Public Beta Test - 1.2.3f - Battle Stat Overhaul, CAI Overhaul and New Traits System (Updated Dec 18)

[KAM 2150]

I beat Praetorians frontally with pikes. Anything else does not even stand a chance.

[bibs]

Is there any way to give pikes a different battle flag mark? One pike unit I was up against had "3 spears within a rhombus" which is the symbol for any medium or heavy spear infantry. On the battlefield it's very hard to distinguish which is medium, which is heavy, which is pikes... I don't think I need to make the case of what's the difference between medium spear / heavy spear / pikes infantry.

[Holland_NL]

I beat Praetorians frontally with pikes. Anything else does not even stand a chance.

Try fighting pikes with hoplites, hoplites just win now if they are of comparable caliber like silver shield pikemen vs the pontic bodyguard

[Meta-Mark]

Just pressing "F" switches units to melee mode.

Yeah I forgot mentioning that feature too.

By the way I did some further tests. Yes, units are generally better at killing cavalry in Disciplined Formation thanks to the bonus.
The specific occasions in which they perform better with it disabled (which happened in the previous occasions) are when you fight already engaged horsemen, thus a wider front helps surrounding them AND the fact that they don't keep their formation allows them to engage the majority of the horsemen instead of stopping the whole unit before the first single horseman they meet.

Unfortunately there are other occasions in which I want to disable it, since they behave almost exactly like a phalanx, so they have huge difficulties adjusting their orientation in combat and they eventually end up facing the nothingness in front of them while 95% of the enemy is on their flank or rear. Giving them the attack order again only worsens the situation because it just makes them go pretty much straight forward, while most of the enemy doesn't really fall back but shifts to the sides.
Sometimes I can solve this by giving them a movement order in the direction of the enemy clicking on the ground behind it, so they orient themselves correctly and then I can give them the attack order. Other times the situation is too much screwed-up for it to work.
I can live with that, though.


Against infantry, I noticed that they probably suffer too many casualties on first impact, both against identical units in standard formation and different (more damaging) units. In the first 20 seconds or so they generally score 1 kill every 4 casualties against identical units, and such casualties occur surprisingly fast. Only after some time they start compensating and someway get an edge, but not consistently.

The main problem with that is that they're supposed to take less casualties, but sometimes the enemy charges and retreats like cavalry usually does, and charge them again, which makes the unit take a good deal of casualties while delivering little to no kills. With standard formation the unit would be able to chase the retreating enemies and someway prevent them to charge back properly, or at the very least they both charge each other again.
Meanwhile Disciplined Formation can't do the same, so you'll have to disable it if you want to prevent hit-and-run by heavy infantry, which brings the question "why did I even enable it to start with?"



Now "hit-and-run" stuff brings me to another point, which is more like an honest question really:
Are you satisfied with cavalry at current state?

While testing I got the impression that MAYBE it's a bit too good in prolonged melee. It's not like they win alone against very heavy infantry, but still I feel like they don't take enough losses for you to actually pay much attention to them. I found it a bit too easy to charge enemy heavy infantry with non-shock melee cavalry leaving them unchecked in prolongued melee while maneuvering with other units. It takes a pretty long time for them to take casualties, so much that I have time for other units to rest and recover some stamina before charging and letting the first unit disengage.

Also they barely take any casualties by infantry when disengaging from combat, so simple charge-and-retreat against infantry facing you is an almost 100% safe tactic.
Maybe all of this is due to the overall reduction of the pace of battles with lower melee damage and increase in importance of armour. This last thing particularly affects cataphracts. They can safely charge legionaries (even in Disciplined Formation), deal damage, and retreat with 0 losses several times. But melee cavalry can safely adopt this tactic too and win almost effortlessly.

It seems plausible to me that it was the decrease of combat pace the thing that improved the effectiveness of "cycle charges", since cavalry relies more on immediate damage compared to infantry, so their main strenght was mostly unaffected by it while their weakness was indirectly mitigated.
What do you think?


*I think I must add that I play battles at Normal difficulty. As far as I know it's the one that doesn't alter units' stats.

[Holland_NL]

After 20 minutes of non stop pike phalanx vs hoplite phalanx / silver shields vs pontic bodyguard
Losses silvershields: 60
Losses pontic bodyguard: 4

Without the beta the silvershields destroyed the pontic bodyguard in the same match-up no problem.

[Holland_NL]

When it comes to normal melee unit vs pikes in the beta it looks less good but works the same so on that front pikes seem mostly fine. With and without the beta the pikes performed the same vs normal melee units. With the beta though it is a lot more sword work instead of pike poking to keep enemies at bay.

[quachandy99]

Wait... what? Pike problem again? Until CA fix the clipping problem the elite hoplite will never beat bronze shield or silver shield frontally without some help

[Ptolemaios Soter]

After 20 minutes of non stop pike phalanx vs hoplite phalanx / silver shields vs pontic bodyguard
Losses silvershields: 60
Losses pontic bodyguard: 4

Without the beta the silvershields destroyed the pontic bodyguard in the same match-up no problem.

I tried replicating this to no avail. My battles lasted more like 12 minutes of actual battle time and the results of two tests were:
Losses Silvershields: 27
Losses Pontic Bodyguard: 122

and
Losses Silvershields: 34
Losses Pontic Bodyguards: 124

In both cases my silvershields killed 27 hoplites before receiving their first casualty. In the first test, the lines were slightly angled, but the second test was perfectly aligned. I used 8 ranks deep and only ever used the first single click attack.

