The Pet Peeve thread

[Kobal2fr]

OK, so we have the 1.2 buglist and 1.3 wishlist to vent off our "OMGWTFFFS this game is horrible" urges, and the tongue-in-cheek one to make fun of them. What about... the little things ? You know, the stuff that's not game breaking however you stretch the word, but that just feels wrong to you. That detracts from your experience somehow. The minor detail that breaks the camel's back ? The silly thing you can't clear out of your mind and just haunts your nights, hounding and clawing at your sanity until you're nothing but the dessicated husk of the man you once were ?

OK, I'll start to get the ball going. Here's what nags me :

- the fact that every general, no matter your tech level or what the date is, is in full Renaissance plate. Heck, even brigand captains attached to a lone peasant unit have them.

- Likewise, no matter wether it's turn 1 or 225, the guards in spy/assassin videos are always in full field plate.

- Xbowmen quivers being on the wrong side of the model.

- I have no idea what the weather is. Oh sure, I can see rain, or snow, or fog but... What ? Is it "light showers clearing up later" ? "dense fog all day" ? "sunny with chances of rain later" ? I wanna know ! I USED to know !


And a strictly RTW one :

- "Domus dulcis domus" ? Whoever came up with that one oughta be castrated and shot. And if it's a temporary, beta, debugging name that somehow got left in the game, who let it slip needs to be drawn and quartered.
I mean it was so... underwhelming. "Congratulations ! You have managed to expand Roman culture all the way to the edges of the known world against all odds ! Here's us taking you for an idiot as a reward."

[Philbert]

One thing I find annoying is the fact that if you have 2 units of something, the order in which they are deployed in the field is always (! not 50% of the time, but always) reversed: The unit listed left is deployed on the right and the unit listed right is deployed on the left.

Now I usually change the default deployment anyway, but still it nags me.

[Fußball]

One thing I find annoying is the fact that if you have 2 units of something, the order in which they are deployed in the field is always (! not 50% of the time, but always) reversed: The unit listed left is deployed on the right and the unit listed right is deployed on the left.

- the fact that every general, no matter your tech level or what the date is, is in full Renaissance plate. Heck, even brigand captains attached to a lone peasant unit have them.

- Likewise, no matter wether it's turn 1 or 225, the guards in spy/assassin videos are always in full field plate.

I also find these slightly annoying.
@Philbert: That simply does not make sense, reversing the order. This has likewise annoyed me. Why would one simply do such a thing...

@Kobal2fr: Also, it nips at me that any non-Islamic faction you play has the same armor. You go to Eastern Europe into Russia and everyone wears the same armor except your general, who thinks it is cool not to conform, so he wears Western European style full plate. It would have been nice if based on a faction's location at least, that the given general wore different armor.

A long time peeve of my own is the lack of substance given to the Mongols. CA seemed to give them all that they needed on the battlefield, but not on the campaign map. They are considered an Islamic faction, they have Islamic portraits and their general and army markers are Islamic. CA had enough time to make simple voice overs for them but not enough time to give them a bit more detail?

Tschüß!
Erich

[HoreTore]

Yeah, the deployment phase is definitely my pet peeve. I hate having to reverse the sequence on my unit cards at the start of every single battle...

Also, I'd want the ability to make custom tactics. Like what we had in MTW, where you could choose various deployment possibilities from a list, bu we can make our own. When hunting rebels(or other small/medium battles), for example, I always use the same formation, however, it is not the one my troops are deployed in...

[Kobal2fr]

Ah, right. I'd like to add "I can't reorganize unit cards like I'd want to" to the list then :)

[Whacker]

Hrmmm... "Little" things?

- City view feature. Utterly fail to understand why that was removed from RTW when it was already there.

- The unit and building queue and info cards have a 'rushed' feel to them, and are not nearly as vibrant or clear as the RTW ones.

