My Two Cents

**Philippon** · October 21, 2008, 11:27 AM

I have been a wargamer since 1972 and as a consequence, have learned much over the years regarding how military units work both in campaign and on the battle field. For this reason I have routinely had the same criticisms of various mods I've played over the years. Since you are all just starting, I hope to save myself some time remodding you myself. This is a good thing because; first, I only know how to mod a couple of things; and second, I can't mod everything that needs to be modded.

Movement allowances. Your typical Roman Army at the height of the Roman Road system could, with a full supply train, march all the way up the boot of Italy and down to the city of Corinth in six months, which would be the time frame for the two turns a year.

Without a supply train, that army would be at the eastern border of Anatolia looking down at the Mesopotamian Plains.

Now the road system was not as extensive in the Middle Ages, but that should give you a pretty good idea as to how far your armies should be able to move. If you can not, as the English in 1066, march from London to York and take out a Norwegian Army, and then march back down to Wessex on the southern coast and get an arrow in the eye from the Normans in a single summer turn, your movement allowance is too small.

Finances - The expense of the army was always far greater than the expense of building. While cathedrals and walls would take years to build, the moneies spent were seldom beyond the local financial capability. The army on the other hand, broke the yearly budget of the entire kingdom. In mod after mod after mod, you pay thousands to build your infrastruction and hundreds to raise your army. In real life it was the other way around.

It should take five turns minimum to build a building, and often ten or twenty turns, but the expense should be such that it would not be that unusual for you to be building something in every single town, castle, city, etc. that you have once you get yourself established.

Likewise buildings will never take as long to build as walls, roads, port facilities, or agricultural improvements. Those things require massive amounts of manual labor to achieve and the success of the Romans was due to the fact that these things were undertaken by their armies when not out campaigning.

Armies on the other hand are going to be very expensive to recruit and maintain. While peasents and other 'grab 'em and stick a spear in their hand' troops will be cheap to raise and maintain, your professionals are going to cost you much. Sun Tzu was correct in that it took the entire financial capability of 8 men to keep one man on the field in an army.

Thus your financial situation should be such that if you have a total population of 80,000 in your towns and cities, you will have sufficient financies to raise an army of 10,000 of which 5% are elite, 15% are professional, and the remainder 80% are levies. In practical terms, five stacks which have 100 knights, 300 men at arms and archers, and 1600 peasents or militia spear. And that will cost you everything that you are going to earn that year in income to both raise and keep on the field those five stacks.

However, when not out on the field, the army should be practically free. I would propose that every single unit be free to garrison and have the garrison allowances of sufficient extent that you could easly put those five stacks into ten towns or castles and not cost a thing to maintain. Naturally villages will not be as good to garrison as moat and bailys and only the largest citidels or cities will be able to garrison 20 units each, but they should be more extensive than the vanilla and this would reflect that cost of keeping the army out on the field which numerous scripting efforts have produces such odd financial situations which are not quite real.

Provences - I like lots of provences, who doesn't, but one of the things I've always felt was a bit off was the fact that the further east you got, the larger the provences got as well. While this is done to reflect the population disparity, there's a better way to do it.

Provences in my mind should all be roughly the same size and the eastern one's be almost all tiny villages which will take forever to build up. Thus you will have an entirely different set of issues when dealing with the eastern campaigns than with the western since you won't be able to build up the infrastructure in the east like you can in the west. Naturally population growth will need to reflect this. It needs to be as slow as you can make it.

Campaigns - The persistant fear is that of a siege fest. Folks, like it or not, this was the situation in the world until the 1800's when gunpowder technology reached a point where fortifications were unable to absorb all the damage an army was capable of inflicting

In a realistic mod, your typical army is going to be out there laying siege to a well defended castle or town and hoping that it falls prior to the arrival of the relieving army nearly all the time. The battle on the open field isn't going to be the rule, but rather the exception.

This is why the fast armies had a moble siege train with them. Or the tools and parts needed to build the siege equipment on the site. The AI should be concerned about making sure each and every one if it's sites has a decent garrison in it to make sieges long and costly for it fhe garrison is to low then the assult is worth the casulties since they won't be that low.

Area of Recruitment - This is a must in my opinion. Each culture had it's own ways of fighting and certain units should be available to anyone who happens to control that or part of that territory. The English made good use of the welsh longbow, but it wasn't England which made the welsh longbow, it was the Welsh of Wales who ended up being controled by England. Had the Irish taken over, it would have been the Irish using the welsh longbow.

Likewise mercenaries should have a period of time in which they show up and remain recuitable but also fade away. You won't be able to hire Swiss Halberders in 1225, but in 1525 you want as many as you can get your hands on. So mercenaries should be plentiful but likewise expensive.

