Roman campaign H/H

[Tankbuster]

Just to let you know I'm doing my part, I'm going to open this thread for my present and upcoming reports.

For now I have a little report with a couple of suggestions and questions; a more detailed version with screenshots is coming up but I'm not on my RS2 computer right now (just killing time before I have to get my exam grades).

First off, what I like: I like the overall feel of the game a lot more than the unpolished version that I tested 11 months ago; it's a much more polished experience and many of the rough edges are gone. You probably don't want to hear over and over again all the things I like though, so I'll zero in on the things that might take some more tweaking. Just suggestions, of course, feel free to disregard them at will.

The Roman campaign starts off with a bang (obviously) and gradually falls into place as you get back on your feet and start calling the shots. Two comments about the initial turns:
- I think the way the battle with Hannibal is meant to be is that you face his 20 (fairly inexperienced) units with the 16 you get at the start. However, what s like myself will do is get 4 reserve units from neighbouring provinces, and then fight Hannibal with 20vs20, and winning fairly easily. Maybe you can make Hannibal's troops a little tougher (the Numidian cavalry in particular might be more experienced, if we're going for a historical touch), so that even when s like me get troops from neighbouring regions, that still puts them at a disadvantage. That assumes others are as bad as me though
- if possible, the troops spawning in Capua could be a tad more defensive (or a tad bit larger, depending on your fancy); right now they rushed north to Rome immediately, and while they did give me an initial scare, they split up into seperate armies which proved easy to beat. This way I had regained control of Italy maybe 7 turns into the game. If the troops were a little more defensive (like a full stack staying in Capua trying to hold it, as it happened historically) it would have taken me much longer, considering I would have needed to muster a complete legion rather than the rabble I now used.
- divide the population a tad more between Rome and, say, Arretium and other cities. Right now Rome is this massive metropole (24000+ almost immediately) which allows to keep pumping out new Republican units virtually at will). I'm discouraged from building Allied legions as those would drain their already feeble populations too much. Dividing it might enable me to use a greater variety of troops.

As for the battles, again, I was a critic of the battles in my former testing runs, but they've improved a lot since then. I like the time the battles take and the moral of the units. Still, couple suggestions (do with them what you will, I know some of them are probably either hard-coded or just hard to fix, I'm just going to point them out):
- the general and cavalry units still have a tendency for suicide charges; I know that Darth's formations were very good at stopping this, I'm not too convinced on Sinuhet's solution for it. Either way, it's just a pity when there's an anticipated battle and it starts off with Hannibal charging into your lines without any back-up from his troops
- there's a dependency on cavalry and/or missile troops to win the battles effectively. This was the case earlier and has improved since then, but not all that much. The reason is that infantry-vs-infantry battles still take forever (on a city square it took me fifteen minutes to kill three units with 9 of my own, even though I had them all surrounded), so in comparison there's more to gain with focusing on cavalry charges and/or having slingers shoot the enemy formation in the back. I like the tactical aspect of it all, but it's still sort of ridiculous to have your infantry fighting for five minutes while barely making progress, and then inflict 100+ casualties with four swings of a slinger.
Another downside of this approach is that the vast majority of the kills are done by the cavalry (when the enemy routs) or your strategically placed missile troops. This leaves your infantry gaining little experience points at all; sort of ahistorical for the Romans.
Again, it depends on your taste of the battles, and it's probably pretty annoying to change, but maybe there's a possibility of increasing unit lethality while simultaneously increasing unit morale. That way you could, theoretically, maintain the duration of the battles while also making the infantry aspect more exciting.
Case in point: a unit of Libyan Spearmen might now fight 5 minutes, be down at 180 men and then rout (because of issues with unit morale or whatever); increasing lethality and morale might make it so that they fight 5 minutes, be down at 110 men and then rout.

Bugs and small corrections (or just things I noticed that I thought might be bugs):

... I'll have to fill this in when I get home, 'cause I don't have the screens and stuff.

[Tankbuster]

Apologies for not putting up the screenshots as I promised, I've been away from my good internet connection for the past two weeks and so uploading pics was too difficult. I spared 'em all up for now so I'll have a big report right now

Overall campaign progres

I already commented on how the start of the campaign played out in the post above, but the following turns have been remarkably tough. I was quickly at war with the Arverni and Gallaeci (both of which declared war on me) and the Boii (though that was my fault: I wanted upper Italy) and combined with Carthage they put up one hell of a fight. I had held on to Emporiae in my campaign, and so after securing Italy I tried pushing downwards into Spain in the direction of Carthago Nova. I made slow progress (capturing Sagunton and Carthago Nova) but when the Arverni and Gallaeci attacked me the pressure in Spain became unbearable: I had to give everything I had to try to hold on to my Spanish provinces, and even that wasn't enough. At some point I was seriously considering abandoning my three Spanish settlements in favour of a less bloody war (imagine that! I was actually going to surrender those regions to the AI)! It was only through a clever ruse that I was able to partly avoid that fate: I let the Gallaeci take Emporiae, which cut off the attack path of the Arverni; which effectively meant that I only had two adversaries in Spain, which was more bearable. The Arverni quickly turned onto Upper Italy though, and it took me some really hard battles to beat them back without losing a city.
It was really really difficult. Never seen anything like it.

The way I eventually made a come-back out of the static situation I was in, was pull back all my Spanish legions and hit Carthage where it hurts the most: their core cities Carthago, Thapsus and Hadrumentum. By a big war effort I was able to take over their key regions and so that effectively took Carthage out of the picture: just mopping up to do now.
That's one thing that disappointed me a little bit though: Carthage goes through a great deal of trouble to protect Spain (which is awesome) but has a tendency of leaving Africa really weak. I guess it's better than the reverse, but it would be cool if the fight had been harder: right now taking Africa was pretty much a walk-over.

