Divide et Impera (Divide & Rule) - Main Thread

[PumkinKing]

Hey Selea

Well, you never respond to me (I don't know how you respond to anyone---YOU ARE A BEAST! LOL) but I just wanted to throw my 2 cents in.
I love the direction you are taking the mod----I totally agree about how units route and they would sometimes just route cause they did not want to fight. My concern is that this is a game and maybe trying to get the units to react in a absolute realistic way might be reaching a bit too far. The battles are becoming either extremely short or very long with almost no casualties. I like the very long battles! LOL

So, I tested out 5 different custom battles and 6 battles from my lets play and here is just a what I saw---DON'T GET MAD LOL!

Calvary is just to powerful----not all of them, but most. What I mean by this is instead of flanking and doing a charge to shock troops, I saw them in all the battles fighting in prolonged melee and taking almost 0 casualties and crushing my legions. Now, this would be realistic if I had inexperienced troops, however, in my campaign I had maxed out troops that where just decimated in long prolonged battles with cav. That is the first thing I saw, next was the routing.

So, I love the idea of men "Freaking out" and routing, but it is just so random and not really working. In one battle, Rome vs North Carthago, it lasted 20 secs as the whole North Carthago army just routed. Battle over. In another battle, my very experienced troops went up against newly recruited Hoplites from North Carthago, it did not go well for me LOL. In the battle I lost a total of 89 men and all my lines broke. The battle lasted a good 9 mins, but against the Hoplites and with me flanking, they took 8 casualties. I have seen this a couple times where Hoplites take 0 casualties. Not sure if that is just a bug or they are buffed or something. Just thought I share.

So, I know you have been having a debate as far as how many casualties army's sustained in battle, and all I can say is both sides are correct. I was a classical history major and my later studies took me specifically into the Roman history. Selea, you are correct in the fact that in many battles there were very few casualties, however, by the time of the Marius' Reforms, this simply was not the case. The battles Rome fought from this time period became extremely bloody for many reasons (Better weapons, tactics, and the evolving nature of warfare). The Marius' Reforms came about just for this reason, as Rome lost a huge battle against the "Barbarians" with 70% casualties. Now, many deaths came about when units would break and turn their back, but the fact remains they took serious losses. Were there battles that sustained very few casualties? Sure, sometime one army started a battle and saw it was crap, and just simply bugged out.

Now, I have 0 modding experience and don't know how you guys do this stuff, but this seems like a huge task on making units route realistically, based on fear of the opponent. From what I have seen it just is not working correctly and having the opposite affect or realism. One of my campaign battle I faced level one spearman while suffering 1-2% casualties. All my men just gave up.I do let's play, and for the first time I had to stop one of my videos and redo a save. I am all about reducing the kill rate, I hate killing 4000 men in 6 min and I totally support where you are going with this, but as you can see there needs to be some tweaks.

Selea, all I have to say is I really applaud what you do and I am just blown away with what you have done so far. Simply amazing. So, please don't take this post as a negative I just want to give you as much info as I can so you can make the best mod out there. Like I said before, I do let's play videos and brag about your mod and how amazing it is. I have been with you since day one of AGA, and have no plans on leaving. If you want, I can send you videos of the battle bugs, as I record all my gameplay. Anything to help. Thanks for all the hard work!

Oh, please excuse grammar on this post, I am typing on my phone. LOL

Yeah i know how you feel it seems he more likes to respond to negative criticism (Joke)

New Status report:

Still playing suebi, war against a celtic tribe is holds now some rounds, because not all armies are destroyed in the frist round of war and the gates of their cities are open.

The computer opponent is abit stupid at a Fort defense battles, however i think this lies on the game itself.

I'm still happy with the mod and cant wait for your next updates.

