Feedback & Feature Requests

[samcoolrunner]

First of all, really like your mod Silven thx for that.
I wanted to talk about sieges, what do you think about sieges? you do not agree that the Legionnaires that attack the walls are too stupid? breaks often the formation whit the result that portion of soldiers goes up the stairs other trying to cross the main door, really frustating , do you think is it possible fix, remove or improve AI Siege?
really sorry if you have already talk about this issue/bug ..

[DavidZ]

@DavidZ
In addition to this, if you've got a super low overhead then I suspect that you don't have a very large military force, because once you start maxing out your armies your upkeep will certainly keep your income in check. As you expand, corruption increases as well as squalor (which lowers income by forcing you to lower taxes). I don't think the economy can be fairly assessed by Turn 12. Keep playing and expanding and watch as your financial situation changes.

Increasing building costs by some minor amounts might not be out of the question though. I'll consider it. Thanks for your feedback!

Yea you're right with the income that doesn't have to change. But, please look into increasing costs of buildings. The late game experience is probably the same, since building costs are such a minor expense compared to army value, but it makes a huge difference in early game.

One of the things I love about playing vanilla is the early game anticipation of being a developing nation, surrounded by enemies and having barely enough money to scrape together half a stack. I think if you start right off the bat making enough income to support 2 full stacks and getting every possible building upgrades, it kinda kills the immersion. (*note that I'm playing as rome, which I admit have a easier time starting, but imo very hard difficulty should mean the player shouldn't have the money to just pump out units at will and fight on multiple fronts).

[Ganossa]

Yea you're right with the income that doesn't have to change. But, please look into increasing costs of buildings. The late game experience is probably the same, since building costs are such a minor expense compared to army value, but it makes a huge difference in early game.

One of the things I love about playing vanilla is the early game anticipation of being a developing nation, surrounded by enemies and having barely enough money to scrape together half a stack. I think if you start right off the bat making enough income to support 2 full stacks and getting every possible building upgrades, it kinda kills the immersion. (*note that I'm playing as rome, which I admit have a easier time starting, but imo very hard difficulty should mean the player shouldn't have the money to just pump out units at will and fight on multiple fronts).

My income in turn 30 was 104 coins. I am playing on very hard and had only 3 half stack units and 6 cities. That was pretty fair I think but less could have made it hard. I also only invested into economical technology so far.

[HenrikN]

I'm also playing on very hard, as Rome, Junia (diplomatic penalty, harder to get trade agreements) and didn't found I'm swimming in money either.. I've invested maybe 2/3rd into civil tech, going for eco buildings, had 3 stacks out of 10 possible when the (incredibly immersive killing) civil war happend etc, and I haven't been able to build new buildings every time it's been possible, I've had to save up money to be able to build. For me, in this campaign, the income and cost of things seems about balanced at least.

One thing I DO think have the wrong cost on the other hand.. mercenaries. They are so expensive, I would never ever use them.. weren't mercenaries common back then? If they were this insanely expensive, how could they have been common, noone should be able to afford them? Now as Rome I don't really need any merc to get some diversity to my armies, as we have the lovely aux units to feel the void, but if I try some other faction next time, which doesn't have Rome's aux units.. I think I'll have to mod the upkeep costs the mercs, so I actually will allow myself to use them.

[Gaios]

Mercenaries are good as a assault reinforcement when u dont have full stack armys yet. You recruit the mercenaries which is pretty cheap use them in the battle and dismiss them after the battle so u dont have to pay upkeep. If you want to realy use mercenaries in your armys use carthage, they get 40% discount on mercenaries upkeep.

[Gaios]

Silven, talking about ranged units( archers and slingers), I think you should buff them a little, right now unless u are almost in meele range they are useless compared to having more infantry, cav or siege weapons( ballistas and onagers). Reducing the calibration area of archers to 2 and slingers to 2.5 is the solution Im using right now, but the ideal solution would be increasing projectiles normal damage a little and reducing calibration area so they would destroy unarmored non shield units, increasing shield block percentage on shields so big infantry shields would block arround 90 to 95% of incoming arrows( they would be even more immune to arrows then they are now) and making ranged units ignore shield when hiting units from behind and engaged in combat since they shouldnt be able to use their shields properly in those situations. I dont even know if its possible to do what i said but its an idea and i think it would be a lot more real and balanced. Now about skirmishers, their damage is fine right now i just think you should give better meele weapons for them so they can be used more efectively as a flanking and rear attacking force after they are out of ammo, skirmishiers usualy have shortswords( 12 normal damage 4 ap damage), giving them generic swords( 28 normal damage and 4 ap damage) would solve the problem, they would still be destroyed by any infantry because of their inferior attack, meele defence, armour and numbers but would be able to cause some damage attacking from the flank or the rear.

