Regarding CA's new seige policy

[Dodanodo]

With the wall of text below I am putting forward some of the gripes I have with the new system of provinces proposed by CA.

From the information so far released CA has made it clear they intend to reduce the amount of seige battles to be fought, relative to the amount of normal land battles. The way they intend to do this is by dividing provinces into separate regions, presumably only one of wich will contain an actual city. Now since we know very little about this system, we don't know how many regions per province there will be, but I think it is save to say it will on average be somewhere between 3 to 5. This should result in roughly only 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 battles will be seige battles, the rest normal land battles, including the ones not about conquest of territory. I also think it presumable that the regions that will not have cities as their 'capture point', will be secondary settlements, as seen in earlier TW games, such as resource builings or culture buildings etc.

Now let me make two things clear from the start, since I suspect this is going to be quite a wall of text. first of all, I have no problem with fighting less seige battles. Normal land battles tend to feel more dynamic, because you have allot more space, and flanking manoeuvres feel less forced do to the absence of streets and walls and such. Secondly, I am not basing my assumptions on the artistic representations of the factions starting positions so far revealed, as I know they are purely artistic, and not based on the eventual ingame campaign map.

Now what I'm trying to say with this post is that I don't feel very comfortable with this proposed system. While I do see the merit in the reduction of seige battles, reducing the grind and making the now more rare seige battles more epic, this also implies several other things. First of, either CA is going to zoom in massively compared to any previous Total War game, making a map of Europe on the scale of Napoleon TW's Italy campaign or smaller, wich I honestly doubt very much, or some historicly significant cities are going to be turned into farms or other resource buildings. I did not like this in Empire, but I could understand it there. Since in that time, very few battles were fought inside settlements, especially unimportant ones. In the era of Rome, that was not the case however.

Lets take a piece of the map, southern Greece for example. Now Greece was quite densely populated with cities at this time. Lets take the folowing map as an example of the major cities in the region at this time: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...eloponnese.svg . Now I don't know the exact population sizes of these cities, but I think it's save to say those all had populations running into the thousands. Since CA plans on reducing the amount of seige battles, I don't think it likely the amount of cities is dramaticly going to grow from what it was in Rome I, where we had somewhere between 100 and 110 I believe. Bare in mind the area to be covered is going to increase, how much depending on how far east they will go. CA Has spoken of hundreds of regions, so with the region to city ratio I set before, I estimate no more then 150 cities will be in the game.

The problem that this causes is viewable in the map I showed above. Of those 9 cities shown above, no more then 3 will be actual cities. The rest will likely be represented by something else, like a farm or mine or something. The same will happen in other regions of the map. take Babylon, wich is right next to Seleucia, or Thesalonica, wich is right next to Pella. These significant cities will likely be reduced to resource buildings. I just find that a damn shame. Let me stress though, that I do have much faith in CA's abilities, but since I don't know what the system looks like, I'm basing my assumptions on past games. This is basicly what happened in Empire.

The second problem I have with this is that it could potentiolly make the conquest of new regions far too easy. CA has stated it intends to reduce the amount of small stack units, and wants to move towards legion based rather than unit based recruitement and management. My question is then, what are you going to use as garrison troops for all your regions. lets say you are playing as Rome, it's early in your campaign and you have 2 legions, one in the north and one on sicily fighting Carthage. Suddenly, a Greek faction, let's say Epirus, falls ashore near Croton and starts raiding all your regions. since they will be undefended by your legions, unless they are all significantly garrisoned, they will be ripe for the taking. The greek army could have conquered half of italy before one of your legions arrives, doing massive damage, without losing a single man.

Now let me stress again that the quarrles I have with the proposed system are based on assumptions I made, wich I based on my past experience with Total War games. It is very well possible that all the problems I'm posing are irrelavant, because for example those regions will have significant garrison forces, or they are going to work on a scale big enough to turn all the significant cities of the era into full sized cities in the game. I simply don't know for sure, so it would be nice if someone, Will, Craig or Jack from CA, could sort of hint how close I am to the mark, or atleast wether my gripes are justified or not.

thank you for taking the time to read this, my apologies fro the grammar and such, English is not my native language, and I'm also dyslectic.

