Feedback, 3-4 hours gameplay

[Friar Chris]

I'll try keep each point fairly brief for ease of digestion, but I have some ideas about Roman barracks that I particularly like so that one will be a bit longer, and at the bottom. As always, thank-you all very much for the mod, without FotE I wouldn't be bothering to play Attila TW today as the vanilla game seems overly-simplified and unrewarding to me, but FotE brings it vastly more in-line with my expectations and makes it a more immersive and fundamentally more enjoyable experience already.



Archers and Slingers feel pretty ineffectual.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Due to their fairly mediocre kill-potential combined with their puny range in the last two Total War titles, I struggle to justify the price-tag assigned to them. ~150 upkeep per turn could net some decent medium/heavy melee infantry to fill out the line instead. I don't know how the damage in FotE compares to vanilla, but I think archers and slingers - just like in Rome II - could use a rather large boost to their range. Currently any old infantry unit can dash down the max range of a bowman or slinger in a matter of seconds. I could understand their highly armour-blockable and shield blocked nature if they had 150-200% of the range they currently have in order to facilitate their use as attritional devices, morale-reducers and units to displace enemies off hills and defend walls, but their current setup is particularly poor. Given that I can grab javelins for 47 upkeep per turn, why would I spend 150 to have less effective archers get charged down with doing similar or even less damage with no particular redeeming qualities?

As I understand, by this time in history recurve and composite bows were the norm. Indeed, I'm amazed when people justified the abysmal ranges in Rome II on the bow composition claiming they are but simple hunting bows, as I understand most middle-to-late Roman auxiliary bows were composite war bows in nature with wooden hunting bows reserved purely for training new recruits. I'm not interested in the old slinger vs bow 'which has better range' argument. Both should have a hell of a lot more range in-game, I'm fed up of having to use archers as less effective versions of javelinmen... One can perhaps justify having 'Hunters' with less range as they're re-purposed local hunters without war bows, but then they should also have an accompanying large drop in price and upkeep relative to properly equipped Sagitarii.

Most Cavalry...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

...Seem to have crazily high melee defence. I'm not sure what the rationale is behind this, as when I consider what is said (particularly in DeI but also generally) about cavalry - which is that cavalry are not meant to be good for prolonged combat in close melee, but for mobility, charges and shock, and fast redeployment. Yet we have basic Hunnic Mounted Tribesmen (cheap and plentiful) on 95 defence, ERE Vexillatio Palatina on 121 - others similar and even higher? This seems to give cavalry amazingly good performance in prolonged melee combat, such that I've had heavy spearmen struggle (and lose) against basic Mounted Tribesman because they just can't get any kills on them. What's up with this? I was very happy to see cavalry get appropriate armour in FotE and they already have high health-per-unit relative to infantry; why do they need inflated melee defence as well especially considering that they're cavalry?

Walls and Artillery...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I've not had a chance yet to actually experience a proper siege battle to know if FotE has already changed this, but in vanilla walls are ridiculously easy to knock down, and siege engines accordingly have so little ammunition that I don't want them in an army as they're rather useless beyond the first thirty seconds and take up slots I might need for other units. I'd very much like to see much, much stronger walls but also correspondingly much more ammunition for the artillery that's going up against them. The melee combat pace is blissfully reduced to a better speed in FotE; to go along with this walls should pose more of a problem and a better defence than a 20 second wait at the outset of battle to knock a huge great hole in them. By all means do what was done in DeI, whereby siege artillery had a lot more ammunition but more realistically worse accuracy. Given we can finally fortify any settlement (looks angrily at Rome II) and the new settlement battle mechanics and AI in Attila, it'd be very good to get sieges working better than the non-events they are in vanilla with its overly casual combat pace.

It'd be nice if increased numbers of barricades for most settlements could be considered. 1 Barricade is practically pointless, and they require no equipment to remove but add a good layer of gameplay to the semi-fortified towns that feature in Attila. Perhaps military buildings (barracks and guard tower types) could add +number of barricades in battle as well to their settlement?

