Tomn posted:

Quick question - wasn't one of the particular Roman strengths their ability at combat engineering and siegecraft? I seem to recall it being mentioned as a particular Roman feature, though I can't recall where - possibly in the Gallic Commentaries.

Mans posted:

Sieges were hard and complicated during classical times and the major battles were fought outside of cities because of the simply lack of space to place entire armies inside them. Artillery made fortifications stronger too, most battles of the Italian wars were sieges, most battles of Louis XIV were sieges too. The basic here is that battles were fought both on open ground and attacking fortification, yet Rome I is really based on siege battles, more than 80% of the battles are sieges.

Notice there's a massive difference between "take town" and "make a large scale assault on every single community which has massive gently caress off fortifications and capacity to hold entire armies inside them. Force towns

Sieges are boring and tedious. Open battles should be the basis of the game and Rome II would improve immensely by forcing armies to go play outside the walls.

Saying "just wait 8 turns for them to come out" is dumb too, they come out really weakened and the AI sucks at sallying out.

Tomn posted:

Quick question - wasn't one of the particular Roman strengths their ability at combat engineering and siegecraft? I seem to recall it being mentioned as a particular Roman feature, though I can't recall where - possibly in the Gallic Commentaries.

Koramei posted:

It's 10 years old. Rome 2 is going to be based on Shogun 2, not its older cousin, and Shogun 2's siege mechanics are pretty good.

Mans posted:

What's different? Last game i played was Medieval 2 so i know zero about Shogun's siege mechanics. The campaigns of this time period were based on conquering towns as they were usually based on areas where resources converged, but must battles didn't really happen like in Rome's sieges, they happened during the walk, during a retreat from a failed siege or from an outside relieving the besieged force.

Again, the base of this argument is that Rome II should base the game around open fights where the AI isn't a joke and you're allowed to play around with tactics.

Mans posted:

They were one of the few factions with giant siege equipment like the onagers, also being complemented by Scorpions and stuff. I think only Carthage and the Seleucids had the same toys.

What's different? Last game i played was Medieval 2 so i know zero about Shogun's siege mechanics. The campaigns of this time period were based on conquering towns as they were usually based on areas where resources converged, but must battles didn't really happen like in Rome's sieges, they happened during the walk, during a retreat from a failed siege or from an outside relieving the besieged force.

Again, the base of this argument is that Rome II should base the game around open fights where the AI isn't a joke and you're allowed to play around with tactics.

Rabhadh posted:

When you think about it though that sounds kind of terrible. Every time I attack (or am attacked) near Teutoburg forest I get an ambush on the march instead of a meeting engagement? Because thats the way that one map is set up?

Rabhadh posted:

In the video the map is basically a long narrow road though

Alchenar posted:

All we really know is that with Rome 2 they're trying to solve the problem of late-game blobbing in a new way that sort of iterates on the way 'Realm Divide' works in Shogun 2 and FOTS.

TheSeltsamOne posted:

Do you have the source on that? That sounds pretty neat.

quote:

First post for a while and I want to take this opportunity to talk about the changes we have made to the combat system and tweaks we have made to the morale system as well.

Combat changes

There have been big changes to the combat system for Rome II. I will talk about these changes in the context of some new stats: weapon damage and health.

Weapon damage is split into two parts, base damage and armour piercing damage (referred to as AP damage from here on out). AP damage is always applied but base damage can be blocked by armour. Melee weapons and projectiles have this damage split. Health is the amount of hit points a soldier in a unit has, and damage dealt reduces a soldiers hit points.

This system gives us a lot more flexibility in how we balance units. Whereas before an axe may have been set as armour piercing which would reduce target armour by half, the new system allows us to give axes lots of AP damage but little base damage so that most of their damage cannot be blocked by armour. Other weapons may have the other extreme, lots of base damage but low AP damage which would make them fantastic against units with low armour but weak against more heavily armoured opponents.

All weapons do some AP damage so you can always guarantee that no matter who is fighting who some damage will always be done, though this may be very little.

Health has been introduced as the system that damage affects, most units will have a similar amount of health (more for cavalry when mounted to show the hit points of horses) and armour will be a bigger factor in a unit’s survivability as that can block damage whereas health can only absorb so much.