Well that's all I can think of for now. I'd love to volunteer for this mod since I am quite intriqued by it. But I can't mod much and my historical expertese is limited to the theology, philiosphy, and the overall history of warfare. I can offer advice on general topics, but on how good the spearmen of the Lombard League were in 975, I don't have the info nor do I know where to find it.

**Basil 11** · October 21, 2008, 11:32 AM

I like these points you have made... especially about King Harold's army marching around England

...

+ rep

**davidtotalwar** · October 21, 2008, 12:35 PM

Philippon I agree with almost every thing you said, it would make the game very interesting, I do however have a problem with how much an army can move in a given turn. You are correct in history armies could move a similar distance to that, but that would course problems with game play as on nation will be able to move all over the map killing of enemy armies and the enemy will not be able to move to stop you. So I think the movement of armies should stay how it is.

But every thing else you said I think was very good ideas.

**Subuatai de Bodemloze** · October 21, 2008, 03:07 PM

Noted and I personally agree with your post.

Cheers!

**OdinX** · October 21, 2008, 03:25 PM

...wow...beautiful. If it were possible to reflect even half the stuff you said in your post, then the mod will indeed be a helluva challenge on even the simplest difficulty setting. However, I'm concerned that many of things won't be able to be done given the amount of time this mod has been in effect. There will probably be quite a turn around to the mod...at least, I think. Definitely a great post overall, VERY informative. Are there any sources to support this information tho? Also, PM Hross if you'd like him to hear you on this.

**Alkidas** · October 21, 2008, 04:32 PM

Interesting post. And historically there's certainly much truth in what you write, but we also have to take into consideration that this game is too "unrealistic" in many way and so we have to make compromises. In reality you don't fight wars all the time, armies aren't mostly permanent, your opponent doesn't freeze while you move etc. Some of those things you wrote have already been considered by the team.

As for the thought of joining.... You would need to know something well in order to do that. If your thing is balancing for instance, then you'd need to know, for instance, how effective is halberd against horse, against infantryman etc. Stuff like this. You wouldn't need to know what a halberd looked like exactly.

Or if your thing is religion, then you would need have a lot of info about the monasteries of a certain order. And so on.

It's true that the capability of being able to find information from books, electric sources (I don't mean Wikipedia obviously) etc. is essential for a researcher.

**Copperknickers II** · October 21, 2008, 05:00 PM

Since you are all just starting, I hope to save myself some time remodding you myself

Um... as good as your points are (and they are very good, +rep) we are at pretty much an alpha stage now, and that means that although we haven't exactly finished, we have most of our features done and working (albeit separetely) Hross and the rest of us have made some very big decisions and we hope not to have to make any more. Now to reply to some of your points.

Movement allowances. Your typical Roman Army at the height of the Roman Road system could, with a full supply train, march all the way up the boot of Italy and down to the city of Corinth in six months, which would be the time frame for the two turns a year.

Without a supply train, that army would be at the eastern border of Anatolia looking down at the Mesopotamian Plains.

Now the road system was not as extensive in the Middle Ages, but that should give you a pretty good idea as to how far your armies should be able to move. If you can not, as the English in 1066, march from London to York and take out a Norwegian Army, and then march back down to Wessex on the southern coast and get an arrow in the eye from the Normans in a single summer turn, your movement allowance is too small.

For gameplay reasons, there is always a limit to movement points. As much as we want to make them realistic, the turn system makes for a serious detraction in gameplay terms. If you can 'March from London to york, take out some norwegians, march back and get an arrow in the eye from the Normans' that is all very nice, but you have to remember that the enemy will have no time to react, therefore making it equally if not more so unrealistic, and not nearly as fun.

Finances - The expense of the army was always far greater than the expense of building. While cathedrals and walls would take years to build, the moneies spent were seldom beyond the local financial capability. The army on the other hand, broke the yearly budget of the entire kingdom. In mod after mod after mod, you pay thousands to build your infrastruction and hundreds to raise your army. In real life it was the other way around.

It should take five turns minimum to build a building, and often ten or twenty turns, but the expense should be such that it would not be that unusual for you to be building something in every single town, castle, city, etc. that you have once you get yourself established.

Likewise buildings will never take as long to build as walls, roads, port facilities, or agricultural improvements. Those things require massive amounts of manual labor to achieve and the success of the Romans was due to the fact that these things were undertaken by their armies when not out campaigning.

Armies on the other hand are going to be very expensive to recruit and maintain. While peasents and other 'grab 'em and stick a spear in their hand' troops will be cheap to raise and maintain, your professionals are going to cost you much. Sun Tzu was correct in that it took the entire financial capability of 8 men to keep one man on the field in an army.