[Tyrac]

One thing I find annoying is the fact that if you have 2 units of something, the order in which they are deployed in the field is always (! not 50% of the time, but always) reversed: The unit listed left is deployed on the right and the unit listed right is deployed on the left.

Now I usually change the default deployment anyway, but still it nags me.

Yeah. Drives me nuts.

[Ciaran]

A peeve would be the faction heir status jumping all over the family tree.
A major annoyance is the fact that mounted units can´t dismount, especially since I seem to recall that it had been stated back in time that this particularly lovely feature would make a reappearance.

[Tyrac]

THE QUOTES!!!!!

Would it really take much more time to get a few more? We all play this game too much..... So we have all seen every single quote about 20 or more times.

Read the signatures on this board for example. There is NO shortage of things to say yet I have to suffer the same damn things over and over every time I play.

Hell just add back in the quotes from the past 3 games even!!!!!

[phunkbot]

Mine would be the way how you have to coax the game with various little tricks to reorganize your unit cards on the campaign map and having to pause and pause and pause a battle to maintain at least a chaos I am to blame for....

[Budwise]

Yeah, I have two big ones but they aren't game stoppers.

1. I use the spacebar one time when on the campaign map to make everything move faster. Unfortunately, when I move something like a stack of troops through area A, instead of telling me its blocked by an other factions army, it makes me go on a major detour out of the way and it won't let me undo it. So in other words, I waste a minimum of two turns to get reinforcements to the front.

2. Not being able to pick the start time. I still to this day have not seen the Timorids nor the Aztecs but my recent campaign I am getting close to that. I just wish sometimes I don't have to start so early and I should also be able to type in the ending year, if I want to turtle to the year 1800, I should have the right to do so.

As a whole, even with its many flaws, this is a great game and I thank CA for it.

[JJ2335]

1. Computer AI in siege mode. When I attack, the computer moves the defenders (archers, spearmen) off the walls if I deploy far enough from them. Then the computer units run to the city square. When I advance, they rush back - too late and exhausted.

2. Computer AI defending on hilly terrain. They predictably deploying on highest ground. Defenders abandon the high ground after I rush up with my cav archers! My units all get up there and AI tries to charge back up?!

3. Musical Chairs Game for breeding governors. A long-term growth policy of low taxes and farm priority breeds poor taxmen and traders. To get good traits the governor has to be there on building completing turn. You need to maximize the taxes and moveout garrisons.

4. On VH - you vs the world, instant one turn full stack garrisons, infinite enemy navies that are always bigger than yours. Piecemeal armies. I would love defending/attacking more armies that fight in force like the Mongols.

5. Fighting half ballista armies, lol.

I still like the game but I use some house rules.

[Didz]

Computer AI in siege mode. When I attack, the computer moves the defenders (archers, spearmen) off the walls if I deploy far enough from them. Then the computer units run to the city square. When I advance, they rush back - too late and exhausted.

Its interesting that you should mention that as I felt the same way about this behaviour at first and have since come to think that its either very stupid or pretty clever depending upon what you consider to be the alternative options.

On the wall or Off the Wall
The AI seems to make an assessment of whether it is better to deploy its men on the walls or off the walls at the start of the siege. I find if my assault force has towers and ladders, it normally places units on the wall opposite the point it expects them to land. However, if I have rams or if my force is heavy with catapults and ballistae then it frequently decides to leave its men in the street behind the walls and let the wall towers do the killing. Its choice is not always perfect but it means that I rarely get an opportunity to massacre wall mounted units with my catapults unless I have first done something to lure them onto the wall.

Abandoning the Walls
The AI always abandons the walls once a breach has been made or the gates smashed. This is sound logic, in that in theory the walls are now breached and cannot be defended. As a human player I can make value judgements to sacrifice troops even after the walls have been breached but the AI does not seem to have that capability. If it did no doubt people would be moaning that the stupid AI left units defending the walls even when our cavalry was heading for their city centre.

