Whats the Devs plans after the recent Patch 14 release of Rome 2?

**Alu10** · July 31, 2014, 11:54 AM

Hey. To Dresden and all other Devs of DeI. I heard alot good from the new Patch 14 of Rome 2, making the Battle AI and Siege AI work properly. My thought is, you slowly moved away from settlement battles when you made the AI sally forth every single time (except for port settlements). Will you test out the settlement battles and if you enjoy them will you revert that mechanic? When will DeI be optimized with the recent patch? You are doing a great job.

**Dresden** · July 31, 2014, 12:26 PM

The reason we have minor settlements sallying out is that our larger units sizes have issues when navigating the little buildings in those areas. You still should get normal sieges with walled settlements.

**Alu10** · July 31, 2014, 05:52 PM

i noticed that they opened the yards for units in small settlements. dont know if DeI has all patch 14 features in it. i think, unless the attacking force is equal or lower to the enemy force, it should be a open field battle, but when the attacker is stronger, it should be settlement battle. Im tired of all time the same open field battle. it is fun to play those battles (at least for me), from time to time. me and my 650 hours of rome 2

**Cope** · July 31, 2014, 10:51 PM

Originally Posted by Alu10

i noticed that they opened the yards for units in small settlements. dont know if DeI has all patch 14 features in it. i think, unless the attacking force is equal or lower to the enemy force, it should be a open field battle, but when the attacker is stronger, it should be settlement battle. Im tired of all time the same open field battle. it is fun to play those battles (at least for me), from time to time. me and my 650 hours of rome 2

You would not be saying this if you were playing a maritime style game, since the AI does not sally out of coastal settlements, so every single one of them takes place in the town. In other words if you are spending a lot of time fighting around the Mediterranean, you'll end up playing the same boring settlement maps over and over and over and over again.

The reason for this is because CA totally messed up the design. Here is why.

- The only reason they gave us 'minor (wall-less) settlement battles' is because they were too incompetent to code a working siege AI on release, so they had no choice. Ergo they were badly thought out from the start.
- Part of this bad design was disabling the player from building walls as part of a covert attempt to reduce the number of walled siege battles - which they knew were not working.
- They should have made all siege/minor settlement (ms) maps bigger.
- They should have made more ms maps in general. The lack of variety is staggering.
- They should have made it possible for the AI to sally out of coastal settlements: I have no idea why they haven't done this. Then you could have the chance of the AI sallying out set at 50 or 60% so you'd get an even spread of open field/ms battles at all times, not just huge gluts of open field or ms battles depending on your campaign map location.
- They should never have made so many 'coastal' settlements in the first place: the system of building independent ports, like in Empire/Napoleon was much, much better.
- They should have given ms small walls and towers so they would look cooler, be more realistic and offer a challenge greater than painfully trying to micromanage your soldiers through small streets.

There are plenty of more things they got wrong, but these were the main ones I could think of. The point is, its not DeI's fault about the ms battles. They put in the 80% to counter balance the impossibility of the AI sallying out of coastal settlement battles.