Melee defence is still a factor and is matched against melee attack to determine if a unit will hit and then see if it does damage.

Shields in Rome II do not just provide a bonus to melee defence, they now can provide a bonus to both melee defence and armour when a soldier is attacked from the front or left. How much of a bonus is given to melee defence or armour is dependent on the shield a unit has in the database. So a hoplite shield will give a big bonus to armour but less to melee defence due to how it was held close to the body and could not be moved around lots, but a celtic shield will give a big bonus to melee defence showing how it was used much more actively.

Charge bonus now affects both melee attack and damage to reflect the changes made to the combat system.

All these changes allow for a lot more flexibility and more depth to be portrayed in the unit balancing and combat calculations. This system has more depth to it than any previous Total War games whilst keeping the rules simple so players can grasp what each stat means. All the complexity of the previous system has been retained with more added to it

A brief note here on ranged combat. With the way we display arcs to show the range of missile units, dynamic height based range bonuses are basically impossible to do as it is entirely dependent on who the unit is targeting. Instead we have implemented a damage bonus for ranged units firing down on enemies, and a damage reduction for ranged units firing up on enemies. This allows us to have an advantage for ranged units on high ground without massively complicated code for dynamic firing arcs with very few benefits.

The new combat rules also have one v many combat coded into them. The animations may look 1v1, but under the hood every available additional attacker is factored in and will result in a person surrounded by enemies dying a lot faster.

Morale Changes

There have been less code changes to the morale system, the big one being a smoothing mechanism to soften some of the big jumps between different morale values that can be caused by balancing. This, when combined with units being in the wavering state for longer will allow players more time to react to units in trouble and to try and boost their morale.

The morale values themselves have had a lot of changes, for example the morale penalty from being under missile fire is much greater in Rome II to emphasise the harassment nature of missile units and allow those ranged units to be less focused on just killing opponents and so offer a wider array of tactical uses. The morale effects for lost casualties and flanking have also ben tweaked to help make the cause and effect of player actions more clear in the battlefield and put more emphasis on good movement and positioning.

Unit Stat Scales

As some people noticed in the Teutoberg trailer, the stats for units are a lot bigger now. This is because we are using a wider range of stats for units in Rome II. For example in Shogun 2 morale may have gone from 4 to 15 for most units (excluding heroes). In Rome II it can go from 10 to 75.

This greater range allows us much more granularity in the bonuses we give from experience and in the campaign and also a greater range to differentiate units over.

Additionally, I should point out that the Teutoberg video certainly showed barbarian units breaking earlier and Roman units surviving longer than they will do in the final game. We tweaked this for the video so that the guy demoing it could actually get through the battle to the end without dying horribly halfway through. It can be hilarious when that happens for the fifth time in a row, but maybe not so much when we are trying to record a video to show you….

Below are images of some of the Greek shield patterns.

madmac posted:

The most confusing thing is that it can be hard to follow the use of attack vs damage in places now that they are different stats...It does sound like the new system puts more emphasis on armor vs damage then attack vs defense, but I could be wrong.

quote:

Thanks for cross-posting this. Coming from an RPG perspective, this makes a lot of sense to me. You compare the attack vs. defense values in order to determine the hit chance, and then you compare the armor/hitpoint vs. AP/base damage values to resolve the effect of a successful strike. A unit with a high attack will land more strikes, whereas a unit with high damage will be more deadly when those strikes land.

A Saucy Bratwurst posted:

Sounds like you just pick the units with the best AP and win.

quote:

It sounds like if you pick high AP but low total weapon damage you would have a unit that would do less overall damage to less armored opponents than a low AP high damage weapon.

Captain Beans posted:

It sounds like if you pick high AP but low total weapon damage you would have a unit that would do less overall damage to less armored opponents than a low AP high damage weapon.

madmac posted:

This. Also keep in mind that accuracy and damage and AP damage are all different stats. Not to mention some shields give bonus defense while others provide armor. Also it sounds like multiple HPs will be the default, with most soldiers falling in an expected range.

