Movement Range Reduced in .82h / New Patch?

[TheSavage]

Is it just me, or does the movement range on both land and sea seem reduced in the new patch and mod update?

Playing as Rome and trying to move my armies around Italy, it's no longer possible to go from one city to another in a single turn... Even NOT in winter and with decent roads.

Seems like the minimum movement range (barring specific penalties) should allow the player to move armies between two cities of average distance during a single turn.

[Ritterlichvon86]

It's awesome. It means you don't have city battles only, but more field battles. You can't just go from city to city directly. The only way the AI gets time to react and intercept. Makes for better gameplay, I played 400 rounds like that and had the most awesome campaign ever, even Carthage's CAI did well, kept their territories, and expanded right into southern Gaul.

[TheSavage]

It's awesome. It means you don't have city battles only, but more field battles. You can't just go from city to city directly. The only way the AI gets time to react and intercept. Makes for better gameplay, I played 400 rounds like that and had the most awesome campaign ever, even Carthage's CAI did well, kept their territories, and expanded right into southern Gaul.

Honestly, I did not think about that, and am perhaps not far enough into my campaign to have noticed it. The short ranges can make moving troops around (even in friendly territory) a bit of a pain, but I see where you're coming from.

Regardless, putting aside whether range is too low or not, I am asking if it has changed with the latest update. (Other than the seasonal changes which have a net effect of reducing movement ranges most of the time.)

[Iron_Duke]

Good for field battles, not so good for historic accuracy. It seems the two have to be mutually exclusive at the moment, which is a shame as I don't like having to choose between them.

[Hetairos]

The new movement range changes are just ridiculous. Just to make it clear the only change CA made is x0.5 for sea travel. Here is my post about the movement speed changes yesterday:

Sometimes I am just speechless.

I think before Patch 8 or 9 I thought wow the auto-resolver for this game is the burner. It is as accurate as it can get. Than: BAAM auto-resolve is getting patched to a totally insane nonsense. Even now they continue to patch it and its once again as off as it can get.

NOW, movement is a thing. In ancient times sea travel was by far the fastest and easiest way to transport people, goods and armies around. the average travel distance of an army was 20-32 km per day while navies did travel around 100-200 km per day. I did mod this in my sub mod for DeI - Authentic Ancient World - and multiplied it there for about 5x or 6x higher than it was before. Unluckily the movement speed database tables are completely off, so modding transport ships or ground movement cost does not work at all. So basically this means transport fleets will not travel 5x or 6x higher but remain with their land unit movement cost which is very limited. NOW CA's masterminds had the idea to even furthermore decrease those by increasing the movement cost of the sea. Ok, fair enough I just multiplied the entries in my mod to 10x to 20x higher and was expecting the movement tables in PFM to work now. BAAAAAM slap in your face, they still do not work and now transport ship fleets do not only remain with 1x BUT 0.5x movement speed rendering it completely crazy. What another insane change.............. better to remove the transport ships entirely now if you ask me. remove the torches as well... maybe the game itself should be removed so it wouldn't cause more trouble. Maybe we need a "wonder"?

[antred]

It is a bit annoying that it takes something like 4 turns to move an army from Italy to Sardinia now.

[TheSavage]

The new movement range changes are just ridiculous. Just to make it clear the only change CA made is x0.5 for sea travel. Here is my post about the movement speed changes yesterday:

OK... so it is not just me that transport fleets are INSANELY slow now?!?

Very frustrating. Sea invasions are pretty much useless now.

One option would be to raise the movement range extremely high for both naval and land units, but then raise the movement cost much higher for land terrain types (assuming THOSE still work). That would compensate for the hardcoded change to naval movement.

[Butan]

I understand your points Alec, especially on trying to have armies/fleets move as fast on land/sea as they did in reality; but on the matter of navies, since the automatically generated transports are there, do you count in your equation the time saved by automatically generating the transports instead of "building" them?

Even then, I agree that it seems the changes were quite drastic, especially since it seems you cant use PFM to edit them again


Like Iron_Duke I would like a better compromise between historical accuracy and enjoyable gameplay... maybe it would help to go from a 4TPY to a 6/12TPY as the standard version and scale movement points from there? But I think DeI isnt going to change standard TPY if there is no better reason

[TheSavage]

I'm not sure what the TPY has to do with it. And keep in mind that reduced movement ranges not only make the situation more tedious for the player... they significantly hamper the AI. The AI is not very good at executing strategic maneuvers that take many, many turns to pull off, because they are likely to change goals a few turns in.

Transport fleets are moving so slowly now that it more than compensates for any time spent "building" them. Trying to move troops across the Adriatic from Brundisium, it is seriously quicker to go by land all the way up Italy and down through Illyria. Not only is this unrealistic and unhistorical, but it completely nerfs naval invasions.

It is a serious problem.

