My Early Thoughts For The EB Beta.

[khelvan]

1) I like the idea of heavy reliance on basic citizen hoplites for the Greek alliance. For small cities, this especially makes a lot of sense. However, as I will go on to discuss, I'm not sure that not giving major cities more advanced hoplites to begin with is a good idea.

If the advanced cities cannot build more advanced units, it is an issue with the recruitment system through error, not design.

1) I'm not sure that it really makes sense to be able to build certain types of troops in all provinces. Building Iberian units in North Africa just doesn't make much sense. In a real life scenario, those units would have been raised (or hired in the case of mercenaries) in Iberia, and only then sent to their final destinations. I don't have an issue with allowing certain "generic" stile units being built in any integrated province however. The Romans had a history of integrating provinces, and especially towards the later empire, drafting provincial troops into their standardized armies. Even when the Romans were hiring German cavalry though, they could never train German cavalry in Italy.

Well, for some levy units we consider this simply a matter of handing the natives a few javelins, for instance, and organizing them into a unit. This happened in many places, and examples abound.

Romans aren't the best example, as they did raise legions from foreign provinces. Additionally, people from throughout the empire would travel to Rome to find employment in the army. This is one of the "special" things we will probably reflect at some point for the Romans.

However, while Iberia may be able to train a basic levy unit throughout the world, Carthage should not be building Iberian units everywhere; this is an error.

Conquering a province and instilling a government may imply some form of colonization. For many factions it does. We intend for our government system to gain complexity; for some government types to show assimilation, others to show colonization, others to show cooperation with the natives. These imply different unit recruitment choices, one of which will be the ability to build some "faction" units outside of the faction home lands. Others to be able to build "native" units through utilizing native allies. I will be making a very long, involved post about our government and unit recruitment system in the future, asking for help in shaping our systems and understanding if we are missing something RTW has to offer us in this effort.

2)Why can you walk from Asia Minor to Europe? It really doesn't make any sense and kind of works against the great naval system that you've built. I'm guessing there are other land connections, which I would be equally opposed to.

These "land bridges" are not meant to actually show a land connection, but rather represent bodies of water that historically were crossed without major fleet efforts. Some of these are close enough for you to actually see, and some you could swim. It implies small fleets of rafts or barges which could be (and often were) assembled at the crossing point and discarded after the crossing.

They show areas that were historically easy to cross and were not the focus of major naval engagements due to their proximity. The best way to show this, in our opinion, is the ability for both land and sea units to cross. The crossings are still blocked by naval vessles if they are near, so this perfectly represents what we were trying to achieve, as well as improving gameplay in those areas by encouraging the AI to make those crossings military objectives, as they were in history.

3) I'm not sure why the Britons are playable.

I have answered this time and time again. For the sake of brevity, I will merely say that we view the map as a whole, and faction interaction as impact over all of the cultures, not through their interaction with only one or two (see Roman or Greek) cultures. This particular faction had an impact throughout the known world through trade, as well as very strong military impact in their own area of the world. Just because they did not invade the mainland does not mean they did not meet our criteria for being expansionistic, for one. Which they did. They held an empire about as large as Dacia in her heyday, and had a similar cultural effect (trading with Carthage, for instance, and others). And a similar military effect in the British Isles; one could say even more successful based on how the wars in Dacia and Britain versus the Romans eventually played out.

We cannot show a growing, expansionistic faction as rebels; the Casse being a case in point, though other worthy factions come to mind.

4) The economics may be a bit off, but I haven't played enough to say for sure. As Epirus for instance, I had my starting provinces the city above the capital, and Pella, each fully taxed and with one garrison unit, except for Pella which had my main army with 8 units. I had trade rights with the Romans, Dacians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Pontus(ians?), Armenians, and Egyptians. Despite this, I was losing money every turn. I simply could not turn my finances around. We know from history that Epirus was able to field a much larger army. Again, I'm not sure on this one yet, as I haven't spent enough time with it.

This is a design decision. We have made it explicitly difficult for a standing army to exist. You use it, or you lose it. It is more difficult in the beginning, yes, but that is a benefit, in our eyes; players are actually challenged by this.

Based on the number of positive posts and messages we've received on this, it only reinforces that we made the right decision. Some may not like it, but it is something we'll only make "worse" in the eyes of those who don't like this monetary challenge, as it makes the game more fun for the majority of the public, as well as our team members.

5) For some reason, my cavalry seems to randomly keep breaking off pursuit of broken enemy units. Even after I give them the order again, they sometimes will simply stop the pursuit after killing a few of the enemy.

We can't directly influence the battle AI, as much as we would like to.

6) Load time, both at start up and between turns, is much longer than vanilla and RTW. In game lag is not a problem however.

Yes, this is something we are looking into. We have had some success so far toward making this better for the first patch.

Thank you for your comments.

[DocHolliday2006]

If the advanced cities cannot build more advanced units, it is an issue with the recruitment system through error, not design.

In that case, I would suggest that Athens and Sparta need to have more advanced units available. Sparta especially, as it states that their units are now serving as mercenaries in the faction text, so it would only make sense that they could produce Spartan warriors.

I have answered this time and time again. For the sake of brevity, I will merely say that we view the map as a whole, and faction interaction as impact over all of the cultures, not through their interaction with only one or two (see Roman or Greek) cultures. This particular faction had an impact throughout the known world through trade, as well as very strong military impact in their own area of the world. Just because they did not invade the mainland does not mean they did not meet our criteria for being expansionistic, for one. Which they did. They held an empire about as large as Dacia in her heyday, and had a similar cultural effect (trading with Carthage, for instance, and others). And a similar military effect in the British Isles; one could say even more successful based on how the wars in Dacia and Britain versus the Romans eventually played out.

Sounds fine. Just my opinion.

This is a design decision. We have made it explicitly difficult for a standing army to exist. You use it, or you lose it. It is more difficult in the beginning, yes, but that is a benefit, in our eyes; players are actually challenged by this.

If this is indeed the intention then I would like to compliment your decision. A very interesting aspect to be thinking about. It makes perfect sense too, as I was just reading about how Athens was having problems keeping their army in the field during the Pelopenesian War