Squalor.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Squalor is quite an interesting new system in Attila. I do wonder whether it should be so liberally applied to practically every building chain that ever gets developed beyond Tier I/II, however. It's an added difficulty on top of food and public order and given that we're already dealing with either (or both of) food consumption and public order penalties on many buildings just because they're higher tier, to then add squalor to ascending tiers as yet another penalty is very annoying. I like the concept of squalor and disease, but not how it's implemented as a blanket penalty to any and every development of a building chain. I'd much rather see squalor tied into specific building types which have an authentic reason to worsen public health or living conditions in the local area, and potentially have larger squalor penalties per each of these buildings, but with less of the 'every damned building beyond Tier II causes squalor' approach.

Food rising in Autumn, dropping in Winter.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Why am I playing a people/Empire/tribe with such severe ADHD that they are completely incapable of comprehending that winter comes every year and that there isn't much food to harvest at this time? For some reason, every 4 turns I have to have a big food deficit lumped onto my empire because apparently we're not only so stupendously gluttonous that we eat every bit of surplus before the end of autumn, but all those granaries and storage buildings are seemingly just there for appreciation of the fine architecture and nothing more. Some seasonal effects make sense. Attrition, army movement, integrity - even public order to a degree (the notion that people get angry with the Emperor for not preventing winter from happening is ludicrous to my mind, but I certainly accept the public order value of things like unseasonally bad or good conditions). Having this strange, cyclical food economy is rather baffling. Yes - less food is produced in winter and obviously if you're talking about the collection of crops, that happens overwhelmingly at harvest-time in Autumn. Why are we basing a faction's current supply of food on this though?

Since the dawn of organised civilisation and humanity's settlement into... settlements, we've been storing food, preserving food in a myriad different ways, and growing different crops and animals such that some are harvested and survive at different times of year. And yet by 400 AD, the mighty Byzantines are still huddling together because all that surplus food from the rest of the year was eaten or just thrown away? The food system in Total War is an abstraction - surplus in summer and autumn does not carry forward to winter (and the following spring, of course, as crops don't suddenly all leap forth from the ground as soon as winter is over); it's an unnecessary addition to put this infuriating penalty to food and this pointless boost in Autumn. There is no 'storage and carry forward' system in this abstraction; historically famine in winter was a product of either a poor harvest in the autumn or lack/failure/looting of storage methods and equipment. Since we can't carry forward the surplus regardless of the buildings and the harvest in autumn in Total War, this particular addition to the seasons system is totally out of player control and seems to exist purely to say 'look how cool seasons are, look at how much they affect', without any positive effect on the gameplay. I get the impression in both Rome II and Attila that when mods add these nonsensical food modifiers to individual seasons/turns, they're doing so only for the sake of adding more seasonal effects because they can. Less is more, in this case.

Roman Barrack Types

I like that there is a system by which the camps for Palatini, Comitatenses and Limitanei are distinguished and unique, and tie into the much better non-upgrading unit setup in FotE. Right now though, the only difference really appears to be that they unlock different units for recruitment, despite the historical background and opportunity for diversification in-game. Currently all three cost the same amount of money, use the same food upkeep and provide similar garrisons, while opening up different recruitment options. Personally I'd like to see:

Spoiler for Barrack Types break-down: 

1. Limitanei Buildings: costing the least to build, the least food to upkeep and providing a good size garrison of Limitanei and Levy-style troops to the settlement. +1 public order at all tiers from local security.

Limitanei are widely theorised to be de-mobilised or retired comitatensis troops granted land along the Limes upon which to live and potentially farm or work a trade, in return for regular training, garrison and service on the border of that region or even to be called up to serve in the regional armies. As such, I feel these buildings should offer the player something to reflect this setup: obviously they provide the least expensive and irregular units to the Roman roster, but as the Limitanei were settled along the Limes for border control, garrison and reinforcement purposes, I feel they should give a bigger garrison, albeit of the slightly less capable Limitanei-type troops. These formations require less Imperial funding and input and work their own land when not on duty, so less food upkeep would be highly appropriate as well. With all this, these building types become valuable to the player to place... well, along their Limes! Providing a bolster to the border forces without draining too much food and providing some basic recruitment opportunities to any standing armies in the area.


2. Comitatensis Buildings: costing the most to build, with the highest food upkeep, providing the largest garrison of (comitatensis) troops to the settlement. +1 recruitment capacity more than other barracks due to the large standing army complex involved.