Thus your financial situation should be such that if you have a total population of 80,000 in your towns and cities, you will have sufficient financies to raise an army of 10,000 of which 5% are elite, 15% are professional, and the remainder 80% are levies. In practical terms, five stacks which have 100 knights, 300 men at arms and archers, and 1600 peasents or militia spear. And that will cost you everything that you are going to earn that year in income to both raise and keep on the field those five stacks.

A very good point, but you have to remember that given the smaller scale of Med2 compared to real life, and the simplified system of regions and building icons to represent huge building projects that span a lot mroe than they appear to in the game, this is not always as straightforward as it sounds.

Provinces - I like lots of provences, who doesn't, but one of the things I've always felt was a bit off was the fact that the further east you got, the larger the provences got as well. While this is done to reflect the population disparity, there's a better way to do it.

Provinces in my mind should all be roughly the same size and the eastern one's be almost all tiny villages which will take forever to build up. Thus you will have an entirely different set of issues when dealing with the eastern campaigns than with the western since you won't be able to build up the infrastructure in the east like you can in the west. Naturally population growth will need to reflect this. It needs to be as slow as you can make it.

You have to remember that given that Europe is a small place and the middle east or africa is an extremely big place, Europe is extremely packed with important cities, whereas in the middle east they tend to be spread out. It is not a question of population, but of the fact that by the time we have done all the cities in Europe, the other three quarters of the map have much less important cities per square (country? you know what i mean

) than Europe. Though i remind you that we have an innovative way of dealing with this.

Campaigns - The persistant fear is that of a siege fest. Folks, like it or not, this was the situation in the world until the 1800's when gunpowder technology reached a point where fortifications were unable to absorb all the damage an army was capable of inflicting

In a realistic mod, your typical army is going to be out there laying siege to a well defended castle or town and hoping that it falls prior to the arrival of the relieving army nearly all the time. The battle on the open field isn't going to be the rule, but rather the exception.

This is why the fast armies had a moble siege train with them. Or the tools and parts needed to build the siege equipment on the site. The AI should be concerned about making sure each and every one if it's sites has a decent garrison in it to make sieges long and costly for it fhe garrison is to low then the assult is worth the casulties since they won't be that low.

Again, we cannot alter the mechanics of the game, so we must stick inside the limits of what is physically possible.

Area of Recruitment - This is a must in my opinion. Each culture had it's own ways of fighting and certain units should be available to anyone who happens to control that or part of that territory. The English made good use of the welsh longbow, but it wasn't England which made the welsh longbow, it was the Welsh of Wales who ended up being controled by England. Had the Irish taken over, it would have been the Irish using the welsh longbow.

Likewise mercenaries should have a period of time in which they show up and remain recuitable but also fade away. You won't be able to hire Swiss Halberders in 1225, but in 1525 you want as many as you can get your hands on. So mercenaries should be plentiful but likewise expensive.

This is easy to implement, and you can count on the fact that a system representing that will be in place

.

**Philippon** · October 21, 2008, 06:15 PM

David: Philippon I agree with almost every thing you said, it would make the game very interesting, I do however have a problem with how much an army can move in a given turn. You are correct in history armies could move a similar distance to that, but that would course problems with game play as on nation will be able to move all over the map killing of enemy armies and the enemy will not be able to move to stop you. So I think the movement of armies should stay how it is.

Me: Well first of all I'm tickled pink at the postive feedback. In regards to your concerns on this part, I agree that the game would be totally out of whack if the movement allowances were as extensive as they were historically given the time frame.

That being said, I have done some experementing on this part and the Movement allowances can be increased to some extent without any serious imbalance.

My first inital concern was in playing Flagellum Dei and struggling with the very limited movement allowed given what I knew historically. It was one of the few things I've learned. I jacked the ma from 60 to 200 and while the Romans could not march from the boot of Italy to Corinth, they could get up to northern Italy and next turn across to Illyricum and that did make a very nice difference in the game. Likewise the spy net work needed to be seriously supported as your faction's opponents could, if sufficiently extensive, bring an army up which you had no advance warning about. In short, sufficient movement allowances given fog of war allow for the sudden surprise attack.

And likewise the fear expressed in having an army able to dash about and defeat several opponents at once is not as horrible as it may sound. If you have to dash about defending several fronts at once, you're not going to be able to go on the offensive.

As Fredrick The Great observed in the 1700's. If you try to defend everything, you end up defending nothing. It's one of those military principles which has to be taken into account. Namely, that you're always going to have to be able to allow one faction to wreak havoc with you if you wish to take out another faction wreaking havoc with you first.

