Kingdoms Battles Balance

[Puzz3D]

Indeed, I can't even conceive how people with Kingdoms will even be able to play online against people without...

It looks like Kingdoms will split the community which has already been split several times. This splitting happened because Creative Assembly didn't continue to make incremental improvements to the engine and maintain the playbalance which would have allowed the fanbase to move smoothly to the next game. Instead, they remade the engine which radically changed the gameplay, introduced new problems and brought back problems that were already solved, and the playbalance was degraded because they put too many units into the multiplayer game. It's common knowledge that beginning with MTW the winner was determined primarily by what units were purchased rather than how the units were used on the battlefield. Out of about 100 unit types only about 14 were worth taking. As a consequence, a large portion of the fanbase was alienated, and didn't move to the next game. It isn't a question of money for most people. It's a question of deteriorated quality in the gameplay and network performance while the system requirements increase.

I can see now that an attempt is being made to improve the playbalance, but the engine is limiting what can be done compared to the older and supposedly inferior engine. Movement speed and reload times are now tied to animations which won't be changed because it's too much work to change them, and while the running speed was reduced in M2TW, they forgot to reduce the charge speed from the extremely high speeds of RTW. The combat cycle is also tied to animations which vary depending on weapon type and this complicates playbalancing. The person who does the playbalancing is stuck with parameters dictated by the animations which were chosen by a graphic artist long before the game was in a playable state.

Unwanted side effects result when you try to compensate for an imbalanced caused by one parameter by changing a different parameter. For instance, the idea of adjusting cav effectiveness in melee vs infantry by reducing the unit size by 25%, which has been done in Kingdoms, causes HA to also have reduced effectiveness in a skirmish with foot archers when that is a separate issue. What's needed are separate accuracy parameters for mounted bow and foot bow so that they can be adjusted independently. Without that you cannot balance the HA vs inf and cav in both melee and ranged effectiveness. LongJohn recognized this back in the original STW. Why does Creative Assembly not recognize this now?