units look to be moving too fast

[Callahan9119]

so your basing your argument on fiction? most estimates of historical battles are embellished, and excaliber is fantasy. most combatants were not professional soldiers anyway.

the marching speed is not the problem its realistic...the fact that men in full armor can charge as fast as calvalry is the thing that isnt good....it imbalances or ruins gameplay and renders skirmishing useless

[Duke John]

So a man in armour with a shield could run 17 km/h, charge at 21 km/h and not be out of breath when he reaches the enemy?

[sunsmountain]

Speed wouldn't be such an issue, if morale were higher. The range of some ranged units (yes) could also be increased and speed would be a non-issue. Guess we're stuck with modding, because why lose the WCIII audience? Flanking? Huh?

[Lord Adherbal]

speed is EVERYTHING. TW battles aren't up to scale, so if speed isn't "slow" you won't ever get interesting battles. I'll give an example: in RTW it doesn't matter what flank your cavalry is on, because they can get to the other flank in 1 second. This makes deployment fairly unimportant because any unit can be anywere in a second or two. Also, with these high speeds archers need to have intercontinental ranges, or else they wouldn't even get a volley off before the enemy reaches them. This has a severe effect on the skirmish phase. There is no more "pav tagging" because everything goes way too fast for that.

even with low kill speed and high morale, the game is still a about rushing and clickfesting (that term is hardly abusive, it just describes the high speed of the gameplay), and not tactical maneuvers.

[Cesare diBorja]

The guys in 'Excalibur' were in real 13-15th century armour so it isn't total fiction. The stuff was real and they were actors who had to work out alot to make the movie and actually pulled it off. Fictional movie, yes. Armour real, yes. Get my point! The premise was fake. The action was real(them in armour, going through the motions, axe and sword blades it hitting the armour were blunt, essentially crowbars, these guys got hurt making the movie!). I met some of the guys(Patrick Stewart, Nigel Terry, Nigel Bruce) from that movie.

For those whom are doubters read about the battles of Crecy, Agincourt and Poitiers! Agincourt was a running battle that took place over a wide expanse of territory. Adherbal says it right!

sunsmountain; imagine if you had to carry 29 kgs of weight and had been doing it for 10-20 years at the age of 34. I am 34 and go camping at times with 20-30kgs of weight and run trails to make. I carried up to 32 kgs(dead weight; 6months training) in the US Navy and could run, Commonwealth SAS often have more, jogging sometimes 5 miles and sometimes having to go up hill. Its not impossible.

diBorgia

[Duke John]

I know that plate armour wasn't that restrictive at all. But I am not convinced that it is possible for 200 soldiers to maintain formation while running at 17 km/h and still be combat worthy after 500 metres.

[Cesare diBorja]

Drop your pack, still at weight+20 kgs, and I would use the my weapon as a brunt and push you over with my body weight and maybe a few of your friends. You are excluding shock force and thinking I am going to stop and swing my sword(or rifle w/bayonet) at you. Think steam-roller. 5'11'' 102.27 kgs(a Scotsman's build, I am Scotch/Irish, French, Prussian, Polish, Ukrainian, Jewish, African and American Indian) and pissed off. A double time until the last 30-50 metres then all out. If I am running at you and you swing to hit, unless you are a g-d of war, most of your blows will be glancing at best.

You know I just did a test with some guys about two months ago at my favorite pub and I told these to stop me. There were one time 3 of them the first time and then the next time, 4. I, both times, ran right through them, pushing them aside and blocking their punches, kicks and what have you, without being touched(receiving a blow). Trained military(intelligence and operations) versus what could be called militia. Hands, elbows and fists, no armour. Demonstration on shock force and initiative. We had all just gotten there within about 30 minutes, I had had one pint.

diBorgia

Subotai my crossbowmen regularly skirmish and then help out the heavies when it comes to the mosh pit fighting. they are responsible for at least 10, sometimes 30 percent of enemy casualties. The changes I made to the Chivmod are based on many books I presented at twcenter.net as 'monkeytool'.

[Duke John]

Well, you may be heavy and having a death wish, but not all soldiers would just charge headlong into a wall of spears. Just like with horses you will have your surivial instinct kicking in and you will slow down. Of course some soldiers may continue to charge.

I cannot believe that medieval soldiers charged like that. The first rank might be able to contact with the enemy but then because of the speed there will be a clash of bodies resulting in grappling and wrestling. Then the second charging rank would arrive. If they also charge like you described than there would quickly be one big pile of soldiers on top of each other as men come charging in as fast as they can.

And isn't double time twice as fast as walking? That would be 10 km/h. That would be realistic but seeing armoured men walking at 17 km/h as if they were featherweights comes across as unbelieveable to many. Seeing that you immediately breaks the illusion of being there on the battlefield and makes TW quite clearly a game, an overdramatized game.

