[wip] the sub mod is work in progress and not available to download yet, this thread is for brainstorming the ideas I have for it. I welcome any feedback.
Prologue
I have been playing the third age medieval 2 mod for a long time, and I just discovered LotRTW in 2019. I knew there was such a mod for Rome but I always thought it wasn't as good as third age, and to my surprise, I find it's better! I only have about 15 hours on it so far (playing 3.02 from moddb with no submod) but there's some things I would like to improve upon especially in the combat area so this BCM (better combat mod) will address those issues I have.
The issues that the sub mod tries to address in detail:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
- first issue: combat AI is annoyingly passive and cowardly. many times I enter a battle only to have the AI run away from the map within the first minutes. Yes, maybe it's the smarter thing to do when the AI will definitly lose, but it's not fun.
> solution: mod wise, the way combat AI behaves is affected by how the formation ai is done, so I tried copying the formation ai from other mods to see how it would affect LotRTW, I have tried a couple and I have stopped on Europa Barbarorum's formation AI for now.
- second issue: archers and all kind of missiles are overpowered. I find myself spamming archers as gondor against mordor because I can annihilate the average mordor army without even engaging in melee. This is wrong, archers shouldn't be able to win on their own without infantry support and making spam a viable strategy kills the fun of having to play a well balanced army.
> solution: reduce all missile and thrown weapons damage by half. their upkeep cost is kept the same despite their reduced power because with upgraded stats (weapon upgrades and skill levels), their stats can raise back as high as they were which is overpowered, but I'm fine with max stats units being powerful.
- third issue: full stack spam. the units in LotRTW are so cheap that the AI can spam full stacks every other turn if not every turn. having full stack battles is fun, but when it's every turn, it gets very repetitive and dull. I would like to make the battles in the game more meaningful. To make the game feel more epic, big battles should be more rare, so when they happen you enjoy them more and they make a bigger impact instead of just being another full stack smash.
> partial solution: double the recruit price of all units (upkeep is kept the same). that was the easiest way I thought of seing less full stacks every turn. the AI cannot spam as many if units are more expensive.
TLDR
Better Combat (sub)Mod tries to make the game more fun by
- making ai a lot more engaging in battles (thanks to Europa Barbarorum's formation AI)
- fixing easy archer spam by reducing all missile and thrown weapons damage by half (siege weapons are unaffected)
- making battles more meaningful instead of full stack spam every turn (double the recruit cost of all units)
I was gonna edit the first post to add to it but I don't have the permission to.
-first issue: using EB's formation AI makes AI a lot more engaging in battle, BUT it got me some CTDs in ambush battles. will have to see if it's fixable, I can swap formation AI myself to go through a campaign when needed, but I wouldn't want to release a feature that causes CTDs to the public.
-second issue: archers being overpowered, I halved all missile damage. I realized it's pretty easy to get the missile damage back to where it was. if gondor archers did 12 damage, halved is 6. it means it only takes 3 silver bars experience to get back to 12 missile damage, and even less with missile damage upgrades. I thought it would take a maxed stats unit to reach full power again, but a max stat unit would actually surpass the original overpowered stat by far. a 12 damage unit does 24 damage at max stats. with halved damage, a unit starts a 6 damage and maxes out at 18. funnily enough, I raised this issue because I thought only 12 missile damage was already extremely overpowered, and max stats will still way surpass that. Not really an issue, halving the initial stats still seem to supress archer spam being a viable option.
-third issue: regarding the third issue (too many full stacks so double the recruit cost), I have been playtesting it and slowly seeing a difference, but, I'm just not quite sure wether the AI (in this case mordor) actually has to buy his own troops, or if he gets new free troops every turn. If that's the case, that would destroy the balance because the player has to pay double and the AI still gets the same number of units. If someone could just confirm that mordor actually buys its own troops, then I can be reassured the balance of the game is properly affected by this modification. Or I will just see for myself with more playtesting.
