MP balance mod suggestion

[Epistolary Richard]

I imagine something similar - i.e. a community standard MP mod - was attempted for RTW. Perhaps it would be useful to have a look at the problems they faced and what, if anything, became of them.

[L'Impresario]

Does anyone else believe this type of project is feasible? Of course, MTW2 may turn out just fine, but I'm sure there'll always be room for improvement. It'd be great if the community banded together to make such improvements.

The short version is "no". The long version isn't that long but reading some old topics in the MTW/STW MP sections can shed some further light and awake funny memories.
The main issue is the existance of a "playable" vanilla game. Even if the balance isn't that great, if the other parameters (speed & movement, hard-coded modifiers, map size, unit responsiveness, pc requirements/performance etc) are at least acceptable by longterm players, then people might consider it worth the effort to further mod the game in order to reach a satisfying gameplay.
OTOH, if the vanilla game is "decent", players won't be willing to try any mod, esp. over perceived balance issues which take quite some time for the "untrained" eye to detect (or accept that changes could be a positive thing).

[CBR]

The MP community is now so disorganised that I think that alone will make it nearly impossible to do.

But even back in STW/MTW days it wasnt possible as there are as many opinions on game balance as there are players.

Some doesnt want changes as they are doing fine chopping up newbies with the vanilla game. Others doesnt want changes because they dont want to learn a new game etc etc...

In my MTW MP days I saw how much big egos, paranoia and pride could ruin it. I guess thats my "funny memories" of it heh.


CBR

[Orda Khan]

I agree with the replies posted so far, Mods for MP have never been warmly received for the reasons given so far plus there are many MP players who simply will not install a Mod.
I remember some very frustrating stat conflicts with RTW MP Mods for no apparent reason and there is no chance that players new to TW would consider that. The best we can hope for is that CA have learnt from the first MTW and remove the European bias that made MTW MP a joke. The factions must be balanced in a way that allows tactical skill to prevail and that includes the Islamic factions

......Orda

[L'Impresario]

The best we can hope for is that CA have learnt from the first MTW and remove the European bias that made MTW MP a joke. The factions must be balanced in a way that allows tactical skill to prevail and that includes the Islamic factions

Nah, I don't agree that there was any European bias, it's just that the settings a majority of players used tended to favour those factions. Although if there's a "skill" gap between two players, then no army can save you.
It always boils down to preferred settings.

[Orda Khan]

There will always be a favoured army cost, one that is used by the majority. How often did we see Islamic factions feature in CWC? Sure, if you are more skillful than your opponent you may succeed but against those with equal skill the Euro's were first choice every time

......Orda

[L'Impresario]

And this brings the question of whether the prices should be modeled after a specific CA-endorsed gamemode, based on, say 10k, and having different prices for MP and SP (there was this option in RTW), or have more abstract prices that will allow different playing styles according to each florin level. The equivalent of this latter option would be VI, examples being 99k for people who didn't care a lot about morale, 10k for those who wanted a cav&sword, get-all-8-cav-to-the-flank kind of game, or 5k for more diverse, few elite unit armies that require lots of player attention due to base morale being <6.

[Puzz3D]

Nah, I don't agree that there was any European bias, it's just that the settings a majority of players used tended to favour those factions.

Eastern factions in MTW depended more on archers than did the Western factions. Since the armor was greater in MTW than it had been in STW and the ammo effectively less, the Eastern factions were less effective on any kind of map other than desert. (Ammo was 28 in both games, but distributed per man in MTW rather than per unit as it was STW. DUX mod for MTW/VI increases ammo on some archers to 32 and 36, and STWmod for MTW/VI also increases archer ammo to 36.) Eastern factions faired better in desert because there was less armor used and camels got their fear bonus, but even there the English faction was very good. Desert wasn't played much because of the higher fatigue rate. Fatigue rate hadn't been changed from STW which used smaller maps, so was not optimized for MTW although it was reduced slightly for desert in one of the MTW patches.

RTW also killed off the easy mods of MTW/VI days. Now that eras will be back in MTW2 one can hope it gets better but TBH I doubt it will be as easy as MTW/VI.

I see several problems other than getting people to use it. First is lack of control over important parameters such as individual movement rates in the new engine. Second is the missing features in the battle engine such as "squeezed to tight combat penalty" and the way archers work with nobody in the unit being able to shoot until every man has stopped moving, and then everyone shoots whether or not the individual shooters are in range. Also, it doesn't appear that deep formations of shooters have any accuracy penalty, and the arrow velocity is too high and doesn't appear to be adjustable. Third is the battlefield upgrades which should be removed from multiplayer as they were in MTW/VI because they destroy the very balance you are trying to achieve with the mod. Fourth is that you really have to wait until the battle engine is debugged with patches. If that takes too long, the very people you are trying to attract with the improved gameplay have quit and moved on to other games by the time the mod is ready.

[L'Impresario]

Eastern factions in MTW depended more on archers than did the Western factions. Since the armor was greater in MTW than it had been in STW and the ammo effectively less, the Eastern factions were less effective on any kind of map other than desert. (Ammo was 28 in both games, but distributed per man in MTW rather than per unit as it was STW. DUX mod for MTW/VI increases ammo on some archers to 32 and 36, and STWmod for MTW/VI also increases archer ammo to 36.) Eastern factions faired better in desert because there was less armor used and camels got their fear bonus, but even there the English faction was very good. Desert wasn't played much because of the higher fatigue rate. Fatigue rate hadn't been changed from STW which used smaller maps, so was not optimized for MTW although it was reduced slightly for desert in one of the MTW patches.

I don't think we can establish such a relation as proof that the eastern factions were weaker. Don't forget that only in specific settings you can buy lots of ck or elite units with that extra armour. The line units (eg FMAA, MS, FS) are not in a position that allows them to disregard missile superiority. In lower morale games routing a single unit can create a series of continuous routs, therefore shooting with multiple archers/hybrids/HA a single unit (esp. on the flanks or if you have a decent cav to charge it after having something like 15-20% losses) can really be a considerbable advantage and help create situations where enemy mrl penalties stack.

Missile superiority works better in non-flat maps in order to force an army to attack whether defending or not. This is more pronounced in the early era, but even when the enemy has pavs, easterners get very cheap fast and hard hitting cav and HAs, enjoying special advantages in large maps and low morale settings, where a single charge on the flanks can rout a unit.

Fatigue also favours those having missile superiority, because after 15-20 mins pass, the one who makes a move first will start feeling all the penalties sooner than his enemy. Easterners also tend to enjoy higher mrl for their line units. Ofc at 10 and 15k this isn't perceivable because upgrades tend to favour higher cost units, and they happen to lack units over 500 florins or so (apart from the JHC for the Turks and the bodyguard units but at 10k they leave much to be desired).

From my DUX mod experiences I can safely say that mobility is an advantage that can't be considered equal with pure brute power (eg high attack and defense scores). In vanilla VI, if you want to highlight such an aspect you need to have a specific team that has trained together plus a number of other factors, talking about 10k here. That's because western factions can afford to have ck chasing routers and decimating them quite easily, while cmaa and fmaa v3 can afford to stay unprotected from most cavalry types (no spears that is) if on hold and/or in a formation that presents no discernable open flanks.
And no, I won't bring RTW into this comparison, mainly because routers tend to evaporate when chased.