The Comitatenses made up the vast majority of the Roman field armies; Limitanei and Palatini were generally only employed in units detached from their respective responsibilities. Basically as far as I understand, the Comitatenses made up the bulk of the Roman Legions; they were the 'main army', the standing troops of the empires. The Comitatensis barrack buildings should accordingly be the main hubs of recruitment and army organisation - using the largest amount of food to feed the many mouths of the regular legion forces, being the largest stand-alone military complexes and so costing the most to construct, and also providing the largest garrison of troops from the pool of regular soldiers stationed and working within. This offers the player the main recruitment and military hubs for the regular troops of the legions, to be built in recruitment centres and regional military hubs.


3. Palatini Buildings: middling cost to build, with a middling food upkeep, providing the smallest garrison but of good quality palatini troops to the settlement.

Palatini originated from the Imperial Escorts, and for much of their existence were the soldiers under the nominal direct command of the Emperor himself. They were frequently detached and used in field armies alongside Comitatenses, but their heritage and origin was from a separate, senior organisation. In FotE, the most senior and best equipped troops are the Palatini and these are naturally available from the Palatini buildings; but considering that the standing formations of palatini were (for most of the time) as far as I'm aware much smaller than the numerous regional Comitatensis armies, it should make sense that these buildings are smaller, somewhat cheaper and don't provide the same size of standing garrison, but instead provide a handful of high-quality scholae and palatini defenders to bolster the settlement. This offers the player a building chain that is likely to be the rarest type of recruitment ground, often prioritised in larger cities and heartlands where he wishes to recruit higher-quality units, as the unit training and equipment paradigm is the most specialised of the army types available to the Romans. 'Palace Guards' need not only be found around the palace in a sandbox game (and historically became more wide-spread), but the theme of this chain should be for your elite centres, I feel.

A note on all of these: I see that currently, there is overlap with what higher-tier buildings of each chain can recruit. Third-rank Comitatensis buildings get access to multiple Palatini units, while Fourth-rank Limitanei buildings can recruit Equites Catafractarii(!). I understand that over time in the Roman Empires, the lines dividing the different types of troops became more and more blurred as more Limitanei and Palatini were required to bolster the standing armies and due to changes in the nature of these troops and their employment, but I don't think this is a good thing to have in-game. Palatini buildings should building Palatini units, Comitatensis buildings Comitatensis units and Limitanei buildings Limitanei units - it's a game, it's an abstraction of recruitment and it does rather undermine the strategic gameplay if upgrading a building grabs you the options that you would otherwise have to build another building chain for.

The garrisons currently also appear to change instead of grow, and even decrease in some cases (Comitatensis Tier IV - no garrison?!), as these buildings are upgraded. I'd like very much to see the garrison size and make-ups I've theorised above, but currently the garrisons don't seem to make much sense either with regards to the types of unit the buildings provide, or the amounts as the buildings are upgraded but get no extra troops (unless the UI only shows the current level's addition over the previous level?).

[Ahiga]

Appreciate the observations! It looks like we lost a db table in the process of release - I had intended for a system very much like what you described when it comes to the cost and recruitment time of the Roman barracks. I have the table so I will see if I can throw it into an update of FOTE to post here, at least. This is the system I had devised:



The breakdown at the bottom shows the sum total turns needed to reach the tier. Limitanei 2 is 8 turns (3 for the barracks tier 1, 5 for Limitanei 2) and so on. If these values are too high I could divide them across the board by some percentage. Maybe make it so Limitanei Tier 2's sum total is 5 turns (2 for barracks tier 1, 3 for Limit tier 2), Comit tier 2's sum is 8-9 (2 for barracks tier 1, 6-7 for Comit tier 2), and Palatina's tier 2's sum is 13-15 (2 for Tier 1 barracks then 11-13 for Palatina Tier 2).

Conceptually I figure the building times are 'fine - the sum for EB Tier 2 is 9 turns (3+6) which is about the same for the Limitanei and Comitatenses. The sum of EB tier 3 is 18 (3+6+9) and that's in between Limitanei Tier 3 and Comitatenses Tier 3. Palatina's higher level turn rates are much shorter because the initial high barrier raises the sum total - Palatina Tier 3 is 27 turns. If we made it 17 turns (same as Pala Tier 2) it would end up being something in the 30s.

