Focus on less, more significant battles, less sieges.

[Abe86]

To my understanding those gameplay changes have been things CA has been striving for since the switch to the warscape engine, with the inclusion of capturable province specialties as an effort to take battles outside of cities, for example. In my view this didnt pan out, though as it's almost always easier and more efficient to just go straight for the town and capture the whole province.

So in Rome 2 it's been stated we'll have provinces divided in several capturable parts, but I'm wondering what gameplay systems are in place that would encourage the player away from just going straight for the city again ?
Let's start speculating, I could imagine something like capturing about three sub regions -or the city - of a province could net you said assaulted province, but that, in turn, could resort to micromanagement headaches whereby fast low-unit armies could just swallow up your territory if you're not carefully looking over every province.

That brings us to our next point, bigger, more significant battles. I imagine getting this to work would be tied to the new recruitment system, the only way I could personally see this taking effect is by not allowing single units to roam the map, but have them consolidated in bigger armies at all times, whose maximum size might depend on a general's ability for example.

The more I think about it, the more I realize those are two very tricky gameplay puzzles to solve, I thought this could be an interesting discussion, so I'd be curious to hear what you think would work, and speculate on what new gameplay systems are in place in that regard.

[Ichon]

If the provincial capitol is simply the largest urban center and the heart of the government in the geographical area the other regions governed in that province might well provide manpower, income, and resources to whoever controls them- just at a reduced rate if the provincial capitol is not also owned as that is a symbol of resistance to the local population who won't cooperate fully until they see their hope of relief gone. Secondly the garrison/levies at the provincial capitol might well be an entire army unless the outlaying regions are captured first which then reduces the final battle to manageable level in the siege assault. Finally there might be incentive to trade regions short of the provincial capitol captured for vassal or protectorate status as if the defenders army is reduced to hiding out in the last region under protection of a walled city there might be incentive to give limited hegemony to an invader to regain the captured regions.

Also the captured regions could work with supply lines where regions owned in a province where the provincial capitol is not also owned cost more to maintain as well as can be subject to supply lines being cut instantly if an army does not have a direct route back to a province where the provincial capitol is owned to manage the logistics of the supply lines. Could make exception for ports if they are not part of the city- IE, army has supply route back to controlled provincial capitol cut but is on a port which is not embargoed by the enemy- still can get supplies. Of course the loss of supplies in a TW game probably won't be decisive immediately. I expect extra attrition, loss of morale each turn, and perhaps slowed movement?

[MathiasOfAthens]

Having low-unit armies swallow up or take the smaller towns outside of the major cities is pretty realistic. In real life these towns were walled and lightly garrisoned but incredibly hard to assault. It took time and it would take a lot of lives to take. However, after 500 AD armies began to get smaller. Units were in the 10s and 50s. Armies would around 1000 men.


I would say CA is going for a realistic situation with smaller capturable towns. You can prioritize how many men you want defending the towns, if any at all.


What I would love to see is a type of diplomacy where say if you go to war with a faction you have a set of points you need to force the other faction to capituate or sign a cease fire. Kinda like Europa Universalis. So if you declare war and take 1 or 2 capitals and a few towns you may have enough to sign a ceasefire or a treaty demanding a return to previous borders or the signing over of some of the towns you took?

If your losing the war you could ask for a cease fire or surrender to their mercy and they get the regions they took.

But for the sake of the gods dont let the AI declare war again. I think EU got around this by preventing war from being declared so soon after the last one.

[Modestus]

If our understanding of legions means only being able to recruit a full stack then we can assume that the other factions will do the same therefore all battles will involve armies with full stacks even if they have become depleted. Personally I think this is fine as long as you have some leeway when it comes to the composition of those armies.

It does create a few problems though what happens if a unit is completely destroyed during a battle how do you bring the stack up to a full 20 units again? and how do you destroy an army completely?

As regards the province capital and its regions, I am assuming that the capital will be the main administrative centre and will be the only city\town with a city battle-map. Regions can be garrisoned and you can besiege them on the campaign map however if you assault them there wont be any city battle-map instead it will be like in ETW. I would also guess that only a province capital can have a governor.

How to regions interact with the Province capital ?
If you want to prevent the head shot there has to be some mechanism that prevents you from going straight to the capital and if the capital of a province is the administrative centre there also needs to be some mechanism that allows you to incorporate a region from one province into another province.

