Greek Unit Balancing
Let me just say before I begin that I think this mod is the real saving grace of Rome 2, and is the only real reason I actually play the game over shogun. I would also like to really thank the developers for their incredible work, and wish there was some way I could support them further this mod. However, I recently started a campaign as Epirus, and upon doing some research on how to progress at honga.net I noticed some problems with unit balancing for the greek and successor states.
The first problem I discovered is the high tier unit called 'Basilikoi Peltasti' for the Ptolemai and 'Pheraspides' for Epirus (and also included under other names in other hellenistic factions). The most immediate inconsistency about this unit is that it is listed as having different rolls for each faction: being listed as 'royal peltasts' for the Ptolemai and 'royal swordsmen' for Epirus, and without any significant stat or role change.
I thought it might just be the stats, so I put the units to the test. What I found surprised me even more. Both units have exactly the same abilities which geared towards the classical role of the swordsman (no skirmish etc.), but when they throw their javelins upon charging, both of their ammo only dropped to 87%, meaning they have 7-8 javelin throws in total. That is two to three more that the average javelin armed skirmisher unit, and shows an obvious gearing in that respect towards a skirmishing role.
To further reinforce this idea of the unit being intended for an 'elite skirmishing' role,the ridiculous cost of the unit simply does not match its rather mediocre melee stat line. The Thorakitai Legionarii costs 320 less and beats the unit in every category except base moral, which is further shown to rather ridiculous extents in battle:
For a unit costing more than bodyguard elephants, I would say is a pretty poor performance. What I would suggest to the developers is to fully turn this unit into an 'elite skirmisher' type unit. Firstly by giving it the ability to skirmish, increasing its movement speed, and allowing it to fire like a missile unit. Then I would personally like to see them have an increase in melee attack and charge but traded for some of their defensive capabilities, turning the unit into a strong flanking unit, but that is really up to the developers.
The second problem i discovered was with the general balancing between the legionary type units and the pike units. Pike units traditionally were used due to their essentially impregnable frontal formation when on level ground and in the Macedonian phalanx, even the Romans only daring to attack in order to exploit gaps in the formation caused by skillful maneuvering or the more versatile roman mantiple system. This simply is not the case, with the Thorakiati Legionarii being able to defeat the most elite pike infantry from Epirus in a continued frontal assault, with the pike unit costing 350 more than swordsmen.
From my understanding of the game mechanics, weapon deadliness is the minimum amount of damage done every hit, and weapon initiative is the frequency of the attack, with melee attack the chance to hit and defense the chance to avoid a hit. Therefore, the att/def statline for pike units does not make any sense. With 18a attck (16 while in phalanx) the pike unit will hardly ever hit even medium defense targets, even with the sea of attacks from the initiative. I have witnessed the legionaries being knocked back once or twice, then just walking through all these fruitlessly stabbing pikes to engage in frontal melee. The lack of any weapon deadliness as also a slight problem, making the pike units only really usable as an anvil type unit as they will only actually do damage on a successful hit, in other words, not very often. Furthermore, the very high defense skill (80 while in phalanx) does not actually make any sense, as it only comes into effect when the enemy is attacking the unit itself (hand to hand) which a pike unit in phalanx should never really experience frontally, and if it were to, should be overwhelmed quickly.
The final imbalance I think I found did not only apply to the greek units, but most sword infantry as a whole, and is the pretty much total disregard for high armor in melee due to the over use of the weapon deadliness stat. To the best of my understanding, armor is the ability to reduce the damage done by a melee attack, but weapon deadliness is the min amount of damage done by both a successful or unsuccessful attack, and therefore is unaffected by armor. This enables units with high weapon deadliness to totally slaughter high armor units and was one of the main reasons why roman legionaries were so very bad a few patches ago. Realistically, heavy infantry were really only so effective because of their armor, most enemies attacks would simply not be able to get past the chest armor of the legionaries unless it found a gap or was focused behind a sharp point. An example is hard to find, as most high armor troops also have high deadliness, but it can be seen by the even outcome of both peltasti units from earlier in the post, one having 12 armor more thatn the other and both having high weapon deadliness:
To correct this I would essentially do what meerkatology (who was the first to point this out btw) has done to ALL units instead of just roman ones, namely to decrease weapon deadliness and increase melee attack to compensate, so low armored troops are killed just as fast but high armored ones last longer.
If there is any way I can help any of the developers, just PM me, I love this mod and would really like to see it continued to be developed. Cheers.
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Originally Posted by GatoVolador
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?470432-BunnyPoopCereal-s-Workshop-FTW
