Public Beta Test - 1.2.3f - Battle Stat Overhaul, CAI Overhaul and New Traits System (Updated Dec 18)

[Dresden]

one more question! how do i revert seleucid as empire with PFM? it's in lua_script or DB?

culture_subculture_government_types table. Find the rom_seleucid entries and change the checkbox to empire instead of monarchy. Will only affect new games.

Should bug report about this thread be addressed here or in bug report thread?
Unique Odryson library (last upgrade) does not have intellectual progression trait like previous upgrades.

Yes please use this thread for reports and thanks!

[Andrew1994]

yesterday i installed the beta and battles seemed good but a bit weird
i played 2 battles both i as romans and another person controlling some barbarian faction
i was outnumbered in the first battle i managed to win but i nearly lost the whole legion while the enemies were pretty much underarmoured in most cases.principes did good triari absolutely did great hastati routed to fast facing barbarian shortsword units.
cavarly gave me victory in the end although it seemed a bit different from pre beta
also cretan archers didnt have the kills i expected them to have .70=90 pro unit while firing at low armored foes
the second battle it was a 2vs 2 so i controlled 2 legion but still i had more losses than expected from militia units.hastati for a reason underperform when facing lighter but more mobile units.i had 4k kills while recieving 2k casualties mostly infantry

feedback about missile units:numidian archers having fired almost all arrows while taking 5 kills
the target was appulian heavy inf which at that time they had 80 armour
the weird thing is that the volleyed them from behind(!!) for 5 or 6 times and the got one man down

In another campaing however pikes work better doing kills but also recieving and if flanked pikes are doomed which is historically acurate.light infantry did wonders (more of medium infantry,thracians aor to be exact) cavarly also massed many hundred kill but missile where one more time mhe.and by misiles i mean 1 unit of cretans 2 rhodians and 2 dart slingers.they got aproximately 60-100 kill while agrianian axemen got like 300

I dont say i dont like the new contex.it has many potencial.i just try to give some feedback to make it better and more balanced

[Dresden]

Thanks, keep the feedback coming guys we appreciate it! It will help us further balance and update the new system since there are a lot of changes.

[Ptolemaios Soter]

Higher importance of armor and experience, bigger difference between elite and levy troops, between light and heavy troops, and the decreased ability for archers to do much of anything against heavily armored opponents. Those are all some gameplay changes that will affect different folks differently. If you relied on archers a lot, then you may be disappointed. Personally, I find that it places more emphasis on a heavy infantry mainline with light infantry flanking troops. That's exactly I feel it should be!

[Ivan_Moscavich]

Higher importance of armor and experience, bigger difference between elite and levy troops, between light and heavy troops, and the decreased ability for archers to do much of anything against heavily armored opponents. Those are all some gameplay changes that will affect different folks differently. If you relied on archers a lot, then you may be disappointed. Personally, I find that it places more emphasis on a heavy infantry mainline with light infantry flanking troops. That's exactly I feel it should be!

For Rome and Greece, yes that style fighting does make sense. most eastern units and tactics however rely on light Range units and other such tactics.

[Ptolemaios Soter]

Maybe increase the armor penetration of composit bows then? Given that most early and mid game units in the east are low armor, that shouldn’t affect regular combat too much, but would make them competitive against Roman and Hellenic units as well as late-gate Easterners.

On the other hand, Rome didn’t really struggle against Parthian archers except to the extent that morale broke. It was the heavy cavalry charges and poor command decisions that caused most losses. Cretans are a personal pet peeve of mine that I’m glad to see addressed by this pack. They were and should be great archers, but shouldn’t be able to decimate elite infantry - especially from the front and didn’t have elite eastern composit bows. I just did some testing with them and results frontally against Carthaginian Sacred Band (early) were 68 kills before beta and 7 kills after beta. (Late) were 62 and 3 respectively.

From a historical perspective, I think archers being useless against heavy infantry is great! If gameplay balance necessitates a change, then maybe the AP can be tweaked.

[lequintal69]

New combat system seems OK to me so far! As said above, armor plays a greater role. Cav charge seems a bit stronger, but weaker in melee (this is great). Pikes roughly the same.

