Elite Units should be a bigger investment!

[SinerAthin]

So, right now; the things that I dislike the most with Elite units is mainly:

1. They are too cheap. It doesn't feel like a serious investment.
2. Unlimited. Not really 'Elite' when they can make up an entire army.
3. Often negligible performance in comparison to ordinary troops. Feels more like just slightly better legionaries, not demanding any more consideration.

Now, about the third & their performance, I don't expect them to take on entire armies by themselves, but I'd like to see their performance setting them apart from the rest of the Legionaries/Armored Legionaries
(This is mostly only with Rome though, as the Oathsworns for examples are a gargantuan improvement from their ordinary foot sluggers)

I realize that a manpower system might be hard to implement, so I'd like to see maybe a Cap with each army. So units that are classed as 'Elite' (Oathsworn, Praetorians, inlc variants such as Praetorian Cavalry) are capped to a certain number, like 4-6, meaning you can't make entire armies of elite units.

[karamazovmm]

players complain that things restrict the players, players complain that things arent restrict enough for players

dont want to get the entire army of elites, dont recruit the entire army of elites

[FireElemental]

players complain that things restrict the players, players complain that things arent restrict enough for players

dont want to get the entire army of elites, dont recruit the entire army of elites

This. AI is handicapped enough.

[camper-futter]

players complain that things restrict the players, players complain that things arent restrict enough for players

ya know that "elite" is just another term for "restricted"
so in this special case about "elite-"units even i would vote for a (soft-?) cap.

preferably by a manpower system. but that wont not happen

[SinerAthin]

I think that a manpower pool would be a rather "revolutionary change" if I am going to put it that way, because Rome II doesn't really have any manpower pool in the first place. You can recruit however many units you want of whatever sort.

This also creates issue with that it renders the Roman auxiliary rather pointless.
For instance; why would you ever recruit barbarian auxiliary when you can just recruit normal Roman units who are almost the same price but much better? (Does not apply to unit variants that the Romans don't already have)

The reason why I didn't mention a manpower system is because it could require a bit more work to put in.
Although I do like the idea of the provincial system being the cap on how many elites you can reqruit, as then you can still make an 'elite army' by relegating your elite units from other armies into a single one, at the cost of your other armies losing their elite units. It would give the player a good bit of flexibility while at the same time ensuring that elite units remained rare.

dont want to get the entire army of elites, dont recruit the entire army of elites

If you intend to play in any optimal way, getting an army of elites is almost always the best.

I can understand that some people like to RP while playing(I do it sometimes too, to a lesser extent), but the game's mechanics is often what decides how a gamer, even optimal/power gamer will play, because most humans will pursue the solutions that work out the best for them.

[karamazovmm]

I think that a manpower pool would be a rather "revolutionary change" if I am going to put it that way, because Rome II doesn't really have any manpower pool in the first place. You can recruit however many units you want of whatever sort.

This also creates issue with that it renders the Roman auxiliary rather pointless.
For instance; why would you ever recruit barbarian auxiliary when you can just recruit normal Roman units who are almost the same price but much better? (Does not apply to unit variants that the Romans don't already have)

The reason why I didn't mention a manpower system is because it could require a bit more work to put in.
Although I do like the idea of the provincial system being the cap on how many elites you can reqruit, as then you can still make an 'elite army' by relegating your elite units from other armies into a single one, at the cost of your other armies losing their elite units. It would give the player a good bit of flexibility while at the same time ensuring that elite units remained rare.

basically you want to have back the m2tw recruitment system. I don't.

and you want a more difficult or less rewarding economical system, I can go with that.

because the only way that you can force people to not recruit how many units they want is by limiting their recruitment rates or by putting a hard cap.

so basically what you propose is not feasible by sheer application of logic.

given that the only way to make you choose some crap auxilia units is to make the economy harder, and by god have I not see many threads on how to make money in this game, its not even hard. So you can economically consciously choose the crap unit

but that alone isn't enough given that people actually are able to think sometimes, they will learn how to make money, thus there is the comeback of the units.