Counter attacks
The AI seems to be programmed to perform local counter-attacks whenever feasible. So, for example I frequently find a non-wall mounted unit will rush the wall as soon as my ladders or towers begin to spill out troops onto the battlements, even if it chose not to garrison the wall at the start of the siege to reduce missile casualties. There seems to be a cut-off point to these counter attacks in that after a few failed attempts the AI stops doing them and falls back to defend the city centre. However, at this point it gets abuse for being too passive so it seems to be in a no win situation.

Likewise it will counter attack the gate or a breach as soon as your first troops try to penetrate. This can be a real pain and makes it difficult to get a bridgehead inside the walls, but can be exploited by clever players like myself who deliberately block the streets with spearmen to meet the counter-attack force and frequently outflank them with cavalry down a side street to prevent them from escaping again.

Its actually hard to decide what the AI ought to do for the best. If it always manned the walls and never launched a counter attack we would accuse it of deliberately placing it troops in harms way and being passive. However, what it currently does is equally capable of being exploited by human players who master its shortcomings.

Ideally, the AI would be as imaginative as its human opponent in handling sieges, but given the options a human is willing to attempt that would be difficult to achieve. For example, in one siege I actually chose to move all my horse archers out of the city and attack the AI’s ladder teams from the rear whilst blocking their assault with spearmen on the walls. This caught the AI unawares, but when the AI attempted exactly the same manoeuvre against me I was ready for it and merely shot its cavalry to bits with my crossbowmen making it look like a dumb move.

Personally, I think there is little that could be done to improve the AI on siege defence, its does the right things but basically gets creamed because we know its going to do them. On the other hand if it was totally unpredictable then by implication some of the options it chose would be really stupid and we would be laughing at it so what can you do?

[Ciaran]

Playing the Forth Eorlingas mod for BI, I remember another one: campaign map pathfinding. In RTW and BI, when I can see an enemy army or settlement, my troops will move around it, staying well out of its control zone. Not so M2TW. It´s always the straight road, and usually any long-distance move ends up in some enemy´s control zone. Even putting a spy in the army (to increase the line of sight) doesn´t work, whenever I want any of my armies to avoid getting stuck I have to maneuvre them manually to give any castle, city, fort or stack a wide berth. I mean, if something worked in the past, and you´re going to use basically the same code again, who in his right mind would think to change the working parts .

[Foz]

Well there's a couple things you could do, Didz. One would be to come up with more viable options and present the AI with a weighted random choice between them. Currently, though, the AI tries to evaluate the situation and deploy its troops in the one way it deems most tenable... so the implication is that if you give it options, they are inferior. This isn't necessarily the case, as there could be better options missed by the simplification of its decision routine, but unless you make the decision code more complex to allow it to see those better options, you would be making the AI do inferior things by letting it do anything other than its current first choice. So the problem is really that to give the AI choices that will result in consistent play at the level it currently plays at, you must first come up with a way to generate choices that are better than the ones it currently makes so you can use them as options.

It's also possible, though, that including some seemingly inferior options would actually help the AI by lending less predictability to it. In that case you are basically sacrificing one in favor of the other though, so you'd need a lot of studying to figure out just how much benefit is really gained by making it so the AI's moves aren't simply predictable.

There's another question too, even if the AI decision routine is improved: should you use that to make the AI have choices, or to simply improve the one decision it will always make? Again this ties into the predictability versus viability discussion.

Of course likely the best way to improve the entire situation you mentioned is to make the AI model better at predicting and reacting to threats. In the case you mentioned, the AI fails to employ the strategy you did because it doesn't recognize it is about to be railed by your crossbows. If it could realize that, it would avoid having it happen, and hopefully implement a better strategy. Similarly, its best recourse when you correctly predict its actions is to be able to fluidly react to how you counter it. It doesn't need a better strategy nearly as much as it needs better ability to adjust its strategy during the course of battle.