CA super glue back in patch 4, unfortunately.

[wulfgar610]

One thing that has always bugged me with TW is how difficult it is to pull a unit back to a new line. For example you click and drag the outline of a unit to a new position and in theory they should disengage and pull back to the new position.

The problem in TW is there is some sort of glue magnet that causes the unit to fail its maneuver order and gets pulled back into the fight.

The first time this melee deficiency was corrected was in Rome2. First time I could click and drag and the unit would disengage with minimal casualties. Hallelujah!

But now unfortunately with patch 4 the superglue is back!!! Why? I can't find anything in the patch 4 notes regarding this?

I'm back to what I hate! Click, drag, multiple times and by the time the unit fully follows orders, half of it is destroyed.

For Pete's sake Hannibal did this at Cannae with his entire line of Gauls repeatedly giving ground until some units might have rebounded by up to a mile. Even meat heads like the Suebi could pull this maneuver at Vesontio.

I'd hate to think that this game destruction is back because people complained about not being able run down every last router when historically most of them did successfully run away.

Can somebody explain to me what is going on here?

[Humble Warrior]

I`m sure this was in pre beta 4 patch.

p.s. CA always adds more than the Patch says, they`ve been doing since original MTW. Not a bad thing, I always enjoyed running their patches to see what they`ve done they didn`t write.

[BroskiDerpman]

It was always in game, it's to prevent drag throughs with cav if I remember correctly.

In Rome 1 you can disengage much faster without spamming orders. In Shogun 2 I had to spam right click many times so my cav don't get stuck but it's much harder in Rome 2.

If you disengage I believe your unit loses all defense values thus high casualty rates.

[wulfgar610]

You could be right, maybe they went back to superglue with patch 3. But there was definitely a stage were you could click and drag and they would nicely disengage. In one historical battle the Byzantine cavalry charged the Varangian lines almost 20 times before the Varangians started to retreat. Obviously in total war the cavalry might only lose half their men on the first rebound and be annihilated on the second charge. But historically the Byzantines won the battle although they found the Varangians rather plucky infantry for a bunch of Barbarians.

[Frost, colonel]

Yep this is a problem, at the moment think twice before pulling back, or don't play with Beta 4. It's that one or two men that are still stuck fighting who draw the whole unit back into the fight. I don't play with fancy tactics at the mo, and often just leave units fighting.
I'm more concerned with units within my battle line turning side ways, and leaving big gaps at the moment(time for reserves I think).

Yes we are annoyed that more than 1 month later we are still waiting for the game we brought(and it may never be really fixed), but there is always that inherent risk. when we are so keen on playing the game, that installing a Beta patch may not be that wise.

[wulfgar610]

Oh, well back to patch 3. I've got the prepatch game in another folder (due to long experience with TW). I'll just copy that into common and head back to a patch3 save.

[Anna_Gein]

One thing that has always bugged me with TW is how difficult it is to pull a unit back to a new line. For example you click and drag the outline of a unit to a new position and in theory they should disengage and pull back to the new position.

The problem in TW is there is some sort of glue magnet that causes the unit to fail its maneuver order and gets pulled back into the fight.

The first time this melee deficiency was corrected was in Rome2. First time I could click and drag and the unit would disengage with minimal casualties. Hallelujah!

Did you really had trouble to do so in RTW ? Maybe I don't understand what you want to say but pulling back troops from melee was extremely quick to do in RTW.

I guess the problem with the lattest games comes from the 1vs1 animations. Most soldiers are tied to an enemy soldier in order to let the animation work so even when your soldier try to disengage the other is still tied to him or at least attempts to remain so.

[Dago Red]

Even a shameful monkey could have assessed that the game -- a game that's largely about trying to simulate large scale battles from classical antiquity -- needed a new animation. A disengage animation, to intervene in the 1v1 combat animations, for units to turn and reform at their line. Some men/horses getting hung up in battle is fine, it even works out amazingly well sometimes* but whole units cannot even move without seemingly dropping their pants.


*in M2TW you can end up with a handful, or even 1 man, still fighting with the enemy unit as the rest of your men follow your orders to fall back and reform. It is a great little effect of the way units disengage, especially when your 1 stubborn badass kills 2 guys before he runs back to join your unit. They shouldn't have tried to reinvent the wheel.....

[BigHairyMelon]

What they really need is a move backwards button so your infantry can fight and move backwards at the same time, and also lets you give ground without exposing your backs to enemy missile fire.

Also in my opinion the warscape engine just sucks balls for anything that concentrates on melee fighting. It was only half decent for shogun because Japanese armies did a lot of 1v1 fighting but for roman and medieval combat tactics formations and organised fighting play a bigger role and warscape can not emulate that at all.

[Krasnaïa Zvezda]

What they really need is a move backwards button so your infantry can fight and move backwards at the same time, and also lets you give ground without exposing your backs to enemy missile fire.

This.

