Gross Disparity in Ability

[Callicles]

Yeah thanks man.

I was being sarcastic, my friend.

I think your complaint is baseless. Warfare is stressful and difficult. It requires extreme mental effort and focus. If you want an arcade-like slug fest, go play vanilla or one of the other mods. EB is for the player who wants a more measured style of game play. Its not for everyone, and there is nothing wrong if you like the faster-paced but less intellectually vigorous style of vanilla. I'll be the first to admit that, from time to time, it is fun to play mindless games that look pretty (all sorts of popular first-person shooters come to mind). But it is an all together different prospect to play the "thinking-man's" game of EB and then complain when you have to perform simple arithmetic functions or keep track of your character's ancillaries.

I think it is analogous to signing up for a race and later complaining because you don't like to run. Perhaps next time you should try bowling.

[geala]

@ 140: As far as I understand your problem is with roleplay. Your hard build generals have less stars than every crappy rebel or unexperienced faction general. You cannot urge the EB team to change the visual effect, there are other things in priority. Solve the problem with roleplay (perhaps you still don't have the experience with evaluations): all the rebels and other factions use a mendacious and delusive system to evaluate their generals who are corrupt and pay money for command stars. One star of your generals equals at least three of theirs.

I cannot remember to have ever had a general with more than 3 command stars in my EB campaigns. The stars are not important. More important are management and influence, I like generals with many of them.

[mcantu]

CA has this to say about command stars"

Originally Posted by JeromeGrasdyke
It currently affects both morale and combat ability - we tried it for a while with just morale, but it ended up being not enough of a bonus. The combat calculations have changed so much from Rome to Medieval as to be unrecogniseable, so it's no longer easy to equate stars to experience.

As a rule of thumb it's one point of attack per command rank, up to a maximum of 10, and this can become negative for very bad generals. This combat bonus is applied to all troops under his command on the battlefield. Experience is one point of attack and one point of defense per chevron, plus a morale bonus as well.

The general's command also controls his radius-of-effect, which is set to 30 m + 5 m * command + 2 m * influence. This is used to award morale bonusses to nearby units (in addition to the combat bonus), and when testing which units are affected it tests the distance between the actual general's position and the centre-point of the unit being considered.

Some of the above doesnt seem to apply since 1.2 but its good general info, particularly how the area of effect for the morale bonus is figured.

I think it may be that the attack bonus for the entire army he talks about is only for auto-calc battles.

[blacksnail]

The "enemy general with extra stars" thing is as Foot says. EB uses Command stars pretty much entirely to balance the auto-calc battles, the outcome of which determines a variety of battlefield traits for the player general. Believe me when I say that we would make them invisible if at all possible, because misunderstanding of their purposes causes exactly the kind of frustration typified by 140's posts.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

The AI is pretty well crippled by it's own stupidity, giving it extra stars makes it at least try to put up a fight. Without the stars sometimes it wouldn't even offer battle.

[JeromeGrasdyke]

Just to clear this up ( as requested ;-) ), from the old code on my machine at CA the General's command modifier on attacks is still there in the last version, but it only applies to melee attacks and it is -inverted- so the quality of the defender's general is applied as bonus directionless defense for the defending soldier. It is also rescaled to range from -6 to +6, changing quickly at low bonus levels and then slowing down towards the top of the range. The idea was to limit the number of stacking bonusses which speed up the battles, i vaguely remember.

Also, the bonus is not limited by physical distance, and is supposed to represent a good general's ability to get superior performance from his troops through training in small scale maneuvers. The only way for this bonus to result in faster combat death rates rather than slower ones is if the defender's general has bad command traits...

If you want to test it, I would suggest a battle between some big peasant units, fighting the units 1v1 and timing the length of time to rout; then repeat giving each army a 10 star general. You should see a slower time-to-rout with the generals. In the end though 6 pts is not enough to make up huge troop quality differences, so don't expect to see miraculous differences.

[Geoffrey S]

I'd just like to jump in and mention that EB is the only mod I've seen using this approach to command stars, yet I've seen no mention of other mods experiencing the problems which this approach of increasing enemy command stars is said to solve. Has anyone got some more experience with other mods to either confirm or deny this?

[bovi]

Just to clear this up ( as requested ;-) )

Thank you very much .

Xehh, perhaps you should read Jerome's post again.

[mcantu]

Just to clear this up ( as requested ;-) ), from the old code on my machine at CA the General's command modifier on attacks is still there in the last version, but it only applies to melee attacks and it is -inverted- so the quality of the defender's general is applied as bonus directionless defense for the defending soldier. It is also rescaled to range from -6 to +6, changing quickly at low bonus levels and then slowing down towards the top of the range. The idea was to limit the number of stacking bonusses which speed up the battles, i vaguely remember.

Also, the bonus is not limited by physical distance, and is supposed to represent a good general's ability to get superior performance from his troops through training in small scale maneuvers. The only way for this bonus to result in faster combat death rates rather than slower ones is if the defender's general has bad command traits...

If you want to test it, I would suggest a battle between some big peasant units, fighting the units 1v1 and timing the length of time to rout; then repeat giving each army a 10 star general. You should see a slower time-to-rout with the generals. In the end though 6 pts is not enough to make up huge troop quality differences, so don't expect to see miraculous differences.

Jerome,

Thanks so much for dropping in. I had completely forgotten I had asked you for your input.

So you would say that what I quoted from you up above is no longer valid?

Originally Posted by JeromeGrasdyke
It currently affects both morale and combat ability - we tried it for a while with just morale, but it ended up being not enough of a bonus. The combat calculations have changed so much from Rome to Medieval as to be unrecogniseable, so it's no longer easy to equate stars to experience.

As a rule of thumb it's one point of attack per command rank, up to a maximum of 10, and this can become negative for very bad generals. This combat bonus is applied to all troops under his command on the battlefield. Experience is one point of attack and one point of defense per chevron, plus a morale bonus as well.

The general's command also controls his radius-of-effect, which is set to 30 m + 5 m * command + 2 m * influence. This is used to award morale bonusses to nearby units (in addition to the combat bonus), and when testing which units are affected it tests the distance between the actual general's position and the centre-point of the unit being considered.