[Puzz3D]

[1]EDIT: the announcement for this forum lists the following rule first:
"1. No CA/RTW/MTW/STW/Modification Bashing"

So a rule was made in Feb 2006 for this forum that can be interpreted as "no game criticism". That's interesting. BTW, the rule forgot to list M2TW which is the game this form was created to discuss.

The fact remains that I can't click fast enough to play RTW/BI multiplayer, and it looks like M2TW will be the same. My response time on average is 250 milliseconds between seeing a change on the screen and clicking the mouse button.

[R'as al Ghul]

I'd say that anyone who has seen Horses and men run and walk in real life should be able to tell that what Rome presents is not a realistic representation.

Of course, it's a game and some things can't be represented and/ or wouldn't be fun to play with, but run speed is not one of these things.

Personally I've only bought BI to play the upcoming mods like Ran no Jidai, Nap Mod and Bue Lotus. I've always liked the 3d battles and think they are what makes Total War special, not the campaign map. As others have stated, the R:TW battles are too fast for me.

Atm, I'm enjoying Samurai Warlords, our mod for M:TW/VI and have a lot of fun with people like Puzz3d and CBR who want the same gameplay as me. But there'll eventualy come the time when gamespy turns off the server support for M:TW and then we are forced to move on to newer titles. I'd hate to see Total War MP die because it's not enjoyable. I hope CA reads some comments and fixes what needs to be fixed. They can always have an option to personalize the speeds, camera, interface etc.



R'as

[CBR]

Gah well if we are going to talk about speed and realism (which we talked about a long time ago) Im just gonna give a link to a thread from RTW demo days: clicky and to be more precise my post

But just to be clear: I dont care about if speed is realistic or not, I care about control.

IIRC escavations near the site of the battle of Visby showed skeletons with lots of wounds on arms and legs (and thats just impacts that can seen on the bones) That directly goes against this IMO "Hollywood" style of charging into each other but points towards a more careful style were soldiers actually used their weapons and not their bodies to run down people.

Plus men-at-arms of later ages didnt have any shield or just a small buckler shield. Only way to defend against a thrust would be to actively use your weapon (or buckler) to block or simply move back or to the side, cant just hide behind a shield and run forward and hope for the best.

I just dont the point in your test. Would you be using same tactic if they were armed with swords or pole-axes?

I certainly have books on Crecy, Agincourt and Poitiers but where is all the running in those battles?


CBR

[Kralizec]

Another issue with RTW walking/running speeds (and MTW2 as it appears), as Chivalry: Total War has pointed out, the consideration of scale. While it might be easy in RTW to have a cheap unit pin a phalanx and circle a cohort around to annihalate the pikemen from behind, in real battles that would require more planning and soundly implemented tactics.

A personal dream of mine is that you can trust units (units in the broad sense) to operate on its own, kinda like group AI in RTW but with more intelligence. Roman troops would have excelled at this as the centurions attached to maniples and cohorts most definitely were men with valour and tactical insight. You, the player could only take control of local troops if your general was nearby. Then you could actually cut off the enemy's army from command by pinning down the enemy general!
That's far beyond the TW approach though, but a man can dream

[Callahan9119]

i just watched the movies again, it seems worse every time i see it,,,gameplay trailer 2 on most i have seen

look at those animals using "charge" /run, its really bad..if it stays like this i can surely bet i wont touch mp... graphics are damn pretty though

i recently heard cannon elephants are gonna be in mtw2....i grow more worried as i read

[screwtype]

I agree with you entirely sunsmountain, there are plenty also who DO visit these forums that are happy enough with the speed. Let's not forget though, CA increased unit speeds for RTW, there was no unit speed debate before that. Both STW and MTW had a large MP community so what was their basis for implementing the change? There are countless MP vets who quit the game due to RTW.
Already we have seen the response by [cF]Adherbal and I am quite sure there will be others too.
A speed toggle would be a very nice feature, in fact the host should have access to many settings and this has been mentioned frequently but unfortunately it has never been implemented

......Orda

In my opinion the speed problem in STW/MTW was not so much the speed of the battles themselves but the awfully long time it took to chase the enemy off the battlefield once you had won.

Mind you, it didn't bother me that much, I liked the epic feel of battles in those games, but I can understand how CA would want to cut down the battle time for a wider audience. I just think they went about it the wrong way. The solution wasn't to speed up unit movement and kill rates, it was just to make the routing stage quicker. That could have been easily accomplished just by, for example, giving the player the option to quit the battle with a victory as soon as he had all enemy units routing, and just autocalc the remaining casualties.

The other obvious solution, as many others have pointed out, is to have an "arcade" mode for the youngsters and a "realism" mode for the buffs. Or to have a lot more options you could set to your taste. I mean, there are all sorts of ways they could have approached the problem other than dumbing the entire package down for the kiddies. But they chose not to make use of them.