[DavidtheDuke]

Well I think a good solution is to make the campaign map moddable. With that in mind you could enlarge the map and include more siegable cities.

[Dodanodo]

ofcourse, that would be a good solution. But I'm afriad with the work going into modding the campaign map, even with mod tools, that will not be as simple as it sounds.

[monsterlord]

About the legions part in your post, I am actually excited if it would be like that. Now you have to make decisive decisions like either lose a few cities on mainland Italy or to lose Sicily or build a new legion and probably wait a few turns and risk losing more cities

[Dodanodo]

About the legions part in your post, I am actually excited if it would be like that. Now you have to make decisive decisions like either lose a few cities on mainland Italy or to lose Sicily or build a new legion and probably wait a few turns and risk losing more cities

I agree that that in itself is an intresting way of handeling army management, but it basicly takes away your ability to manually garrisson your regions, wich I'm not very fond of. Since I'm quite a defencive player, I tend to want to guard my cities well.

[The Holy Pilgrim]

I needed siege engines of my own for that wall of text.

But good post!

[The Juggernaut]

I'm not entirely sure that CA will be completely taking away our ability to recruit individual units, maybe just make it more favorable to recruit whole legions at a time (i.e. decreased cost, faster recruitment time). We should be able to garrison our cities with a few cohorts, maybe devote a legion to garrisoning a whole region, split up across multiple provinces. For example, 15th Legion is garrisoning Sicilia, with cohorts in Messina, Syracuse, etc.

[AngryTitusPullo]

The problem that this causes is viewable in the map I showed above. Of those 9 cities shown above, no more then 3 will be actual cities. The rest will likely be represented by something else, like a farm or mine or something. The same will happen in other regions of the map. take Babylon, wich is right next to Seleucia, or Thesalonica, wich is right next to Pella. These significant cities will likely be reduced to resource buildings. I just find that a damn shame. Let me stress though, that I do have much faith in CA's abilities, but since I don't know what the system looks like, I'm basing my assumptions on past games. This is basicly what happened in Empire.

Siege battle are basically land battles without walls. Only province capitol will have the ability to have walls. The 3 smaller minor capitols wouldn't have them. This means more field battles. Less sieges.

Problem solved.

The second problem I have with this is that it could potentiolly make the conquest of new regions far too easy. CA has stated it intends to reduce the amount of small stack units, and wants to move towards legion based rather than unit based recruitement and management. My question is then, what are you going to use as garrison troops for all your regions. lets say you are playing as Rome, it's early in your campaign and you have 2 legions, one in the north and one on sicily fighting Carthage. Suddenly, a Greek faction, let's say Epirus, falls ashore near Croton and starts raiding all your regions. since they will be undefended by your legions, unless they are all significantly garrisoned, they will be ripe for the taking. The greek army could have conquered half of italy before one of your legions arrives, doing massive damage, without losing a single man.

Reduce small stack units for the AI. That's the major complaint. Of course players will be able to bring full or half legions any time. Cohorts can still be detached.

[Ngazi]

Really the thing everyone needs to remember is we really have no idea what this system will be like, and CA themselves are probably still brainstorming the map and such. I agree there needs to be cities where cities were, but it is possible that you are forced to fight field battles instead of land battles just like how it was in RTW. If you start a siege, and there is a relief force nearby, the relief battle will force you onto a field battle. This can be quite common in the dense Greek and Roman regions in RTW as well. Although the AI often needs a little convincing to come attack you. In Latium I can always count on, when I was about to attack Rome, position on the river and having the Romans come at me in a bridge battle. It made taking Rome all too easy.

In the end there shouldn't be any need to pay so much attention to the number of siege vs field battles if the movement in the game promotes ending turns in the field. This can be done by design: not forcing every unit to garrison in order to keep order, having the AI hold key field tiles with terrain advantage over staying in their cities, and not having enough movement per turn to walk straight up to a city from across the map.

But at the same time we get a lot of threads about field fortifications, people who want siege battles, as long as there is variety and fun to them. And with the cities so complex now there is even less reason to shy away from the siege battle.