Just a few downsides:
1/n=Normal phalanxes seemed a bit op to me with beta. What do you guys think?
2/The new speed design, I'm not sure about. As many noted, its kinda annoying not beeing able to run with heavier units. I mean its not like they are in full gothik plate. Also it takes AGES to cover the battlefield to even get started (if you are using Larger battlefield submod like me, you are prob gonna suicide)
Also, values seem weird for some units, meldan peltasts with decent armor and a shield to carry have 4 speed, while several heavy archers have 2 and thus cant even run, which is terrible for ranged units
Lastly, there is no 7 speed anymore for cav units, and every mid range/heavy cav is at 8, thus no difference is made anymore between a full mailed horse cataphract and a average armored heavy cav with no armor on his horse.
Imo, it was better when cav speed ranged from 7 to 10 (could even extend it)

[KAM 2150]

Just to make sure, I was talking about the "Rapid Advance" ability light Hoplites had in vanilla Rome 2.

Issue with that is how AI uses it, mostly when it is walking towards the player so it gets tired before combat starts and is unable to use it later when it would actually benefit it. I have other idea about it that will better reflect troops training and commander ability (like Caesar legions being much better at fast maneuvers compared to Pompey forces, despite being made of similar type of troops).

Kam, the Indian macemen have slightly higher stats than guild warriors but now use the same pop (2) so I don't think they are distinct enough. I would suggest making them much better than guild warriors as shock infantry but bringing back to pop 1 to avoid spam. This way they can have their own niche rather than just taking over the guild warriors role making them (the guild warriors) useless.

About the mercenaries... Is replenishment also in the startpos? If not zeroing that for elephant could be a workaround

I will see what I can do.

Hi Kam, I looked through this thread and your Experimental Combat System thread and didn't notice anywhere that really explained how DeI and the pack changes the mechanics for stuff like this. For example, from my understanding of base Rome 2, there is a base hit chance (i think 40%?, there is so much conflicting info moving around the internet), and then a unit's hit chance is based on this, plus the melee attack bonus of the attacking unit, subtracted by the melee defense of the defending unit. For example, a unit with 30 melee attack vs a unit with 40 melee defense would have a 30% chance to hit.

Obviously, with the re-worked melee attack and melee defense values from this test/your pack, I assume there is a different system going on in the background, as a high tier unit vs a low tier unit would barely gain any %chance to hit with the old system. Is there a thread out there detailing these changes overall? By that, I mean things like the re-worked hit chance calculations, unit hp values relative to weapon damage, how long charge bonuses last in DeI, etc. If you or anyone else knows about it, I would really appreciate it! (I did try to use the search function, but the closest thread I found stated that something like this didn't exist at the time, (from ~9 months ago)

Vanilla combat values have no use as I only work on my custom values so for example charge bonus lasts for only 10 seconds and minimum hit chance is 1%. In base game hit chance is broken as after certain amount of defence, all units will still score at least 15% or more, making all low attack units equally good versus heavy units anyway. Overall RNG system in this game works…odd, sort of like infamous X-Com 96% accurate shot will mist 3/5 times But in this case it works in our favor as I would expect to be no difference between a unit with 4 and 5 attack, while there actually is, at least around the system I’ve made. If you want to take a look at specific, best is to just open this file and look through the tables.

Changing startpos entries is a real chore, have a good time with it. [IMG]file:///C:\Users\Stefan\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif[/IMG]

Question: what I never liked with the projectiles is the high range of javelins, really unrealistic under battlefield conditions, and not in relation to the range of arrows. Is it, with the new stat overhaul still official view that it is needed for the AI units to work properly? (I always changed it to lower ranges and felt no negative results from it in battles on the side of the AI, but maybe I was deluding myself)

The issue is still here and will always be here as it is coded into BAI. With stuff like a range of 60 you can even notice own units having problems with targeting enemy under specific angle.