Economy

The Roman Economy is I think quite well-balanced. During most turns I get just enough money to retrain battered legions (which costs a lot) and at the same time building small things (temples, small infrastructure) in most of my cities. However, when I want to build something bigger (imperial palace, for example) that's something I need to spare for and have to sacrifice other projects for. That seems very realistic to me.

That said, I have had two faction leaders who have given me the Economic Depression trait, and so at some point it got so bad that I had to remove all governors from my cities: the -8 unrest of the trait made just about all of my cities go into the red. However, that also meant I avoided the negative effects of having a bad faction leader (the trait also brings about negative effects on taxation, but since I wouldn't let them govern anymore that did not have an effect)! So maybe it would be a good idea to lessen the unrest impact of the trait: that way I'll at least be inclined to keep them in my cities (and that way the negative taxation traits will at least have an effect). Right now these traits become so negative for my empire that I have to get rid of all my governors: however I also dodge the entire intention of having this trait in the first place, which defeats the purpose.

Battles

I've fallen in love with the battles over the past few days: I think they're quite well-balanced now and offer a pretty good challenge while at the same making it very fun.
I also want to retract my previous statement about Sinuhet's formations: in the first few battles I regularly had generals charging my lines without any troop support whatsoever, but that has happened very rarely since then. Either you changed something or, but in either case there's not much of a problem there.

The only big criticism I can give is that the pila's are way overpowered. I've catched Scutarii take out 60 men of a cohort with just two volleys. Considering inflicting that amount of damage in hand-to-hand combat would have taken them four minutes, that's quite an overpowered weapon. Sure, it ensures that fighting pila-units becomes a pain in the ass and makes the battles harder, but ultimately it's just a pain in the ass to lose 10% of your troops just in you approaching the enemy's formations.

A minor criticism would be is that while you can get lower-class units to rout in a realistic amount of time, higher-level units like Boii Champions or Sacred Band infantry just fight on and on and on: they fight on for five minutes even when they're the only ones alive of their army. A bit unrealistic, so if at all possible, maybe their morale can be brought down a wee bit.

Oh, and another easy to fix criticism: the city towers are way overpowered too. The stupid AI takes hundreds of casualties from them, and that ultimately just makes it too easy for the human player to win sieges. And we don't want that now do we

Some battle results to give you an idea (I won't upload the screens, that's just a waste of time) of the kind of outcomes I get:

3519 Romans vs 3793 Carthaginians ==> 3719 kills versus 1125 kills (this was against Hannibal)
2438 Romans vs 3150 Carthaginians ==> 2848 kills versus 800 kills
2841 Romans vs 2740 Carthaginians ==> 2679 kills versus 594 kills
3434 Romans vs 3000 Rebels ==> 2867 kills versus 900 kills
2700 Romans vs 1850 Rebels ==> 1800 kills versus 350 kills
6000 Romans vs 3500 Carthaginians ==> 3400 kills versus 950
4300 Romans vs 3536 Carthaginians ==> 3000 kills versus 1500 (!)
3307 Romans vs 2400 Carthaginians ==> 2400 kills versus 760
4000 Romans vs 2700 Arverni ==> 2500 kills vs 650
3100 Romans vs 3400 Arverni ==> 3150 kills vs 400
2400 Romans vs 2500 Arverni ==> 2300 kills vs 1550 (!! this was tough)
2802 Romans vs 3200 Arverni ==> 3143 kills vs 885
3307 Romans vs 4300 Arverni ==> 4253 kills vs 1774 (!!)
5000 Romans vs 4000 Boii ==> 3700 kills vs 1300
3400 Romans vs 4300 Boii ==> 3782 kills vs 250
5000 Romans vs 5000 Gallaeci ==> 4000 kills vs 1500

Overall the Boii are the weakest enemies, though strangely they do quite well on the campaign map

On average I get about 50% "easy battles" (which I define as having around 15% casualties) and the rest "hard battles" (25%+). That puts RSII as having the toughest battles I've ever fought. Volumes tougher than SPQR even!!
I'll often have fresh legions that take such a beating that they need to get retrained almost immediately. And even when they don't, legions take such casualties so that they can't go on for very long.

Army compositions

I've only fought many armies of Carthage, Gallaeci, Boii and the Arverni, but so far they've been decent:
- the Arverni field a large variety of troops, mainly infantry-focused though. Very few cavalry (other than missile cavalry like Medium Arevaci Cavalry), though they are one of the few enemies that sometimes field a Noble cavalry unit. About 20-25 years into the game they start gradually increasing the number of elite units into their stacks, which makes them much more challenging.
- Carthage is very good too, and fields plenty of their best units even very soon into the game: I often saw 3 Sacred Band units in one army, backed up with a crapload of Celtiberian infantry and Early Libyan Spearmen
- Boii has a nice collection of troops too, but strangely, they don't field as many elite units as some of the others do. They field just about no cavalry though.

So the morale of the story seems to be that the composition is pretty good, but the AI has a tendency to under-recruit cavalry. And when they do recruit some, it's almost always low-tech missile cavalry.

Speaking of which, the Gallaeci are the only ones fielding large amounts of cavalry, but they're invariably missile cavalry like Cantabrian Jinetes. In my last battle with them they had no less than 8 (yes, 8!) of those units with them. Missile cavalry in that large quantities becomes overpowering (infantry can't handle it for some reason) so discouraging the AI from using so much missile cavalry and at the same encouraging them to field more Noble Cavalry and the like might be a good tweak.
I haven't really been checking other factions, even though I probably should. I might do some of that in the next few days.

CTD's

I only got one or two, and none that were really related to anything specific in the game: probably just my notebook freaking out. So good job!


I'm going to bed now but I'll try to finish this tomorrow