Am I the only one finding the battles boooooooring?

[Daveybaby]

I think the archer thing is a side effect of the semi-intelligent battle line management where you select your entire line and click the enemy line and they automatically choose targets instead of all piling onto the one you clicked.

That would be great if it only did it when, say, 'fire at will' was on.

what's the trick to make charges work? I double-click the enemy, they run up and then stop to adjust formation and stroll into the enemy with swords out. I single-click the enemy, sometimes they just walk all the way up with swords out, sometimes they stop and pull lances and start charging but they almost always stop for formation and end up walking in with swords.

ALWAYS single click, NEVER double click. You also need to let your unit form up first, i.e. stop them far enough away, facing the target, wait for formation to stabilise, then click the target once and leave them to it. Yes, its a pain to set up, and requires a bit of time and space to do it in (which your enemy might not allow you to have) - but IMO thats a good thing - cos when it works its devastating.

And given enough space I find it works pretty much every time. Carnage ensues in enemy ranks.

wedge formation seems to work more often but generals can't do wedge.

Only just occurred to me that possibly which shape formation you use also makes a difference - i always use 2 deep wide formation. I've also noticed that once your cav get tired they wont charge as effectively (or maybe they only get a couple of charges before their lances are broken or something) but by that time i'm usually using them to chase down routers.

[Marius Dynamite]

Am I the only one finding the battles boooooooring?

No you are definetly not. I find the battles very boring. I have no idea why I find them boring though. I loved RTW and RTR battles. Perhaps It was because I loved the factions and the unique fighting styles. I also loved NTW online battles. With M2:TW its just not as fun. It could be because of the lagging in larger battles or the Sprites, I'm not sure. The bad Sprites on Cavalry has certainly put me off. I am thinking back to RTW and RTR and the many fun battles I had. I think the M2:TW graphics are not ready for a TW game.

I am hoping MTR will be more fun, or maybe the patch.

[Griz]

ALWAYS single click, NEVER double click. You also need to let your unit form up first, i.e. stop them far enough away, facing the target, wait for formation to stabilise, then click the target once and leave them to it.

Only just occurred to me that possibly which shape formation you use also makes a difference - i always use 2 deep wide formation.

tried that, didn't work. general's unit is sitting a good distance away from a peasant unit, facing directly at them in 2-deep line, mouseover shows "ready" instead of marching. and yet single-click still results in a lazy stroll into the front lines most of the time. other times they start charging and then stop like 20 feet away even though the formation is fine.

when the charge actually goes off it kills at least 1/4 of the peasants and usually causes a rout, but I can't get them to reliably charge because of the constant formation nonsense.

I haven't noticed any difference in success rates with 2-deep or 4-deep formation, but most of the time you're better off with 2-deep for maximum impact and more guys actually fighting after the charge instead of picking their noses in the back of the formation.

[Daveybaby]

Hmmm... okay well i guess i take it all back then. Weird - seems to work pretty reliably for me.

Just last night had a lone general attacked by a single unit of dismounted feudal knights. Was a bit nervous cos i knew that if i messed up the charge i was toast. 20 cav vs 60 dfk - after first charge down to 11 cav vs 18 dfk - a couple of cav lost when the charge hit, the rest before i could pull them back to regroup. 2nd charge routed the dfk.

H/H campaign, btw.

Gonna have a bit of an experiment tonight, methinks - see if i can get it to actually fail consistently.

[Maizel]

I'm begging to agree.

My battles always consist of just shooting at the enemy standing still until my ammo is used up, and if anything is still standing then, charging with all my infantry = win. I need the patch soon D:

[Mordred]

If you want to get the AI moving due to bug, just attack his shooters, on many occasions AI counter charges in full force.

[Marquis of Roland]

No problems with arrow fire at will mode, but I have big problems with guns on fire at will mode. For some reason when enemy gets into close range they don't fire. Defensive stance is on, skirmish is off.

As far as cav charges go, I have the "wandering around" problem about 50% of the time, most likely cuz 1 or 2 enemy infantrymen is fighting one of the knights on the fringe of the formation, it screws up the charge from AI perspective maybe? Not sure myself for now.

There are some bugs when moving groups over rough terrain; I expect them to change formation to maneuver around some rocks but i don't expect them to stay in that formation once they're in the clear.

Even with all of these problems I enjoyed the graphics and animation very much and I hope they fix the gameplay issues soon

[Wizzie]

This is one of the things that is really killing the game for me at the moment. The "realism" argument for the massive spacing is, to put it politely, a load of codswallop. Maybe the proponents of this theory arn't thinking of the same thing as I am, but when a perfectly formed unit charges into the enemy (if you can call it charging, I too am getting "lets stroll into the enemy line" syndrome with my units, and that is single-click attacking from quite a large distance away) and then stops mere feet away to space themselves about four to five meters apart so they can by butchered, I call that a bug. This happens all the time in sieges and less so in field battles. So massive street battles turn into complete fracas' as the attacking units are pushed together and the dreaded spacing takes over. So while the defending unit has a nice tight-knit group of spears defending, all of a sudden my units of Dismounted Knights gather up speed for a fearsome attack, and then they all stop, about 5-10 walk into combat and the rest all stand back making sure no-one invades their space. So now you have maybe 5 or more knights fighting a full unit of spearmen. Lovely.
I actually have taken to telling my units to march beyond the unit they are fighting to so that they walk into combat. And this doesn't always work as the foremost men try to push through the defenders and get hacked to pieces. This seriously needs to be addressed.

