Total War: General discussion.

After bingeing several of Many A True Nerd's older Total War campaigns, and getting thoroughly sick of Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, I've managed to get Medieval II: Stainless Steel 6.4 working again.

Currently about 20 turns into a Hungary campaign, Early Start with Real Recruitment off so I'll actually see end-tier units. Still coming to terms with how a lot of the game's standby units - solid heavy cavalry, non-militia spear infantry - just aren't part of the Hungarian roster. Hell, the wooden castle at Kassa couldn't build anything on turn one.

I went with an immediate alliance with Poland since I don't need to defeat them and it'd be nice to have a border I don't have to worry about. Haven't seen any Venetian or Holy Roman movements my way, but the Byzantines are scary in 1100 AD. Three mid-to-full-sized armies have been marching along our new border south of Budapest and Sofia, and occasionally their Diplomat will hit me up for "Accept Or We Will Attack" money. But a couple hundred Florins every so often seems like a bargain compared to what a war would cost me, at least for now.

With the aforementioned rebel settlements taken and the Venetians in Croatia, I decided to expand east into Targoviste since the Cuman Khanate is weak and pathetic. Then I remembered I'm in an Early Start campaign, the Cumans control half of Russia, and their militia-grade mounted archers can shoot up my Hungarian Nobles and beat my Magyars in melee. I really hope after I capture Iasi, the Cumans decide it's too much bother to march across Ukraine and retake their lost territory.

Cao Cao just died of natural causes ;_;

And Cao Ren and Yuan Anyang died on the battlefield, in one of the last battles to evict the forces of Liu Bei from my heartland. I like to think that even though theirs was a marriage of political expediency, as Yuan Shu desperately needed food to support his war against Yuan Shao and I wanted a general plus money to build stuff, the years of campaign by each others' side eventually forged their partnership into a comfortable marriage, if not a loving one.

But now my north is mostly clear, with Gongsun who's my vassal to my north, and some border army at certain points in case of betrayal.

Meanwhile, Wu is getting uppity towards my southern regions which I grabbed to check its expansion. I'm thinking as soon as I fight their field armies, doing another two-pronged assault wherein I test the utility of Taiwan as a springing board with which to invade the mainland.

I think I shall refer to this as Chiang Kai-shek's Prevenge.

Playing an Egytian campaign in Rome 1 now, I own 30 territories out of the 50 I need, which is all of Arabia, the Far East, the Caucasus Mountains and Asia Minor.

I've been forced into conflict with the Romans because I could see that the Scipii were embarking troops on ships, undoubtedly getting ready to invade Asia Minor. Rather than let them make their way on my domain, I decided to beat them to the punch and sink all their ships as I placed my armies on the Balkans. I hope to get all of the Balkans before they reach the Marian Reforms.

Something of note that happened in this campaign is that Numidia has conquered Carthage, yet another event I've never witnessed before. I don't plan on invading Africa since that would overextend me too much, but I hope I get to fight against Numidian legionaries if they manage to tech up like that.

Creative Assembly presents: Daddy Issues: The DLC.

Taking infos from the Steam page and the blog post:

• 194 CE start date, accessible to all the vanilla lords minus the Sun Jian (RIP) and the Dong.
• Lü Bu and Sun Ce as playable lords, plus Yan Baihu as a free-LC addition .
  • Lü Bu's faction mechanic grants him actions and bonuses from defeating enemy characters.
  • Sun Ce has a list of "ambitions" (campaign objectives) that grant him bonuses once completed... but it's also tied to a "luck" meter that kills him when it runs out. Ouch.
• A couple of unique units for both, but nothing too exciting yet. There will be more units included in a future update, though.
• Yan gets a couple of Shanyue units (Nanman DLC, hint hint), a unique bandit tech tree (finally) and some kind of bonus mechanic from coalitions and confederations. His model is a bit too... anime for my taste, though.
• New characters spotted: Chen Gong, Cao Ren, the Qiao sisters, Gao Shun, Liu Yao, a couple more I don't recognise.

I'm a shameless Sun Jian stan and not having him around would be a downer, but the new mechanics sound lit and I can't wait to try them out. Sun Ce's luck bomb in particular sounds like a trial run for some kind of "hubris" mechanic that they might attach to Achilles in Troy.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 5th 2020 at 7:40:01 AM

The luck bomb is also related to the rumors of Sun Ce's death being because he was cursed by a mystic for his actions in the wars. So rather than seeing Sun Ce dying in battle, assassinated or of natural causes, his death is directly related to a more mystical figure.

Very interesting concept for them to follow.