So we apply a hard cap of lets say 4 praetorian guards.

however, since the player learned to make cash, why would he recruit those crappy auxilia units? for that you need to have a cap on regular units, lets say 4 legionaries for each army, because if you limit that the way m2tw did, which was basically wait a few more turns to recruit that unit that you want crappy system, you can still recruit the regular units and not have a single auxilia unit. since the general at the formation of the army is basically nothing, he doesn't matter, so no matter how long you wait for those troops to replenish you can wait, or make that general the supply line to the battlefront, which makes waiting for those turns so that you can recruit that unit that you want, useless and annoying.


so to make it simple:

harder economy -> forces you to choose cheaper troops

player adapts -> hard caps introduced for elite units

player still chooses the most optimal combination -> hard caps for regular units

or

player still chooses the most optimal combination -> soft caps that are replenish able -> annoys the player because s/he needs to wait even more to have its army up and running.

conclusion one crappy system, annoying doesn't reward the player and limits things to the impossible

If you intend to play in any optimal way, getting an army of elites is almost always the best.

I can understand that some people like to RP while playing(I do it sometimes too, to a lesser extent), but the game's mechanics is often what decides how a gamer, even optimal/power gamer will play, because most humans will pursue the solutions that work out the best for them.

the game mechanics doesn't force you to choose anything, I use the starting crappy armies till I can make the elite armies the way that I want, which means half the campaign is done on crappy, lvl1 to lvl 2 troops till I can have my elite units with all the buffs I can.

basically its simple, don't click more than X number of times on the elite unit icon during the recruitment.

[Humble Warrior]

basically you want to have back the m2tw recruitment system. I don't.

and you want a more difficult or less rewarding economical system, I can go with that.

because the only way that you can force people to not recruit how many units they want is by limiting their recruitment rates or by putting a hard cap.

so basically what you propose is not feasible by sheer application of logic.

Sigh... just look at reality. Really, take a look at your army. Is everyone in the US army a SEAL? Or is everyone in the British army an SAS troop?

No. Why?

Because these men are trained to a very high and very expensive quality. This expense is a sort of `unit cap` of real life.

Not only that, only the fittest, smartest, most capable of men are used. They must be. Most men in the army are simply not of that calibre. You could also call this a natural reality `unit cap`.

To add to that, if somehow you could afford to make every member of the army an Elite troop then the quality of soldier would degrade. The `Elite` status would no longer be `Elite` and ultimately a new limited or `unit capped` Elite would be created anyway.

But carry on with the delusion.

[krisslanza]

Sigh... just look at reality. Really, take a look at your army. Is everyone in the US army a SEAL? Or is everyone in the British army an SAS troop?

No. Why?

Because these men are trained to a very high and very expensive quality. This expense is a sort of `unit cap` of real life.

Not only that, only the fittest, smartest, most capable of men are used. They must be. Most men in the army are simply not of that calibre. You could also call this a natural reality `unit cap`.

To add to that, if somehow you could afford to make every member of the army an Elite troop then the quality of soldier would degrade. The `Elite` status would no longer be `Elite` and ultimately a new limited or `unit capped` Elite would be created anyway.

But carry on with the delusion.

You know of course, Rome 2 is also a game. Realistically, you wouldn't gain a consistent amount of Talents per turn (fluctuation in taxes and all that), soldiers would die of old age/lose skill, you could "run" out of men capable of fighting, etc. etc.

Most of these would be needlessly tedious though and just drag down gameplay for no real mechanic benefit. Sure, from a meta game POV, using all elite troops is the best. But no one is MAKING you play that way, it's your own choice if you want to field an entire army of "elite" troops or not.

[Eofor]

so I'd like to see maybe a Cap with each army. So units that are classed as 'Elite' (Oathsworn, Praetorians, inlc variants such as Praetorian Cavalry) are capped to a certain number, like 4-6,

No, what CA should do is implement a recruiting system that limits the number of units you can recruit per province, with the numbers and types of units available determined by the types of buildings you build.