Hard to speculate at this stage not enough information.

[Razor]

What I would love to see is a type of diplomacy where say if you go to war with a faction you have a set of points you need to force the other faction to capituate or sign a cease fire. Kinda like Europa Universalis. So if you declare war and take 1 or 2 capitals and a few towns you may have enough to sign a ceasefire or a treaty demanding a return to previous borders or the signing over of some of the towns you took?

If your losing the war you could ask for a cease fire or surrender to their mercy and they get the regions they took.

But for the sake of the gods dont let the AI declare war again. I think EU got around this by preventing war from being declared so soon after the last one.

Agreed. Play Europa Universalis or Victoria II and you'll get to see how it works. Not only does capturing provinces increase your war score (showing the progress of a war and who's on the winning/losing hand) (and losing provinces lowers your war score), but so does winning battles and blockading ports. I can imagine that pillaging small villages/countryside surrounding the province/region capital could also increase your score with this mechanic. With this war score you can cash in your war goal(s) that cost a certain amount of war score. Something like this system would be nice, and would also give direction in a war, especially for the AI.

[Modestus]

Agreed. Play Europa Universalis or Victoria II and you'll get to see how it works. Not only does capturing provinces increase your war score (showing the progress of a war and who's on the winning/losing hand) (and losing provinces lowers your war score), but so does winning battles and blockading ports. I can imagine that pillaging small villages/countryside surrounding the province/region capital could also increase your score with this mechanic. With this war score you can cash in your war goal(s) that cost a certain amount of war score. Something like this system would be nice, and would also give direction in a war, especially for the AI.

Yes a much better system , one important thing though about the War-score in EU3 is that you don’t own a province\region just because you have captured it. You cant have a situation where if Rome captures Athens off the Greeks and then Egypt on the next turn captures Athens off Rome both Rome and Greece suffer the same negative effect when it is only Greece who has really lost a City.

I have argued for years that the only way to create a sophisticated diplomatic mechanic is to force the AI to concede ownership of provinces\regions in a peace treaty. In EU3 if Egypt was an Ally of Greece then Athens would return to Greek ownership in Total War it becomes Egyptian.

[The Glorious Moldovan]

The thing i like about this,is that in case you dont want a war and you want to force the AI to give you land,it'll give you these small regions instead of the whole province

[Abe86]

I really like that suggestion, Mathias. To my knowledge, in those Paradox games, you would need a reason to declare war, then accumulate warscore through victories, successful battles or sieges, pillaging undefended territories etc...
Once you had sufficient warscore, you could propose peace and make demands (lands, treaties, etc...), the more warscore you had, the more demands you could make and the more likely they would be accepted.

What I think would really work in Rome 2 with that system is how you could start a war, and for example collect a certain amount of warscore by capturing a number of sub-provinces, or the same amount by capturing a more valuable target, like a city. In the end, you'd capture the province in both cases because post-war demands dictated by said equal warscore, but you could have some meaningful choices on how to wage that war, as only victories - their scale and their number - would matter regarding your post-war conquests.
Couple that with a system that includes something like a slowly replenishing manpower ressource, where your army production is not solely tied to the number of cities you control, and a large loss of men is a very significant setback, and you could elegantly solve the problem of less sieges and less, more significant battles; in my opinion.

[magpie]

I am a little confused about the battlefield tactics that CA are planning.
There was mention of armies/stacks being shown as coloured blocks which you click on and I assume you again click on some place on the strat map to move them.
You can then zoom in to see the actual units of the army and engage the units in the normal way on the battlefield.? Plus I think a stack is now 40 units?
I suppose you zoom in further for close up action of the fighting?

[ironbrigade]

Two great ways to make tw better for sure, I never liked that 85-90% of all battles were siege battles, my idea would be to make the map hugh or slow down armies,so they had to take a few turns getting to a city in first place giving more chance to have open field battles.


Larger battles and armies is something I have been hoping for a since the first TW game I played medevil 1. Hopefully it will make for some truly epic battles. The only thing I think could work is to have a minimum number of units in each group, they must have a general etc.