This is what often makes playing the Byzantines such a challenge, you have the Turks and the Egyptians on one side pushing into Anatolia and you have Venice, Hungary, and Sicily pushing at you from the Balkins. You won't ever be able to fight a two front war with offensives on both sides until you are disgustingly rich, so you knock back one side first then dash over to take out the other side next.

That being said, I understand perfectly that eternal issue between game play and realism. Every mod has to make those sorts of decisions. But I am starting out with the wish list and seeing what is workable and what is being done. And one never get's the wish list in toto *grins*

**Philippon** · October 21, 2008, 06:32 PM

Odin: ...wow...beautiful. If it were possible to reflect even half the stuff you said in your post, then the mod will indeed be a helluva challenge on even the simplest difficulty setting. However, I'm concerned that many of things won't be able to be done given the amount of time this mod has been in effect. There will probably be quite a turn around to the mod...at least, I think. Definitely a great post overall, VERY informative. Are there any sources to support this information tho?

Me:Yes, as you might notice in the post, I alluded to Sun Tzu who wrote "The Art of War" in 250 BC. It's a military classic which deals with much of the psycology of warfare. It's principles are still valid today. There are also hundreds of old Strategy and Tactics magazines floating around with thousands of articles on all sorts of military statistics and battle reports which can be referenced as well if you have the patience to track them down with a good index. Another military classic is Vertigus "On Things Military" written by a Roman General. His principles are still part and parcil in training US Marines.

But one of my favorite sources is a war game known as Prestags which was put out in the late 1970's. It covers all warfare from 2,500 BC to 1500 AD and gives you a generic grasp of how units operated on a battle field. There is a ratio which is persistant throughout all pre-bayonet armies which varies slightly from unit to unit and from army to army and from tactical system to tactical system, but when it came down to it, Alexander the Great's Phalanx of Macedonian Sarissa is going to operate in an almost identical fashion as the Spanish Pike Tercio of the Renaissance. The Macedonians were better armored as a rule, but that is about it. Both would be about twice as effective at killing an equal number of Viking's with Axes as the Vikings would at killing them. Which is of course why the Viking axemen were so effective at their job of looting and pillaging . . .they almost always ran into peasent levies or milita spear which were 66% to 100% as capable, depending on training and moral.

So yeah, there are sources for this. Another source is the Face of Battle by John Keegan. He was a teacher at Sandhurst Military Academy in England back in the 1960's or there abouts and he examined three battles. The first was Agincourt in which he examined the impact that the English Longbows had upon the French knights. The history channel has also on occasion had some documentaries on the impact of specific weapons on the various battle fields of the past 5,000 years as well.

**Philippon** · October 21, 2008, 06:49 PM

Copper: Um... as good as your points are (and they are very good, +rep) we are at pretty much an alpha stage now, and that means that although we haven't exactly finished, we have most of our features done and working (albeit separetely) Hross and the rest of us have made some very big decisions and we hope not to have to make any more. Now to reply to some of your points.

Me: Understood. All this stuff is not as straightforward as it sounds in real life. As I said prior, I was giving you my wish list.

But likewise, I was expressing myself in principles, like the siegefest fear which I've seen in several mods in the past. It does happen in the Total War mods, which is why some mods make Very Big Maps with Very Big Provences so you end up with battles as opposed to sieges.

In the game, you can always count on the AI to do curious things like surrender a full strength stack in a city and fight with three units in camp. BUT, the prinicple should be that since the typical army in the typical Medieval war spent the typical day laying siege, the game should not be altered in such a fashion to keep the AI from laying siege to your towns and you having to lay siege to the AI's town.

In other words, you use the principles to weigh what sort of adjustments you wish to incorporate into the mod. So perhaps you might give some factions, such as the Byzantines, faster siege equipment units like catapults and ballista since the Roman fashion was to carry the small iron parts and rawhide of the equipment and get the wood from cut down trees around the siege works making the siege equipment on site as opposed to say other factions which would cart those machines already prebuilt into war and thus move at a slower pace. As far as I can tell, most medieval armies had those principles already known, at least in the later Middle Ages. The arrival of Cannon changed that forever since you can't build a cannon barrel on site.

So that's what I'm aiming at. Trying to lay out principles based on what I have learned as sorts of lamp posts to make decisions IF such decisions have not yet been made. I know how hard it is to mod this stuff right . . . to go around like some jerk and tell you to start over again is not my intention nor would it be thoughtful. So if I have come across like that at any point, please accept my apologies as it wasn't intended.

**OdinX** · October 21, 2008, 06:55 PM

Given the amount of information you have, this is impressive to say the least. However, I was actually thinking about gameplay balances as well. I mean, there's only so much that can be done with the M2:TW engine. Hopefully, in the future when a M3:TW is made (