Rome Total War II

[Malakal]

Say whatever you want, for me Medieval 2 had the best overall representation of medieval combat. Yes, some aspects didnt work as designed - like units getting stuck in fighting mode due to single people fighting, but overall it was quite realistic.

There was no RADIO or even flags for communication, you stuck with the dude with your banner (that was smaller than in game and only really visible until dust covered it) and did what your unit did - more or less. Charges were hard to execute properly, orders were lost. Once two armies met it was chaos.

And I think that cavalry charges had just the right amount of power. Not as much as Rome 1 where single cataphract unit just ran over legions slaughtering whole units instantly, but if you charged downhill into light units they died. If you charged into heavier units some of them died, morale got lowered but unit could survive. If you charged a spear or pike wall you were stupid.

And some historical battles to argue my point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Klushino 8-10 hussar charges on Russian positions, ultimate unsuccessful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Varna earlier battle that was lost when king charged the center of the opposing force and got himself killed without breaking enemy formation.

My point is simple: cavalry when used to charge prepared enemy infantry will lose. Most successful charges were executed against infantry that wasnt in defensive positions.

 

[Akarnir]

I'm simply tempted to post a video of how ridiculous the soldiers looked when they were fighting. Too lazy, but if you guys keep insisting with your autistic defense (Of a compagny that has admitted previous animation and cohesion system were flawed), I will bother.

And the cavalry charge in rome 1 sucked, just like medieval 2 charge sucked too. Shogun 2 made significant improvement to have more realisitic (still not perfect) charge : It could either run over the whole enemy bataillon, or completely fail, just like it was the case back then.
In real life, An unprepared unit would get literally crushed, while a dense unit of veteran soldier with spears could easely break the charge (assuming no flanking).

Flanking a enemy unit on foot, however, was devastating. Just look at the battle of gaugamela. You could run over several ranks of units.

In medieval, because of the awful cohesion, flanking often did not work properly. Not enough enemy soldiers were exposed, therefore only a X number of knight would charge the flank. X corresponding to the number of men directly exposed on the flank (meaning less than 10 most of the time).

 

[Brayko]

It's not nearly terrible as you make it sound. Each unit serves it's purpose, and I've never felt betrayed by the games mechanics in any catastrophic proportion. The biggest issues are the pathfinding on siege battles but that's really about it. The only autistic person on here is you by trying to gut and fuss trivial matters in an otherwise fluid combat experience.

 

[Akarnir]

It's not nearly terrible as you make it sound. Each unit serves it's purpose, and I've never felt betrayed by the games mechanics in any catastrophic proportion. The biggest issues are the pathfinding on siege battles but that's really about it. The only autistic person on here is you by trying to gut and fuss trivial matters in an otherwise fluid combat experience.

''NO YOU are wrong''. We could go on and on, and both look like autist.
I often watch Total War competitive battle replay in my free time, so in the next few day I'll try to come with a comparaison video : shogun 2 vs medieval 2 unit mouvement. 2 points :

First you'll notice how retarded the combat looks in Medieval 2 and even shogun 2.
Second you will also notice it will look less retarded in shogun2, meaning CA is proving you wrong.

One thing that will be easy is to come up with a video that highlights the cavalry clusterfuckness. Failed flanking, and incapacity to clearly prenetrate and crush the enemy lines when he is taken by surprise.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

To be honest there is difference between "more realistic" and competitive games.

 

[Malakal]

It's not nearly terrible as you make it sound. Each unit serves it's purpose, and I've never felt betrayed by the games mechanics in any catastrophic proportion. The biggest issues are the pathfinding on siege battles but that's really about it. The only autistic person on here is you by trying to gut and fuss trivial matters in an otherwise fluid combat experience.

''NO YOU are wrong''. We could go on and on, and both look like autist.
I often watch Total War competitive battle replay in my free time, so in the next few day I'll try to come with a comparaison video : shogun 2 vs medieval 2 unit mouvement. 2 points :

First you'll notice how retarded the combat looks in Medieval 2 and even shogun 2.
Second you will also notice it will look less retarded in shogun2, meaning CA is proving you wrong.