Another thing that's annoying me considerably at the moment is unit movement on walls. Tonight, for example, I deployed my archers on a segment of wall that looked likely to be attacked by a ladder. But the sneaky AI runs the ladder to another section of wall on the other side of the gatehouse when the battle begins. Fair enough, so I click on my unit a send them running to defend that part of the wall instead. Now, for whatever reason the unit breaks into a long chain of running men (obviously), BUT as soon as about 35% to 50% of the unit reach the target every man in the unit stops where he is. And even if you double click on the target position again, they'll run a little bit until the main chunk of the unit reforms itself onto the slightly-altered target and then stop again. And then, since maybe 50% of of the unit is strung out along a few lengths of curtain wal in groups of ones and twos they refuse to fire upon the incoming enemies. This isn't a usualy problem, but one of a myriad of 'quirks' that I'm experiencing with walls in sieges. On another occasion, because some of archers were stuck at the bottom of ladders (litteraly 4-5), while the rest was formed on the walls, the entire unit refused to open fire.

And one of my pets hates is that if your siege towers are interrupted in any way while they're being set against the walls they are rendered useless. This happened me at Caernarvon when the AI ran a unit out of the gates to intercept the men pushing my siege tower. They charged just when the tower was at the wall but the men had not yet climbed it. Obviously I ordered my men to engage the enemy that had attacked them before climbing the tower, but after they had dealt with them they refused to climb the tower (I tried telling them to attack units atop the walls, clicking to move them to the top of walls, telling them to 'pick up' the tower, but nothing worked). Another glitch is when you order more than one unit up a tower by telling two units to attack an enemy on top of the wall. They'll climb it alright, but if the enemy is destroyed before all the men have climbed the tower the units can 'freeze'; it becomes unresponsive (presumably because they target of their attack command no longer exists, meaning the remaining men at the foot of the tower or in the tower stop moving and the entire unit becomes locked up).
Since these problems are situationally-specific, they only occur at certain times and less so now since I have guessed most of the triggers and avoid causing them where possible, but it puts severe restrictions on how you use your units if you have to think "Oh, I don't want to tell them to do that just yet or they might lock up on me, I'll wait till the tower is completely clear".

And all of this before I even get to how cavalry chase down routing units! It's horrendous. Instead of them chasing off to slay the cowards on a madcap gallop (which was the general form of pursuing fleeing enemies at the time, rather than forming up and using the gradual, perfect charge), they seem to go everywhere BUT into the enemy. Instead they splay off in all directions, or run back and reform and then charge (by which time they have no chance of catching up before the enemy flees over a boundary), run parallel to the unit they're supposed to be butchering, or some other wonderfully abstract form of stupidity a lab full of chimps would be hard pressed to outdo. Some of these are bugs left over from RTW too, which makes it doubly puzzling as to how they managed to survive years of developing the same basic code.

...

Anyway, you'll have to excuse my rant. It probably comes across like I hate this game, but it's the complete opposite. I think the battles have the potential to be fantastic except there are certain kinks with the way units move and function. The campaign is superior in every way to Rome, except for a few things (assasins slightly weak, uber-powerful inquisitors spamming everywhere, the "factions relations: Abysmal" quirk whereby after getting into a war it becomes nearly impossible to get the AI to ceasefire even under the most generous ortheatening circumstances), but after playing for a few days the various glitches can really begin to destroy the experience. I understand most of the campaign bugs and the passive AI will be fixed in the first patch, but the lack of mention of this unit spacing bug has me slightly puzzled. M2:TW is, in my experience, the best Total War game to date. Yet some of the gameplay makes the game awkward and ponderous where it should be fluid and responsive.

P.S. And to think I registered here especially to make this post
Hello everyone

[Koval]

I'll have to agree about the movement of units on walls, but you have to admit.... Its been improved a lot from RTW. It still is somewhat lacking, however.

Don't get me wrong, i think this game is awesome, one f the best i've ever played, but there are a few things that, if changed, could make for a much more enjoyable playing experience.
In my opinion, the main factor is the almost complete disregard of armor. Is it just me, or is armor worn to deflect enemy blows? The one hit KO's by peasants at fully armored knights seems a bit off to me. Maybe this was aceptable in RTW, where all the units were a lot less armored.
I think MTW was pretty good in this respect, where units would swing repeatedly at other units, a lot of their blows glancing off their opponents armour. And even without armour, i think it would take more than one shot to drop an opponent.
Maybe i'm wrong, but i'm just simply annoyed at seeing units standing about, taking their time, carefully deliberating before attacking, and when they attack, their attacks seem to be perfectly aimed as to kill their oponent (usually) in one shot.