[hospitaller13]

The worst part about total war is the endless grind against the AI's army spam and having to take every single city from them. I think this is slightly more managable is shogun 2. but it earlier games it was terrible.
Historically a major battle could decide the outcome of an entire nation.

While i oppose the concept of less cities or turning some into secondary settlements with resource buildings. Victory in a field battle should have more significant impact, (perhaps smaller cities could surrender). Another idea being that if provincial capital falls other secondary cities will be easier to subjugate. (Again perhaps a surrender mechanic independent from factional diplomacy.)

Finally i think that great emphasis should be set on the capital city. If the capital falls the faction should be thrown into disarray or splinter as its center of power is gone. I would like to point out two historical examples.

First being Hannibal's invasion of Italy, despite taking many cities and wining great victories he was unable to break Romes hegemony of the Italian peninsular. As he could not take Rome she survived and conquered the known world.

The other example being the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople in 1204 AD (Capital of the Eastern Roman Empire). The Eastern Empire had outlived The Western Empire for over 1000 years. Its territories had been taken/raided by the persians, arabs, vikings, babarions, normans, ETC. But the empire survived. When the foruth crusade took Constantinople it shattered Byzantium fatally. Sure The Byzantines held onto some key cities and even managed to come back. But it was a death blow and would result in the Turks taking what was left.

[Dodanodo]

The worst part about total war is the endless grind against the AI's army spam and having to take every single city from them. I think this is slightly more managable is shogun 2. but it earlier games it was terrible.
Historically a major battle could decide the outcome of an entire nation.

While i oppose the concept of less cities or turning some into secondary settlements with resource buildings. Victory in a field battle should have more significant impact, (perhaps smaller cities could surrender). Another idea being that if provincial capital falls other secondary cities will be easier to subjugate. (Again perhaps a surrender mechanic independent from factional diplomacy.)

Finally i think that great emphasis should be set on the capital city. If the capital falls the faction should be thrown into disarray or splinter as its center of power is gone. I would like to point out two historical examples.

First being Hannibal's invasion of Italy, despite taking many cities and wining great victories he was unable to break Romes hegemony of the Italian peninsular. As he could not take Rome she survived and conquered the known world.

The other example being the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople in 1204 AD (Capital of the Eastern Roman Empire). The Eastern Empire had outlived The Western Empire for over 1000 years. Its territories had been taken/raided by the persians, arabs, vikings, babarions, normans, ETC. But the empire survived. When the foruth crusade took Constantinople it shattered Byzantium fatally. Sure The Byzantines held onto some key cities and even managed to come back. But it was a death blow and would result in the Turks taking what was left.

I like your idears. I'm not opposed to less seige battles, but I believe there are better ways to do it then CA's proposed system. As said earlier in this thread, some good AI programming and minor tweaks to how units are recruited and managed, you could please both parties. without having to reduce the amount of seigeable settlements. another way is as you propose to bring back a similair feature as in Napoleon, where you can demand a settlement to surrender willingly, wich would actually make sense. If a garrisoned city is beseiged, either one of three things can be the case: The garrison force is similair in strength as the beseiging one, and will sally forth to meet the attacker outside the gates, or it is not strong enough to do so and it will either surrender or wait for a nearby field army to come and assualt the beseiger, in wich case you would also get a field battle. A simple solution, without altering the amount of walled cities. and if you're a seige junkie, just pack some catapults and you can just choose to assault the walls anyway.

[Emperor Domitianus]

I like you post.
Well you have taken a very good example to propose. However the problem is the lack of informations about the strategic map. If the map size is going to increase and the regions going to be represented as in NTW Italy, well, it will be a very good step foward. Infact it's obvious that can be only 1 capital for a province but is also obvious that there are minor settlements to take care of. If they will divide the provinces into regions, each regions has to contain a city or something. Perhaps small towns to take over or plunder to force the main garrison to move out from the capitol and intercept the enemies. I like this idea since I didn't play sieges too much and preferred to take over by starving the army inside or force them to move out. I hope they will give us more info about the strat map because it seems it's going to change alot from the previous TW games.