One thing that will be easy is to come up with a video that highlights the cavalry clusterfuckness. Failed flanking, and incapacity to clearly prenetrate and crush the enemy lines when he is taken by surprise.

CA isn't proving anything, they made enough dumb decisions and scaled back from even Shogun 1 and Medieval 1 to not be considered the ultimate judge. What THEY think is wrong is not necessarily wrong. It's like saying devs are always right, yea, we know how that usually goes...

Your point about units losing cohesion and charge strength doesn't hold since its very realistic but I can concede that single people getting stuck shouldn't affect whole units.

Also there are several points you are not even making. Like charges only working for single unit depth, if you charge with two unit deep wave somehow it doesn't help or even worse, they get in each other way.

And pathfinding/combat on the walls is so horrible it's not even funny. Shit I have seen there is crazy.

 

[oscar]

The problem was that the animations made some units far less effective than they should have been and others far more. These were not planned or an attempt at realism, but coding mistakes.

There's always been problems like this in the TW games. Even back in the original Rome charging the clear rear of a spear unit still resulted in your cavalry occasionally getting pin-cushioned. Or your soldiers randomly abandoning their pikes and drawing their short swords.

 

[Raghar]

If you wanna a correct cavalry charge go play roleplaying wargame. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC9D4D94F428B1946

It has correctly looking cavalry charges. A stream of cavalry rides around unit fast and do whack to side of the unit one after another.

Also there are several points you are not even making. Like charges only working for single unit depth, if you charge with two unit deep wave somehow it doesn't help or even worse, they get in each other way.

And how should it behave? In reall world when they charged into infantry en masse from behind they did that in a line to maximise impact, and to avoid getting into each other way. It's not like the horse would stop immediately.

 

[Akarnir]

Your point about units losing cohesion and charge strength doesn't hold since its very realistic but I can concede that single people getting stuck shouldn't affect whole units.

.

The main problem comes from the fact that the coding does not allow the soldier to behave individually. It doesn't have that dimension.

There seems to have been some sort of confusion regarding this : I'm not talking about unit getting lost, spreading too much or having difficulties with adopting a correct formation, that would indeed be realistic.

I'm talking about soldiers behaving like Buggy zombies, unable to fight properly, unable to walk at a normal speed, getting stuck in their constipated position forever. Unable to target enemies properly : you see 10 enemies surrounding one of your soldiers and all they do is ''slide'' on the grass, ''pushing'' each other and attacking one by one, with 3 seconds of pause intervals. With ineffective animation like oscar mentioned, some units who were supposed to be elite shock troop ended up being unable to win against weaker units because their animations and attack sequence had been coded badly and were far less effective than the more simplistic ones of the weaker units.
Melee combat looked clunky, soldiers movement was awful. A melee combat ended up looked like 2 legions of mentally challenged soldiers, having no clue what to do with their weapons, occasionally charging at a single, distant soldier, when another enemy soldier was standing just next to them, taking a dump.
Soldiers just don't engage each other, the pathfinding is broken, they stand there, looking at each other, heading in random directions.

And in fact, one of the reasons the pathfinding is so broken, on the micro level and macro level, is because the soldiers are constantly trying to behave in perfect cohesion with the rest of the unit, but it fails because of bad coding. The soldiers are constantly trying to readjust and establish pathing accordingly. Which breaks the point about ''realistic'' incoherence.
That is why you constantly have to reposition your cavalry into a perfect line for the charge to simply work, else they will try to readjust mid-charge, stop, lose their momentum, and slowly walk toward the enemy soldiers, and engaging in the worst kind of clunky melee ever. They can't just charge chaotically at the enemy, without really caring if they're in perfect pathing synchronization with their own unit.

Fortunately this is the thing that should be improving in rome 2 : with the repeated clicking, indicating your unit to forget about the coherence, synchronization and position. The generals say ''run toward these woods'' and they will run toward these woods, individually.

