The Will of the Senate - Out of character thread V

[Lucjan]

I don't see why anybody would have an issue with accepting approximated units due to platinums failure to somehow be compatible with itself.

I've asked a friend for his cd key from a disc that no longer works and he's going to look for it for me tomorrow, I'll try some more things to see if I can't get platinum to work for us when I have the second key, I'll let you guys know what's up after that.

[Mount Suribachi]

Yeah, I think playing with all Roman armies with vanilla should be OK. Other than the increased movement speeds I would imagine its pretty similar.

[econ21]

Myrddraal reckons it would not be a problem to mod the stats and movement speeds in MP, so we should be fine.

Now that Ancrya has been resolved, I've played turn 3 of the civil war (autumn 250). I now need orders for turn 4. The savegame is:

http://www.totalwar.org/patrons/pbm/250-win.zip

Most important are Lucjan's orders for Servius and Quintus Naevius; Swordsmaster's and Tiberius's for Luca and Decius; and GeneralHankerchief's. The others will not reach Italy for another season or more.

If people could get me orders by Monday night or Tuesday at the latest, that would be good.

[Death the destroyer of worlds]

Just a brief note that I found the battle and the reports utterly fascinating.
Muchos kudos for econ21 !
Of course I am also enjoying the civil war stories.
Senate - Consul
1 - 0

[Tamur]

And I have to add that, even though I was in the "general" chair for the Senate, I found the reports equally fascinating. It made me wish in a big way that there were a way to do that more often -- though of course I would not wish it on econ to have to referee another battle spending hours and hours of his time to do it.

He gave both Braden and I obscured and incomplete battle reports based on where our generals were, made us order by division rather than unit, and generally turned it into a much more real experience. At times it was frustrating, at times rather shocking, but both in a good way.

I've often wished that, in TW battles, I didn't even have the option to micromanage each unit -- that I could instead turn things over to a division commander and say "get this job done" without worrying that said commander will simply charge any enemy in sight range.

So, having econ give us exactly that possibility was jarring at first. Now I'm having a lot of trouble going back to the normal fashion of TW battles.

A big thanks to econ for the way he handled this.

[econ21]

I really enjoyed doing the umpired battle, although I was surprised by the amount of work it involved. I always wanted a game which simulated the real decisions of a general, rather than getting you to micromanage each individual unit. If we did it again, what I would change would be starting out with two stacks only on the field and then bring on any other stacks a random time during the battle (say probability = [turn #]/6). I think that would add a little more drama and also space out of the combats a little, so everything was not resolved by turn 4 as here.

I think the mechanisms of splitting up fights into mirrored mini-custom battles is a reasonable way of weighing the forces involved, but still allowing some role for battle strategy. After the battle, Lucjan wondered if each that each general should have the chance to fight the AI in these mirrored contests, but on reflection I think it is better that an umpire do it trying to follow the orders given and reflect the lines of deployment. The AI is so awful, there are lots of gamey things you can do to win with virtually no casualties (and our campaign tallies of kill ratios have encouraged the development of these!) but these don't accurately simulate what would happen. Trying to follow the orders of each general and averaging the result seems preferable.

Just a note on translating battlefield losses to the campaign map: I don't have an easy means of changing the strength of units on the campaign map, so I either disbanded them or kept them whole strength. I took the estimated unit survivors, then added 35% of the casualties back (as recovered wounded, prisoners, stragglers, whatever). The final % of the unit remaining was the chance that the unit stayed on the campaign map - I used a random generator to test against that. We could use the same method for translating MP battles onto the campaign map - although we would have to think about whether there should be a further penalty for the loser (the possibility of army dissolution). It struck me after the battle that it would be a shame to dissolve Legio II, so Numerius did a deal with Manius that his survivors would guard the east rather than just be disbanded en masse.

[econ21]

To keep things on track, I'm going to set a deadline of 6pm UK time tomorrow (Tuesday) for any orders for the campaign map. If I don't receive orders, I'll use my judgement to make the moves but won't get anyone into any trouble if I can avoid it.