New units for SP campaign - Suggestions?

[barocca]

i agree, for MP only a couple of things are missing from the mix,

for SP tho' the sky is the limit, the idea is for players to have fun,
(anyone here any good at fiddling the build priorities so an AI will build decent troops mixes??)

Pavise
when "dismounting" you can dismount to an entirely different troop type
(from cav to infantry) so i think it might work to go from cav to artillery

but will the AI "dismount" at all??

cheers
B.

[Noir]

The AI won't dismount at all in my experience.

[Puzz3D]

VI easily allows to create 100 or more unique battleunits when all options are used.

Those 100 units will not be significantly different from one another. You need a 2 combat point difference between units for the AI to offer strong opposition, and the useful operational range for melee units is about 12 points.

[Noir]

They won't be in terms of use - but they will be in terms of flavour. Even having a different grpahic or a different name or a different artwork in the unit info BIF makes all the difference in the world for SP enthusiasts as it excites the imagination and enhances immersion.

[cegorach]

Pavise
when "dismounting" you can dismount to an entirely different troop type
(from cav to infantry) so i think it might work to go from cav to artillery

It works any way you want to cavalry to cavalry, infantry to infantry, artillery to cavalry etc.

but will the AI "dismount" at all??

No.

[R'as al Ghul]

No.

[R'as al Ghul]

So, if we enable any kind of artillery the AI will most probably spam it.
If we enable a unit that only dismounts to artillery in castle battles, the Ai won't use it.

Brilliant! Why go through the hassle of creating this units, then?
It will only give the player an advantage and it's not as if we play any castle battles in MP.

I think the only possibility is to make an artillery piece, make it expensive, make it take 2 or more turns to build and make the build priorities so that the Ai hopefully doesn't spam it too much.
I'm confident that I can reduce the numbers of built artillery pieces but I'm frustrated that the pavise idea will probably not work out.

[Noir]

It will work if you make it useful for field battles as well ie make it a more proper missile unit with protection. Then there's no need for dismount neither the AI will spam it as it won't be in the "art" list. The other thing is that the spamming rate can be regulated by building preferences to my experience.

The idea is good, but it needs time and testing to become an integrated part of the SP game. The MP game is an entirely different story, and i'll leave the experts speak on that as i find it almost perfect as it stands.

The idea behind many things in the SP game is to provide flavour for the player - its not to increase satisfaction in the tactical field. Most mods for MTW i know are built around that perspective. So advantages over the AI are cherished if not huge and if they add to immersion.

[TosaInu]

Hello Yuuki,

I agree with that. There are however more tricks in the bag than straight combat only.

The anti-cavalry bonus for example can be applied to any unit (or not), consist of two parts (defensive or offensive) and can have any value. There are 3 bowstats (two shortbow, one longbow) which can be made totally different. Two firearm stats together with several other missiles that can be used somehow. Each man can carry an unique supply of ammo, morale, speeds, unitsize, rankbonus etc can be applied, as well as overkill stats which are only overruled by more overkill.

Let's say the melee ranges from 0 till 20, and 0,2,4..20 are used to create normal units. A special unit (we neglect the realistic question) has a defense value of 20. That means that even the normal 20 melee unit can hardly dent it. To make a tailored melee anti-unit you have to give it 40 melee so it kills 40-20=20. You can use the is afraid off parameters as well as other combat, morale, cost and speed values to avoid the last unit to be the only relevant one. Think the first to be an ultra defensive unit and the latter the destroyer of that defense.

It is true, that it will be very difficult to balance this for MP; to avoid having only a fistfull of units that will prove to be the best bang for bucks and thus become the only used ones. The more units in a game, the harder it is to achieve the MP required <10% balance. Even for a game like VI, which is pretty well equiped.

What Noir said is also true, even a clan using some sickle yari for its ashigaru, instead of the plain one, but having the same stats is great for flavour (the sickle adds options to drag a samurai from his horse, so more anti-cav makes a new unit).

The nice thing is that the more minimalistic roster and the extensive one can both become part of the same modification, by using era files and if need to, unique stat files.

Each individual/group of player(s) can then decide what to use in his/her campaign or online games. Or maybe even tweak it.

[TosaInu]

So, if we enable any kind of artillery the AI will most probably spam it.
If we enable a unit that only dismounts to artillery in castle battles, the Ai won't use it.

Brilliant! Why go through the hassle of creating this units, then?
It will only give the player an advantage and it's not as if we play any castle battles in MP.

Mobile heavy calibre arq. Apart from the foundation, Japanese castles weren't the yards thick massive stone constructions like in the West. So, it's not odd to see a weapon like that doing damage to a wall/gate as well as units.

Do the hitstone/hitwood parameters in Projectiles.txt work?
I recall you could make any missile effective agaist the wall. A method to assault a castle is to set fire. You could make the torch more effective or adjust the grenade.

I think the only possibility is to make an artillery piece, make it expensive, make it take 2 or more turns to build and make the build priorities so that the Ai hopefully doesn't spam it too much.

That will be good to do.


A different thing: is it possible to make a working supply train or a unit that hands out extra ammo?

