Battle maps and city maps

[Nehcrum]

I have no real idea about how much you modders are defining how the battle maps and the city maps actually look, but I do have some requests.

I dunno how much you can affect the slope on battle maps without changing the strat map too much, but in certain areas, the battle maps slope so much that it is ridiculous. You have problems angling the camera so that you can see the enemy, and the height difference means you can shoot halfway across the map and troops get exhausted by marching just a few hundred paces.
Is it possible to change that, maybe put a max amount of sloping possible?

City battle maps, specifically walls, are kinda wonky. I dunno if it is you that do the actual placement of walls and towers, but in some places, they are kinda illogical and severly handicaps the already dumb AI.

Things like wooden walls having their towers placed far away from gates where they are most needed and stone walls having weird angles where no tower can fire on approaching troops och where towers are placed a small bit away from the corner instead of being a corner tower, meaning that the tower will fire att people on the wall.
Especially problematic at Helms deep, where the AI tends to put ladders or siege towers at that exact location, meaning a crippling slaughter where the siege tower will get shot down, or the troops coming up the ladders won't have a chance to actually get up on the wall.

Perfectly square city walls, with a tower in each corner and a gatehouse in the center of each side wall, with towers evenly spaced between, might not be very exciting, but it would help the AI from being needlessly stupid.
Medieval walls in real life tends to be kinda tedious as well, since a boring and easy plan is easier to build for the low-skillel laborers usually involved and less possible weaknesses.....

[Aradan]

Slopes is something we can control to an extent (how steep they are on the battlemap), but we cannot tell the engine "don't climb up a slope if it's more than X degrees", the engine can't handle this thing.

Placement of walls and towers is defined by settlement plans, which are quite tricky and also subject to a certain set of hardcoded rules, and the same goes for street plans etc.

We'll see what we can do there, but please remember it's all quite more complex than it looks and even the slightest of changes requires extremely thorough testing to make sure we've not made things worse in any unforeseeable way. And of course that there are extremely few people who are familiar with this sort of thing (BM settlements and pathfinding). We can't make make any promises.

[Nehcrum]

Slopes is something we can control to an extent (how steep they are on the battlemap), but we cannot tell the engine "don't climb up a slope if it's more than X degrees", the engine can't handle this thing.

Setting some kind of max on how steep slopes can be, would make wonders, it's what I was out for in the first place.

Placement of walls and towers is defined by settlement plans, which are quite tricky and also subject to a certain set of hardcoded rules, and the same goes for street plans etc.

We'll see what we can do there, but please remember it's all quite more complex than it looks and even the slightest of changes requires extremely thorough testing to make sure we've not made things worse in any unforeseeable way. And of course that there are extremely few people who are familiar with this sort of thing (BM settlements and pathfinding). We can't amke make any promises.

As I have said in earlier posts, all I know is how to fiddle with the text files, anything more advanced than that, I have no idea about.

If it's too complex, don't bother, they aren't broken right now, just handicaps the AI unfairly.

[Éorl]

This is actually an issue I have worked my ass off to get right for the final release during the last months. The changes I've made result in terrain that actually fits Tolkien's descriptions (like a flat tree-less Pelenor, a real ravine into which the Hornburg is set, dramatic mountain ranges with peaks and sharp relief, a far superior allocation of battlemap ground textures etc. pp.). Steep slopes are generally limited to mountain areas which are inaccessible on the strat-map now, but they can appear here and there on battlemaps. Everything looks far more beautiful now, rest assured.

Setting some kind of max on how steep slopes can be, would make wonders, it's what I was out for in the first place.

I've edited the LOCAL parameters for the steepness of slopes, actually, so this has already been considered (and extensively experimented with ).