Are the Romans too Powerful?

[caravel]

In all probability the "men" in the older engine were consisting of a single "dot" concept wise. The combat caclulation it-self could have been very straight forward. In the newer engine, the men being 3-D and all, they should be consisting of a "hit-box" for calculation purposes. The calculation now should be way more complicated in that it has to include where the weapons are falling in order to make a "hit" before the actual calculation can take place (at least i would guess so).

Men in the older engine were constantly tracked through out battle and the campaign, I'm not so sure about the new engine. Every many had his own valour stats IIRC. The unit valour is just an average of the valour of every man in the unit. I believe that this is no longer the case in the newer engine.

Units in the older engine were very obedient in taking orders and also could do quite amazing courses of action that gave tactical options for the skilled player. One example is the way they spreaded in chasing down routers - you can clearly see that they were operating well in an individual basis.

True, I have noticed this also.

In RTW units move as one whole/blob and such tricks as well as effective router chasing do not happen (at least i didn't notice them). They also seem to be slightly deficient in the way they gang up on enemy soldiers.

I find them unwieldy and they never seem to target a particular man in a unit but more so attack the mass of the unit, I've observed cavalry riding past jabbing at thin air, and a man on the ground suddenly fall down dead when he was clearly not close enough. This is more obvious when you're trying to clean up routers. Also you can end up having to pull units out and send them in again just to kill off a lone enemy in a "glob" this is more of a problem in city plazas. The contact is simply unconvincing. If they were individuals then one of those individuals would be able to kill that lone enemy inside the mass of your men, this leads me to believe that somehow they're not. STW/MTW had poor sprite based unit graphics but if you look you can see exactly which man is attacking which.

This last bit, together with the larger amount of battles on avergare per campaign due to the introduction of the new campaign map system, may be the sourse of the very fast kill rates that were also responsible for a loss in tactical depth in RTW. In other words the game would look bad and boring and take ages to complete with more "reasonable" kill rates, and this can be seen in certain mods that the units duke it out with their repetitive hits or in RTR that there is an endless array of relatively long battles that render it too long to be trully fun for a new player non-TW hardcore.

True, the battle engine has been designed around a different principle. Trying to apply the STW/MTW principles of slower speeds, lower kill rates etc doesn't work for RTW IMHO.

In the end, the results look goofy to me even to this day. The animations of 3-D men, however advanced - still defy belief and are ridiculous, and if i may add of hollywood-like aesthetics that are cheap and populistic IMO. They would need uber computers to make them act really proper, and once one starts going down that route there is no end to the amount of detail you can include.

The problem with the battle engine is that CA's entire focus was on 3D unit models, and nothing else. In a strategy game where if you're actually zoomed in close enough to appreciate it all, then you cannot really oversee the battle effectively. The physics of this are quite simply appalling. Men shooting through the air in all directions, flying horses, slow and unrealistic lunges and swipes. The physics seemed to have taken second place to the appearance.

In all probability the "men" in the older engine were consisting of a single "dot" concept wise. The combat caclulation it-self could have been very straight forward. In the newer engine, the men being 3-D and all, they should be consisting of a "hit-box" for calculation purposes. The calculation now should be way more complicated in that it has to include where the weapons are falling in order to make a "hit" before the actual calculation can take place (at least i would guess so).

And this is, for me, the interesting part. 3D men with no substance. They are 3D visually only. They still work on the principles and same attack round system of SWT/MTW, as far as I can tell. The weapons and attack swings are only cosmetic and very often out of sync with the opponents death. This is no more advanced than STW/MTW in terms of combat, and not truer combat physics such as that seen in some hack and slash games where the actual weapon is picked up, and used to attack the enemy causing damage on intersection with the mesh/bounding box. It doesn't work like this in TW games because a true physics engine for combat, for thousands of men, and not just a few, would eat the CPU. In short their 3D nature is only cosmetic, it adds nothing to the physics and dynamics.