40 Unit Armies

[wargod2009]

Lets stop beating around the bush here or however that saying goes: The battles in Rome 2 are once again disappointingly small and yes historically inaccurate. I know that is a phrase a lot of you who enjoy the casual, arcady* direction that CA has taken with games, despise but it is the truth. With the improvement in the engine of Rome 2, instead of using that power to create a more tactically significant and an overall more grand strategic experience, with more men, more complex commands, etc, CA has decided to focus on immediate gratification with obsolete micromanagement and eye candy (I PRAY they eventually release a blood pack). I know that you CAN command up to 40 units but you can NOT recruit an army from the get go to be 40 units strong. This was something that unsurprisingly was cracked by the wonderful modders of Empire Total War and Napoleon Total War. There is absolutely no reason why CA can't have at least this improvement in the game that two older games have. This system is much superior to the one implemented in Shogun 2 and now Rome 2. The AI in these modded ETW and NTW games made 40 unit armies with little trouble and thus you never had to hope and see as in Shogun 2 if they or you had another ally army nearby that could join the battle. Bottom line is that the 20 unit stack plus 20 reinforcement combination is inferior to what MODS have been able to do. Heck even 40 units is still too small. In a proper strategy game like this, I prefer quantity over the super detailed individual soldier in an army of only a paltry few thousand. I am not the only one who feels this way. Just my two cents and hopefully we discuss this.

[Rex Armeniae]

20 units with 20 reinforcing units is enough and perfectly fine, performance contra scale wise. Get over it, you're not going to have tens of thousands of soldiers in your army, there's no personal computer that would be able to run it.

[BunnyPoopCereal]

20 units with 20 reinforcing units is enough and perfectly fine, performance contra scale wise. Get over it, you're not going to have tens of thousands of soldiers in your army, there's no personal computer that would be able to run it.

yes there are. I'm not sure if you're thinking in the hundreds of thousands though. But tens of thousands we can do.

[Dan113112]

yes there are. I'm not sure if you're thinking in the hundreds of thousands though. But tens of thousands we can do.

It lags, though. You'd need to create larger maps as well. There's also problems with path-finding in large units. I imagine CA has tried fixing them but with little success. So, even with 40 units the armies are still fairly small compared to history. Unless you want to run 80 units.

People like the OP will never be satisfied.

[talljoe]

yes there are. I'm not sure if you're thinking in the hundreds of thousands though. But tens of thousands we can do.

Bunny, I'm curious why you believe this? The CPU benchmarks don't lie, doesn't matter if it's a i7 3970x at 4.4ghz or a i5 3570k at 5ghz, even a 20v20 battle will dip to 30fps and below on high settings. In a 40v40 stack battle I still get CPU bottleneck with an i5 4670k at 4.2ghz and 2 GTX680s in SLI.

Do you mean with low settings?

[Dan113112]

Bunny, I'm curious why you believe this? The CPU benchmarks don't lie, doesn't matter if it's a i7 3970x at 4.4ghz or a i5 3570k at 5ghz, even a 20v20 battle will dip to 30fps and below on high settings. In a 40v40 stack battle I still get CPU bottleneck with an i5 4670k at 4.2ghz and 2 GTX680s in SLI.

Do you mean with low settings?

I played an 8v8 MP ETW battle with max graphics and max unit sizes. That was on an older laptop Intel PC. The battle lagged but it is possible to do it. Not to mention that the newer TW games actually run a lot smoother with less lag.

Even in Mount & Blade: Warband, high-end PC's can barely handle 500 men at max graphics.

[TheCzech]

20 units with 20 reinforcing units is enough and perfectly fine, performance contra scale wise. Get over it, you're not going to have tens of thousands of soldiers in your army, there's no personal computer that would be able to run it.

Exactly it all comes down to performance.

[Huberto]

20 units with 20 reinforcing units is enough and perfectly fine, performance contra scale wise. Get over it, you're not going to have tens of thousands of soldiers in your army, there's no personal computer that would be able to run it.

Don't be ridiculous. My i7 920 from 2008 and a GTX 460 runs NTW with 40 unit stack armies on high settings just fine.

