A question or two about unit behavior...

[Hoplite7]

Do complex/slow animations, such as those by dismounted knights or billmen, hinder combat performance? I would think it would as spearmen can kill two or three of them in the time it takes to kill one peasant in a theatric way.

Also, today in my Russian campaign the Poles used a ladder against a broken section of the wall. They climbed up and fell off, all 85 of them. Has this happened to anyone else?

[Foz]

For the first part, as far as anyone can tell, animations are directly tied to combat performance. Your men cannot kill anything except when they are animating an attack. So the easiest answer is yes, longer animations could possibly make your units attack less frequently, and thus perform worse. This is likely to be somewhat counteracted by a minimum time between attacks imposed for all units though. The gist is that most animations are probably shorter than the minimum time between attacks required by the game, so generally a unit will have some wait time imposed, and thus attack as often as every other unit. For instance if 10 seconds are required between attacks, but all attack animations run less than that, then all units should attack every 10 seconds. I think the precise reason for this is to allow the programmers the ability to have cool and/or intricate unit animations without them negatively impacting performance. So while there's no hard evidence, I actually speculate that for the most part the attack animation length is made irrelevant by the wait time imposed by the game between attacks.

To your second part... LOL. That's hilarious. Haven't seen it myself, but it's not exactly surprising, the game is sometimes quirky. It'd be priceless to have that footage captured...

[Frederick_I_Barbarossa]

Can't say I've ever seen a ladder to nowhere...sounds like one of those crazy M.C. Escher illustrations...

[Whacker]

What is it with the Polish and ladders?? This begs for a good joke.

Linky: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showp...&postcount=171

[sapi]

i've seen the ladder to nowhere trick too

[Omisan]

It's historically accurate. They are simply climbing on one another's shoulders until they reach the wall. That's how Polish army did in back then. The ladders were only used to draw fire from archers while the men climbed.