I understand your points Alec, especially on trying to have armies/fleets move as fast on land/sea as they did in reality; but on the matter of navies, since the automatically generated transports are there, do you count in your equation the time saved by automatically generating the transports instead of "building" them?

Even then, I agree that it seems the changes were quite drastic, especially since it seems you cant use PFM to edit them again


Like Iron_Duke I would like a better compromise between historical accuracy and enjoyable gameplay... maybe it would help to go from a 4TPY to a 6/12TPY as the standard version and scale movement points from there? But I think DeI isnt going to change standard TPY if there is no better reason

[Hetairos]

Guys guys, don't mix the building time with the movement speed, please!

In ancient times the movement speed of military navies was:
- about 20-32 km per day on land (infantry)
- about 90km per day with unfavorable conditions
- about 180km per day with favorable conditions

The construction time of transport fleets were reported to be about:
- a few weeks: e.g. from what I read = little less than 1 week to chop down enough wood, little more than a week of transporting the wood and about another 2 weeks of constructing them. a few more days to embark. so basically it would take around 1 month to get ready to sail.

To me it was extremely surprising that it took so little time to construct the ships... i by no means know how to construct a ship nor how it works, but i also read the same for egyptian ship building, it was a extreme fast process. would be interesting to read more about it though.

NOW: As DeI is 4 TPY and AAW 12 TPY one turn is more than sufficient to build transport ships.

Database-wise this means pathfinding_transaction_costs for land to sea / sea to land should be set to the maximum movement point of a land unit (e.g. cavalry moving 2'400 movement points = land to sea transaction costs 2'400) this prevents transport fleets and agents to sail when they enter water.

BUT once in water (in the next turn, and assuming a 12TPY setting) it would be possible to sail from Rome to Alexandria in 1turn under favorable conditions and 1,5 turns under unfavorable conditions, 0.75 turns from alexandria to Bosporus, 1 turn from carthage to gibraltar... just a few examples.

The major problem we have here is that movement in Rome II is "Total Bugged: Rome II"
--> transport fleets do move with the land unit movement points NOT the transport fleets points
--> terrain / ground / sea transaction costs do nothing hence it can't be modded
--> but than again street movement costs can compared to ground movement costs be modded for whatever reason... BUT it makes no sense to mod roads if you can't mod the rest
--> most of the movement effects in the database do NOT work as well, luckily seasonal effects and skills effects do work and influence the movement range

SOOOO the last change with the increased sea movement cost was probably made for Hannibal at the Gate (to hide that the AI is unable to deal with double time, forced march and land to sea movement, do you remember carthaginians sailing around the cost of north africa in double time stance not knowing what to do? don't you think this would happen in HaG as well? hence CA hides the AI's inability by making transport fleets a total nonsense for the AI BUT also for the player.) Hence your comment:

Transport fleets are moving so slowly now that it more than compensates for any time spent "building" them. Trying to move troops across the Adriatic from Brundisium, it is seriously quicker to go by land all the way up Italy and down through Illyria. Not only is this unrealistic and unhistorical, but it completely nerfs naval invasions ​= hidding the problem with the brainless & sailing AI, preventing hannibal and rome to move their fleets to water forcing them to take the land route.

It is a serious problem.

CA regularly cheats, rather than being honest:
- unable sailing AI = significant decreased ship range to render it useless
- performance patch 1 = decreased texture quality
- performance patch 2 = LoD disaster
- etc.

[Hetairos]

I understand your points Alec, especially on trying to have armies/fleets move as fast on land/sea as they did in reality; but on the matter of navies, since the automatically generated transports are there, do you count in your equation the time saved by automatically generating the transports instead of "building" them?

In my mod some of the essential movement speeds are:

infantry / dignitary = 3000 (equals 20km per day)
cavalry / champion = 6000 (equals 40km per day)
cameral / spy = 8000 (equals 50+ km per day)
transport fleets 22000 (equals + / - 140 km per day (90 would be under unfavorable conditions and 190 under favorable ones, so 140 is a good compromise))

So as the highest movement range for land units is 8000 and therefore i set the transaction cost for land to sea to 8000 so you if you embark / disembark to land you will loose your ability to move by using up all your movement points.

Unfortunately CA did in a later patch another insane change ............

they linked the transaction cost to pathfinding in that matter when you embark disembark in ports you will not have those penalties... similar to not having movement or attrition penalties when sitting on streets. This is of course insane and makes no sense. Most ancient ports could not support a full armies naval transport... maybe carthage... alexandria... but i do not know any other port that could do this. before they did this change it worked fantastically!!! even when at ports you would not be able to move. it would make most sense to have transaction costs in the database like this:

- land to sea, shore
- sea to land, shore
- land to sea, minor port
- sea to land, capital city port
- land to sea, minor port
- sea to land, capital city port

I wish that CA would be more passionate about their product and think features through a bit more. instead of increasing a massive amount of features to release one at a time but to do it right. I mean come one the entire game is so flawed from a to z. everywhere where you look you see nice ideas, interesting features, but all flawed, not ready yet or just unnecessary limitations within.