[talljoe]

Don't be ridiculous. My i7 920 from 2008 and a GTX 460 runs NTW with 40 unit stack armies on high settings just fine.

"just fine" meaning 20fps? I need to find the link, but this forum has the CPU benchmarks... and i5 3570k at 5ghz was the highest, and that barely managed 31fps minimum... the 6 core/12 thread i7 3970x managed around 30 I believe, and the 920 around 18...

[Revan The Great]

I too wish that they'd pour more resources into AI improvement than in eye candy, but this will never happen. When trying to preview the game, either in a very brief showing at E3, or on a 1 minute television spot, the only thing that really matters are gorgeous graphics. You can't show people the depth of your political system, or how smart your AI is in a brief amount of time - it's something that needs to be discovered over hours of play. So improving graphics simply has the most 'bang for its buck', in terms of generating sales - blame the consumer, not the developer.

That said, I'm fine with a little abstraction in terms of the numbers of soldiers. Most computers couldn't handle 30,000 soldier battles, so they need to abstract things a bit. What I've done is just add a 'zero' to everything...if I have an army of 3,426 men, I think of it as actually being an army of 34,260 men. No big deal.

[Dan113112]

Lets stop beating around the bush here or however that saying goes: The battles in Rome 2 are once again disappointingly small and yes historically inaccurate. I know that is a phrase a lot of you who enjoy the casual, arcady* direction that CA has taken with games, despise but it is the truth. With the improvement in the engine of Rome 2, instead of using that power to create a more tactically significant and an overall more grand strategic experience, with more men, more complex commands, etc, CA has decided to focus on immediate gratification with obsolete micromanagement and eye candy (I PRAY they eventually release a blood pack). I know that you CAN command up to 40 units but you can NOT recruit an army from the get go to be 40 units strong. This was something that unsurprisingly was cracked by the wonderful modders of Empire Total War and Napoleon Total War. There is absolutely no reason why CA can't have at least this improvement in the game that two older games have. This system is much superior to the one implemented in Shogun 2 and now Rome 2. The AI in these modded ETW and NTW games made 40 unit armies with little trouble and thus you never had to hope and see as in Shogun 2 if they or you had another ally army nearby that could join the battle. Bottom line is that the 20 unit stack plus 20 reinforcement combination is inferior to what MODS have been able to do. Heck even 40 units is still too small. In a proper strategy game like this, I prefer quantity over the super detailed individual soldier in an army of only a paltry few thousand. I am not the only one who feels this way. Just my two cents and hopefully we discuss this.

Learn to use paragraphs, please. It's hard to read a wall of text like that.

As for your rant the answer is simple. CA doesn't think the majority of players like to micromanage 40 units. So the armies are 20 units. It has nothing to do with the AI. From what we have actually heard from CA it is about micromanagement and gameplay. How is the game arcade-like? Having 20 units instead of 40 does not make it any more arcade-like than previous games.

[jsully16]

Everyone, the battles are historically inaccurate, cancel your preorders.

Historically inaccurate. Historically inaccurate. Historically inaccurate.

Get a life, people.

[Rodent24]

I would definitely like a bigger scale for the battles. With some clever programming, a solid LOD system and maybe a little less detail, performance wouldn't be such an issue.

However not with the current control system. Controlling 40 units, each with abilities without pressing the pause button can be quite a hassle.
I know you can use groups and formations but you still have to target and charge with individual units. A game should not be designed around a pause button and should not become a Korean clickfest in my opinion.

Once they come up with some sort of system where you can macro a little more and can easily control battle lines and flanks without losing the option to manage individual units, I'm down for it.

[Rex Armeniae]

laggy...