I assume you own Medieval 2, so just try to go into the games files and ''mod'' a one man unit. You will see for yourself, it will look awful. The solider acting like it's constantly being dragged toward the actual invisible center of mass of what should be his unit, never attack...

 

[Malakal]

Its impossible to mod 1 men units, minimal amount is 4 men.

Secondly its pretty obvious that units behave this way since they are not rendered as people in a unit they are a single being - each soldier is not individual, unit is. Its the engine and its limitations.

Of course if the game were to represent every single soldier and calculate everything for his movement and other actions it would work better. But its an old game and I'm quite sure it was impossible to run at PCs then. Or impossible to code for the developers which gives the same result.

 

[Akarnir]

Its impossible to mod 1 men units, minimal amount is 4 men.

Secondly its pretty obvious that units behave this way since they are not rendered as people in a unit they are a single being - each soldier is not individual, unit is. Its the engine and its limitations.

Of course if the game were to represent every single soldier and calculate everything for his movement and other actions it would work better. But its an old game and I'm quite sure it was impossible to run at PCs then. Or impossible to code for the developers which gives the same result.

It is possible. In Third age Total war they've come up with different solutions. One was a script that made every soldiers in a unit die at the beginning of each campaign battle, except 1.That worked for sauron, because we had 4 sauron in one sauron unit, which was awkward.

And yes indeed, the problem comes from the limitations of that time, especially the hardware one. But now, we got the confirmation that they've managed to give each soldiers an individual mass. This is great news, probably the greatest one, because this could mean that much of the combat and behavior coding will apply on each soldiers individually. No more connection to the center of mass.

 

[aron searle]

I don't know why people are arguing here, what MTW2 did they play?

I remember bill-men where particularly useless, their strength came from charging, yet when you asked a 100+ strong unit to charge, about 10 of them would charge, with the rest lagging behind, then they would start walking when the front 10 hit the line.

 

[Raghar]

Main strength of bill men was armor piercing strike. They had numbers and they were cheap enough to use against foot knights.

 

[Tytus]

So have you guys seen the new trailer?

 

[spectre]

Fuck yea, dogs and flaming pigs haystacks confirmed.

Seriously though, had there been some sort of gameplay, we would have stuff to discuss. Unfortunately, I'm not that much of a history buff for that period to nitpick/fap over the details.

 

[Brayko]

"Germania. Will. Be. Free!"

 

[Kukulkan]

"Germania. Will. Remain. Independent!"

Elaborate, please.

 

[Brayko]

AAA non-historical dramatization hype always tickles the funny bone is all.

 

[oscar]

God damn would it kill them to have different accents for a German and a Roman? Augustus and Arminius sounding the same is ridiculous.

 

[Akarnir]

It's not really a trailer for the game. I think it's a trailer for an upcoming Demo of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. They did the same with the Carthage Demo. First a demo, then a full scale Dev diary about the battle.

In less then 2 weeks expect at least 10 min of info.

And oscar If I'm not mistaken, Arminius grew up in Rome as a political hostage. So He would be perfectly fluent in latin, probably more than in german. He even became a roman general.


EDIT : and I fucking hate this AAA dramatization too. Makes me cringe each time I hear those cheesy background voice.

 

[Sranchammer]

History is fun!

 

[KoolNoodles]

The dramz and "personal cam" and all that bullshit sucks, but I don't really care if they get everything right out of the gate(mods can fix it ). Just don't give us a god awful template(ETW) and at least make it entertaining with room for improvement(MTW2). Plus make improving it not horrifically hard(ETW,NTW,STW2-so not likely). That is all I ask. Give us a fun game that isn't broken that the community can fiddle with, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

Or else.....

 

[Akarnir]

mods can fix it

I would be careful about relying on an hypothetical altruistic super hero, that is the modder.

 

[oscar]

I've always thought the Portuguese language (spoken by actual Portuguese not Brazilians) could make a more interesting replacement from the usual generic American or Queen's English accents we normally get for Romans.

 

[Jick Magger]

Meh, I can understand artistic license being taken for the sake of drama or theatrics. Casual audiences lap up shit like dashing rebels with dreams of freedom from the totalitarian empire.