-fourth issue: when fighting in mountains, especially in mordor, the terrain can be stupidly steep. I would like mountainous terrain to be moderetaly mountainous, the current mountains at their worst are so steep that no real army could be walking in a place like that and it makes it very annoying to play imho. I'm not sure how I would address that problem though, I don't know what data I should touch to modify the property of terrain to be steep. I will have to investigate, if anyone knows about that, some help would be gladly welcomed.
-fifth issue: campaign AI being unable to use multiple stacks cleverly give huge advantage to good factions. if I use the historical battle "Battle of the last alliance" as a reference for balancing, 1 good faction stack is approximately the match of 3 stacks of mordor, hence the imbalance in the campaign. the AI only attacking with a single stack at once, if the player meets it with his own full stack, it means the player overpowers the AI by a factor of 3 to 1. fighting mordor stacks gets boring because there is no challenge at all.
> first attempt to solve this problem: I reduced all good faction units soldier number by 40% (140 gondor soldiers reduced to 85, 100 rangers reduced to 60, 80 elves reduced to 48), but I increase all evil faction units cost and upkeep by 100%. because good units cost the same with less soldiers, evil units must cost more to keep a good balance. at this point, mordor orc units cost approximately the same as gondor units.
so, before, the stack odds were about 1:3, but with a good stack being 40% smaller, the odds are now about 1:1.5. this means that a 1v1 stack battle will be more challenging, more fun, more balanced. More playtesting will tell how this turns out.
[wip] the sub mod is work in progress and not available to download yet, this thread is for brainstorming the ideas I have for it. I welcome any feedback.
Well hey welcome to LotRTW! I've put up some notes/comments/thoughts below.
Originally Posted by RomTrep
First issue: combat AI is annoyingly passive and cowardly. many times I enter a battle only to have the AI run away from the map within the first minutes. Yes, maybe it's the smarter thing to do when the AI will definitly lose, but it's not fun.
> solution: mod wise, the way combat AI behaves is affected by how the formation ai is done, so I tried copying the formation ai from other mods to see how it would affect LotRTW, I have tried a couple and I have stopped on Europa Barbarorum's formation AI for now.
Agreed, this can be really annoying - I've always wondered if it's possibly also a disconnect between the campaign map AI and the battle map AI when they choose which battles are worth fighting? A more aggressive battle AI, especially for orc factions and particularly for orc factions on the defense (instead of just forming up waiting to be attacked) would almost certainly be a valuable addition. I can't remember what exactly it was that I'd changed to get the effect (I think it was the secondary hitpoints values maybe) but this 'form-up and retreat' thing does occur slightly less in the Campaigns Addon sub-mod.
Originally Posted by RomTrep
Second issue: archers and all kind of missiles are overpowered. I find myself spamming archers as gondor against mordor because I can annihilate the average mordor army without even engaging in melee. This is wrong, archers shouldn't be able to win on their own without infantry support and making spam a viable strategy kills the fun of having to play a well balanced army.
I can't recall exactly (again... ), but I think there were several reasons for the powerful missile weapons. I seem to recall having raised this same issue way back in beta and eventually being convinced. I think it had something to do with keeping missile units viable in multiplayer games and also making them more of a threat when in the hands of the AI against the player. A more aggressive battle AI, particularly for orc armies, would probably also contribute to reduced viability of a player-led archer spam strategy though, which would be good.
Originally Posted by RomTrep
Third issue: full stack spam. the units in LotRTW are so cheap that the AI can spam full stacks every other turn... I would like to make the battles in the game more meaningful. To make the game feel more epic, big battles should be more rare, so when they happen you enjoy them more and they make a bigger impact instead of just being another full stack smash.
> partial solution: double the recruit price of all units (upkeep is kept the same). that was the easiest way I thought of seing less full stacks every turn. the AI cannot spam as many if units are more expensive.