[Ganossa]

Mercenaries are good as a assault reinforcement when u dont have full stack armys yet. You recruit the mercenaries which is pretty cheap use them in the battle and dismiss them after the battle so u dont have to pay upkeep. If you want to realy use mercenaries in your armys use carthage, they get 40% discount on mercenaries upkeep.

This, it often saved my day. You can recruit them when ever you want even if your city is besieged. With that you have a decent advantage for that extra money.

[UglySori]

Hi Silven. I wanted to thank you for developing this mod and to give some feedback. To preface, I haven't really played any Vanilla. I didn't purchase Rome 2 until the more substantial overhaul mods came out because as a TW vet since Shogun 1, I understand that initial release from CA is usually not worth playing. I play a good amount of Stainless Steel to this day and I appreciate that cav in this mod has been brought more inline with the experience in MTW2. I've put maybe 100 hrs into some Radious mod camps so far. STIM looked really interesting so I picked up the mod. First thing I noticed off the bat with the Seleucid camp I started in STIM is that elephants and in particular armored elephant generals maybe a bit overpowered early game. As an FYI, I play all my games on VH/VH.

I am not sure if its because there were some mass changes to elephants or increases in charge damage but early game there is nothing that can truly stop elephants. Elephants can simply charge into masses and keep their momentum (because they tend to flatten formations and break up unit cohesion) to charge at units outside the blob and therefore continue to bounce around charging everything.

In Radious mod, even with stampede activated, it feels like elephants are not able to make as large of initial impact when charging into an enemy spear unit. Coupled with the possibility of greater infantry speed in that mod and morale buffs the AI has a much greater ability to surround and kill elephants after their initial charge.

So far my STIM campaign, I've basically been able to raise a couple Armored elephant generals purchase a couple levy pikes with each general and take settlements with my general getting 800+ kills per battle. It doesn't matter if the AI has standing armies w/ the settlement garrisons at their disposal as the low tech early game for everyone means that they have nothing but light spears to try to stop my elephant general.

The result has been that by turn 15, I've captured 14 settlements riding the coattails of my multiple Armored elephant generals. The only issues I've run into is when the AI manages to build some pikes or has been able to build enough javelin skirmishers that my elephants could be knocked out in my initial charge into the heart of their army. Otherwise I am running conquering the entirety of the Middle East using armies that compose of an Armored Elephant gen, a handful of levy pikes, and some light cav units to chase down stragglers.

I decided to do some custom battles using an Armored Elephant general against handful Roman Triarii and they do seem to have the mass and unit cohesion to absorb a charge and because of their numbers are able to surround and kill. Unfortunately early game AI controlled levy spears and desert spearmen aren't having same success.

Some other feedback - Settlement tower damage is really high on VH. The towers basically one shot all the early game infantry - Hillmen, Eastern Spears, Levy Pikes. Not the end of the world but kind of hilarious.
Is there a reason why recurve composite bows have less range (135) than normal bows (140)? I was under the understanding that recurve bows because of their energy efficient designs tended to have large pull weights which meant that compared to "normal" self bows they would have longer ranges. Long self bows tended to have largest pull weights.

Thanks for all the hard work.

[Silven]

@UglySori

Thanks for the outstanding feedback! Elephants were recently nerfed, but its possible they may need even more adjustment. I'll look into them. It's probably a fix as simple as lowering their mass and HP.

Regarding bow range:
1)Gameplay proceeds Realism, always. The ranges are there to enforce gameplay balance, as the recurve and composite bows do more damage than normal bows.
2)Watch This

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Xaero.xiii]

edited:

Feature Request:
- Make nomadic faction units emphasize quantity over quality by making them cheaper to build but standard in stats or weaker stats in general. This would reflect the horde aspect of nomadic tribes.
- Add some basic foot units for the nomadic factions. They had this before they were a featured faction but were removed. (wtf CA?)
- Balance the strengths of nomadic faction vs all other factions of Rome II. It is almost impossible to apply the guerrilla tactics of nomads because horse archers are so inherently weak against heavy armored infantry. They barely make enough damage to make the following melee cavalry engagement advantageous for the nomad faction.
To solve this problem here are some suggestions:
- return the heavy shot but make it like fire arrows (strong damage and ap but a higher reload time),
- make nomad faction horse archers stronger in general
- more ammo for nomadic horse archers
-introduced barbed arrows or poison arrows as an option for nomadic factions. http://listverse.com/2010/01/05/top-...the-scythians/

Anyway just some suggestions to balance out nomadic factions. Right now its impossible to imitate an ahistorical Genghis Khan or Attila in Rome II lol

[tomFoolery]

~Snip~

Double posted here and in the STEP/Heavy Shot thread started by N0vaxz.

