RoP's strategic balancing
A lot of people lately have been asking about whether or not Persia expands as the AI or have suggested that some factions are too weak and need to be beefed up to contend with the rest. In the same vein we get a lot of suggestions about increasing unit variety.
This isn't a post to say "how dare you tell us what to do!" Everyone at RoP loves it when the fanbase suggests new ideas or ways to improve the game. To be honest I hope you guys never stop. I'm just writing this post to describe pretty concisely why some of the suggestions didn't go through or why we decided against some of them.
Firstly and fore-mostly in my mind is the idea of giving Persia advantages to make sure they become a giant empire. When we started out at RoP we really wanted to make a historical mod. One that accurately reflected the world of the age. To this end we really wanted to show exactly how remarkable the Rise of Persia was because it simply was a very hard task. The Persians had to deal with limited resources and fight extremely powerful empires to gain their success. If we gave them unique faction bonuses this would entirely detract from the accuracy of the mod. Moreover it would make playing as the Persians a little boring.
The factions like Egypt and Makedon, which people often point out are considerably weaker than their neighbours, were designed specifically to be so. this is again part of RoP's vision of creating a realistic world. Egypt was fielding an army that was behind the times apart from their mercenaries and Makedon was just a fledgling state. To take these factions on you have to be ready for quite a struggle.
lastly the requests for unit variation are mainly tied in with realism again but there are other factors. If a unit roster looks bare to you or the variety of their units is lacking. This wasn't a conscious decision by us to make that so. A lot of the time we are researching factions that barely have any information on them at all and as such we don't have a lot to work with. Sometimes research indicates that the military in question really was quite singular in their approach to warfare. As such the supposed lack of variety is entirely down to the lack of variety in the historical period. A great suggestion is to check out the eastern factions as they have far more exotic units than the western powers.
However some of the other requests involve re-skins of the same model just to make the battlefield look a little nicer. This is a suggestion that doesn't really have any problems at all in itself. The only constraint is that graphics artists are pretty rare these days for RTW so whilst we have some we want to put them to work on creating new factions instead of going over old work. This way we can get a full version out and then begin to go back and tweak certain things.
I hope this answered some questions out there. By all means keep pouring in the suggestions no matter what they might be. We just love to see people taking an interest
- Rez
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Originally Posted by Uranos