[cegorach]

A different thing: is it possible to make a working supply train or a unit that hands out extra ammo?

No.



But you can use such as an objective in MP battles e.g. a supply train is ambushed and needs to be saved and so on.



About siege units - just make it

a) infantry not artillery so the AI will NOT spam them together and use too extensivelly in field battles

b) make it hard to build - perhaps by adding an unique structure (one per faction) so the number of such units will NEVER be too large.

c) make it not too cheap or too expensive - both affect AI choice somehow - it produces too many cheap units in the beginning and too often the expensive ones if it is advanced enough...

[Noir]

Making it hard to build detracts fun from the campaign in my opinion. I dislike having to considerably tech up to get all units and also it works lawys for teh advantage of the player. Alternative solution is to make its production building unique and attach a low AI preferance value.

[Raz]

Katana wielding unit long overdue. If you can build a building named Katana-Kaji, you'd naturally assume you'd be able to make a unit that wields a katana!

Bah! I'm too angry right now, I need to lay down.

[barocca]

Katana wielding unit long overdue.

yes.

if you build it they will come...

otherwise you have to wait for me to have a whole free week...
(me? with three sons under 10 - i got buckleys mate... )

(for all non ozzies - buckleys chance)

[Puzz3D]

Think the first to be an ultra defensive unit and the latter the destroyer of that defense.

The AI will use the defensive destroyer on every other unit, and so will a human player. A WM can beat an NI in 60 seconds, but that same WM beats a YA in 5 seconds. Certainly 5 seconds is the low end of the scale for combat resolution time. That 5 seconds is being achived with a difference of 9 combat points (6 points, 5.6% chance to kill, for the WM striking the YA) + good charge. That's about the range you have to work with before combat resolution time becomes too short or too long. Two NI fight for about 3 minutes (-6 points on the strike, 0.6% chance to kill). In addition, a good part of the -20 to +20 dynamic range of melee combat has to be left for combat bonuses.

Likewise the usable speed range is limited by fatigue on the low end and controlability and scale factor on the high end. The lowest usable speed in Samurai Wars was found to be 6, and the highest 24. We tried a walking speed of 4 for NI and the unit incured too much fatigue on large maps. Once again it was found that to be tactically significant within the scale of the game a difference of about 20% in speed is necessary. You also have to allow for cavalry to run something like 2x the infantry running speed. So we have infantry walking at 6 or 7, running at 10 or 12 and charging at 12 or 14. The ninja walks at 8, runs at 14 and charges at 16. The cavalry walks at 8 or 10, runs at 20, 22 (hatamoto) or 24. and charges at 22, 24 or 26.

Morale is another parameter with a limited usable range. In Samurai Wars we found the usable range to be 0 to 10. The lowest we could make a melee unit and still have it functional was morale 6. You can go below 6 with a pure shooter. The highest is about 10 before you simply have units fighting to the last man.

[TosaInu]

The AI will use the defensive destroyer on every other unit, and so will a human player.

That's why you have to use the other tools too. Make it slow so it 'can't' catch anything, but the equally slow defensive unit, give it a low defense, so even if he engages another unit he'll suffer, make him afraid of all other units, make the defensive unit afraid of him (there will be an optimum somewhere), give the offensive unit very low armour, a negative anti cav defence bonus so even one crippled horse will ruin it.

I'm not claiming -^ all this will make a nice unit, just throwed in some options to bypass the 'limits'.

I doubt the AI being foolish enough to make spamarmies with such a unit, let alone human players (which is btw not an issue at all, as the extra units are intended for the SP era).

[barocca]

what effect does the formation width and depth have on combat capability, or missile survivability?
could we use width and depth to reduce manouverability?

[Flaxmac]

Hi,

Talking about other units, just wondering what it is that helps an ally decide to assist you attack a province that you are attacking ?
What about this for a suggestion, not an alliance that was made with a emissary, but rather an alliance that was made with the marriage of a princess would give a fifty percent chance of the daimyo helping you. Maybe the princesses could have ratings which increase or decrease this percentage chance.

Could we be asked if one of our allies were about to attack a province if we wanted to send troops to help him ?

Is there a tech tree for the Samurai warlords ?
Is there also a province description chart, listing benefits of the province plus other info ?

[Puzz3D]

Talking about other units, just wondering what it is that helps an ally decide to assist you attack a province that you are attacking ?

Your ally isn't deciding to help you. He's just deciding to attack that province. Being an ally just reduces his chance of attacking you.

Could we be asked if one of our allies were about to attack a province if we wanted to send troops to help him ?

I don't think so. If you want to help an ally take out a clan, you can just attack that clan yourself and help weaken it. You can sometimes make a pretty good guess at where the AI is going to attack, and attack the same province.[/QUOTE]

[Puzz3D]

I doubt the AI being foolish enough to make spamarmies with such a unit, let alone human players (which is btw not an issue at all, as the extra units are intended for the SP era).

There is a human player in the SP era. If the units are given qualities that the AI doesn't recognize, then the AI will make mistakes when using those units.