[wrcromartie]

@Selea, I think that the #1 thing that helps "square" historic casualty reports with fun Total War mechanics is accepting in the mind that Total War casualties include wounded troops. As soon we take that into our minds, things seem to click much easier and it suddenly makes sense to have more casualties. Thus the game "looks" right, with units fighting and dying, and we also get something very much approaching historical accuracy.

You bring up a great point about in-game units having HP. While we could have a lengthy discussion about exactly what HP means in different video games, I think for your mod in Total War, we should think that:

HP includes:
"Near Miss" hits (like a glancing blow)
Hits absorbed by shield, which damage the shield
Hits absorbed by armor, which damage the armor
Flesh wounds

I definitely don't think we should think about HP as including things like broken bones or losing an arm. In reality, if I break a leg or even get wounded from an arrow to the knee, I'm pretty much out of the fight. Even if I get a concussion from a slinger rock, I'm of little use while hobbling along & unable to keep formation. In that case, I'd probably just have to sit down behind the lines and see what kind of battlefield surgery I'm going to get (hopefully there's some booze left!)

So IMO, when we have casualties in a Rome 2 battle, some unknown % of them are dead and some unknown % of them are wounded. Just like on the battlefield, it is tough to really tell who is going to recover until the dust has settled.

So maybe one thing you might consider is to lower HP across the board. As you have already lowered the killing rate due to increased melee defense, armor, lowered melee attack, etc. this might result in more "even" performance. If you lowered HP you could probably even decrease the kill rate further & see an even balance.

Units hit from behind wouldn't seem like they are oddly tougher to kill than units hit in the front. This would also definitely help make units which are routing die faster.

Here's how I think kill speed morale should work, as per the perspective of the troops fighting:

Unit engaged 1v1 frontally, fighting an equal unit - "Things are going fine, we can hold this line. We'll be able to keep this up until one of us breaks" - units fight with lowest kill speed, units would waver at around 65% health, unless there are other modifiers in play like a commander unit or some difference in fatigue.

Unit engaged 1v1 frontally, fighting a superior unit - "This isn't going to end well, but we can keep this up until we're tired" - units fight, weaker unit gets killed around 1.5-2x the rate of the stronger unit, weaker unit wavers when tired or at ~70% health

Unit pinned + flanked 2v1 - "This is very bad, we are getting slaughtered on our flank side. We need support immediately or we're out of here." - if we have unit A being pinned from the front by B, and flanked by C -> B unit has normal kill rate to A; the flanking C unit has x3-x5 kill rate to A. Flanked unit A wavers at 75-85% health depending on how the rest of the fight is going. A commander will have a few moments to try to adjust this situation, but the unit which is pinned + flanked is going to have severe losses during that time.

Unit pinned + flanked with cavalry - "Holy $hit, what the f### just happened? Where is the standard bearer? I'm out of here!" - massive & immediate casualties should be created by the cavalry charge, accompanied by a huge morale shock. Shocked unit may waver immediately at 100% health, but a full charge itself should cause at least 10% casualties, so in practice the unit won't be able to rout before it experiences some deaths.

And again - great job being responsive to the community and allowing us to try to help you make the best Rome 2 mod possible.

PS please note I haven't had a chance to try your new edits since v0.40, so I'm responding to an older build. It sounds like you've already reared it back a little, so please just take my posts for constructive feedback related to general battle mechanics.

[Moody]

Heres how the Rome 2 combat system works.

in a Melee attack skill is used to determine if a soldier hits, Defence skill determines if a soldier avoids been hit.

under ranged fire a hit can be negated by a shield if the shot comes from the left or front (different shield have a higher or lesser chance).

If hit then a certain amount of damage will be AP which will be directly removed from the defenders HP, the rest of the damage will be mitigated by armour.

Armour mitigation works as a random value so it is easier to explain it with an example.

a Soldier with 50 HP and 80 armour is hit by a Gladius with 30 damage of which 5 is AP.

the AP damage is applied reducing him to 45 HP, he then takes a random number between 0 and 80 as the amount his armour mitigates.