[Lord Adherbal]

The solution wasn't to speed up unit movement and kill rates, it was just to make the routing stage quicker. That could have been easily accomplished just by, for example, giving the player the option to quit the battle with a victory as soon as he had all enemy units routing, and just autocalc the remaining casualties.

and killing routers was MUCH to effective anyway. If you had enough cavalry you could always destroy 90% or more of the enemy army. How realistic is that.
Atleast in MTW the routing units still fought back a little, and didn't die instantly by just being touched by an enemy soldier. And they were actualy capable of breaking through a surroundment. In RTW a routing unit has no brain and no defence, making most routing units get annihilated almost instantly. On top of that the direction they chose to run in makes MUCH less sense then how they did in MTW.

[econ21]

That could have been easily accomplished just by, for example, giving the player the option to quit the battle with a victory as soon as he had all enemy units routing ...

We already have that option.

[screwtype]

We already have that option.

Yes, you've got it in RTW. I was talking about STW/MTW. In those games, every enemy soldier had to rout off the field before you had a victory.

What I'm saying is, they ONLY needed to include the RTW option to end the battle quickly after all enemy units are routing. That would have been enough to shorten the battles down to an acceptable time. They didn't need to add the fast movement and fast kill rates as well. That just ruined the battles.

[screwtype]

and killing routers was MUCH to effective anyway. If you had enough cavalry you could always destroy 90% or more of the enemy army. How realistic is that.

Well, I don't know. It seems pretty realistic to me that if you have cavalry you are going to greatly increase the enemy casualties, after all, pursuing a broken enemy is one of the main purposes of having cavalry. I didn't think the kill rate of routers was excessive in STW/MTW. In fact, sometimes I found it frustrating that the cav. took too long to kill routers.

In RTW though, I agree with you that killing routers is too fast, along with most everything else in the game. In RTW, there are generally NO enemy survivors when I have cavalry, LOL. In fact, I adopted an iron man rule, that many others also used, of just taking the autocalc results of pursuits rather than running down every last soldier myself, to give the AI slightly more of a fighting chance.

Atleast in MTW the routing units still fought back a little, and didn't die instantly by just being touched by an enemy soldier. And they were actualy capable of breaking through a surroundment. In RTW a routing unit has no brain and no defence, making most routing units get annihilated almost instantly. On top of that the direction they chose to run in makes MUCH less sense then how they did in MTW.

I don't recall enemy routers fighting back in STW/MTW, but a handful would sometimes break through the surrounding soldiers. It was never that easy to kill every one of them.

As for direction - they used to run in stupid directions in the earlier games as well. There was nothing worse in STW than having one of your units rout when it happened to have the enemy between it and the "safe" side of the map, because it meant your unit would rout right through the enemy unit and get slaughtered

But the rout that most annoys me in RTW is when enemy units defending in a siege rout through the city gates and straight back to the city centre - even after you have taken it! That one is really annoying and stupid, and can create all kinds of problems.

[Callahan9119]

Yes, you've got it in RTW. I was talking about STW/MTW. In those games, every enemy soldier had to rout off the field before you had a victory.

What I'm saying is, they ONLY needed to include the RTW option to end the battle quickly after all enemy units are routing. That would have been enough to shorten the battles down to an acceptable time. They didn't need to add the fast movement and fast kill rates as well. That just ruined the battles.

AGREED!!

[sunsmountain]

speed is EVERYTHING. TW battles aren't up to scale, so if speed isn't "slow" you won't ever get interesting battles. I'll give an example: in RTW it doesn't matter what flank your cavalry is on, because they can get to the other flank in 1 second. This makes deployment fairly unimportant because any unit can be anywere in a second or two.

Not if they march. Marching speeds are ok. It's just the running speeds, to quote CBR:

But the actual distance travelled over time is not that important for the game, its more the difference between march and double quick march. Even if we give the Romans the benefit of the doubt (and turn them all into US marines) and assume they can do 180 steps that would still only be x 1.8 the marching speed.

IMO the x 1.66 increase we had in MTW is more realistic than the x 2.5 we have in RTW demo
CBR

It's of course nice to get your reserves quickly to the spot where you want them to be, but they could take longer if the morale didn't cause troops to rout so quickly. Because of this the charging speeds need to be high, else it won't matter anymore.

Also, with these high speeds archers need to have intercontinental ranges, or else they wouldn't even get a volley off before the enemy reaches them. This has a severe effect on the skirmish phase. There is no more "pav tagging" because everything goes way too fast for that.

Well I've seen Chosen Archer Warbands keeping range in multiplayer, shooting infantry. Pesky little buggers. They're caught pretty quickly by cavalry though. Which is why you should protect them.

even with low kill speed and high morale, the game is still a about rushing and clickfesting (that term is hardly abusive, it just describes the high speed of the gameplay), and not tactical maneuvers.

