Suggestions for upcoming versions
I've been playing RTR for about a month now and have been most pleased with it in comparison to vanilla Rome, but there are some things that atleast i'd like to see change.
Spies
Spies are in my opinion inherently too powerful in the game for two reasons:
First reasons being the chance to open city gates which opens up a (cheesy) tactic
for blitz warfare, making walls less useful, or atleast anything beyond stockade size wall. It's not that battle would start you in control of (one) gatehouse but instead all of the gates are in fact smashed open which makes even less sense.
In my games of old vanilla Rome and RTR too, regardless of the faction i play,
the speed that i can capture cities with spies is nothing short of blitz warfare. Best success i had recently as Germania against Macedon. I sailed past Macedon armies over Adriatic sea with one warship and razed some 10 cities with half of the gates open, making it possible to take two cities in one turn.
Opening the gates presents no risk after city is infiltrated, unlike assasinations for example. And as an insult to the injury, allthough AI makes use of spies, it doesn't use them to open the gates for his armies (never ever has this happened against me).
Second reason is the line of sight of spies. Even an unexperienced subterfuge 1 spy has considerable line of sight making watch towers useless. With meager expense of 100 denarii you remove considerable area of fog of war with these mobile radar stations. With roughly 1000 denarii per turn you will afford enough spies to ensure that no army of yours will ever be ambushed nor will any enemy army ever reach any of your cities unnoticed. This partly applies to generals also who can gain los increasing traits. Fog of war is essential part of the game which massive los ruins.
Assassins
Allthough assassination has been a useful tool thoughout the history,
not even Jason Bourne could go against the assassins in RTW.
Even subterfuge 1 assassins has decent chance against valuable target.
Assassins gain skill fast and it is not uncommon to get subterfuge 8-10 super killers to dispatch of all those pesky generals. If you train roughly 5 assassins, chances are that atleast one of them will survive few missions and is well on his way towards being one of those super killers that can take out even a faction leader.
The success rate of assassins is simply absurd, let alone the thought of a Numidian assassin taking out a Roman faction leader sitting in Rome. Personally i'd just remove the entire assassin unit from the game. Assasination has been common over times, but usually within the nations borders and very rare over the borders.
City walls
I've allways thought walls being pretty much useless in every total war game, because they need someone to defend them. City usually has small garrison just to keep riots in check. Larger garrison would simply be too expensive overally if you intend to have such in every city that is potentially threatened.
So what is really the point of having walls bigger than stockade?
Walls take long time to build, but epic walls slow the attacker down only for one turn (build the siege engines) but so does the stockade. With agents opening the gates, the bigger walls serve even less purpose.
Large walls have towers to shoot arrows, but the casualties are quite small in the end and there are dead angles in the walls to avoid even that.
And even best, once you capture a tower, it will start to shoot the defenders.
Overally taking cities is too easy in every single TW i've played.
Walls are nothing but waste of gold and effort, and potentially will be
used against your own troops inside the walls. I'd like to see this somehow improved, unfortunately i lack ideas myself. More towers? More effective towers? City militia?
Thanks for a great mod and hopefully it will be more great in the next version.
P.S. I'd really appreciate if you could change the Spartan hoplite skin to more macho.
The official Spartan hoplite skin patch doesn't work with RTR and the vanilla Spartans look like little red riding hoods.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by hat79
