Game balance, EDU stats, and etc...

[A Terribly Harmful Name]

Basileos ton Ellenon, although I must say that I am not 'unhappy' with the way the stats are...I am willing to listen to suggestions.

I will say this about one thing, I don't think giving all units 2 hit points is a valid way to make battles longer. That's a 'crutch' in my opinion. I would rather see battles be longer because good skillfull units are duking it out, than the unrealistic look of total crap units getting hit with a sword or spear and surviving the blows! When I see this happening in battles, I start getting bored...as if I'm looking at a 'hyped up' mockery of what of a battle should be.

Also, one of our players, in response to comments that Roman pila were too powerful, noted that Caesar wrote after one battle that his Legion's pila took out the entire front ranks of the attacking Barbarians. I would expect this to be so of unarmored soldiers, and my observation of many a battle is that in RS...armored units fair much better against pila than unarmored ones. This too me is a 'realistic' result, not one that is overpowered.

I must admit that I don't know much about 'lethality'...since another fellow was doing our stats, but was dismissed for flaming players. His concept of the stats, however, is one that I totally agreed with. Barbarians have very high attack, and med to low defence. The Romans, on the other hand, have lower numbers, very high defense, and medium attack. But the theory here is not based entirely on a 'number', it based on the fact that the Romans were rigorously trained, and methodically trained in warfare and fighting as 'a unit'. That is very different from fighting as a 'mass of men'. The kill rate is very liable to be great when units fight as a 'mass' against a numerically inferior opponent...but not an opponent that is used to this, trained to fight in that situation, and not intimidated by it.

To give you an example of this, I fought 6 full stack German armies in one turn in a campaign a while ago.....probably with the version of RS you are using.....with one Legion. It took SIX German armies to finally beat my one Legion. Is this unrealistic? Hardly. If you consider a 3000 against 25000 ratio, these were OFTEN the odds against the Romans, and they usually prevailed. So there is a degree of reality we are trying to portray, not necessarily statistical parity or making battles last longer.

I guess what I'm saying is...we have, I have a LARGE interest in portraying battles more realistically........a lesser interest in how long they are.

As Tony suggested, I would much appreciate if you bring this to our forum at TWC, or PM me.

Sorry all for the delayed response. I do have a couple of things to say first:


TWC is blocked at my work, and I currently have no Internet in my home (some mess due to technical changes) + I'm with few time. But the main aspects of my stats are already set.

I thank you for recognizing my stats. I've been working with them, and I was partially inspired by Europa Barbarorum's stat system. EB quite underpowers the Romans a bit, and there was a lot of controversy around that, but I think the main aspects can be used here.

This includes increasing the armor of units depending on the armor they use, and are depicted as wearing. There is a lot of realism that can be added if we measure the amount of protection Scale Armor gives vs. the rest, and then putting this into numbers; a deep research on reenactments and studies can give us some rough numbers depending on the effectiveness of said armor on the battlefield.

I've used my own stats as an example. Beware, as I made no deep research about this, but it would be more or less like this:

Body Armor

None - 1
Leather, Linen - 2 to 4
Scale - 3 to 5
Chain - 5 to 7
Plate - 6 to 10 (10 goes for the heaviest Cataphracts out there), 6 to 7 would be Lorica Segmentata. 8 would be hoplite body plate.

Helmets:

Light: 0 to 2
Bronze: 3 to 5
Iron: 4 to 6

Greaves - Give +1 armor rating for each greave.



I've taken, for example, two helmets: the early Montefortino helmet used by Romans in the Pre-Marian period, and the Imperial Gallic. Etrusco-Corinthian, Attic, Corinthian, and the Coolus helmet fall somewhere in-between. In my latest re-balancing tests in RS I've given the Montefortino the protection value of 3, as they were cheap, mass-produced and not very sophisticated, but still cost-effective.

So, if a Republican Legionary Cohort wears a Chain Mail (average only, not very high quality) + a bronze Montefortino galea, then that goes for 5 + 3 = 8.This is their armor value.

I've also given fixed values for shields depending on their size and strenght. So the Scutum affords 5 protection, and being trained soldiers, legionaries get 10 to 12 defence skill; that's 8 (armor) + 5 (shield) + 11 = 24 total defence value.


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As for lethality, it's a hidden value that influences combat. It's a second way of making battles last longer, and in my opinion, they don't lose realism. Giving 1 lethality to a soldier means that the first blow that goes through the defences KILLS immediately. Now, with smaller lethality or more HP, battles last longer, and this is backed by realism; in vanilla RTW, people would be killed very quickly because of the standard 1 lethality.

