Kingdoms Battle Map Balance - Latest Blog entry

[Orda Khan]

he did say that in the crusades campaign the eastern factions get new units. Is it really that important to write several hundred words about it? I seriously doubt that reducing the numbers from 40-30 will affect them, they've always been hard to fight catch and kill from a western empire side of view now it sounds like itll be even harder, so I don't see that you ahve that much to complain about.

They get new units in Crusades campaign.......only.
Since those several hundred words make a valid point, yes it is. HA are vulnerable to arrows and anyone who knows how to use archers will quickly reduce the HA to a point where they can be more or less ignored. Regardless of better accuracy, they will still be vulnerable to arrows and 30 will be reduced in number faster than 40.

If you are shooting at enemy archers with your horse archers, you may wish to try a different tactic.

I do not waste HA arrows on cheap units like archers

.......Orda

[John_Longarrow]

Orda,

I'd suggest you download Lands to Conquer and try it out. There is a different feel to it, and all units tend to take more casualties. That should tell you about what you want to know for how cav is changing.

[icek]

I ecited this post after playing lands to conquer. I charged frontally on dfk with polish guard and killed them instantly losing one men. Then i charged into spear militia with polish knights and killed 60% of unit with first blow, second charge defeated them, i lost 33% of unit. but i was scared when i saw dismounted english knights stats (19 att, 16 def) and heavy billmen (14,13) :|

[Jack Lusted]

Yeah DEK and Heavy Billmen are great shock troops, and if backedf up with other infantry can break the enemy line and can be a crucial part of a battle. But their weak against missiles and in prolonged melee by themselves. And they are useless against cav charges.

And yes the best way to see what the Kingdoms balance will be like is to try LTC or the seperate balancing files i released at TWC.

[icek]

I must write this because if LTC balance is kigdoms balance then i dont understand why portugal is so powerfull and poland so weak. Portugal, an almost not egsistant kingdom in medieval, have powerfull aventuros to stop cavalry, dismounted portugese knights to pwn infantry, 2 long range units musketers and heavy x-bows, jinetes and sword militia when polish only usefull heavy infantry is dismounted polish knights[a11,d18],dismounted nobles with spears and without bonus fighting cavalry is useless, woodmen are to weak and dont have a long range unit. frontal charge and infantry battle will lead to polish defeat, and before cavalry do any side/rear attack they will be shooted by long range units. My expertise: give polish a long range unit because they are the only faction in the game besides azteks that dont have it and remove or nerf dismounted portugese knights from portugal selection(they description says that they lack a professional army anyway).

[Jack Lusted]

Well Poland do have a good quality spear unit in their Spearmen, especially with armour upgrades. Their Dismounted Polish Knights will beat Dismounted Portugese Knights in prolonged melee if they withstand the charge which they will. Plus Poland have one of the best cavalry units in the game in Polish Guard which outclass the Portugese knights, and Dismounted Portugese Knights would stand no chance against them. And of course Poland have Polish Nobles who are great javelin cavalry, and the manouverability of the Polish Guard combined with infantry can easily beat the Aventuros.

[Husar]

I'm just wondering, if you decrease all armour by two points(and "balance" this by increasing shield and defense values), make ranged units more accurate and reduce cavalry size to 2/3rds, won't that make late era cavalry like gendarmes and lancers useless compared to knights with shields, especially if the enemy has ranged units? You might say not against gunpowder since that ignores shields, but the AI hardly ever uses gunpowder effectively except for artillery. Yesterday I lost 21 of 80 gendarmes to a salvo of crossbow bolts from danish crossbow militia, i can't remember losing that many knights of any other type to a single salvo and it happened twice in a row. Considering that late armour was designed to withstand projectiles from most angles and that shields weren't used anymore because the armour actually worked, I find that very odd.

