Lines of Battle: General Discussion

['Gunny]

Yup, made them all (as in infantry) .5, except for Pikes which have .7 (Might be a bit high, but we'll see)

Going to roll through one more test (mostly for the pikes and cavalry) and I'll be releasing an alpha before I go to bed for people to fiddle around with and give me feedback.

[need help]

The completely unanticipated squeal to my Line of Battle: Shogun 2 mod that never got updated past ROTS, and Josst's wonderful mod for Napoleon: Total War, Line of Battle: Rome 2 is in the works! This is not intended to be a complete overhaul, but rather just to expand on Rome 2 to make it a more enjoyable game.

Planned Features:
-Get rid of super-fast units that don't get tired after running around the map that seem to only be suited for one song.
-Make melee last longer than 5 minutes, especially when good units are fighting one another, hopefully I can hit a sweet spot between too long and too short.
-Make ranged units less sniper-y
-As many factions playable as possible.
-Various and assorted balance and game fixes to make the game more enjoyable from my perspective.

Possibly:
Some UI changes. I'm not a fan of the unit cards, so over time I will attempt to remake them in the older style. Will likely be an optional add-on if I go through with it.

I'll also be taking a look at the capture point types in the db to see if I can do anything with field battle capture points.

will this be compatible with radious's battle mod?

['Gunny]

Most likely not. In fact, now that I look at it, definitely not, a lot of the things he changes, I change as well.

['Gunny]

Alright, excuse the double post, but I'm exhausted, and I think that if I continue to tweak I'll forget what I did (in fact, I think I already did some stuff with the mass, but I'm not too sure.) I have a busy day tomorrow, and won't really be able to mod any until the evening, and an even busier day on Wednesday. With this post I am including an open alpha version. I'd really appreciate any and all feedback you all can provide to hopefully steer it in the right direction for a release proper.

It is in a movie format, so it's a simple plug and play once you put it into your data folder. And I'm rambling now and realizing that I didn't eat dinner despite the fact that it is 1:15 AM and I have work in 8 hours. So anyway, here is a link to my early alpha version with battle changes.

Removed to avoid confusion

Edit: Oh, and here are some screens I took showing a prolonged melee between Spartans and Athenians, and then my pikemen showing them what "Hammer and Anvil" means. (Will see about making AI pikemen actually... use pikes, as they were destroyed by my pikemen in a not-so-prolonged melee.)

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Biggus Splenus]

Will download and give it a try

Yes, there seems to be something terribly wrong with vanilla phalanx vs phalanx combat I think the phalanx's damage is highly dependent on the target's shield. Some units that went against my phalanx without a shield just dropped dead in front of the spears, hoplite and other heavy infantry with decent shields can wiggle their way through to the melee (so I've noticed). This would explain why a phalanx is so effective against another, because their shield rating is only 5, where as most heavy inf have 20

Hope that helped It's just some guess work, I haven't had any time to test any of my own mechanics, or the specifics of the vanilla one.

EDIT: According to this table that was just decoded http://forums.totalwar.com/showthrea...l=1#post722893
There's nothing special about the pike (apart from the length of course); no armour piercing, no shield piercing, average armour penetration, average damage.... I have no idea what's going on.

['Gunny]

Hm, well I'll definitely be playing around a bit with the pikes when I get home. They don't have bonus against cavalry either, but oddly, they seem to be good at killing cavalry. Weird stuff.

[Biggus Splenus]

Indeed

Well I had time to play a small battle, and it was an improvement over vanilla (although, that's not too hard to achieve it was actually pretty good though), and there's a few things I noticed;

First - HUGE UNITS, running speed has been slowed significantly to a jogging (intentional?)
Second - The new entity radius does definitely help and I actually think it makes sandwiching an enemy more effective (they seem to not be able to fight back once squished too much ), units seem to keep cohesion more (not sure how you done this ), units seem to flee at a more realistic stage of the battle (instead of fleeing at 20% unit strength (like in Radious mod), they run at about 50-35%, depending on situation), and I like this a lot we have to remember these are people, not robots without thought. I would welcome an even greater change in morale though.

A down side to the slow running (again, was it intentional?) is the fleeing units can't get away from pursuers. Former can only go at running speed, latter can go at charging speed when close enough.

ALSO! Fatigue is much better, soldiers actually tier out in melee, which I never experienced in vanilla. Seems to have more of an effect on combat performance too, which is a welcome change

That's all the feedback I got sorry, my day was very full, and I spent my personal modding time with this (because I was keen to use it ). Keep up the good work!

(sorry in advance if this gets post gets TWC blobbed, going to bed now and I wont be able to edit it. This is about the time TWC gets blobby)

['Gunny]

Yes, Made units larger, But I'll have a vanilla unit size one available on full release.