Is it possible that you're fighting on an incline? Slope can dramatically affect pikes, so make sure the terrain is perfectly flat. Other than that, I have to assume we're playing different games.

[Dresden]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfil...?id=1540855231


I loaded my saved campaign and the economy seems to be affected with the beta. My saved game had +7000 money surplus and now it has -3000 money deficit... has the economy and money generated buildings been changed with the beta? If not something seems to be corrupting the saved game numbers... screen attached

The main thing changed in the beta is that women character's final rank doesn't give -5% empire maintenance anymore. So you may have a lot more empire maintenance than you used to if you had a lot of women characters.

[Ptolemaios Soter]

I take it back. We were apparently playing different games! I hadn't updated to the most recent version of the beta from this week. Now playing the exact same battle, I lost 38 Silvershields before scoring a kill and lost the battle after a grueling 30 minutes of fighting with only 36 kills to 173 losses! Whatever changes were just made in the last update dramatically broke pike-hoplite battles!

[KAM 2150]

Which is odd as I haven't directly touched them pikes and hoplites in this update. I will take a look tomorrow.

[jegui]

The main thing changed in the beta is that women character's final rank doesn't give -5% empire maintenance anymore. So you may have a lot more empire maintenance than you used to if you had a lot of women characters.

There are 8 matron women in the family tree (-1%). Does it mean empire maintenance increased from -40% to -8%? do women in other factions also count if not in the family tree... there are 7 matron no in the tree?

There are also 6 influential/opportunistic women in the family tree.

[quachandy99]

Which is odd as I haven't directly touched them pikes and hoplites in this update. I will take a look tomorrow.

IDK about this Kam, the same old problem is the clipping problem which makes the pike easy to get killed by the hoplite and overall in my ANNOYING seleucid gameplay is doing quite well pike holding the line and get the kill when we wanted to and hoplite hold the line REALLY well and DO get some kill on the trash tier

[Holland_NL]

In my seleukid multiplayer campaign my main army got crushed because my bronze and silvershield pikemen couldnt even dent enemy levy hoplites.

[Holland_NL]

A fight of shield bearers vs rhodian basic hoplite took 30 minutes in the beta and 8.5 minutes without it. With the beta the shield bearers barely took losses (like 8 or something) while without the beta they took 50. In both cases the eventual kills were about the same for the shield bearers.

The elite hoplite in a straight phalanx vs phalanx took half the losses vs the basic hoplite. I guess that seems about right, and gameplay wise phalanx vs phalanx not taking literally half the maximum turn timer is also a plus so the beta needs some work on hoplites (and pikes since hoplties now crush them like I said before)

[Maetharin]

A fight of shield bearers vs rhodian basic hoplite took 30 minutes in the beta and 8.5 minutes without it. With the beta the shield bearers barely took losses (like 8 or something) while without the beta they took 50. In both cases the eventual kills were about the same for the shield bearers.

The elite hoplite in a straight phalanx vs phalanx took half the losses vs the basic hoplite. I guess that seems about right, and gameplay wise phalanx vs phalanx not taking literally half the maximum turn timer is also a plus so the beta needs some work on hoplites (and pikes since hoplties now crush them like I said before)

IMO Hoplite on Hoplite action is in an unprecedented sweetspot rn.
Haven´t tested Hoplite vs Pikemen yet.

[lequintal69]

First, I was dubious about Holand's report, but after having a big battle in MP, I think he's about right.

We had a rome vs epirus, rome (5000, mostly hastati/heavy phalanx) vs epirus (5000 of mostly bronze pikemen and a variety of ranged/light inf) defending appolonia

Obviously I camped the streets with my bronze pikemen and created big choke points, but to my surprise, pikemen eventually routed. In the end each of my 9 pikemen units got from 40 to 120 kills, and we are talking about around 25mins of pure choke point fight

Some units, I let them defend, others I spammed forward button. I even tried to manually move the pikemen right ON the roman phalanx (which usually costs you a fair amount of pikemen, but ends up crushing the ennemy when you finally form up) and it resulted in 1-2 kills after 7-8 sec, MILES from what we used to get

Even against hastati or principes, spamming forward didnt get me much kills compared to pre beta.

https://imgur.com/a/vvI6jfI

[ur-Lord Tedric]

If the 'Political Update' is going to be added to the current Beta (f) trial - please, please could it be issued in a 'zipped' format?

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't seem to be able to do anything with a '.pack' file - having looked and downloaded and tried to use the relevent program(s).

Unless you intend to release a full 'f' in the next few days? At least them I could help add to the testing.

[Icarus Smicarus]

You just drop the .pack into the data folder. Don't see how zipping it would be useful.

[Jake Armitage]

If the 'Political Update' is going to be added to the current Beta (f) trial - please, please could it be issued in a 'zipped' format?

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't seem to be able to do anything with a '.pack' file - having looked and downloaded and tried to use the relevent program(s).

Unless you intend to release a full 'f' in the next few days? At least them I could help add to the testing.

No, don't think the 'Political Update' will be added to f (there are many things to be done yet). It will be released as an external submod when it will be ready.
If (and only if) it will be better than vanilla's, then maybe it will be added to DeI.

Yeah, me too, don't get that zip thing sincerely.