I know this is a beta and should not be treated like the full release but when I watch units casually walk into a pike phalanx and start sword fighting with the front row it does worry me quite a bit. In the non-beta system they would keep enemies at a distance by stabbing with their pikes unless sheer weight of numbers or something else disrupting the phalanx allowed them to get close. In the beta they cant only just walk right up the the soldiers ignoring the pikes, I have seen entire enemy hoplite phalanxes push through a 5 man deep pike phalanx and out the other side before turning around and rear attacking the pike unit. Microing the pikes to try and stop it did nothing :S

I like the differences in unit speed but other than that I dont really see any improvements hence my question Ivan luckily answered. What has been built so far is great and improving it will be an enormous challenge!

EDIT: I of course dont use anything that could cause mod conflicts should that come to mind

I actually made pikes hold enemies at a distance in this pack as it did not work that way in normal DeI J Enemy hoplites/pikes walking through own units is also made less noticeable with this pack as they now need to at least push through instead of casually walking through without stopping. Sadly AI rotating pikes/hoplites will never be fixed because only CA can fix it. I am surprised people only report it now while we had even threads made by people about the issue for past few years. I see it in almost all battles for all these past years of working on the mod.

Admittedly i only tried it for a few hours but from what i saw i wasn't a huge fan (i know it's just a beta);

- Cavalry were routing when charging the rear of spearmen

- Heavy infantry (~~2.5x cost of light infantry) were easily routing in a short amount of time 3 units of light infantry (i appreciate they should win, but it's a bit crazy when they only take 10 casualties or so and rout 3 units). By light infantry i mean regular, low armour barbarian spear units

- In the same vein, i think armour may have been buffed slightly too much, light infantry just seems useless in this build. I will play more to try it, but from what i've seen they've taken a huge nerf (they were already pretty weak)

- Heavy infantry seems to be able to traverse the map at almost the same speed as light infantry now

Appreciate this is just a beta and KAM works really hard, just some minor thoughts/disagreements i had with the balance changes, but please keep up the good work man we really do appreciate it [IMG]file:///C:\Users\Stefan\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image002.gif[/IMG]

-You did not provide any info, from all I can know, it could have been a light horse unit down to 20 out of 120 men.
-Again, no info on what units we are talking about

-I still call BS on that heavy infantry speed report as it is not possible until you provide video proof. Especially that this pack makes difference between them larger than it was before. It not possible ; P If there is an real issue, I need more info because with the way it works, that is not possible.

Last night I had a strange battle. I was besieged in a minor town. I set up my defenses, phalanx front, archers to the rear, siege defense structures along the objective entry paths of the town. The enemy forces approached the town and attacked the main path to their front. Only one archer unit bothered to flank to another path and was quickly routed. The rest of the large enemy force marched right up to my main line and didn't attack. They just sat there while their archer units peppered me. Even after I took out all of their archer units, the melee forces (spear and assault infantry) just sat there not attacking. The only unit that attacked my front line was their horse archer general after he expended his ammo. He charged my stakes and the phalanx took care of him. At least 12 units of good melee troops never attacked. I wore them down with my archers and one by one they routed.

I don't believe I have ever seen a battle like this in all my years of playing DEI.

That is sadly issue created in a patch or two ago by CA when they reworked siege AI. In first patch they introduced it before releasing hotfix, AI was even charging from walled city and just walking to other end of the map, ignoring that you are attacking their units xD

yesterday i installed the beta and battles seemed good but a bit weird
i played 2 battles both i as romans and another person controlling some barbarian faction
i was outnumbered in the first battle i managed to win but i nearly lost the whole legion while the enemies were pretty much underarmoured in most cases.principes did good triari absolutely did great hastati routed to fast facing barbarian shortsword units.
cavarly gave me victory in the end although it seemed a bit different from pre beta
also cretan archers didnt have the kills i expected them to have .70=90 pro unit while firing at low armored foes
the second battle it was a 2vs 2 so i controlled 2 legion but still i had more losses than expected from militia units.hastati for a reason underperform when facing lighter but more mobile units.i had 4k kills while recieving 2k casualties mostly infantry

feedback about missile units:numidian archers having fired almost all arrows while taking 5 kills
the target was appulian heavy inf which at that time they had 80 armour
the weird thing is that the volleyed them from behind(!!) for 5 or 6 times and the got one man down