[TosaInu]

There is a human player in the SP era. If the units are given qualities that the AI doesn't recognize, then the AI will make mistakes when using those units.

I see what you mean. Indeed, the dismount function f.e. would be a nice solution, if it wasn't for the AI not to use it :(

The AI does recognise other stats such as anti-cavalry bonus though.

If it means that the mod has only units that requires a human player to use it properly, then we would indeed have a campaign that isn't good (in the long run) for anyone.

Even if the AI fails to use the full potential of some units, it's rarely so that it's totally apathic. The AI does have an edge over human users too (it can micromanage 16 units at the same time). The 90+% fairness required for MP isn't such an huge issue in SP. Quite some is of course, but you have more elbow room.

[barocca]

this is based on what i can find around the web,

in my humble opinion japanese did not go "cannon-crazy" like the europeans did,
i see far more references to large caliber hand guns (hand-cannon) than to regular cannon (european style)

all we make cannon for is the human players who want some form of artillery
(a big bang)

my idea (mentioned in the poll too) is only hand cannon,
make them very low rate of fire, and very lousy accuracy,
(if people then want to unbalance the mod on their own machines they can)
make these hand cannon dismount from mounted ashi-xbow,
make the mounted x-bow a very high tech unit, make em expensive,
make them unlikely for ai tobuild (unit preferences),
make them very lousy accuracy and very low rate of fire

??

[Noir]

My humble opinion:

yes, but please don't do mounted xbow ashigaru. They sound/feel way off the spirit of the era to me.

Large cannons were striped off Dutch ships in order to end the Siege of Osaka (last stand of those loyal to Hideyoshi) from the part of Ieyasu. I think they were used in a similar fashion to suppress a major peasant rebellion again from Ieyasu at roughly the same time.

There are no accounts of them taking part to sieges or battles prior to Sekigahara as far as i know.

Noir

[R'as al Ghul]

Just found this

It's important that you know the truth.

[Bonfire]

[QUOTE=TosaInu
That extra animation could be useful for a disguished ninja (a ball and chain weapon may be hard to animate). There are also slashing animations that fit the naginata.[/QUOTE]

Gothic Nights USE Mace's that might work..

[Bonfire]

i think we already talked about this too but maybe we add HERO units.

only hirable base on what era it is.

like the kenesai but with a diffrent WEAPON specialist..
thats pretty much the only thing i can think of and wish to alter with the japense units.

---------------------------------


i been playing dynasty warriors,legends,and empires since first one came out for ps2 (dynasty warriors 3)tell now with empires 5 i know alot of chinese units of what they could be..
i'll added them now..

(chinese elite unit evenly match to winning not winning easly Agasint 1v1 Kenasi) Tiger General (based on the 5 generals of wu,wei,and shu standards.

the chinese didn't have the choku no tell the later days of the kings and queens of england but they did have standard archer units like the first one you get from MTW non mod style and there xbow came later but only shot one arrow but there dmg and speed was better then the europeans rate of fire. for this next version archer could be called chinese archers and the xbows could be called cho ku no light . next verision or this version cho ku no heavy im not sure on there calvary units but im sure only generals used bows.

infantry it gets a lil harder cause of there method of war play is way diffrrent then the world. they consit of group battles organized war fare.. men of 5-10 would go at it. to minize losses and test to see who could be gifted for spec trainin..

standard sword/spear/building and ther unit production.
Chinese infantry

chinese spear

Chinese Pike/pole
---
2-3 building coould be nanman units like the

Nanman Guard (sword/spear/pole,pike..

---
towards the end of the building tech tree are these.

Chinese Guard (sword)

Chinese Enforcer (spear/skirmisher non-missle)

Chinese shock troops (pike/polearm)
-----------------------------------
As for calvary there eperiance in the feild of calavary units weren't normaly used by everyday units but mainly used for Generals/heir commanding officers and there personal Guards. no missle calavary though (bummer)
-----------------------------------
Seige units (they did use Seige)

they had what is called a wooden Ox wouldn't fight but would bring supplys etc i can see just having this on the battle field would increase Morale.

and since they are the inventors of gun powder i can see a napath like unit being made they didn't use it with guns tell after the mongols were dispanded
(which at this time the europens had trade routes to china)

so seige equipement they did have battery rams.

they also had a juggernaut which used a flame throw like method its was a big wooden mettal tank that spined in a 360 degree and shot fire out.

they also had elephants and fire tatics..

and a very unique seige unit that would build a bring over rivers.. and WAlls.
i've seen them use it for walls alot in dynasty warriors 4. in the battle of XU chang they used it to assualt cao cao directly which it worked but cao cao used battle feild mines to deystroy the advancing attacking army.

[Bonfire]

also i would like to mention since the chinese have been around longer then the egyptians as far as government and religion.. (budism)-christanity didn't take flight tell after WORLD War I. for the longest time christian Followers would be killed hang and beaten to death for there beleaf.

chinese are the only ones to hold on to buddism the longest. and to this day still are. in some way..

anyways wha ti was gonna say...

(since the chinese are organized military to the utmost carefuly style.)

3/4ths of there units should be displined