I also often find that my ranged units get around 200-400 kills each in battles on huge unit size, my close combat units can only get that much in city battles and most of them are DFKs. Currently I find that DFKs and equivalents are so good that they can take pretty much every infantry role, including flanking and cavalry defense, making all other infantry units pretty much useless. Their defense is so high that they can survive most attacks from the front and after you built some you also get a swordsmith guild which makes their swords so deadly that they can kill anything.

Another thing are shield sizes, in RTW most shield bonuses seemed to be given by how big a shield was in size, but in M2TW almost all infantry shields give 6 defense and cavalry shields give 4 defense, at least for western factions. I found that especially weird since DFKs and FKs have exactly the same shield, but their shield values differ by two. Now you can say that DFKs can use their shields better due to being on foot, but IMO that should be reflected by their defense value, shouldn't it? Because against ranged units both shields should give the same protection and horse armour should count seperately, maybe that's why knights get less of a shield bonus?

That's my input so far, maybe I can try LTC sometime in the next days.

[anders]

stop complaining about weak polish units icek, you got strezcly, polish guards, husars, polish retainers, and polish noles, its a great cavalry selection with good performance and a cool "slatcha goes to war feel" that can accomplish a lot, especially against inf. heavy westeners. only problem is the charging cavalry come a bit late/high in the building order.

[gardibolt]

Huh. My cavalry take plenty of casualties as it is; if you try to pull them out to charge again, they just rout and die. If you leave them in, they die unless they routed the unit they charged. Playing M/M, vaniller 1.2. I'm not seeing any need for them to take more casualties.

So if we want the rebalancing in Kingdoms in the grand campaign, we should use LTC? No patch for the GC? That's kind of odd, but I guess it's semiofficial now.

[Orda Khan]

I use cavalry based armies, always have, lightweight for the most part and with many HA. By nature of unit size, my army is always smaller and now it is going to be reduced by a further 25%. I do not see this as an improvement

.....Orda

[icek]

stop complaining about weak polish units icek, you got strezcly, polish guards, husars, polish retainers, and polish noles, its a great cavalry selection with good performance and a cool "slatcha goes to war feel" that can accomplish a lot, especially against inf. heavy westeners. only problem is the charging cavalry come a bit late/high in the building order.

yes poland got only cavalry. and prepare that fighting poland on gs will be fighting nomadic all-cavalry armies only. And since we dont have range them expect that you will face a full cordinated frontal charge that in reality i doubt even english could withstand, and i hope in m2tw 1.3/1.4 will be the same.

[Mad Mac]

Poland is definately going to be a challenge in the Teutonic Campaign, no doubt about that. For what it's worth, I'm becoming pretty fond of the Strezlcy. AP missles, AP axe, sheild, decent armor...I just hope they don't get hit too hard in the rebalancing.

[Zenicetus]

I use cavalry based armies, always have, lightweight for the most part and with many HA. By nature of unit size, my army is always smaller and now it is going to be reduced by a further 25%. I do not see this as an improvement

I don't either. It still seems to me that the cav reduction was applied across the board, based on a balancing for melee cav without thinking about how HA's would be affected. Lusted has mentioned two mitigating factors - slightly increased accuracy (which does nothing to affect survivability of a small unit), and "the smaller number of troops actually makes them harder to hit when in loose formation as there are fewer of them."

I dunno.... that last bit sounds like theorycraft to me. Any way you look at it, a smaller unit is still closer to loss of morale and routing than a larger one, as they start to take damage. The idea of going into battle with what is already a small army if you're HA-based (as you point out), and then taking a further 25% reduction in forces before the battle even begins, just feels arbitrary and wrong. HA-based armies are already a challenge to use well; they're far from overpowered. They didn't need this change.

Question: can the unit sizes be modded back to the original size? I don't pay much attention to mods, so I don't know what's hard-coded and what isn't. Speaking of which... is this 25% reduction in HA units already in place in the LTC mod?

[Jack Lusted]

is this 25% reduction in HA units already in place in the LTC mod?

Yes it is.

can the unit sizes be modded back to the original size?

