Something you might want to look at, Quinn et al, if you haven't seen it...

[Incomitatus]

Ave,

Ran across this in the mod workshop, if true, it turns unit balancing theory on its head... which makes me groan as I am, once again, tinkering with TIC...

Cheers.

[Carados]

How I wish I didn't have such a silly person as my maths teacher at college... >__<

I'm skeptical of a the left/right thing, my own tests seem to indicate that the right side is weakest, but this is against a rotating phalanx and not legionaries.

He didn't look at unit mass either. One problem is that he's looked at unit versus unit. Granted it's hard for us to test invidual combats... but the game does calculate on an individual (and real time) basis and that means an outnumbered foe is going to get hit more from the flanks/rear in the swirling melee.

A point about the shield, I hope he's used missile units to come to that conclusion. Reason being is that in melee the soldiers will turn to meet their attackers - the exception being phalangites. The significance of this is that a unit attacked in melee fromthe side doesn't necessarily lose their shield bonus completely, but merely for the first strike the attacker does on each defender. If the defender survives that first strike then it's all even as he turns around and presents the shield.

Still, it's a solid peice of work and I'll be looking into it in more depth when I get some time.
Thanks for that =)

[Incomitatus]

A point about the shield, I hope he's used missile units to come to that conclusion. Reason being is that in melee the soldiers will turn to meet their attackers - the exception being phalangites. The significance of this is that a unit attacked in melee fromthe side doesn't necessarily lose their shield bonus completely, but merely for the first strike the attacker does on each defender. If the defender survives that first strike then it's all even as he turns around and presents the shield.

I've been meaning to ask someone about this. Lately, as in the last 8 months, I've been playing more M2TW than RTR. I know, bad me. Still, the community for M2 is thoroughly convinced that M2 is the first Total War game where the facing of the individual model matters and that the animation you see on screen in any way reflects the engine's calculations. In other words, they contend that in RTW, it is the facing of whole unit that affects the shield/defense skill bonuses, and not the facing of individual soldiers on the screen.

I don't know on what grounds that assertion is made, nor do I know on what grounds folks working on RTW make the assertion to the contrary. Is there a definitive study? If so, where?

[Quinn Inuit]

That was interesting, thanks. I don't think it turns unit balancing on its head, but it is a notable refinement.

[Carados]

Personal observation. I'm not aware of any study though, I might be tempted to try some stuff.

It's mainly tougher infantry opposed to weak infantry and phalangites when attacked in the rear. The former, when attacked in the back, don't die anywhere near as fast as the latter. Obviously, you could say this is because weak troops don't have better stats than solid infantry, but you must take into account this is when I've already engaged the unit from the front and I've noticed that better infantry stick around for, proportionally, much longer.

Furthermore, I've watched individual combats at the edge of fights. A single guy can hold his own against 3 opponents if they are all in front of him, but sometimes I see a 4th guy sneak up behind him, hit him once, and he dies straight away.

[Incomitatus]

Aye, I've observed the same as you. That's why I've taken the claims of the M2 modders with a grain of salt. At the same time, they blame a lot of the faults with M2 on the way the system changed. Namely, attack animation speed seems to matter a lot more in M2 than in Rome... and the conclusion that was drawn, if I understand everything, is that the animation in Rome is showing what the engine has already calculated has happened, while in M2 the animation affects the calculations. I believe it's from that assumption that they extrapolated that unit facing is more important than model facing in older games.

A point just occurred to me about the study I originally linked to: Does it matter whether he was using ranged or melee attackers? His study was trying to determine defence type effects on kill rates, which means he was studying whole units, not individual models. I'm thinking poorly here, but it seems to me that if the effect of adding say, a point of shield to each model is to have the effect of increasing defence by certain percentages all around the unit as it behaves in combat, that's still significant. We have to ask ourselves then, are we more concerned about balancing the performance of each individual soldier, or of balancing the unit as a whole? I think how you answer that question is going to modify how you think about allocating defence stats.

[Boom S]

I've read the claims that the animation drives the actual happenings on the tactical battlefield in M2TW but I'm very skeptical about it. doing that would take an insane amount of processing power. I mean not only do you have to take into account the stats and location of a soldier you are also taking into account ALL the individual joints in a models body and their movements ! that's far too many variables IMO.
I'm not going to believe it unless CA comes out and say so. more likely is that the game engine takes stats and location of the individual soldiers into account and calculates the outcome using some probabilistic function.