Also yes, running speed has been reduced heavily across the board, and is near-jogging for some of the heaviest units, though I want to make the lighter units a tad faster, so there is a greater difference between armor groups. (Light = fast, heavy = slow, simple! ) Charge speeds have not been changed though, so when 's about to go down, they book it into melee.

Second is good to hear. I think I did the cohesion with knockback, reducing it by 46%. In terms of morale, that's definitely what I was more going for. Not every unit was lead by Gerard Butler , and a unit of slingers shouldn't stick around once everyone else is dead, that said, I do plan on buffing more elite units morale slightly, and also giving a buff to "Attacked in the front" which means that as long as a unit is engaged with an enemy they can see that is in front of them, they are happier and hopefully less likely to break.

Duly noted on the slower running. It would be interesting if I could bring in a modifier to increase run speed whilst broken, but I doubt that. Anyway, I'll see what I can do on that.

And good to hear about fatigue, I definitely wanted to make it more tiresome, and have being tired give some more penalties.

Thanks for the feedback, and I look forward to more!

[gsguns]

Can I play it with the Radious Total War mod?

['Gunny]

You can play it with some of Radious' modules, like the AI one, but not hte battle one, and not the graphics one, because we both have touched the same files there.

[Krasnaïa Zvezda]

I plan on trying your mod but I wanted to know if it was compatible with the Special Abilities Be Gone Mod ?

Because once you've played a battle without magical buffs and flame javelins, it's pretty hard to go back (and also because of the added Shiledwall to the Romans).

Concerning the UI cards, I fully support your plans on modding them because during 20+ battles and the limitations of 10 groups, I sometimes get confused as to who is where and the wavering effect on the card is not clear for my taste.

I'm surprised that it wasn't one of the first thing modded, particularly the unit number on the card itself.

['Gunny]

The latter is a bit more difficult and time consuming, so it isn't high on my priorities list.

As for the former, I don't know if it is or not, but my gut tells me that it may be, I didn't touch any of the abilities.

[Biggus Splenus]

From a realism perspective, I'd suggest making running speeds faster than charging, because people didn't sprint and throw their bodies into enemy formations. Most people probably wouldn't agree with me though, from a game design perspective

['Gunny]

That's an interesting point, I may experiment with it later, but at the moment I'd like to keep it as is. I did some more changes though, made speed a wee bit faster, nerfed Romans a bit more too, and nerfed transports, and some other stuff I can't fully remember .

http://ge.tt/2XLb1ur/v/0

[Biggus Splenus]

Ah finally, a transport nerf

I'll give it a test tonight. One last though about the last version; I think pikemen should have the same entity radius as other units, because when they're not in phalanx it makes less sense

[Dicer]

hey gunny would it be possible to build more then one siege machine per turn ?

['Gunny]

Probably, haven't touched the campaign yet though.

[h7779]

Quick question since you haven't touched the campaign much can I use your mod with Radious A.I and Campaign mod?

[Krasnaïa Zvezda]

So I tried your mod in custom battle and my 80 turns campaign save. First,mod compatibility : the changes made by the Special abilities be gone remain (no more flame arrows/javs, shield wall for romans,...), so is the Ahiga mod that enables fire at will for heavy infantry. I noticed the unit increase bug for cavalry where the men are 80 (for the general) but the horses remain 40. Magnar had the same issue with his mod and the fix he did was make the cavalry units 79 for generals and 159 for regular cav and it works Other than that, the mod was functional (unit size) in my campaign for the recruitment of units and for new garrisons achieved after the mod was applied.

[jackal263]

I tried your mod several times, before and after today patch - It seems the best BAI (or at least the one i prefer most) ... battles are intense and very spectacular.. we can finally admire fight scenes in all their splendor.
I use also SpecialAbilitiesBeGoneV3.pack and it seems not in conflict.. it is a must to remove those ridicolous overpowered effects for missile units.
I also tried your mod together with "no morale mod" and probably (even if not realistic) it gives the best result.
You could get a compromise, upping morale a bit more or decreasing morale hits by events such rear or flank attacks.. and other.
I avoided pike units because in my opinion they are (as always) utterly bugged.
A suggestion for modders.. if pike unbalance and broken behaviour persists, why not remove all pike units and replace them with strong oplite units ?
I know that pike were presents at time, but if CA can't fix them , i think that removing them (giving some bonus as compensation for the factions owning them) could be better than nothing.
Thanks for the great work!
I must admit that in all my tests i used simple tactics, deliberately not exploiting any potential AI weakness.. so the test is limited..
but battles were really amazing expecially after recent patch.
If you have a more updated beta version i would be happy to test it and report any potential bug.
Just a last note.. Previous of today patch i noticed that enemy bodyguard unit was too passive (even when it could be decisive for the fight outcome).. I don't know if they didn't charge when coming in contact with my units (simply walking to contact them, supporting an already engaged subordinate unit), or if the charge was absolutely ineffective..But this probably has nothing to do with your modding.