There's a lot of different combinations of stats and properties to play with for different results. As long as CA doesn't go crazy with units that have high everything, it should work out.

shalcar posted:

The issue is, of course, that you run the real risk of a million different units that vary by only the slightest amount, something that was the case in Rome 1 and this new system will do nothing to actually fix. The myriad of stat variations make it quite overwhelming for newer players in addition to steepening the learning curve (something which turns most strategy gamers who tried Total War off already) without actually adding all that much depth. I wouldn't be surprised to see that almost all units that fit core roles of various factions have identical stats but different skins, if for no other reason than to see a snowballs chance in hell of balance. This is especially true of the multiplayer, which CA will almost certainly want to be balanced if it is to gain any traction.

Aurubin posted:

shalcar posted:

The issue is, of course, that you run the real risk of a million different units that vary by only the slightest amount, something that was the case in Rome 1 and this new system will do nothing to actually fix. The myriad of stat variations make it quite overwhelming for newer players in addition to steepening the learning curve (something which turns most strategy gamers who tried Total War off already) without actually adding all that much depth. I wouldn't be surprised to see that almost all units that fit core roles of various factions have identical stats but different skins, if for no other reason than to see a snowballs chance in hell of balance. This is especially true of the multiplayer, which CA will almost certainly want to be balanced if it is to gain any traction.

Mans posted:

You might by the only person in the world who thinks unit variety is a bad thing. I hope no one responsible for Rome II hears anything you say because unit diversity was what made Rome so fun and the mods even better.

Aurubin posted:

I suppose I should clarify a bit. At most I just want superficial diversity. I liked Europa Barborum for the 8 billion different kinds of spearman/cavalry/people wearing dead animals on their heads. It was nice that Libyan spearmen had different armor stats than the sweboz, but it didn't affect my game that much. If the npc factions have the same stats as their playable counterparts but are graphically different in a neat way, it'll be a nice perk for my campaign game. Multiplayer is fun for the tactics, and I hope Carthage plays radically different from Rome and Pontus, etc to encourage that. That's hard, I know. But really, I just want to see some HD dude wearing a dead wolf fight some guy wearing a dead leopard x a billion.

shalcar posted:

The issue is, of course, that you run the real risk of a million different units that vary by only the slightest amount, something that was the case in Rome 1 and this new system will do nothing to actually fix. The myriad of stat variations make it quite overwhelming for newer players in addition to steepening the learning curve (something which turns most strategy gamers who tried Total War off already) without actually adding all that much depth. I wouldn't be surprised to see that almost all units that fit core roles of various factions have identical stats but different skins, if for no other reason than to see a snowballs chance in hell of balance. This is especially true of the multiplayer, which CA will almost certainly want to be balanced if it is to gain any traction.

shalcar posted:

It's no accident that the simplified and streamlined game that is Shogun 2 is the best in the series, as it was designed on taking out complication and bloat, streamlining systems that needed streamlining (Replenishment and sieges for example) and bringing it all back to basics, from units to buildings.

Shorter Than Some posted:

That's not exactly a universally held opinion. Personally whilst I appreciated many of the quality of life improvements in shogun I felt it was a bit bland compared to other games in the series, a large part of that was due to the lack of unit variety. Yes much of the unit variety in Rome was superficial , but the factions did actually play fairly differently.

I do however agree that Shogun 2 shined in multiplayer and they will have a hard job balancing in the same way with 8 different factions, but I'm interested to see how they attempt it.

shalcar posted:

Yes, I'm clearly arguing for all units to be replaced by a single one called "People". It's because I hate fun. You sure you wouldn't rather be posting on TWC?

Or perhaps I'm arguing that after a certain point, unit variety has a greater negative impact on the game as a whole than any positives gained from the extra variety. Unit variety doesn't exist in a vacuum, it adds additional balancing needs and additional learning from the player. This is in a game that already has difficulty with both unit balance (multiplayer primarily) and with the learning curve for new players (even experienced Total War players). If the unit doesn't have a unique role on the battlefield, it will be used in the same manner as the existing unit and so doesn't actually gain you anything, gameplay wise.

shalcar posted:

It would be a shame if CA bit off more than they could chew like they did with Empire, because if they do gently caress this up, it's going to be a long time before Rome 3.