The LotRTW campain has many, many scripts running in the background and a lot of these are there to help the campaign/strategic AI. Also, the campaigns are somewhat rpg/story-driven, so depending on the faction you're playing and when/where you're fighting those full stacks may in fact be scripted. The scripted armies do have a certain random element to them so that they're not always the same but if you're playing Gondor and finding a bunch of Mordor full stacks wandering around before turn 30 and/or after you've stepped into Mordor lands, those are more than likely scripted.
The last issue I've been trying to fix is regarding campaign AI being unable to use multiple stacks cleverly which gives huge advantage to good factions. if I use the historical battle "Battle of the last alliance" as a reference for balancing, 1 good faction stack is approximately the match of 3 stacks of mordor, hence the imbalance in the campaign. the AI only attacking with a single stack at once, if the player meets it with his own full stack, it means the player overpowers the AI by a factor of 3 to 1. fighting mordor stacks gets boring because there is no challenge at all.
My first attempt to solve this problem, I reduced all good faction units soldier number by 40% (140 gondor soldiers reduced to 85, 100 rangers reduced to 60, 80 elves reduced to 48) and I increase all evil faction units cost and upkeep by 100%. Now, a mordor unit costs approximately the same as a gondor unit but is balanced by mordor having 3 to 4 times as many soldiers in each unit. This way, 1v1 stack battles have much fairer odds and makes them a lot more fun and exiting. In 1v1 full stacks, the odds are now about 1.5 to 1 instead of overpowering the AI by 3 to 1. Also the biggest orc units are 220 for some reason, I might increase those to the maximum of 240 just for fun.
But now that you mentionned many stacks can be scripted, this could lead to a balancing problem because the increased cost is bypassed and only the player gets a nerf. I will do more playtesting and see how it turns out.
I see why missiles should be strong in multiplayer, I only play campaign so far and the AI is just not smart enough to take advantage of strong missiles. I can chase them with cavalry, and the strong missiles end up just being a huge advantage for the player. It just makes the game a whole lot easier when playing against AI.
Also I am having a problem with mumakils. The AI spams them despite their very high cost. I am at turn 50 of a gondor campaign and every 2 or 3 turns, the AI has brand new mumakils, sometimes 3 or 4 units of them. I don't have a choice but to counter spam with archers because they would destroy my infantry. Mumakils are now ruining my fun because it's back to archer spam. I need these to stop being spammed which is what forces me to do a hard counter spam, and I need to make these less vulnerable to sniping so that it makes different approaches more interesting. I am thinking of getting rid of those by now because they're extremely annoying to deal with. Maybe I wouldn't be so annoyed if I saw them every once in a while, it's just the constant spam of units that shouldn't be seen so often. Like trolls, I only see trolls in every 6 mordor stacks or so, but mumakils are in every single southron stack.
So thanks to the covid-19 downtime recently I've been tinkering with the Campaigns Addon sub-mod and, among other things, have re-written or modified a pretty big part of the battle AI with fairly reasonble success. It wasn't even all that difficult once I got into it. Quick summary of some of the results:
-orcish armies (goblin in particular) that are MUCH less passive in battle and also a bit more flexible in their battle plans
-potential happy accident with the previous is that is makes player controlled archer-spam armies less viable
-I've re-done all the base formations on both attack and defence which has made a really huge noticable impact
-Bridge assault formations also re-done to the point that the AI isn't even all that useless in these anymore (within the limits of the engine anyway)
As to many of your other points (archery to a certain extent, the unit and mumak spam, and others), many are actually addressed within the Campaigns Addon sub-mod already.
I'm getting towards having a new (maybe finally final ) release for that packed up and ready to go. Would you have any interest in testing it out?
Last edited by CapnDan; June 28, 2020 at 03:07 PM.
[wip] Better Combat (sub)Mod
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Originally Posted by RomTrep
) release for that packed up and ready to go. Would you have any interest in testing it out?