Yes it's a simple value in the export_descr_unit.txt file.

[Sarmatian]

I agree with Orda. HA should stay the size they are. Factions that have themusually didn't have a problem recruiting them. They are already smaller than regular archers and much more expensive, which pretty much balance out things. HA weren't like European heavy cavalry, and armies who did use them, tended to use them in much larger numbers than Europeans used heavy cavalry. They could use a bit of tweaking though, to reduce the micromanagement. Somehow RTW:BI was much more friendly in this regard, IMHO.

Ok, will wait and see, but I think reducing the size of HA is a bad idea, both from historical and gameplay point of view. It's not enough to say "eastern factions will get some new units to counter improved westerners". HA should be effective as they were...

[anders]

Poland is definately going to be a challenge in the Teutonic Campaign, no doubt about that. For what it's worth, I'm becoming pretty fond of the Strezlcy. AP missles, AP axe, sheild, decent armor...I just hope they don't get hit too hard in the rebalancing.

oh yeah, those strezcly are a great unit AP makes all the difference, and available in great numbers too.

Ok icek, I see the lack of long range, but what unit would you historically have as a polish long-range unit? just accept that poland is a cav. faction and use that for what its worth. granted it would be great to meet the steppe hordes with good ranged foot units, but its funnier trying to beat them at their own game. vanilla, streczly with upgrades and some exp do good against mongol heavy HA.

and orda and all you other guys compalining about HA unit size; dont slaughter it until youve tried it, besides HA and all cavalry were that size in RTw as far as i remember and that worked allright.

[Kronos]

I agree with Orda. HA should stay the size they are. Factions that have themusually didn't have a problem recruiting them. They are already smaller than regular archers and much more expensive, which pretty much balance out things. HA weren't like European heavy cavalry, and armies who did use them, tended to use them in much larger numbers than Europeans used heavy cavalry. They could use a bit of tweaking though, to reduce the micromanagement. Somehow RTW:BI was much more friendly in this regard, IMHO.

Ok, will wait and see, but I think reducing the size of HA is a bad idea, both from historical and gameplay point of view. It's not enough to say "eastern factions will get some new units to counter improved westerners". HA should be effective as they were...

rofl HA in BI were so overpowered it was unbeleivable. The standard multiplayer rules were max 2 HA no CC because of this. Sounds to me you just want an easy game, as if the AI didn't make the SP battles like playing a retarded monkey already

If you do the maths there is actually no difference between the +25% accuracy and -25% unit size, they have exactly the same firepower (although if it's like LTC 3.1 HA will get a boost due to unit stats being increased and unit stats of almost all the other units being decreased.) They may all die quicker but they will kill quick as well making it almost identical except for the fact that all the other units defense will be weaker.

So far I'm liking most of the changes, althuogh i've only done unit vs unit tests thus far. I'm just about to play online with a clanmate to properly gauge the balance although so far I feel some of the 2 handed units are overpowered although the new normality for missiles may counter this.

Another worry is the lowered armour values will decrease the worth of AP units in general and i can see this has been overcompensated for with infantry, however English Longbows and AP cav still seem to have the same level of stats comparative to all the other units. A change I would like to see however is a slight range increase of Longbows and possibly Composite bow Archers to reflect thier true range if there's still time, but again this may imbalance things with England especially looking to become an intensely strong faction.

[Zenicetus]

If you do the maths there is actually no difference between the +25% accuracy and -25% unit size, they have exactly the same firepower (although if it's like LTC 3.1 HA will get a boost due to unit stats being increased and unit stats of almost all the other units being decreased.) They may all die quicker but they will kill quick as well making it almost identical except for the fact that all the other units defense will be weaker.

No, it doesn't balance like that unless your unit is the last of your army standing on the battlefield, and only going up against one enemy unit. In a normal mixed battle, they may kill faster with the one unit they can target, but at the same time they can be taking fire from other units they aren't targeting. It may help win the battle by cutting down the enemy at a slightly faster rate, but they still have to absorb damage from multiple ranged units at times, and last long enough to do their job.