[Rorarii]

I am a little confused about the battlefield tactics that CA are planning.
There was mention of armies/stacks being shown as coloured blocks which you click on and I assume you again click on some place on the strat map to move them.
You can then zoom in to see the actual units of the army and engage the units in the normal way on the battlefield.? Plus I think a stack is now 40 units?
I suppose you zoom in further for close up action of the fighting?

Magpie, go on youtube and checkout some Supreme Commander battles, you'll see the god-view map in the corner with all the icons ... it doesn't mean much.

R

[Römer]

There could be battles about important trade routs, which were blocked by your enemy.
By the way CA is planning to let you command whole Legions, which would mean that if you are fighting on a field these battles decide about the future of your faction. If you loose you are not able to recruit a legion fast enough so the winning team is able to take some provinces from his enemy. From this perspective they are really significant for yourself.

[ironbrigade]

There could be battles about important trade routs, which were blocked by your enemy.
By the way CA is planning to let you command whole Legions, which would mean that if you are fighting on a field these battles decide about the future of your faction. If you loose you are not able to recruit a legion fast enough so the winning team is able to take some provinces from his enemy. From this perspective they are really significant for yourself.

I hope this to be true.

[ironbrigade]

To prevent the 85-90% siege battles that are in previous total war games, I suggest having bigger maps, bigger ares/territories and slower army movement speed on the campaign map. I think this will allow for more open field battles, and will make it harder for invading army to get to the city in the first place.


I think to prevent so many little battles and insignificant battles of previous tw games, there needs to be only armies with a general, than limit the amount if generals, and have a minimum number of units needed for each army. Also make recruiting a army take more time to do. This should reduce the number of battles.

[Habber Dasher]

Well lets take a step back and make an educated guess of what the campaign map and battles would be like with the bare minimum of what CA has told us already. We know "regions" are large administrative centers made up of smaller provinces. Provinces can be captured and held independently of the region capital. Since we don't know much else about the new campaign map, lets assume provinces are similar in size and number to the regions in previous games like Napoleon or the original Rome. Region capitals may control larger swathes of land like Paris or Madrid in NTW. We also know that CA wants more and a greater variety of field battles so I think its safe to assume that these smaller provinces won't have fortifications or have them rarely.

Now how does this effect gameplay? Well campaigns would play out much like those from previous games, except instead of a series of sieges with intermittent land battles you would have a series of land battles that culminates in an epic siege (at least we can hope it'll be epic since CA seems to be focusing on sieges by showing the invasion of Carthage). I personally think this would be a big improvement of gameplay. The only problem is that with the majority of provinces lacking fortification it may be even easier to simply blitz all over the map. This is unless there are improvements in the campaign AI which I don't think we can assume until we see it in action.

Now this is just the bare minimum of an educated guess from what little CA has told us as of now. The actual systems they have in development is likely to be much more involved. One thing I would like is if provinces had certain specializations and capturing them would have immediate and noticeable effects on gameplay. For instance, capturing a farm could reduce the time the region capital could withstand a siege, or capturing a temple or sacred site could increase the moral of your legions fighting in that region. What I would really love is some sort of supply line system where your army had to be in a province directly connected by land or see to your home regions or they would begin to suffer attrition.

As for armies, again going solely off what CA has told us, I assume the the new "legions" will be much like generals in previous games, except they probably have a different set of attributes and don't die. Its also likely that you can recruit and replenish units directly into the legion like you could do with generals in ETW and NTW. However, I'm hoping that since more emphasis is on these legions, instead of simply throwing units together to form and army, that it will be easier for the AI to create large, well-balanced stacks.

[ironbrigade]

Now how does this effect gameplay? Well campaigns would play out much like those from previous games, except instead of a series of sieges with intermittent land battles you would have a series of land battles that culminates in an epic siege (at least we can hope it'll be epic since CA seems to be focusing on sieges by showing the invasion of Carthage). I personally think this would be a big improvement of gameplay.

This right here would be awesome and I love it.

Now this is just the bare minimum of an educated guess from what little CA has told us as of now. The actual systems they have in development is likely to be much more involved. One thing I would like is if provinces had certain specializations and capturing them would have immediate and noticeable effects on gameplay. For instance, capturing a farm could reduce the time the region capital could withstand a siege, or capturing a temple or sacred site could increase the moral of your legions fighting in that region. What I would really love is some sort of supply line system where your army had to be in a province directly connected by land or see to your home regions or they would begin to suffer attrition.

great idea i love them.