With this system you see that the bleedover (Cataphractarii in Tier 4 Limitanei, for instance) doesn't pay off. It takes you 25 turns to get to Limitanei Tier 4, while it takes you only 23 turns to get to Comitatenses tier 3. And by going with Comitatenses Tier 3 you get better units available. Likewise Palatina Tier 2 gets you units (Aux-Pal Juniors, Aux-Pal Spears) in 17 turns it would take 23 turns for in Comitatenses tier 3.

I gave Cataphractarii to the Limitanei Tier 4 because they did exist in the Limitanei. But I could up the price and recruitment time on Limitanei Tier 4 to really hammer the point home that you do not want to build the Limitanei barracks for Cataphractarii - it would be more cost and time effective to pursue the Comitatenses for that purpose.

If you have a better ratio of turns and costs in mind please do suggest it! I hate numbers, so if someone can come up with a better system I am happy to switch to it. My goal is simply to make sure you have a motivation to build Limitanei, Comitatenses, and palatina barracks and not to only use legios or only use Aux-Pals.

Regarding the cavalry: We'll look into that, definitely not intended.

[Friar Chris]

Interesting stuff in general, though I think a T2 Comitatensis costing as much as a T4 Limitanei is a little extreme; but of course that depends just what benefits (especially in terms of garrison and recruitment slots) it brings. The Palatini I had actually costing less than the Comits mainly because while they might be more elite units, they are organised on a smaller scale and probably providing less garrison and bonus functionality; in my mind it's more of a luxury building to build where and when you specifically want your best troops to recruit, and not for functional purposes like defence or border-protection.

Another observation on the bleed-over to other barrack types, however - it means the recruitment UI is typically even more cluttered the more different classes of units each building unlocks. Obviously it's possible to have one of each barrack in a single province, but generally speaking the player tends to have but 1; and it involves a lot of scrolling! A little part of me also wonders if it makes it too easy for me as a player to be able to build other army-type troops with higher-rank barracks of any army type, simply because I have to manage what I build in each area less and can get hold of the troops I want in more areas in the middle game and afterwards without having to think about different buildings and recruitment areas in my empire, and the costs involved therewith.

[Friar Chris]

Oh and with regards to the high melee defence on cavalry: I must have a bug or a conflict (though I'm only using faction icon replacers afaik!) because I've checked the FotE database against these cavalry and they clearly do not have 90, 120 etc. melee defence in your game files (at least in pack 0).

[Friar Chris]

Update: Can't find a conflict, though I'm seeing shield melee defence value bonuses in FotE of 45, 75 and 90 (!!!) for att_gothic/att_round, att_small and att_round_small respectively. I'm guessing these cavalry are carrying small and round small shields, immediately boosting their defence values up to crazy heights? Most infantry shields such as oval and large round shields are only providing 15-30 bonus!

It would appear that all shield melee defence bonus values have been tripled from the vanilla setup, which sees some infantry shields melee defence bonus go from e.g. +7 to +21 but sees some cavalry shields go from +30 to +90!

[Ahiga]

Update: Can't find a conflict, though I'm seeing shield melee defence value bonuses in FotE of 45, 75 and 90 (!!!) for att_gothic/att_round, att_small and att_round_small respectively. I'm guessing these cavalry are carrying small and round small shields, immediately boosting their defence values up to crazy heights? Most infantry shields such as oval and large round shields are only providing 15-30 bonus!

It would appear that all shield melee defence bonus values have been tripled from the vanilla setup, which sees some infantry shields melee defence bonus go from e.g. +7 to +21 but sees some cavalry shields go from +30 to +90!

I'll let Gunny explain it but bear in mind melee defense =/= armor. Armor will always provide protection, melee defense only in melee (And possibly only from the front/side if it's like the older total war games). Cavalry definitely need less melee defense as it'll let them survive against infantry much too long. I think we'll need to make a separate cavalry armor and cavalry shield tables so that we can make sure cavalry are more fragile than infantry.

[Dresden]

The seasonal food shift is from my inclusion of my Seasons mod. The general idea was that in winter your cities would be using up the food stores, while they would be building them up in harvest time. This may not translate as well as I had hoped to the game.

[Friar Chris]

The seasonal food shift is from my inclusion of my Seasons mod. The general idea was that in winter your cities would be using up the food stores, while they would be building them up in harvest time. This may not translate as well as I had hoped to the game.