And that's just a function of defensive stats and armor (HA's don't have much) and the number of soldiers in the unit. Fewer soldiers means the unit dies or routs faster, and this is something that can't be balanced by an increase in offensive power. Well, unless you give them modern weapons or something... then yeah, it might work. :)

Anyway, if I can change it back to 40 HA's per unit with a simple edit in the export_descr_unit.txt, it doesn't matter.

[Guyus Germanicus]

Jack,

Excellent posts. Your job has to be a lot of fun, no doubt about it.

I discovered Total War games a little over a year ago after I got into Civ IV. And I have to say, I have never enjoyed a game experience so much. CA truly lives up to their 'creative' monniker. The depth of the game experience, from campaign strategy, economic warfare, spies, assassins, settlement governance, the psychological aspects of your faction member, to actual combat, is just amazing. And the game designers even have a sense of humor. I love the smart-alec remarks of the rebel units, the voice overs, etc. It's all a kick to me.

I'm looking forward to Kingdoms. I haven't always enjoyed the combat aspects of M2TW, not like I did RTW. So it will be interesting to see how the Kingdoms expansion changes the combat experience in actual game play. I thought that the unit movement in the combat portion of the game experience lacked fluidness. Cavalry seemed to move and react slowly to commands.

Thanks for sharing with us.

[icek]

Ok icek, I see the lack of long range, but what unit would you historically have as a polish long-range unit?

a stupid heavy x-bows, if we talk about history then find me information about heavy knights in portugal army, reitars in HRE medieval army, battlefield assasins in hungary, panzer-pikemen in scotland, powerfull armies of venice and other historically accurate units. Poland can do well in open field but they are pwn by powerfull in that age portugal in settlement battle.

[Husar]

reitars in HRE medieval army

Oh, that's easy.
Reiter is nothing but the german word for rider. Basically any guy on a horse.

And while we are talking about underpowered and settlement battle, what about the moors? Their christian guard are only available in citadels and don't even get an armour upgrade, dismounted polish knights are also available in citadels but have much better armour. and the dismounted polish nobles aren't bad either.dismounted portuguese knights are useless in city battles in comparison to dismounted feudal knights who can take a lot more beating from arrow fire etc. And I don't think aventuros are very useful in city battles.

[econ21]

On a side note, have cav charges against cav been fixed in Kingdoms? In M2TW it is quite dishearting to see cav charge each other with damage only being done with the swords. Same if cavalry charge another cavalry that is static but in formation.

Do you any comments on this point, Lusted? I agree with Factionheir, it is disheartening to have your knights execute a perfect charge, lances down, into enemy cavalry but not seem to have an impact. I mean, knights used lances in jousts vs other mounted knights for a reason. The big edge of the lance over the cavalry sword should be in the charge impact.

[icek]

Oh, that's easy.
Reiter is nothing but the german word for rider. Basically any guy on a horse.

And while we are talking about underpowered and settlement battle, what about the moors? Their christian guard are only available in citadels and don't even get an armour upgrade, dismounted polish knights are also available in citadels but have much better armour. and the dismounted polish nobles aren't bad either.dismounted portuguese knights are useless in city battles in comparison to dismounted feudal knights who can take a lot more beating from arrow fire etc. And I don't think aventuros are very useful in city battles.

at first lol, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiter . second tell me what good is heavy infantry armed with spears without bonus againts cavalry? well i fought as english in 1.2 for citadell of pamplona with balista towers defended by dpk and aventuros and i really slaughter lot of my men and dont really want to think what typical polish army based on cavalry could do to win with aventuros in city battle. Moors have a powerfull, unique, long ranged, penetrating, horse-scaring camel gunner killers.