[Dirty Harry]

Now how does this effect gameplay? Well campaigns would play out much like those from previous games, except instead of a series of sieges with intermittent land battles you would have a series of land battles that culminates in an epic siege (at least we can hope it'll be epic since CA seems to be focusing on sieges by showing the invasion of Carthage). I personally think this would be a big improvement of gameplay. The only problem is that with the majority of provinces lacking fortification it may be even easier to simply blitz all over the map. This is unless there are improvements in the campaign AI which I don't think we can assume until we see it in action.

I think Blitzing could be handled by giving armies greater interception range, greater than even Shogun 2. When not on campaign a legion would be divided into multiple camps all over a region, and would be scouting a wide area around it. Regional army sub-camps could be linked and if a large army approached they would easily have time to to gather up, and then give the player/npc a choice to intercept or retreat based on an evaluation of the situation.

[Habber Dasher]

Well lets take a step back and make an educated guess of what the campaign map and battles would be like with the bare minimum of what CA has told us already. We know "regions" are large administrative centers made up of smaller provinces. Provinces can be captured and held independently of the region capital. Since we don't know much else about the new campaign map, lets assume provinces are similar in size and number to the regions in previous games like Napoleon or the original Rome. Region capitals may control larger swathes of land like Paris or Madrid in NTW. We also know that CA wants more and a greater variety of field battles so I think its safe to assume that these smaller provinces won't have fortifications or have them rarely.

Now how does this effect gameplay? Well campaigns would play out much like those from previous games, except instead of a series of sieges with intermittent land battles you would have a series of land battles that culminates in an epic siege (at least we can hope it'll be epic since CA seems to be focusing on sieges by showing the invasion of Carthage). I personally think this would be a big improvement of gameplay. The only problem is that with the majority of provinces lacking fortification it may be even easier to simply blitz all over the map. This is unless there are improvements in the campaign AI which I don't think we can assume until we see it in action.

Now this is just the bare minimum of an educated guess from what little CA has told us as of now. The actual systems they have in development is likely to be much more involved. One thing I would like is if provinces had certain specializations and capturing them would have immediate and noticeable effects on gameplay. For instance, capturing a farm could reduce the time the region capital could withstand a siege, or capturing a temple or sacred site could increase the moral of your legions fighting in that region. What I would really love is some sort of supply line system where your army had to be in a province directly connected by land or see to your home regions or they would begin to suffer attrition.

As for armies, again going solely off what CA has told us, I assume the the new "legions" will be much like generals in previous games, except they probably have a different set of attributes and don't die. Its also likely that you can recruit and replenish units directly into the legion like you could do with generals in ETW and NTW. However, I'm hoping that since more emphasis is on these legions, instead of simply throwing units together to form and army, that it will be easier for the AI to create large, well-balanced stacks.

[Ichon]

I really don't like the idea of warscore of the Paradox variety in TW series. I understand why Paradox imposed such a system but its very convoluted and fits 17th century and later better than ancient eras where if you could invade and capture land you did not need a justification to hold that land.

If a legion is 20 units with auxillaries and the supply system makes sending 2 legions together quite expensive then a provincial capitol that was defended by full 40 units might be quite difficult to assault without reducing the outlaying regions which contribute manpower to their provincial capitol. Of course the outlaying regions should also contribute something to the invader nearly immediately, not merely deny resource to the enemy which has been recent model of TW games.

Diplomatic and military AI being the same should hopefully make AI much better where a small faction already at war with another faction doesn't declare war just because you have 1 region barely defended. Shogun 2 I saw so many AI's suicide by DoWing when already in a war and moving its army to invade my lands and the AI loses its own lands to the faction it was fighting already and is eliminated before its even able to lay siege on the region it moved to capture.

[Razor]

I really don't like the idea of warscore of the Paradox variety in TW series. I understand why Paradox imposed such a system but its very convoluted and fits 17th century and later better than ancient eras where if you could invade and capture land you did not need a justification to hold that land.

Even back then there were justifications for going to war or not. It fits perfectly fine, because the way I recall it even in Paradox games declaring war on a 'uncivilized' nation doesn't get you infamy. I'm sure there are ways to work this out and set different values or penalties for different cultures.