Extended battles?

**Mooks** · 12-24-2005, 21:31

Notice in MTW theres actually some combat, when the enemy front and yours combat it lasts for several moments and swings back and forth, In RTW the combat lasts a few seconds before somebody (usually the enemy) Breaks and runs..By the time you could get a horse flank-attack they arleady ran.

Im thinkin you could change this by turning unit attack down by 3-5? or maybe turning the defense up 3-5?

Is there a potential mod in this? Battles in RTW go fast, and to fast to enjoy the graphics

**professorspatula** · 12-24-2005, 23:18

Yes, it is possible to reduce the kill speed of battles. I've used various methods, mostly all revolving around the editing of the export_descr_unit.txt file found in your Rtw\data folder. You can edit each unit, changing their morale rating (stat_mental), playing around with their defense and attack skills and armour ratings, but the easiest method is to just reduce the lethality of their attack.

Eg:...

Code:

stat_pri         13, 3, pilum, 35, 2, thrown, blade, piercing, spear, 25 ,1
stat_pri_attr    prec, thrown ap
stat_sec         9, 3, no, 0, 0, melee, simple, piercing, sword, 25 ,1

This is the attack for a Roman Legionary. The bold part controls the lethality of the attack. Anything less than 1 reduces the chances of the attack being successful and taking a hitpoint from the enemy unit. Anything more than 1 makes attacks easier. Reducing most weapons lethality to 0.6-0.7 results in longer battles, and adding a few points to a unit's mental stat means they'll fight for longer before routing.

In my own mod, I've currently gone further by redoing all unit stats from scratch to make things more balanced and interesting.

However, here's a basic export_descr_unit.txt file for version 1.5 of RTW that merely adds extra morale to all units (3-4 points) and reduces weapon lethality a bit. You can play around with the file yourself if you want to make battles last longer. Backup your original file first if you use it.

http://disko.co.uk/files/v15_edu_lowerkillrate1.zip

The file needs to be unzipped to your RTW\DATA folder and renamed to export_descr_unit.txt

Or you can just do it all yourself using a text editor like Notepad. Be warned that slowing down killrates in battles leads to units tiring much sooner, and it's not unusual for troops to become exhausted early in the battle.

**Lentonius** · 01-01-2006, 16:59

I tried a way...

add x amount to attack, and x amount to defence and x amount to charge etc...

This only made things worse...
The only thing that works for me is making attack low and defence high.

**Ciaran** · 01-01-2006, 17:28

Of course the units will kill faster if their attack is increased. As far as I know (at least that´s the way things are usually handled) the stat numbers represent "dices". Each "dice" represents the chance for making or defending against a lethal hit, say, for example, 30% (I don´t know what the real odds are, the numbers are just to illustrate things). Now, a unit with an attack of five has five times a 30% chance to strike a lethal blow. The defense works the same way, the number there represents the number of "dices" used in defense, each with a 30% to block one lethal hit.
So the higher the attack value the higher is the probability that one soldier in the battle strikes a lethal blow to his opponent. At the same time, the higher the defense value, the more likely is it that a soldier can defend against an attack.