Edit by Silven:
There's no need to post the same exact thing in 2 different threads.

[UglySori]

@UglySori

Thanks for the outstanding feedback! Elephants were recently nerfed, but its possible they may need even more adjustment. I'll look into them. It's probably a fix as simple as lowering their mass and HP.

Regarding bow range:
1)Gameplay proceeds Realism, always. The ranges are there to enforce gameplay balance, as the recurve and composite bows do more damage than normal bows.
2)Watch This

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Another solution, if the belief is that elephants currently are in line statwise for late game is to simply deny it's early game usage. In the end because of the research times, elephants, especially armored elephants, should really only be deployed late game. Therefore it might be feasible to deny players the option of choosing armored elephants as a unit choice for generals.

Thanks for the video. It does make some valid points. I still think I would want to give some feedback on bow ranges but I will look into the data files for this mod first.

Thanks again.

[BohemianRomantic]

- Balance the strengths of nomadic faction vs all other factions of Rome II. It is almost impossible to apply the guerrilla tactics of nomads because horse archers are so inherently weak against heavy armored infantry. They barely make enough damage to make the following melee cavalry engagement advantageous for the nomad faction.

Same problem for the Parthian Empire. I'm about eighty turns into a campaign and the Selucid Empire is starting to field well armoured thorax swordsmen. The AP rating on my Parthian Armoured Horse Archers appears to be so low that even when I ride them behind the enemy lines they can barely make a dent. They each tend to kill between five an twenty men each before the lines clash (when behind enemy lines), and this is with unit sizes on ultra. It's reaching the point that I'm no longer bothering to field ranged units at all, mounted or not. Foot units are just as useless. One unit of slingers tend to kill between five and ten men a battle, even against lightly armoured troops. There's just no point in training them anymore, not when you could have a unit of spearmen instead.

Hopefully some sort of solution could be found soon. History shows that the Parthian Horse Archers were very affective against armoured targets (think battle of Carrhae), but at the moment in the campaign as soon as armoured units start replacing the unarmoured levies horse archers become pointless.

[wrcromartie]

Woo patch 7 beta is out! I'm guessing it will be some time for Silven to get this thing compatible.

What do you guys think of the changes? Anyone able to boot up yet?

[wrcromartie]

Also - it looks like they have made changes to the fight_in_formation! (ya!)

Maybe the rotating units bug will finally be fixed?

[Yarev]

Hi Silven are you going to make your mod compatible with patch 7 and when ?

[Gaius Livius]

Just started a new campaign with STIM and beta patch 7 came out. So far I like STIM. Rome2 starting to feel like a proper TW game now.

[Mr. Os]

Havent played patch 7 yet but apparantly formations are fixed with positive feedback. Perhaps you can readd maintain formation back into unit passives?

[Muskelsteffen]

Hello Silven. I've got a request concearning the guardmode change that comes with patch 7.
The changelog says: "New guard mode mechanic: units will be in guard mode behaviour by default and hold their line unless they have a direct attack order."
Could you adapt this change the way that only the drilled units like legionnaires, hoplites and their friends have this guard mode on and that rather barbarian and untrained units, which could not resist to hunt down routing enemies due to the battle-caused adrenaline shock, don't have the guard mode. I don't like it when the commanding of savage suebi slaughteres and rational roman routiniers feels the same.
I would appreciate it if all units whose way of fighting does not contain the holding of formations lack the universal guard mode.

[RGA]

Don't really know if it is feasible but based on my short-lived modding experience with Napoleon Total war, I think I might have an ad-hoc solution for hoplite phalanx breaking formation and charge at enemy upon attack. There is a variable called "charge distance" or something similar which decide from which distance unit turn from walk/run speed to charge speed. Charging invaribly breaks formation, in game as well as in real life. By setting "charge distance" to a very low value, unit will walk unitl they are almost upon their enemy before charging in, which help conserve the formation (the same trick applies in real life as well).

Another suggestion is to increase the payment of client states/ satrapies. Currently they are able of fielding massive armies. The tribute should be heavy, even crippling to their economy. In this way, they are both economically and militarily weak and have to rely more on your protection. IMHO, satrapies should not be able to have more than half a stack, client states no more than three quarter stack.