In another campaing however pikes work better doing kills but also recieving and if flanked pikes are doomed which is historically acurate.light infantry did wonders (more of medium infantry,thracians aor to be exact) cavarly also massed many hundred kill but missile where one more time mhe.and by misiles i mean 1 unit of cretans 2 rhodians and 2 dart slingers.they got aproximately 60-100 kill while agrianian axemen got like 300

I dont say i dont like the new contex.it has many potencial.i just try to give some feedback to make it better and more balanced

Great, thanks for the report! It is closer to what I had in my reports, while I saw people stating exact opposite in this report and not having much casualties from fighting lighter troops or not having any significant casualties at all.

Anyway thanks for the feedback, I will be working on some changes based on all reports over next few days J

New combat system seems OK to me so far! As said above, armor plays a greater role. Cav charge seems a bit stronger, but weaker in melee (this is great). Pikes roughly the same.

Just a few downsides:
1/n=Normal phalanxes seemed a bit op to me with beta. What do you guys think?
2/The new speed design, I'm not sure about. As many noted, its kinda annoying not beeing able to run with heavier units. I mean its not like they are in full gothik plate. Also it takes AGES to cover the battlefield to even get started (if you are using Larger battlefield submod like me, you are prob gonna suicide)
Also, values seem weird for some units, meldan peltasts with decent armor and a shield to carry have 4 speed, while several heavy archers have 2 and thus cant even run, which is terrible for ranged units
Lastly, there is no 7 speed anymore for cav units, and every mid range/heavy cav is at 8, thus no difference is made anymore between a full mailed horse cataphract and a average armored heavy cav with no armor on his horse.
Imo, it was better when cav speed ranged from 7 to 10 (could even extend it)

Many units do not have their stats in place so I would like to have specific units written down like in your post but I can assure you, they are not made due to conscious decision, rather due to how formulas calculates stats. Easy to fix.

Change in cavalry speed was to combat base game bugs and AI issue. Basically I never had problems with defeating AI cav because for some reason AI loves to pull own cav out of frontal 1v1 combat, this leads your unit to trigger charge bonus, running down elite enemy cav units from 90/100 guys to 20/100 guys in few seconds. That is why I made all medium/heavy cav to have speed of 8 and charge speed of 7.5, meaning that cavalry can pull away from combat with other cav (although issues still happens, it is not as big). Thanks to that I see much more action from AI cav compared to varied cav speed. In Rome 1 and Med 2 all units had only regular or fast speed and it worked perfectly for balance.

[CadetNewb]

If you guys have the time, could you look at the Indian and Armored Indian elephants in Baktria? I don't know if it's an oversight, but the armored variety lose health, and have 430 instead of 530.

[servent9]

culture_subculture_government_types table. Find the rom_seleucid entries and change the checkbox to empire instead of monarchy. Will only affect new games.

Yes please use this thread for reports and thanks!

thank u

now i add emp_parthia as shahanshah.

and rom_ptolemy to emperor pharaoh

[quachandy99]

Hi DEI Team,
I have an idea for Merc in this game, why not we turn off the population system for Merc instead of Merc having pros and cons:
Pros: No population tier shall be depleted (and they are just well trained or expert in that role??????)
Cons: REALLY expensive, NO discipline trait to every Merc in every culture and have low replenished rate like 4 to 6 turn depend on the situation you in to get fully replenished

thanks you for reading this if you really like the idea of EU4 why not using that Merc system to be more easier for you guys?

Mercenaries: I want to reduce most merc replenishment across the board, especially some of the specialized ones. When we made them cheaper to retain, we should have lowered the replenishment values. Previously, upkeep was a limiting factor where now it really isn't anymore. However, I need to change each value in the startpos and I haven't gotten around to it yet. Elephants, for example, should be very rare. - from dresen said so

[KAM 2150]

That would not really represent how mercs worked in that tome period.

[quachandy99]

That would not really represent how mercs worked in that tome period.

then case close in my idea hope you guys can done this beta soon and give you guys some rest time

[Dumb4zz]

can i try this with steam?

[♔Greek Strategos♔]

can i try this with steam?