Yeah; the issue is that it causes a sudden loss of food upon which your preparation or agricultural state has little-to-no effect; as TW doesn't use any system which takes into account stockpiling or the harvest from earlier in the year, it's just a flat penalty that applies every 4 turns and potentially screws up public order and causes force attrition not because you're failing to produce food or had an unseasonally bad harvest, but because it applies a flat detriment. If the game did take into account the yearly harvest and/or had some sort of storage system the idea would make total sense, but as it stands it just applies a penalty every 4 turns that can't really be prepared against short of over-farming the rest of the year or taking areas out of tax especially for the winter.

I'll let Gunny explain it but bear in mind melee defense =/= armor. Armor will always provide protection, melee defense only in melee (And possibly only from the front/side if it's like the older total war games). Cavalry definitely need less melee defense as it'll let them survive against infantry much too long. I think we'll need to make a separate cavalry armor and cavalry shield tables so that we can make sure cavalry are more fragile than infantry.

Well the increase from vanilla is disproportionate; while melee defence is higher across the board, this means the average decent infantryman might have, say, 30-50 melee defence, but even cheap tribesman cavalry are running around with 90+ melee defence, meaning that when they're trapped or committed to a long melee fight, they actually outfight infantry because they're so hard to get a hit on. I get the idea of tripling the infantry-predominant shields (which varied between around 7 and 15 melee defence) to slow down the gameplay, but applying the same tripling to the cavalry-predominant shields has had a huge effect as they were already around 20-30, meaning they've shot up to crazy melee defences like 90+. Cavalry have already had their armour buffed in FotE (or rather, they actually *have* armour now!), so it's a double-whammy which makes many cavalry units into unstoppable tanks.

I think part of what I've been finding with slingers and archers, incidentally, is particularly in testing against cavalry: they have less damage (halved!!) and less AP damage than vanilla (oh and more spread), meanwhile cavalry armour (and possibly health) has increased a lot in FotE. Result is that cavalry other than unarmoured scouts and skirmishers are often nearly immune to arrows, while archers are generally nerfed to hell anyway.

[Friar Chris]

Another thing I found: whatever shield it is that Steppe Levy and Hunnic Spears use, it bestows them with +75 armour! Result is Steppe Levies and Hunnic Spears with 79 armour each?!

Cheap Steppe crap infantry have better armour than the majority of Roman heavy infantry and cavalry... Other Hunnic units (and some other faction units) have shields which give them +45 armour, which is nearly as bad in some cases.



Some crazy things going on with the shield values at the moment...

[juanplay]

Here is a video i made of a custom battle between WRE and the Huns. Armies are a combination of tier 2 and tier 3 troops (Army Composition is at the end of the video), with the Hun one being your normal late stack minus heavy onagers (i replaced them with Hunnic tier 3 lancers, because those things can take down to 250 kills each). The roman army im using would most likely be extremely expensive to maintain for even someone with a good economy, so there would only be one or two such armies at any given time. I wanted to make the video, to hightlight the fact that despite my decisive victory, some Huns Foot units that have better stats than the most elite roman units (For example, Herculiani vs Elite Uar Warriors) and the fact that Huns archer units cause huge damage to armoured roman units even in testudo. Video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJQ_...ature=youtu.be

[Dresden]

The battle system is definitely in its infancy so all of the feedback is highly appreciated. 'Gunny is currently on break I believe, but when he surfaces we will be addressing many of these issues with the next update.

[shawn858]

I know the answer is probably no, but is this mod compatible with the warriors of faith battle mod?

[Alexander Iulianus Verus]

Is there any work I could do in implementing these changes? I'd need access to the information from the databases and such. I know how to properly edit tables as I've done it myself. I'm looking to sink in tons of hours of gameplay and would prefer to do it in a version that is most up to date.

[RollingWave]

I'm not sure if this was changed by FOTE or some other mod I installed, but in my games now I can't liberate (at places you can normally liberate, like Macedonia etc.) maybe it was the improved CAI? hmmm.

But FOTE + improved CAI is hard as hell, I can't believe I struggled so hard with my Franks campaign and still lost by like 425 AD (i had to migrate... TWICE. the second time blowing up two entire province, and STILL lost.)

[Junaidi83 de Bodemloze]

Hmm interesting