Developer blog update: Morale & Difficulty Settings

[Duke John]

Units are individually upgraded which breaks the RPS system, and creates all kinds of imbalance between the units and weird unit combos.

I agree completely . We removed the ability to upgrade units from Napoleonic 2: Total War and I can say it's working very well; I can't recall a single complaint about it! Not only does it improve game play (although that can debateable) it also reduces setup time as buying armies is much more intuitively.

[PROMETHEUS]

I agree completely . We removed the ability to upgrade units from Napoleonic 2: Total War and I can say it's working very well; I can't recall a single complaint about it! Not only does it improve game play (although that can debateable) it also reduces setup time as buying armies is much more intuitively.

I do not see why the unit upgradeability should break gameplay or umbalance it , infact if you pick upgraded units you pay more for them so the result is that you will have less units , I remeber it worked very well for the online battles of medieval , also the Devs stated that they will implement 10k rule as well or 5k wich was the standard on online multyplayer battles at this time ....

[Bob the Insane]

I do not see why the unit upgradeability should break gameplay or umbalance it , infact if you pick upgraded units you pay more for them so the result is that you will have less units , I remeber it worked very well for the online battles of medieval , also the Devs stated that they will implement 10k rule as well or 5k wich was the standard on online multyplayer battles at this time ....

While not a MP player I do understand the issue here... The problem is that sometimes Unit A with the right upgrades in more effective than unit B and cheaper dispte unit B being a more advanced version of unit A...

At a simple level it was not balanced sufficiently...

Of course the mechanism works beautifully in SP but that not the problem here...

[Puzz3D]

I do not see why the unit upgradeability should break gameplay or umbalance it , infact if you pick upgraded units you pay more for them so the result is that you will have less units , I remeber it worked very well for the online battles of medieval , also the Devs stated that they will implement 10k rule as well or 5k wich was the standard on online multyplayer battles at this time ....

Anti-cav bonus is included in the base price of the unit. Upgrades cost a percentage of the base price, but the anti-cav bonus doesn't increase with upgrades. This means all anti-cav units pay too much for their upgrade relative to non-anti-cav units. This is part of the reason that cav/sword armies came to dominate MTW multiplayer. You have the same situation with ranged units. In MTW, LongJohn attempted to address this by giving discounted upgrades to ranged units, but all this did was transform upgraded ranged units into super melee units breaking the RPS gameplay.

Another issue is that CA insists on tying morale to the experience upgrades. This causes gameplay problems because morale determines at what point a unit will rout. The value of some units is dependent on their ability to rout enemy units using a fixed magnitude morale penalty, but this value will be eliminated if morale gets too high. The cost to purchase that unit doesn't change, but its value on the battlefield does as morale level changes.

The game doesn't work right if the morale is too low or too high, and there isn't a lot of dynamic range in the system. In MTW, you only have about a 4 point range over which it works well. It's a stretch to say it works well over a 6 point range. The engine has fixed morale penalties for all kinds of combat effects, but allows unit morale to vary all over the place via upgrades, both purchased upgrades and battlefield upgrades. You can't design a particular gameplay under such conditions. It's unclear whether morale is still tied to upgrades in M2TW because Palamedes didn't talk about morale in the conntext of multiplayer except to say that units no longer rout in less than 5 seconds.

Certainly, battlefield upgrades have no place in multiplayer. They were removed by CA in MTW/VI v2.01, and the game played better as a result. Then battlefield upgrades came back in RTW. Where is the logic in that? They had better gameplay without the battlefield upgrades, so they put them back in RTW and left them in through 3 patches and an expansion?

Good things are that the upgrades don't provide as much of a combat boost as they did in STW/MTW and are more limited, and they are pricing them so that a unit is most cost effective at its base price. This is much improved over the STW/MTW system, and means that choosing a good morale level is even more important if there isn't going to be a separate adjustment. The very fastest a unit should rout is about 30 seconds, and that's with the strongest offensive unit matched against the weakest defensive unit. The longest a unit matchup should last is probably around 2.5 to 3 minutes, and that would be with highly defensive units matched up.

[Orda Khan]

All upgrades, including honour/valour should be removed from the MP side of the game, I have been advocating this since I started playing. Upgrades are fine for SP as they depict faction improvements along with the various buildings. In MP they detract from the essence of tactical play; sure, tactics are still required to win battles but with far less thought and relying on uber units. The last thing I want to see in MTW II is the boring cav/sword armies of VI.
Having selectable options would be another step forward and I don't see there being a problem here either. Just like army cost, it will not be long before a 'generally accepted' level becomes the norm

.....Orda