Kevin's Watch

Murrin wrote:Oh, I should probably warn you about something else: archers are useless in R:TR. The creators decided that in R:TW the archers were far too effective, decided that in real life it must be unlikely for such a small thing as an arrow to find a target, and changed the odds, such that I've never seen a single soldier killed by archers.

In my last BI game I had a few Archer units with 3 Gold Chevrons and thought it was spurious that the enemy cavalry would forget the battle as a whole and try to eradicate them instead...

I finally got round to downloading the demo of this, after all the praise it's got (and after Deadhouse Gates made me want to command an army ).

It was quite fun, but it seemed a bit... easy...

In the Hannibal vs. Julii battle, I had hardly any idea what I was doing, and entirely failed to use my units to my own advantage (I forgot to even order the cavalry to do anything until halfway through) but I still had a pretty convincing victory. Everything seemed pretty much automated.

Do they get harder? I don't really want to buy it only to find that I'll always win no matter what I do.

It's been a while since I played that demo, but I'm quite sure it's geared toward neophytes who've never played the game. So it has "safety pads", I suppose. I for one found the regular game to offer plenty of enjoyment and challenge. Then again, I've never considered myself a particularly skilled gamer, nor do I consider an easy game as something bad (Ocarina of Time, for example).

I might give it a shot then. An easy game isn't necessarily bad, if it's story driven for instance, but a game like this I'd imagine relies on the gameplay.

And that said, what I saw of the gameplay seemed potentially cool, just... perhaps wasted because it seemed like the tactic of having all your units charge together worked well enough anyway. But that may well not be the case in the game proper.

It's usually not. And if you play the difficult battles, it's a sure recipe for diosaster.

Try it out...definitely worth it IMO.

--A

I'm going to take my comments back anyway, I just played it again and failed miserably twice. I must've just been lucky the first time.

Avatar wrote:It's usually not. And if you play the difficult battles, it's a sure recipe for disaster.

Try it out...definitely worth it IMO.

--A

I'm pretty sure you're talking about the "Historical Battles" rather than Campaign play there, Av?

I haven't played the Historical Battles much. In fact the only one I remember playing was one where you had to fight off an ambush.

I tried it 2 or 3 times and got routed each time.

I just play Campaign mode now, I get enough satisfaction from against-the-odds wins in that.

So yeah, The Somberlain, it's not all peaches and cream as you blithely sit in your command tent with your concubines...

No, was talking about campaigns...you can set the difficulty for both the campaing map and the battles.

I don't play the historical battles really.

--A

Sorry if my last post was confusing, Av. I hope you don't think I was putting words in your mouth.

I tend to set the Campaign difficulty to "Very Hard", but leave the Battles difficulty at Medium, ever since I read somewhere that turning up the Battles difficulty doesn't change the AI's tactics at all it just makes your individual soldiers weaker. On VH level they can just plough their cavalry head-on into your spearmen without fear.

Playing VH/M I find that I am frequently outnumbered, but the battles are winnable.

I played some VH/VH campaigns on vanilla RTW, but found it was virtually impossible to manage an "Heroic Victory".

I've been trying for the last few days to mod Rome so I can start a campaign with all of Italy under my control--but it's turned out to be a real b*tch to get working.
Supposedly you can just cut and paste cities in descr_strat.txt into a new faction, then move the armies around, but whenever I try this it crashes my game. I'm stuck on my laptop again during term time, so I can't update past patch 1.1, which might be the problem.
Anyhow, after long hours of playing with things, I finally managed to work out a way to do it. I had to change one thing at a time, and load the game each time to check it worked.
What I ended up doing was moving the roman armies out of the cities (by adjusting the coordinates 1 point--if I went the wrong way, or on top of another army, it wouldn't run), changing all the roman armies that weren't heir or leader to Julii (had to change the names to match the Julii list, and carefully edit the other faction's family trees--all the family members became Julii 'generals'), then moving these armies into the cities.
The result is, I control all of Italy at the start of the game, but the Senate, Brutii and Scipii still exist. When I start the campaign (I copied the files and made a new campaign, so the original would be unchanged), the cities are all given to me because my armies are placed inside; but it doesn't affect the other factions. They're still allied, and I still get senate missions. However, careful pruning has left them all with four family members (leader, heir, and their wives), no units, and because of the cities they have no income or way of generating units. It'll be a job of two turns to kill them all. Removing the factions entirely only made the game crash again.
And even before I did all this, I had to edit other files to create a new character trait, one that made my family members instantly popular enough to attack Rome--otherwise, the game wouldn't accept me taking the city.