[Raikou]

Lets stop beating around the bush here or however that saying goes: The battles in Rome 2 are once again disappointingly small and yes historically inaccurate. I know that is a phrase a lot of you who enjoy the casual, arcady* direction that CA has taken with games, despise but it is the truth. With the improvement in the engine of Rome 2, instead of using that power to create a more tactically significant and an overall more grand strategic experience, with more men, more complex commands, etc, CA has decided to focus on immediate gratification with obsolete micromanagement and eye candy (I PRAY they eventually release a blood pack). I know that you CAN command up to 40 units but you can NOT recruit an army from the get go to be 40 units strong. This was something that unsurprisingly was cracked by the wonderful modders of Empire Total War and Napoleon Total War. There is absolutely no reason why CA can't have at least this improvement in the game that two older games have. This system is much superior to the one implemented in Shogun 2 and now Rome 2. The AI in these modded ETW and NTW games made 40 unit armies with little trouble and thus you never had to hope and see as in Shogun 2 if they or you had another ally army nearby that could join the battle. Bottom line is that the 20 unit stack plus 20 reinforcement combination is inferior to what MODS have been able to do. Heck even 40 units is still too small. In a proper strategy game like this, I prefer quantity over the super detailed individual soldier in an army of only a paltry few thousand. I am not the only one who feels this way. Just my two cents and hopefully we discuss this.

Agreed.

I think we can all understand and appreciate CA likes to favor the little guy and middle man with not so great rigs which I think is awesome but at the same time I wish they'd think about the enthusiasts that build several thousand dollar rigs to play epic scale games such as Rome II total war.

I wish they would've ATLEAST added the option to have 40 unit armies specially since there's now a limit cap on armies so we'll no longer be seeing say 30,000 vs 40,000 battles. We'll be mostly resigned to seeing something like maybe 15,000vs 10,000 battles wich is fine but like stated in the quote there's been much larger battles pulled of fin previous titles

Give us the option to either mod this or do it yourself with a major patch update CA, please

[Templar Spartan]

40 unit armies means battles with up to 160 units (40+40 reinforce vs 40+40 reinforce). I doubt your rig could run that efficiently, let alone the average person who doesn't have an i7.

Not to mention the pathfinding issues and map / city expansions that would need to take place, among all the other potential hurdles.

"Don't be ridiculous." Pfff.

[Huberto]

40 unit armies means battles with up to 160 units (40+40 reinforce vs 40+40 reinforce). I doubt your rig could run that efficiently, let alone the average person who doesn't have an i7.

Not to mention the pathfinding issues and map / city expansions that would need to take place, among all the other potential hurdles.

"Don't be ridiculous." Pfff.

Ha ha, so now it's 80 unit battles we're talking about?

I play 40 unit stacks all the time with NTW. Why would TWR2 not be able to handle that with a little bit more multicore support? Besides we can have two stack battles with 40 units per side so obviously the system can handle it well enough.

What people are upset there are drops below 30 fps in heavy zoomed in battle. Does it really matter that much, so much that we can't have large battles? That's ridiculous.

[Sir_Red]

I see both sides. AI with tens of thousands would be even dumber and PCs would struggle

BUt then again fighting against carthage with perhaps 5000 vs 5000 men (at a push, with some reinforcements) is pathetic when irl they were slogging it out with 40-80k troops on each side. It must have been absolute carnage and the landscape littered with bodies.

I'm playing NTW with 40stacks atm and it's a good compromise, I'm getting 8k-12k per army, and so with 2 full stacks vs 2 full stacks it comes out to a total of around 40-50k troops on the battlefield, making for some real end of days battles

[StealthFox]

There are has been lots of discussion on this and many, many threads, no need for another one.

[Astaroth]

The biggest problem for me is not the lower performances that most computers would suffer as a result of 40 unit stacks but rather the impossibility of micro-managing such a large army without pressing "pause" nearly all the time. And I'm not some casual gamer or new to the TW series. I have played TW games extensively since RTW, including lots of mods and I have also played several RTS games, some of them on a fairly high level online.

Fact is, having to control 40 units at once would be extremely stressful and/or require you to pause all the time. Even using control groups wouldn't solve the problem.

"But you wouldn't be forced to use 40 units in one stack!"
Actually, yes, you would be. If the AI fields 40 units or even 40+40 units at once, sticking to just 20 would be silly at best.

"But they could include it as an option for everyone who would like it!"
Except that it isn't so easy. Larger armies affect the balance of the game a lot and would most likely require different AI programming and such. As opposed to adding different unit sizes, including a higher count of units (40 rather than 20) would be quite difficult.

And considering that most people a) don't want to do that because of the major micromanaging hassle and clickfest it would be, b) can't even run such large battles on their rigs and c) simply couldn't care less, this hardly seems worth the effort.