Let's look at reality. Guy with gladius+ scutum vs. another one with spear+hoplon shield; a spear hit kills, but it's not just a spear hit here. You know that it will take long before someone gets mortally wounded, mainly because they have big shields and some battle skill. And they would be knocked down several times (the legionaries had special iron caliga for this). So this won't make weapons weaker, it will put in gaming things that cannot be otherwise represented well like blocking, knocking down, parrying, etc, non-fatal and superficial wounds, etc... Just check EB, and the battles there are more accurate because of this, IMO. With lower lethality, units will fight longer.

Now this brings the issue of longer battles. What I'm focusing here is mainly staying power on the battlefield; hastati don't get a chance against Spartan hoplites, but they were not girls either: their function was to kill and wear down, not destroy the enemy completely, and here "wearing down" works. The hastatus would mainly stand behind his shield, blocking enemy attacks, then stabbing when some vulnerable part was exposed. At the rate they're presently killed, however, I can barely conduct the "wearing down" before they rout.

Actually, I'm fine if RS can take down unit numbers and give lower lethality. This will mean battles won't be as big, but individual combat between units will get more interesting end involving, rather than just being a quick meat grinder; I know "meat grinders" weren't rare, but that's when both units have vast disparities. Now, I'm trying to make reasonably equal units to fight with a deeper level of complexity, adn this includes being able to stand the enemy in inferiority for longer. Take Marathon, weak Greek Center, they held on, flanks fell on Persians, victory; the people in the center could hold for a reasonable amount of time even if their odds were inferior. They wouldn't survive alone, but they gave a good account of themselves for enough time.


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Now, about pila, with such new re-balancing they need to be tweaked down. They and all missiles; considering that the shield defensive value is doubled every time somebody throws missiles at anything with a shield from the front, they'll get weaker. But here is the main realistic point: missiles would be ineffective when attacking from the front, mainly because the shield + armor value was too big. A shield, even a wooden, small one, was able to block many missiles coming from the front, and only a few AP missiles such as pila would be able to at least pierce the shield and make it useless.

When reducing the attack of missiles, I'm mainly focused at improving game strategy: low missile values encourage players to fight more in a more realistic way and avoid shields. They'll get the enemy from behind.

I guess the most famous historical example to back this approach is Hastings. Soldiers were firing at the enemy, their missiles couldn't pierce the shields. They only managed to do some serious damage when they fired above the Saxon shield wall, avoiding their shields.

Now, any archer would notice that. But then not all enemies would form a shieldwall: from the front, they could just move their shields freely to avoid enemy missiles, especially Romans with their large Scuta and Testudo formations directed against enemy arrows coming from above and from the front.

The result of weaking missiles is that players will seek to do more damae by throwing missiles from behind, rather than from the front. In RS 1.10b, my fellows got killed a lot by Peltasts firing from the front; VANILLA, in this aspect, had a better balance: most bows of the time were weak, short-ranged, self bows. Javelins were a bit more effective, but still only a few heavier javelins could get through shields. Pila would still be powerful missiles, but they're killing too many people. I guess VANILLA just did right with pila too; it took concentrated pila fire to make heavily armoured units run, but in RS 1.10b a single hail of pila is enough to decimate half of an Armoured warrior unit... If legionaries are skilled swordsmen already, for game balancing it would be better to tweak down pila. And for the sake of historical realism, read about tests made with rebuilt pila against armored targets, and etc...

To give you an example of this, I fought 6 full stack German armies in one turn in a campaign a while ago.....probably with the version of RS you are using.....with one Legion. It took SIX German armies to finally beat my one Legion. Is this unrealistic? Hardly. If you consider a 3000 against 25000 ratio, these were OFTEN the odds against the Romans, and they usually prevailed. So there is a degree of reality we are trying to portray, not necessarily statistical parity or making battles last longer.

Most barbarian armies were composed of fresh and untrained levies being thrown in waves. Either RS could have:

Alot more expensive legions to reflect more of their elite status

Lots of barbarian levies but also expensive barbarian elites and even good barbarian rank-and-file. In gameplay balancing, this would make the Romans a bit tougher to play with since I found it too easy to spam super-strong legionaries and kill everything on my way with them. Rome got defeated several times, even Post-Marian Romans. That said, they got high casualties when facing barbarian infantry; the average strenght of the barbarian warrior class cannot be understimated, and they did have troubles fighting these elites. Problem for the barbarians is that 90% of their army was made of untrained levies, so it was easy to just overwhelm the barbarian elites with legionaries after the rest of the barbarian army was running for the hills.