If I would have been a project manager at CA I would so make those guys fire under their arse (thats a german saying no idea how you say this in english, but i think you see what I mean)

[TheSavage]

One option to overcome the transport fleet nerf is this...
1) Double all land unit movement points (and I think agent points too)
2) Apply 50% movement penalty base movement penalty in ALL seasons (to compensate), and then add on actual seasonal effects from there (e.g. a -50% movement penalty would become -75%)

This should double the range of transport fleets (thus reversing the recent nerf) while leaving land movement the same. It is not an elegant solution (the tooltip will show at least a -50% movement penalty for every season), but at least it should fix the problem.

I am trying to test it now.

[Dresden]

You could also use the difficulty table to apply movement penalties.

However, the question becomes do those penalties still apply to the transport ships, since they are now using the land unit movement values.

[TheSavage]

I tried solution below and it didn't work. Sea transport movement was doubled (back to "normal", as hoped), but the 50% seasonal movement penalty applied WAY more than 50% penalty. Units in cities could barely move outside of city. Units not in roads couldn't move AT ALL.

I then tried with 25% seasonal movement penalty and it seemed to actually work. Land movement seemed similar (if not exactly the same) to previous range, and sea movement was doubled. So it does appear to be a fix, although I have no idea why 50% penalty acts more like a 90% penalty.

One option to overcome the transport fleet nerf is this...
1) Double all land unit movement points (and I think agent points too)
2) Apply 50% movement penalty base movement penalty in ALL seasons (to compensate), and then add on actual seasonal effects from there (e.g. a -50% movement penalty would become -75%)

This should double the range of transport fleets (thus reversing the recent nerf) while leaving land movement the same. It is not an elegant solution (the tooltip will show at least a -50% movement penalty for every season), but at least it should fix the problem.

I am trying to test it now.

[Dresden]

Ok, great, I will look into doing this change. Thanks for the testing and idea.

[Hetairos]

Thanks for the idea about how to circumvent this. However I wouldn't want to make the changes appear in the UI e.g. a seasonal effect. Maybe the way Dresden proposed to add effects in the difficulty table would work, BUT I am not sure if this wouldn't also affect the transport ship movement as well. So far I am staying with the old method because I think CA will redo this. Enough people complain about it already. Maybe they will focus on the AI sea to land behavior and enable the old system OR MAYBE even enable the freaking tables and fix transport ships using the land units movement points... basic stuff!

[TheSavage]

Ok, great, I will look into doing this change. Thanks for the testing and idea.

Good luck. Might also want to look into the seasonal movement effects in general, as I'm not sure why - after I doubled the unit movement points - a 50% seasonal penalty resulted in virtually no range while a 25% seasonal penalty resulted in the desired 50% reduction in range.

Keep up the good work! Love the mod.

[TheSavage]

Thanks for the idea about how to circumvent this. However I wouldn't want to make the changes appear in the UI e.g. a seasonal effect.

Yeah I agree it is not an elegant solution and not ideal to have the penalty show up in seasonal affects. At least for me, however, it seems far less ideal to have nerfed transport ranges, since that is a practical matter that affects gameplay (killing naval invasions) rather than just a cosmetic issue.

So far I am staying with the old method because I think CA will redo this. Enough people complain about it already. Maybe they will focus on the AI sea to land behavior and enable the old system OR MAYBE even enable the freaking tables and fix transport ships using the land units movement points... basic stuff!

Haha, are you joking? (Seriously, I am asking.) I wouldn't hold your breath. If R2TW were a Paradox game, it would be fixed by the next patch. But R2TW is a CA game, so I'm betting that this problem will be around for a while. Even money that the movement tables are still bugged in the NEXT CA game.

[Hetairos]

Yeah I agree it is not an elegant solution and not ideal to have the penalty show up in seasonal affects. At least for me, however, it seems far less ideal to have nerfed transport ranges, since that is a practical matter that affects gameplay (killing naval invasions) rather than just a cosmetic issue.



Haha, are you joking? (Seriously, I am asking.) I wouldn't hold your breath. If R2TW were a Paradox game, it would be fixed by the next patch. But R2TW is a CA game, so I'm betting that this problem will be around for a while. Even money that the movement tables are still bugged in the NEXT CA game.

Haha you are totally right here How could I one moment believe in CA's sanity and common sense

[Butan]

What I meant with TPY change is that if we cant totally control movement point, we can scale it with the time. But I agree it would be a ridiculous way of trying to find a solution to movement cost problems also I'm a proponent of more TPY than 4 so here I am


Anyway cool to see some members being active with modding and cooperating with the DeI team... credits deserved I say.