Without a penalty to stacking all your units together and concentrating all your attacks, the charging speeds would indeed still make it rushing and clickfesting.
With that penalty, you'd lose the clickfesting, but still have rushing (to get to all the flanks).

But do notice how higher morale (and higher killrates) help: Your units will be engaged and cannot quickly rout 1 unit and help routing the next 1, without suffering massive casualties. There needs to be balance.

sunsmountain; imagine if you had to carry 29 kgs of weight and had been doing it for 10-20 years at the age of 34. I am 34 and go camping at times with 20-30kgs of weight and run trails to make. I carried up to 32 kgs(dead weight; 6months training) in the US Navy and could run, Commonwealth SAS often have more, jogging sometimes 5 miles and sometimes having to go up hill. Its not impossible.

Hey I don't argue with big fella's but can you do 250 steps/minute for half an hour? Roman principes can. It's not so much about whether it's physically possible, but whether it adds to gameplay or substracts from it. If you can charge to any point on a field within 10 seconds then it doesn't really matter how you deploy your troops. There is no point in a formation or a strategy, since you can hunt & kill every individual unit with your best anti-units.

This is something that has to change to give better gameplay, which we enjoyed with previous titles. Rome looks gorgeous, but it's all over too soon. With the battle lasting as long as the marching, nothing has changed with respect to MTW except now I can do 2 indecisive battles instead of 1 decisive one in the same amount of time.

[CBR]

Oh and when I did the tests back then I didnt realise that even a bit of fatigue lowered overall movement. A fresh infantry unit running is doing something like 280% of walk speed(Duke John did that calculation) So thats around 17 km/h, 69% faster than run speed on MTW.

IIRC some CA dev said heavy infantry speed was reduced a bit in BI. But I never tested it.


CBR

[Dooz]

If you guys want to play a real good battle sim, this is the game you want.

http://www.madminutegames.com/

It's a civil war game (so maybe off-topic), but it's absolutely the best war game out there. You won't find anything to complain about here concerning movement speeds or anything else. Try the demo for TC2M and be amazed. You might just stop playing TW after this...

[Sabuti]

Perhaps not for you and me, Orda, but what about the 90% of Rome TW gamers (they exist, this is a fact), that do NOT visit these forums, that ARE challenged by the AI, and that DO enjoy the battle speed as it is?

Where are you getting your statistics as to how many RTW players there are, and how many of them find the AI challenging? Of those who find it challenging, what is the demographical age break down? I could see a 10 year old finding the AI a challenge, but a 20 year old? If your 20 or older and find the RTW AI a challenge, I have a couple bridges I want to sell you.

Besides Difficulty levels are there so that the game is a challenge for the best players on the hardest levels, not so some 10 year old can brag they beat the game on the hardest levels. When the highest levels aren't a challenge to good players, that's just sad.

[Sabuti]

I'm still wondering wher you figure you get the right to judge who should be playing TW. And 2 minutes to get to one end of ther map is too much time. And having a job that is 2 hours a day to get to and from 4 days a week means I don't have 20-30 minutes to spend on 1 battle. Which are second banana anyway. My main focus is the strategic map.[/QUOTE]


If your main focus is the strategic map, then aren't you just playing a board game on a computer? Go play risk!

[sunsmountain]

Where are you getting your statistics as to how many RTW players there are, and how many of them find the AI challenging? Of those who find it challenging, what is the demographical age break down? I could see a 10 year old finding the AI a challenge, but a 20 year old? If your 20 or older and find the RTW AI a challenge, I have a couple bridges I want to sell you.

The group under consideration consists of 100 physicist students, 10 of which own the game. Of those, I am the only one who is unchallenged. All my fellow students are, to a more or less extent. After a while, they find out cav works best (it does, simply trample and rout all opposition) and beat the campaign game fairly easy.

Their ages are 20 years old on average, with me upping the average a bit. Let me tell you something: I remember fondly my first battle experience in the campaign game in Medieval Total War. It was against the AI, we had roughly equal troops, but needless to say, i got my *** handed to me on a platter. I had to learn to form a cohesive battle line, which i didn't at first, i got outflanked and my urban militia's routed.

If the AI doesn't force you to do this, and is fairly challenging if you simply point and click (most do, it's a warcraft 2 & 3 conditioning, games which almost everybody owns), then give us 1 reason not to be challenged by that?

Besides Difficulty levels are there so that the game is a challenge for the best players on the hardest levels, not so some 10 year old can brag they beat the game on the hardest levels. When the highest levels aren't a challenge to good players, that's just sad.

Yes, and after about half a year (again on average), most of them left the game for other games. This is what separates a hyped game from a true classic. A true classic still gets played. A hyped game doesn't.