Ofc you can. As the opening post says:
To install, simply place this pack in your data folder. Make sure you have "enable out of date mods" checked in the Mod Launcher and activate the mod pack.

[corsair831]

After playing tens of hard battles on this mod, I think your point about heavy infantry defeating 3 units of cheap ones seems perfectly normal to me. I've run into the same problem myself and adapted. Elite infantry are elite for a reason. They are better armored, better equipped, better trained/fed/disciplined and it's historically accurate that they are so much better than the cheap units. 100 roman legionnaires would be able to defeat 300 armed peasants.

You're right i should have provided some evidence.

Well yes, i agree that elite infantry should be tough, but if you make it so that elite infantry easily defeat more than their cost in light infantry, you're effectively completely nullifying the need for light infantry. What is the point of a 450 cost spearmen which when you have 3 units of it (1350 cost), all 3 units can be routed by a single 1,000 cost heavy infantry unit?

Shouldn't the purpose of heavy infantry be as shock infantry; have them grouped together and they will be extremely effective at punching through, but when they're isolated they are more easily defeated?

Check out my last 5 or 6 screenshots here, it's a head on (rested) charge of 4 units of Iceni basic spearmen (cost 415x4 = 1660) vs a unit of Arverni general's bodyguard (cost 1320). The Arverni general's bodyguard beat all 4 units and only took 50-60% casualties. I understand that elites are supposed to be good, but they were almost completely surrounded and they still won, whilst being less expensive.

https://steamcommunity.com/id/corsair831/screenshots/


------------------------------------------


@KAM, i tested it again and this time the heavy inf were slower, seems i was wrong, sorry for wasting your time.

I was wondering however about the classifications of some units. So for example Sparta, Helots are classified as Medium Spear Infantry whilst being basically naked (8 armour), and Skiritai Macharaphoroi are classed as Light Melee Infantry whilst having 26 armour. I was just wondering if these classifications do anything (light, melee, heavy etc) in game-terms, or if it's just a meaningless label to give the player information?

I just ask because the more heavily armoured Skiritai Macharaphoroi outran all of the other Spartan units i tested whilst having pretty decent armour and only 3 Speed,

Thanks!

Screenshots,

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.n...5F36F62048663/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.n...36C0F029476F2/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/949588657190800953/F01AFBCE58186504F9CED52BB80079DC644E8B9C/


Also, just one more thing, i was wondering what kind of balance you are going for regarding the armour? From what i can see it makes the biggest difference (very very very significant difference) when all of the units are tired, and much less of a difference when the units are fresh, is that the kind of balance you were aiming for?

Cheers!

[quachandy99]

Eeeeeeeer guys.... should we need to tone down the baby popping of our family tree LOL... I'm not even joking at this point I mean 1 guy can pump out 8 childs? and you have to hope RNGess to make the child died xD

[Holland_NL]

I charged capadocian lancers at a single unit of townsfolk with the intent of barreling right through them but the peasants actually stopped the unit dead in its tracks :S
A lot of them died sure but such a fast moving mass of horses and lances shouldn't get stopped dead in its tracks on flat terrain.

[Krakenz]

Hey guys. I really would like to love and praise this balance but i just cant, a unit of elite Agema pike phalanx gets smashed from the FRONT by marian praetorians. That means every legionary cohort will massacre any average pike phalanx from the front no matter how tight the formation will be. Pikemen do not really hold anyone at distance, praetorians got x2 kills before pikemen shattered. Is it intentional? Or maybe something isnt working right for me?

[Andrew1994]

Another report which is exactly the oposite from my last one.I continued a campaing with a pal and we fought a battle,me taking charge of an african faction (thez had mostly lightly armored spearmen and manz missile troops,javellins and achers) while he had an aor massalian army(the interesting fact is the appulian heavy infantry which at that time had 80 armour).So i outnumber him 2 to 1.almost encircle him with my units and i charged the appulians and other units in many cases from 2 sides.i couldnt believe that javelins and archers score minimum kills at engaged units.So the battle ended with him recieving mostly 100 casualties.At the end we tested to fire a unit of appulians from behind with slingers.with 6 salvos from behind i say again they scored 4 kills