If he gets higher than the remaining damage he takes no further damage.

So if he gets 20 then the takes an addition 5 damage (25 - 20) bringing him to 40 HP remaining, if he gets 30 then he only takes the 5 original AP and sits at 45 HP.

It is important to understand that this happens at the Soldier level not on a Unit level - Units do not have HP the soldiers within them do.

In the case of Charging - the charge value adds to the damage (I cant remember if its random amount or flat increase).

This is the root of the problem and it is a Mechanical issue with Rome 2 - high armour units can soak up a lot of damage if they get lucky.

If you see a unit devastating low armour units on a charge but not high armour units - this is the problem and it isnt easy to get around - too high a charge value and the unit will utterly destroy low armour units...

[wrcromartie]

@Moody - great post. Per your comment, I am revising my post references to "Unit" and changing to "Soldier" as I was intending to refer to the individual soldiers.

[michaelpap]

Detroit Jones - can i ask on what battle difficulty you were playing?
also Selea can you advise what y think is the best difficulty setting?

many thanks in advance for your answers!

[Detroit Jones]

Detroit Jones - can i ask on what battle difficulty you were playing?
also Selea can you advise what y think is the best difficulty setting?

many thanks in advance for your answers!

Hard battle difficulty, and each unit with 2-6 experience chevrons, latest Divide Et Impera update.

[Narcissus]

Hi Selea.
Firstly, great job you guys are doing! This game really need people like you to take it to the next level.
I have a question regarding recruitment of units; what is your philosophy concerning recruit times? If one year is divided into four turns (each turn being 3 months) I think it would make sense (be realistic) that the less powerful/trained units would take maybe 1 turn to recruit, and that the recruiting time increased gradually maybe up to 3 or 4 turns for veteran units, siege weapons, ships etc. I dont know much about history when it comes to training armies in the olden days, but I am all for making this mod realistic. I think having different recruitment times will also force the player to plan better before starting a military campaign. Just a thought
Keep up the good work

[rtwfreak]

two part mod will never download it. If you can't put everything into one download then don't put it at all. Leaves too much room for errors like I got with Medieval total war two. Had to take it back because of a bad disc my rom wouldn't read. Finally got a good one. I don't care how many good replies you've gotten this is a mess.

[Epic28]

two part mod will never download it. If you can't put everything into one download then don't put it at all. Leaves too much room for errors like I got with Medieval total war two. Had to take it back because of a bad disc my rom wouldn't read. Finally got a good one. I don't care how many good replies you've gotten this is a mess.

It is a two part mod because Steam Workshop only allows a 200MB file upload. Considering Med 2 didn't utilize Steam, it is safe to say you don't know what you're talking about "leaving too much room for errors". This is a mod. Not disc based software.

[xernoxis]

two part mod will never download it. If you can't put everything into one download then don't put it at all. Leaves too much room for errors like I got with Medieval total war two. Had to take it back because of a bad disc my rom wouldn't read. Finally got a good one. I don't care how many good replies you've gotten this is a mess.

If you download from TWC it's just one file.

[PumkinKing]

two part mod will never download it. If you can't put everything into one download then don't put it at all. Leaves too much room for errors like I got with Medieval total war two. Had to take it back because of a bad disc my rom wouldn't read. Finally got a good one. I don't care how many good replies you've gotten this is a mess.

If you want only one data then take the manual installation method.

[Tabun]

First of all. Nice mod, most of it. I've tried reading alot of the comments to see if there were anything regarding my question but couldn't see any similiar.
So... I started a new campaign with Egypt and I'm using the Galatian? Warriors that came with this mod, I think. Funny thing is that they start routing after losing 10 men? The "Citizen Cavalry" for egypt does the same thing. Routs with very very few loses. Something with the this mod or might it be another mod doing this?

Im currently running DEI, Dresdens trait mod and G.E.M.