Way, way too much effort. But nice one all the same.

--A

It isn't so hard, just tedious (and often frustrating). Since all the customisable code is in text form, it's really easy to modify.
Next stage is to give myself an army or two, since I deleted the troops under the other romans' family members, and the ones I took are holding the cities.
I might play around with some other stuff, too. I'm thinking of tripling the starting money (so it's like all three factions combined) and maybe improving the enemy factions a bit to counter any advantage I might now have.

Since I can't run Medieval 2, I have to compensate somehow, heh.

Haha, yeah, it's gonna be a good while before I manage a machine that'll run Medieval 2. *sigh*

--A

Either I forgot to check my difficulty settings, or the Brutii campaign is easy as hell. Once you get Greece in your hands (achieved very quickly once you get one good army on the peninsula) the money just rolls in. I've been on 70000 denarii ever since, with a mind to roll right through Egypt in one run (it'll never work).
(I got bored with modding and started playing a straight campaign, with the only Roman faction I hadn't played before.)

The Brutii are fun to play. The experience bonus your troops get from Temples of Mars rocks. Believe me, the run through Egypt is very possible. I did that in the last vanilla RTW game I played.

IIRC I took the starting forces to Greece to complete the first Senate mission. Then I shipped them straight to Alexandria. The Egyptians don't have many units that early in the game. Alexandria and the two cities south of it are ripe for the picking if you can hire the right mercenaries.

So all of a sudden you've got some of the biggest (population) cities in the game.

Then you can build the best barracks and start pumping out Praetorians, Urbans, etc.

*reminiscing* Good times. Good, gore-splattered times.

But yeah, it's possibly too easy. Easier than slogging through Gaul with the Julii, anyway.

Reinstalled Rome: TW last night and loaded up my old saved campaign. Immediately remembered why I stopped playing it, as two of my cities are under siege by massive Egyptian armies that outnumber the defenders two to one!

I'd defended against worse odds before so I let one of the battles load up to see if I could fight my way out of it but the Egyptians are far more organised than the Carthaginians were. I'm up against two battering rams, two siege towers and at least half a dozen sapping points (possibly more like eight). The make up of my army is encouraging, as it's about half cavalry and half infantry, and mostly heavy of both. I think I'm going to forget about defending the walls and post my troops opposite the sapping points.

I'll have my two family members sally forth and smash the small diversionary force on the north of the city, as I want them to be able to flee if it looks like I'm going to lose (not sure if that works during a siege though). I think the whole thing hinges on the remainder of my cavalry, who will have to emerge on the far side of the city and sweep round to hit the artillery and the infantry sapping and pushing the siege towers. My biggest obstacle is what looked like a very large cavalry contingent that the Egyptians have brought with them. The cavalry might just nullify each other and then I'll lose out when the weight of their infantry overwhelms me.

I hope it's a winnable battle, although even if I hold on to the city I doubt I'll be able to repair the walls and retrain the defenders before the Egyptians turn up with another 1000+ man force. I really need to survive both of these battles, as those three cities along the Nile are too hard to defend. If I can take a couple of territories to the East I'll be able to mount a more focused defence, otherwise it could be curtains for my North African campaign.

Good luck. The Egyptian Desert Cavalry are tough...light cavalry with heavy weapons and the resulting bonus that axes get against armour. I played with the Egyptians many times...combining the archers, desert axemen and desert cavalry made an awesome force.

--A

Hmm, I might have to be a bit more cunning with my cavalry then. Maybe send a decoy force to draw the cavalry away first. It doesn't so much matter if my own cavalry get annihlated, as long as they can deal with the sieging infantry first. Plus if I can stop them from breaching the walls altogether, then the desert cavalry are rendered useless and I can just watch the clock run down. I'll be very surprised if I achieve that though!

I always turn the timelimit off. *shrug* Maybe send your cavalry around both sides. Whoever gets intercepted is sacrificed, the rest can still hit the infantry.

--A

No time limit? But I'd actually start losing cities, then!