[Adreno]

i dont think there will be legion recruitment button at all, i think you will have to recruit everything seperately and when the stack is big enough you have the ability to make a legion out of it.. that gains bonuses and penalties and will lose those whenever it gets disbanded.. i think that is much more likely as theyve already said that invidual unit recruitment will still be in, they might make it a little easier but i doubt there will be a button that will spawn an entire army in a turn

[UsulDaNeriak]

i dont think there will be legion recruitment button at all, i think you will have to recruit everything seperately and when the stack is big enough you have the ability to make a legion out of it.. that gains bonuses and penalties and will lose those whenever it gets disbanded.. i think that is much more likely as theyve already said that invidual unit recruitment will still be in, they might make it a little easier but i doubt there will be a button that will spawn an entire army in a turn

I don't care if there is such a button to recruit 10 cohors or 30 maniple in 1 turn. But it MUST be optional. If not, they take away a lot of customizability from the game which is a core feature for their customers.

Btw, it would not work for the pre-marian times anyways. It worked for the romans, but they did disband their (reduced) armies every year and recruited a new full one next campaign.

It also would just work for the roman legion. But legions are just about 50% of an army. It could never work for the other 50%. A roman army was not standardized. No roman army looked like another.

And regarding the province thing: I am afraid, we will get less content not more. If CA says, that Rome2 has more regions than Rome 1 had cities, i say, give us more provinces in Rome2 than cities in Rome 1, and I buy it. I highly suspect this region model. It stinks simplification.

We need more info. If a province in Rome 2 means about the size of a province of the Roman empire, this would mean about 100 manageable provinces on the entire map, if the map is as big as the map of Europa Barbaorum. I could live with that. But I like to see it first. Until then, I expect much less provinces. And this is not the game, I like to see.

[Ticklestick]

If you are a defensive player like you said, you would likely have a garrison within a turn's distance of the invading army. The real question is whether you could defeat the army with your garrison. Probably not, which is how it's supposed to play. If you can't control the surrounding countryside with your army, you shouldn't own it by being locked up in your city walls. There absolutely needs to be a reason to fight in the field, and CA is finally doing it. This also opens up something new. You don't need a doomstack to invade another territory! If you have an equal force to the enemy city's garrison and start pillaging the outlying territories, he's going to have to fight you in the open field. Once again, this is how it should work. As for all of the map stuff, we just have to wait and see.

[MathiasOfAthens]

If you are a defensive player like you said, you would likely have a garrison within a turn's distance of the invading army. The real question is whether you could defeat the army with your garrison. Probably not, which is how it's supposed to play. If you can't control the surrounding countryside with your army, you shouldn't own it by being locked up in your city walls. There absolutely needs to be a reason to fight in the field, and CA is finally doing it. This also opens up something new. You don't need a doomstack to invade another territory! If you have an equal force to the enemy city's garrison and start pillaging the outlying territories, he's going to have to fight you in the open field. Once again, this is how it should work. As for all of the map stuff, we just have to wait and see.

I kinda agree with Ticklestick here... while I would like to see some smaller scale sieges, battles on these farm buildings or mines or small villages I also understand the reason for the army to march out and commit to land battle. Athens and Plataea met the armies of Thebes and Sparta and her allies on the field rather than wait for them to march to their cities. Same with Marathon. Athens and Plataea again marched to fight in the field.

I just hope that for some regions if a village is represented on the campaign map I would like the battle to show the village on the battle map.

[Dodanodo]

I know it's mostly speculation, I just whanted to give some thought and attention because if this system isn't done properly it could ruin the game for some people. I would just like CA to keep in mind that a balance is important and that they shouldn't be designing the game around avoiding seige battles as much as possible. I don't know wether they are, but thats the fibe I'm getting a bit.

[Sebastianus Somerus]

In Hearts of Iron III(Totally different game) you can attach and detach corpses to armies and amies to army groups etc. It would be cool if you could make single units and attach them to certain legions. There shouldn't be premade legions

[I WUB PUGS]

Really just need a damn war score system so it isn't just about taking cities/provinces.

Then again I'm thinking in somewhat modern terms. What would be the point in R2TW of not sacking towns and villages?

Gimme gimme gimme all the slaves!

[Gorhaax]

The best would be to have the system as Automatic or Manually controllable as possible.

I find it too hard to speculate without further information from CA.