[Jack Lusted]

An official statement from the Oz team about 1.3:

In order to ship Kingdoms some of the original Medieval II data needed to be changed to support new features. Primarily some miscellaneous settlement blocks. By changing this data, this created a problem, not with Kingdoms, but with Medieval II multiplayer. When a player who has the expansion pack installed plays the original game against someone who does not have the expansion pack installed, there is an incompatibility between the two versions and they will not be able to play against each other. If we allowed them to, as our trials showed, desyncs are immediate and unresolvable.

In order to not 'split' the Medieval II MP community into two (those with the expansion pack and those without) we made the changes in the form of a patch called 1.3. This patch which is placed on the Kingdoms disk is the identical version to what will be separately publicly released. The Medieval II Patch 1.3 is no longer something we can continue to work on or alter as it has to be identical to the one released on the Kingdoms disk. This Kingdoms disk has just gone gold!

About 5 months ago we did consider adding bug fixes and balance changes but it was determined that this would be an impossible achievement to aim for. It would mean that we had two fluid code bases and fixes going on (med II and Kingdoms) which both had to be completed and mastered on the same day. This would have for certain overloaded our testing resources. For the rest of the development team, the loss of focus by dividing their attention across two projects would have been equally as detrimental to the Kingdoms project. Shipping just one of these products on its own is an incredibly weighty task that pushes the studio to its absolute brink. Trying to pin two moving targets was just too unrealistic and in hindsight it absolutely was the correct decision to make. When we made this decision 4-5 months ago we shared it with SEGA and they agreed that whatever 1.3 patch is found on the released Kingdoms will also be permitted to be released separately to the public as the 'compatibility patch'.

[I Am Herenow]

Well, fair enough, but will CA release another patch after Kingdoms is released with bug fixes etc. (and "Get off my land!" please!!!)? Like they did for RTW with 1.5 and 1.6.

[crpcarrot]

lol can someone translate that to english please :D

from what i understand (english not being my first language and all) the game balancing is included in patch 1.3 and will affect thr grand campaign. right?

[Jack Lusted]

from what i understand (english not being my first language and all) the game balancing is included in patch 1.3 and will affect thr grand campaign. right?

No it will not.

[crpcarrot]

ok then why would a vanilla player need 1.3 at all?

Edit: will 1.3 only affect the multiplayer community?

and to think i was egerly awaiting the patch to start another campaign

[econ21]

No it will not.

If one buys the Kingdoms expansion, will the rebalancing affect the core M2TW campaign or just the four Kingdoms campaigns? I'd like to try a vanilla campaign with the rebalancing.

[Husar]

at first lol, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiter.

Nice find, but I don't know what we would call these troops in german, in the game they are called Reiter, but there is no such german wikipedia entry as you can see on the bottom left of your link. I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, I was just kidding anyway.

second tell me what good is heavy infantry armed with spears without bonus againts cavalry?

It's good against infantry since no bonus against cavalry = no malus against infantry either. They just use another weapon and animation.

well i fought as english in 1.2 for citadell of pamplona with balista towers defended by dpk and aventuros and i really slaughter lot of my men and dont really want to think what typical polish army based on cavalry could do to win with aventuros in city battle.

Dismounted polish knights, a cavalry based army of any nation will have a hard time conquering a castle full of heavy infantry and ranged units. And dismounted polish knights are decent sword and shield infantry just like dismounted chivalric knights.

[/QUOTE]Moors have a powerfull, unique, long ranged, penetrating, horse-scaring camel gunner killers.[/QUOTE]
Who are useless in city/castle assaults as long as the enemy does not stand around waiting to get shot. They also have rather low armour so while they can kill a lot, they're also vulnerable.

If one buys the Kingdoms expansion, will the rebalancing affect the core M2TW campaign or just the four Kingdoms campaigns? I'd like to try a vanilla campaign with the rebalancing.

As far as I understand any possible rebalancing will only affect the expansion and not the grand campaign, for that one could still get the LTC mod I guess.

Actually, I like it that way as described above, I'm not saying the LTC mod is bad in general, just not my cup of tea apparently.