very interesting campaign. I play with no retraining.

I've started a couple of 1.3 campaigns on M/M, and my experience is very different. I am just steamrolling every battle with ease. The last four battles I fought I was actually outnumbered, and didn't lose a single soldier in any of them!

The one thing I have noticed about this game compared to 1.2 is that units don't seem to rout so quick, but then maybe I've just got used to RTW's quicker routing by now. My general's already got more stars than I can poke a stick at so maybe that's why my units aren't routing at all.

I never intended to start a M/M campaign, but I just installed a new mobo and RTW's been crashing all the time, I only started this campaign to see if the game was stable and didn't bother changing any of the options first.

[screwtype]

BTW, one thing I have noticed with 1.3, and that is that you can still blockade an enemy port and not be attacked by that faction's shipping. I blockaded the port of Carthage with just one ship and even though there must have been a dozen Carthaginian ships within an inch of the port, not a single one tried to raise the blockade. How stupid is that.

I also noticed the same silly phenomenon of your ships running into neutral ships during their move and thus having their movement ended for that turn. What the heck is the reasoning behind that? The ocean isn't big enough for two ships to pass each other in the same turn? I missed completing a couple of Senate missions because of this nonsense.

[Puzz3D]

My general's already got more stars than I can poke a stick at so maybe that's why my units aren't routing at all.

I guess that's the difference. I don't take my best general and steamroller the AI. The best battles are when the generals are closely matched, and the strongest AI generals I've encounted are 6 stars with most in the 2 - 4 star range. All of the Total War games give too much combat boost to the units via the command stars, and when there's a big disparity in power between the two armies there isn't much need for tactics.

[Veresov]

[QUOTE=Red Harvest]I've fooled around with a couple of 1.3 RTW campaigns so far, fought maybe a dozen large battles on VH/VH. I'll start listing some comments, and perhaps add to this later. I haven't looked at stats changes yet.
Adding Items:
10. Archers still charge infantry at times without really firing. This became apparent when the AI threw its Cretan archers into my meleeing Hastati. I could see this if the Hastati had been alone on a flank, but my unit was backed by cav, etc. What a waste of a great missile unit.

This you can fix by adjusting down the secondary combat attack strength of the cretan archers. If you look at the knife skill, it is quite high. The AI looks at this attack skill and thinks this is a good melee unit. Just lower this strenght and the cretan archer will become an archer. This is fixable bug.

[Jambo]

Isn't the idea and testing of an army entirely of skirmishers or archers rather pointless? I mean, neither myself or the AI ever seem to have armies so constructed. Anyway, if I had a whole army of skirmishers or cretan archers it's conceivable I might use a few in melee...

Edit: Hmm, I wonder if BI (or 1.4) is different from 1.3 in this respect. In my 4 or so BI campaigns I don't recall any unit type acting particularly idiotic other than the frustrating bug of pila throwers not throwing their pila before attacking.

[Red Harvest]

Isn't the idea and testing of an army entirely of skirmishers or archers rather pointless? I mean, neither myself or the AI ever seem to have armies so constructed. Anyway, if I had a whole army of skirmishers or cretan archers it's conceivable I might use a few in melee...

Not really, I've had groups of ranged units (especially purchased Balearics as Carthage) get caught during overland transfer or after being dropped almost randomly before I lost my boats. I've also had to put together scratch forces with nothing other than a few javs and perhaps a unit of infantry. By the same token, I've seen all skirmisher/ranged unit type armies fielded by the AI. And in certain regions, the most likely composition of a brigand army is a bunch of skirmishers (like the Illyrians, etc.)

I even used three of the merc Numidian javelins (foot--the weakest unit in the game except for peasants and maybe townwatch), a family member, and a couple of hastati and a unit of Samnite spears to take Carthage which was held by two elephant units, a family member, and various infantry and skirmishers. Carthage sallied, and the "weighting" showed me to be heavily overmatched by about 3 to 1. I beat the main units as they sallied into my waiting skirmishers and infantry. Then I "skirmished" the elephants to exhaustion after they made a long trip around from a side exit. While they mauled my skirmishers and some hastati, the fatigue was too much, and after a lot of jav and pila vollies as well as melee, I routed them back into the city, and took the square. The skirmishers did most of the hard work.

However, that isn't the point. The point is trying to see what the AI thought was the proper thing to do with ranged units vs. melee and cavalry, and to figure out why it continues to charge its skirmishers into the main line. It didn't sit and camp, it didn't advance to the edge of effective range and begin firing. It didn't divide in two to keep the hapless enemy trapped between two fast units. The AI doesn't use ranged units as a screen most of the time.

And when I put my ranged units out front in classical period style, the AI charges at them like a red flag to a bull. I have to back them closely with spearmen because I know what is going to happen with them out front. The spearmen don't deter the AI, but they do make short work of any pursuing cav.

[Red Harvest]

This you can fix by adjusting down the secondary combat attack strength of the cretan archers. If you look at the knife skill, it is quite high. The AI looks at this attack skill and thinks this is a good melee unit. Just lower this strenght and the cretan archer will become an archer. This is fixable bug.

I'm not so sure and killing a unit's melee is not really a fix, it is crippling one part to get the unit to actually behave like a ranged unit. I experimented with this a lot in earlier versions or RTW, but can't recall what happened when I tried that type of test.

I've run tests with three Carthaginian javelinmen now, and they do the same as archers, line up three units deep and surge forward, then run before throwing. Three units deep is the worst possible combination: it leads to FF issues, and masking issues, and most importantly it prevents them from using flanking/rear fire. Plus they fatigue faster than the pursuer, and all at the same time, because they keep moving back and forth (since they are faster.) A worse deployment would be almost impossible to find. It gives up all the advantages of having fast, multiple ranged units.

What ends up happening is that if the melee unit pins one of the javs, the other two try to attack sequentially before they've fired all their javs. That is illogical, they should empty their supply before attacking. That is how skirmishers were meant to work. Avoid melee until the enemy has been depleted and can be broken. Even if the ranged unit has a very high melee attack, it should seek to deplete its ranged weapons as much as possible before engaging. It should only melee if it is a "sure thing," forced, or ammo depleted. In MTW the jav units had trouble skirmishing, but archers actually worked.

I did the 1 vs 1 cav test, equites vs. Balearic slingers. Predictable. The slingers walked up nearly the whole way, charging my cav without firing. Same as in 1.2. It's just a dumb thing to do, as a comparison of stats shows the Balearics have no business getting into a melee fight, especially head on. So the Balearics get slaughtered while inflicting about 10 casualties. Under my control I inflicted over three times as many casualties and nearly won the fight. Nothing special, I turned off skirmish and kept shooting until the equites hit my line.

Simply put, the AI is not inclined to make use of its ranged attack if it is moving.

Isn't there an additional problem about the AI not using Pila now? Hasn't been an issue for me so far as I've been playing vs. other non-pila cultures.