European Barbarorum: A point of critique

[Shorebreak]

The EB team has done some great work on the RTW game and I applaud them on their accomplishments; however, a grave problem still exists at a tactical level. When the player gives a command to a unit on the battlefield, the unit's response is much too fast. On the ancient battlefield, units were given initial orders and set into motion. At this point, regaining control of the units was no easy task, since communication was done by flags, horns or messengers. As a result, new or contradictory orders took a moderate amount of time, if at all, to make their way the troops. Rome TW, and by extension EB, negates this lag, as a player clicks and units immediately respond. This ability leads players to “micro-manage” and deploy troops in wild, over extending formations; two things that generals in antiquity could never do. I understand that some historical aspects have to be sacrificed to maintain playability; however, the way things stand now seriously contradict the nature of combat in antiquity and the purpose of EB, which is to promote a high level of accuracy.

Be this as it may, I believe two simple tweaks, if possible, could remedy this issue:

1) Install some lag time between the moment a player issues a command and the time the unit acts. This would change the way battles are fought tremendously in that it would negate micro-managing and force players to pre think deployment and battle tactics.

2) Perhaps limit a unit's capacity to act to a radius around the commanding unit. This would take command and control to new levels of difficulty and accuracy, as it would force players to deploy their units in close proximity to their general, as was the case through most of antiquity, and keep their general in close proximity to the fighting, thus increasing the chance of a tragedy, such as Darius III's at Gaugamela.


While I have no idea whether or not these two recommendations are even possible, I believe that they would greatly enhance the historical accuracy of the game, which happens to be the heart and sole of this great mod. What do you think?

[QwertyMIDX]

I think those are the sort of thing's we'd need to mess with hardcode to change.

[O'ETAIPOS]

Not even those things are probably hardcoded, but in real battle field you have more or less competent officers comanding parts of the army and reacting to the situation. AI just cant do this kind of things in existing RTW engine. So as it may look unreal it is not that bad when you accept that your orders represent not only highest commander but also other commanders down to "regiment" level

[Lord_Morningstar]

I would argue that there are situations where gameplay should prevail over realism. A situation such as this could make the game frustrating to play rather than simply challenging. The excellent discipline of RTW armies is a bit odd, but probably necessary to prevent an overly-complex and very hard to manage game.

[Krusader]

If this had been possible (I believe what you are asking for is hardcoded), we would probably have tried to implement it, but also made it an optional install, as I believe some players wouldnt have been that keen or willing to play their battles like that.

[stalin]

In real life battles lasted longer than 5 minutes.
Actually it is way easier for you to roleplay the command delays in your game in same way some of us have house rules and so on. There is a game like you described here:
http://www.legionarena.com/
with demo here:
http://www.vgpro.com/file/4353_legionarenademo.exe.html
so you can test the gameplay