[neopara]

Let them try to balancing the units first before capping. Beta patch 4 already suggest that non-elite units got a boost. If two 500 koku units can beat one 950 koku unit then you don't need caps. The game has been horrible unbalance since launch and they are only starting to fix it now.

[cevap]

The Medieval 2 system was the only one I could stand with what you have in mind. I dont want to be limited to 6 units of whatever if I can afford to recruit them but I would be for some kind of manpower pool that slowely regenerates.

[Maklodes]

Sometimes I think it would be nice if you had general direction over what sort of army you were recruiting (focus on archers, or swordsmen, or heavy cavalry, or whatever), but elite units were a consequence of regular unit recruitment. You can recruit 10 units of legionaries, and maybe one is spontaneously upgraded to an evocati cohort or something, but you can't recruit evocati independently. (Recruiting 10,000 soldiers and figuring out which 1,000 are the best seems more plausible than just recruiting 1,000 soldiers all of whom are awesome. I mean, how would you do that?)

That might be regarded as rather frustrating, though.

[rrgg]

There's sort of an opposite problem with navies at the moment. The extra hull strength of many larger ships doesn't seem nearly enough to counter for their lesser mobility compared to levy units, so naval battles seem to be almost always decided by simply "who has more ships".

[Jofoblie]

A little idea I had was that the price of elite units would increase for every elite unit of that type you had. So you could field an army of oathswarn if you were ridiculously rich, but if you were struggling for cash you'd still be able to have one or two in your army as you'd expect.

[DividingSolid]

I would like to see a cap in the custom battles as well.

[Dago Red]

I agree but forget it! For the love of Zeus leave CA alone about this stuff. It's so easily done by modders.

CA needs to concentrate about 9 months of nonstop work on actually releasing a game that works on the most basic levels and then give modders all the tools they need. No idea what happened to multi-turn recruitment, recruitment replenishment pools or unit caps, but there are a list of about 100 other missing or broken features and many cannot easily be changed by mods.

[archone]

Don't need a cap, but their cost is too low. A full army of elites should be very powerful and expensive, not something you can easily spam after 50 turns. In addition to encourage, elites should get abilities like inspire and warcry like in Shogun, they shouldn't just be unkillable supermen. Their power should come from their abilities as well as their stats.

[Thorn777]

I use mod houserules in campaign: 5 Hastati 4 Principes 3 Triari 2 Equites in every legion, rest assorted stuff like Auxilia, Velites, Balistas etc.

Also makes it historically more immersive, and lol I like about RTW2 that Hastati really are a bunch of noobs needed to be saved by their higher ranks all the time.

[krisslanza]

So TWC complains that "CA is limiting out building options! I can't make omnicities everywhere!" "CA is limiting my armies/fleets!" so now there's complaints of "CA ISN'T limiting my elite units! Come on CA why are you failing so hard!?"

Sigh. Does TWC even know what they want?

[smilydude]

Perhaps a system where your buildings produce a certain number of men per turn? For instance you could make a Roman barracks that produces say, 500 trained Hastati/whatever per turn. This number could increase as the population increases to eventually produce 1,500 Hastati per turn. This goes in to a manpool with a cap that is a percentage of how large your population is (it would be silly to have 50,000 professional soldiers when your population is only 60k) that dictates how many men you can recruit. You could have 3 different manpower pools representing different tiers. A levy pool in which you can recruit a very large percentage of your population to be untrained mobs, a professional pool in which you could recruit a smaller percentage of your population if you have buildings training and arming them, and an elite pool that fills much, much slower than the others.

It's a crude idea, but I'd like my elite units to have some value to me. I've been throwing away Triarii and Oathsworn away like nothing, considering I can just recruit them in one turn anywhere I please. They should take time and effort to get, and make you think twice before you risk them.