The History of MTW

[ajaxfetish]

Excellent effort, Servius. I think this thread deserves a sticky.

Here's a bit on morale and fatigue, though I'm sure there're things I'm leaving out.

Morale and Fatigue

Morale
In M:TW, you do not win battles by killing the enemy soldiers; you win by breaking their morale. All units had a set base morale, anywhere from –2 for some peasant-types up to 8 for knights and some other elite or fanatical units. This morale could be enhanced or depleted by numerous factors on both the strategic and tactical levels. Morale in battle was tracked by several states from ‘impetuous’ to ‘routing’ that were displayed with your unit’s info. You could only guess at your opponents’ state of morale.

(Both Morale and Fatigue are tracked by unit as an average rather than on a by-man basis like valor)

Strategic modifications
Buildings: building religious buildings in a province gave additional morale to any units trained there. The base levels, one or two additional morale, were easy to come by, but to get the maximum bonus (around 6 but different for different religions) required a major commitment and was limited to one province.
Vices/Virtues: your generals could get vices or virtues that would have an effect on their forces morale, such as ‘natural leader’ or ‘coward.’ Sometimes a general with fantastic command would have to stop leading the troops because he was such an inbred, dishonest, impious, merciless pansy that his troops would not fight for him.

Tactical modifications
Morale was tracked continuously during battle and changed due to numerous features, including:
Casualties
Relative numbers
Fatigue
Missile Fire
Other Routing Troops
Elevation
Death of a General
Current fighting condition (winning or losing and how bad)
Threats to Flanks
General’s Proximity
. . . and many others

In battle you had to keep a careful eye on all of your units’ morale, especially the touchy ones, and try to outmaneuver your enemy in such a way as to lower his troops morale, such as a rear attack or a killing blow to the general early in the battle.

Fatigue
Fatigue also played a critical role. A unit’s freshness was displayed on the battle icon by four horizontal bars. At the beginning of a battle the unit had all four bars, and as it became more and more tired, it would lose bars, down to three, two, one, and finally exhaustion at no bars (think Cingular ads). Until it was exhausted, the unit was able to march or run (significant difference), but when exhausted it could only move at a walking pace. If a unit were to stand still and rest on the field, it could recover some of its bars, but usually not more than two once it had gotten significantly fatigued.

Fatigue had an effect in battle indirectly by lowering a unit’s morale, and directly as a unit lost attack and defense ability along with each bar, so that a totally exhausted unit would be fighting at –8 morale, -6 attack, and –3 defense, meaning that fancy knights and other heavy troops could become very vulnerable.

No units started with more or less endurance than another, but the more armor they were wearing the faster fatigue set in, and the slower they recovered. Fighting in the snow and especially the desert increased the rate of fatigue, making heavily armored troops a bad idea for warmer climes, and at great risk when fighting the mostly light troops of Muslim factions.

Ajax

[sapi]

Excellent effort, Servius. I think this thread deserves a sticky.

I second that; this is a useful thread

I don't think anyone has mentioned the ransoms yet.

In MTW after an army routes any enemy troops that are mopped up can be sold for ransom after the battle. In RTW I think it just counts as kills and fractional experience points for the units. You could make some good money in MTW, especially if you caught a king or a sultan.

You also had the choice of buying back troops ransomed by the enemy. If a lot of your good units got captured, if you had the money it was a good idea to buy them back.

This also made room for more diverse strategies in battle - do i take in that light cavalry to run down the enemy; is it worth sacrificing a battle slot.

Also, getting your king/undesireable family member caputred provided a good way of getting him executed

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People, can we try to keep the commenting in this thread to a minimum, so new players can focus on MTW information. I know i only got into mtw after seeing rtw was coming out and trying the 'prequel' (in my mind), and information like this was very useful...
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[Servius]

I'll take a whack at the Interface. Someone else wanna talk about moddability?

INTERFACE

When you started MTW, the main menu had the following options: Quick Battle, Single Player (Campaign) Multiplayer (Battle), Campaign Tutorial, Battle Tutorial, Options, and Quit. In addition to the standard kind of video and audio options, MTW Options included the ability to change the camera movement and rotation speeds (which I believe RTW lacks). The Single Player option took you to a screen that allowed you to choose from a new campaign, a custom battle, historical battles, historical campaigns, and other options. The meat of the game was New Campaign. Choosing that would allow you to choose between three MTW time periods (Early, High, and Late medieval periods) and, if you had Viking Invastion, you could choose that prequel time period and map of England.

So, you chose your preferred dificulty, your time period, and then you got to choose to play practically all of the factions in the game, right off the bat. No unlocking necessary. Some factions were in better or worse strategic positions, and their situation differed depending on which time period you choose. For example, playing the French in Early was kinda hard, but playing them in the High period was easier because France was historically more powerful then and the faction's strategic situation mirrored that.

To cut this short, the interface in MTW was smaller/less intrusive, cleaner, and provided more useful controls/options. For example, in a battle, every unit had a rectangular card at the bottom of the screen. It floated over the terrain rather than being housed within an opaque interface block. Each of these cards had an image of the unit and showed:
1) the number of men in the unit
2) armor and weapon upgrades
3) the fatigue level of the unit
4) whether it was moving, running, fighting, under fire, or fleeing
5) the amount of ammo the unit had (if it had any)
If you held your cursor over the unit or its card, text would appear telling you more informatoin about what type of unit it was, what it was good at (good vs. cavalry, strong charge, vulnerable to missiles, etc.), and it also told you about the morale of the unit and why (impetuous, shaken, happy that flanks are covered, worried by so many casualties, etc.)

At the top of the battle screen was the map, the speed bar, unit control buttons, and a timer. Each of these also floated over the map rather than being housed in an opaque interface box. The speed bar was much more useful than RTW's three speed options. The command buttons applied to whatever units were selected. You had the chance to rally individual units instead of having to hope your HQ's rally command would work. Each unit could Hold Position (would not chase a fleeing unit) or Engage at will. They could be commanded to Hold formation too, which was useful in ensuring that spear units held their block formation and didn't break to engage individual units. Every unit could be in a block formation (the standard) a wedge formation (granted +1 attack but -1 defense) or a loose formation (which decreased their vulnerability to missile fire.

Cavalry units could dismount before battle, usually becoming some kind of spearman or polearm unit. Dismounted Knights were a nasty bunch of infantry, Hospitaller Foot Knights in particular.

There were also handy keyboard commands. One that was VERY handy to me but was removed in RTW was the ability to click on a unit, hold down ALT and click a place on the map, and the unit would automatically face that spot. The ability worked with groups too, so you could arrange archers on the flanks of a bridge, select them all, and ALT-click on the chokepoint at the far end of the bridge. Each unit, though selected together, would rotate on an individual basis to face the spot you clicked on. In RTW, to do this, you have to drag your cursor across the map, which brings up the little triangles that mark where the unit will face when you let go of the button. No where near as useful as the simple ALT-click. Feh.