Having the ability to give ground (when ordered) while fighting the enemy would add so much depth to the battles and would bring in much more tactics (flanking, envelopment à la Cannae,...).

It could have even been implemented with the arrows that you clicked to order a unit to give ground or push forward, as there is now mass represented IG.

[jkjktotalwar]

Yeah this is why I'm sticking to patch 3 so far. But radious and all the other freaking modders have moved on to patch 4 and therefore I can't get the mods for patch 3 anymore! Everything's updated for patch 4 and thus does not work for patch 3. ! ing .

[DochtorGajo]

Well if units truly loose their whole defence that really is sad addition. :-D Hard to say, units stopping and in need of neverending clicking is one of core total war featured and as far as rome 2 goes I have experienced it in all the patches I installed so far, with cavalry at least. Second annoying thing is how two or three men allways run after my cavalrymen, when rest of their unit is away, they cant be charged as charge concentrates on main body and if they cant my horses they deal casualties, so I have to run around like idiot. These guys should have their defence and attack zeroed to be killed in stampede of horses and any men and whole units out of formation and spread all over the map in disorder should also be severely cut in their melee proficiency, its ridiculous how proper order and formation tabsolutely doesnt matter in influencing units performance. (Hence the talk about how different militaries will feel completely differently in Rome 2, last time I looked they were all the same dysfunctional bunch.)

Losing half of cavalry in retreat is simply nonsence, I hoped a little, theyll introduce some form of retreat behaviour for units, so for example unifantry could try to step back in formation and retreat in order without turning their rears to the enemy.

[AusHaching]

@wulfgar I think patch 4 decreased the ability of cav to disengage again. It´s not as bad as it was in 1.0, but definitely worse than under 2 and 4.

And don´t call the Suebi meatheads. They eventually brought Rome down, after all.

[wulfgar610]

@wulfgar I think patch 4 decreased the ability of cav to disengage again. It´s not as bad as it was in 1.0, but definitely worse than under 2 and 4.

And don´t call the Suebi meatheads. They eventually brought Rome down, after all.

Well the beta of 4 made things worse. However it seems they've reduced the superglue for the live version. So I might be satisfied. It might have connected with increasing the ability to ride down routers in an earlier patch. If it was, not a good move, killing routers is a low priority game mechanic compared to the battle.,

[SirRobin]

Maybe this is working as intended? After all, in real life, it would be extremely difficult to disengage your troops once they clash. Maybe very disciplined and trained troops would be able to, but is it something we should taken for granted?

It might also be for gameplay reasons, to prevent players exploiting the charge-disengage-recharge cycle.

Or of course it might just be a banal bug, I don't know

[wulfgar610]

Maybe this is working as intended? After all, in real life, it would be extremely difficult to disengage your troops once they clash. Maybe very disciplined and trained troops would be able to, but is it something we should taken for granted?

Very easy I would imagine. They aren't glued to each other except maybe in beta patch four. From what I recall it was termed "rebound" in WRG table top. The unit that rebounded lost moral, however a good die roll would see them regain order. Their opposing number either followed up or didn't. If they stayed put a die roll could see them regain order as well.

Hannibal had his entire line doing with some units maybe giving ground up to a mile.

An old movie which explores the concept nicely is "Alfred the Great 1969".

[Bethencourt]

This happens with ships, once they get rammed they stay there stearing the enemy until they sink. This cannot be seen in vanilla easily as the ship last just two or three rams, but if you increase the hit points to make the battles last more than five minutes you can see it very clearly. In that process there is an oportunity to scape, but just when it is 1 vs 1 ship, and it is when the ramming ship has pulled back and it is stopped to ram again, in that moment you can give your ship the order to scape or to ram the enemy. But this needs to be done ship by ship, which really reduces the gameplay a lot.

[Syntax]

This superglue sometimes bothers me too - in special try to get a general out of fight if he engaged! - That is 99% not possible without the general die! (I don't know i that is a script, it must be otherwise u get him out at least sometimes...- so if some know that superglue effect its fine and just under no circumstances let the general get involved into fighting activity! ...)

On the "usual" units - I have just have to tell myself over and over again- "its a bit of realism!", when u try to get out of fight a lot of guys die....

This glue effect was already there ahead of the patch 4...

[wulfgar610]

That is 99% not possible without the general die! (I don't know i that is a script,

Probably there is something in the code that is back to front regarding this, so rather than being the last one to "buy the farm" he becomes the first.

[Frederf]

The more I read about historical battle the more I realize that the "commit until death on first contact" is a terrible inadequacy of the TW games. The penalty for disengagement is far too high as movement away from contact means your troops practically throw down their shields and are happily stabbed in the back as if they had broken or shattered. Certainly an uncontrolled panic break contact should be costly but not all disengagements are thus. The initial break order should slowly extract your unit from combat taking a minor minor penalty and if you wish to break in the costly way you could override the careful extraction.