[Selea]

Divide et Impera 0.4c:
http://www.mediafire.com/?n8404nz8fa271f4

- Made some more tweaks on morale for better behavior
- Tweaked morale penalties on javelins that could cause wrong behavior in certain circumstances (as for example if attacked by a troop and then your own javelins hitting your own units, causing morale to go too low and making rout units even when they wouldn't normally do)
- Increased damage done on the flank and rear
- Tweaked some units strength
- Update on texture pack

[Mephisto-X]

At first: Great job, the units look awesome and the tactical depth of the battles is awesome, too.
But I have to say that I am one of the guys who likes your "old" battle mechanics (higher casualties, less routing units) more. The reason for this: the campaign! It's pretty hard to destroy an enemy army if their soldiers always run away! And next turn you have to fight against this army again...and again and again and again....and than the Ai sents a 2. army and your units will run away...

[WARLUOK]

At first: Great job, the units look awesome and the tactical depth of the battles is awesome, too.
But I have to say that I am one of the guys who likes your "old" battle mechanics (higher casualties, less routing units) more. The reason for this: the campaign! It's pretty hard to destroy an enemy army if their soldiers always run away! And next turn you have to fight against this army again...and again and again and again....and than the Ai sents a 2. army and your units will run away...

+

[Selea]

The reason for this: the campaign! It's pretty hard to destroy an enemy army if their soldiers always run away! And next turn you have to fight against this army again...and again and again and again....and than the Ai sents a 2. army and your units will run away...

Doesn't this increase the difficulty of the campaign? People always complain that the campaign is too easy...

Apart this: also in this case the behavior is realistic because battles were a huge issue at the time, sometimes lasting for years with back and forth between armies.

[PumkinKing]

After a few more test i still have to say, that i dont know what the problem of some people is.
Not 10 minutes ago i fought with 3000(389 casualities) Germans against 4400(1954 cas.) celts.
They attacked me from the front where i had spearbrothers with shieldwall(so they had not a high killrate), behind them skirmishers wich had perfect field to shoot, because i let some space between the spear brothers.
They fought really hard and tried to flank me with cav.. After i destroyed their cav with mine i attacked them from behind and they began to panic and flee, wich is completly realistic. Also my longbow hunter killed 170 men, so the damage with bows/ distance weapons is completly ok.

All in all i have to say keep up the good work modding team

My previous post(without quotes and pics.):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

@Selea
hey selea i think you are mostly right,

many people are probably just used to the old game mechanics that should you understand. I think the new loss mechanisms are completely realistic.
If 2 Polis declared war on eachother, they have not fought each other millions of men and the armies were not only fearless fighters (front and rear battle Experienced men and inexperienced in the middle). If two phalanxes are mutually marches, that was an ever lasting battle and it cost lots of energy. However, one should not forget the different warfare tactics from time and locations.
Many are simply used to destroy the army of the enemy and then take the city. Now its more a war then ever before(Imagine in ancient times, armies would have almost completely wiped out every time they battle, that would be both uneconomical and impossible). In addition you lose not always all troops and they can get experienced troops. The experience of professional soldiers and veterans should be very important.(Your armys are much more personal)
Maybe now is also an opportunity to rethink that armies are not always destroyed and maybe you could increase the recruitment time again ?

ED I: I think when now the CAI would handle this features perfect War with every nation would be a greater gameexperience.

@Meneros



Awesome work, keep it up. I really like how you now can see the influence of the roman culutre

I hope it will not stop at the mediterannen and eastern factions?!

[WARLUOK]

+

[Sir_Pee_Alot]

Hi guys i must say i love how this is going. the only thing is that you need alot more babysit your units since they run away alot more and you cant destroy big army,s after a long battle but its a minor thing what can be tweaked maybe

[Épaminondas The "Oblique"]

Updated on Steam Workshop. Back to developping more units to add. Don't hesitate to report (but no insults like we got on SW please).