Lu Bu is now Wulfrik the Wanderer and Sun Ce must YOLO

Sun Quan is being a little shit by attacking the commanderies I have to his south specifically to check his expansion in that area. One of his stacks went up against an agricultural garrison, and then he sent this and his other stack against one of my stacks meant to reinforce. Was unable to retreat, which forced me into a fight, and then he continued the attack.

What determines how far you can retreat or whether you can retreat? I retreat, his army catches me again; meanwhile I chase an enemy army and they're like always able to retreat out of range.

Also, what should be the expected casualties if I'm assuming direct control of a battle rather than delegating? Generally I've only been able to inflict 1:2 casualties (that is, I end up killing about half my own number of dead) in battles where I am outnumbered by about 1.5:1. Is that about expected in that autoresolve tends to result in worse k/d ratio, or do I need to git gud?

Also also, does the AI just not siege settlements? They seem to prefer forcing battles rather than weakending the settlement, or does that just have to do with the fact that I have armies nearby so they prefer to attempt to fight quickly?

Finally, am a little disapoint that this trailer doesn't have a poem set to song...

Edited by PRC4Eva on Mar 5th 2020 at 3:34:31 AM

I think the distance for retreat depends on if you've moved on your previous turn. If you haven't moved at all, your retreat will send you extremely far away, but if you used all your movement points, you will only retreat a little bit.

There are so many factors in a given battle that I can't give any opinion on whether you're doing good or not. Generally if you kill more units than you lose, you're doing okay enough.

The AI is usually programmed to give battle when it thinks it has the advantage, even if it would be better if it waited for the garrison to lose numbers because of attrition. It favors speed over efficiency, usually to keep a strong momentum going in territory gain. Besides, with the way troop replenishment works, it's generally not a problem to lose more troops to battle if the city can be conquered two turns in advance, and because of the way auto-resolve works, AI vs AI battles will never result in a unit getting fully depleted, ensuring a constantly replenishing, full army.

Edited by Resileafs on Mar 5th 2020 at 6:59:09 AM

So...I need to figure out what I'm doing wrong, then, because I only ever inflict like half the deaths on the computer. Like, I'll lose 500 or so guys and only kill 250 of theirs. My towers also don't seem to be the machine gun nests that reddit implies they are. Did they get patched or something?

Well, tell us what your battle tactics are. Do you blob your units and send them all at once at the same enemy? Are you slow to react to flanking maneuvers? Are you fielding a lot of low-quality units against high quality ones? If you're playing Romance, are they getting destroyed by enemy commanders?

(I couldn't tell you about towers, I haven't played 3K since launch)

Yeah, I think there was like an extra 0 or something at the end of the towers' armour-piercing damage values so they were utter murder-machines (I honestly assumed it was intended since they're were also highly lethal in the Attila entry) that has since been fixed.

If you're not finding as much success as you'd like in battles wherein you outnumber the enemy, you may have to spread out your forces a bit more. Naturally, while it's self-defeating to spread out too much and therefore let some of your units be ironically outnumbered, spreading out is still the real benefit to outnumbering the enemy so that they may fan out and strike the enemy in their flanks overwhelmingly as soon as possible. Especially ensure your cavalry benefit from this - indeed, one of the best way to break individual units quickly is to charge at least two cavalry units into their rear since cavalry charges are devastating and the damage two shock cavalry can inflict doing that can outright rout a lot of infantry units just from that. Broken units causes the remaining units to worry as their allies flee and eventually enough broken units will cause the losing army's units to realize they don't have a chance and will shatter everything that's not unbreakable.

Oh yeah, and never forget to try to target the general. Every army shatters much faster while their general is dead.

Oh hey, here's something that I'm sure some of you were kind of hoping for - the soundtrack of Three Kingdoms is now on Spotify!

Fucking finally

Dear God, I hope the soundtrack of the other games also end up in Spotify.

Edited by raziel365 on Mar 5th 2020 at 7:20:21 AM

I think the last soundtrack they released was Shogun 2/Fall of the Samurai, which was quite a while ago. There's this one battle track in particular from Age of Charlemagne that I've been trying to track down to no avail.

Yeah once Rome 2 came out, they just stopped putting out soundtracks for some reason. But the world needs a playlist of the Huns' music for cruising down the highway!

Records mode, mostly running militia with a smattering of normal infantry/cav units.

I'm generally trying to just match element rock paper scissors. Melee cav against archers, spears against cav, swords against spears, etc. Often it's I line my guys in trees and then wait for the enemy to come to me. Fights tend to devolve into snowballs of clusters as they go on, I attempt to herd my units around, but a lot of the time they have difficulty disengaging after it's devolved into a cluster.

I mostly run into issues when I am being outnumbered by >30% or so, or if my unit mix isn't sufficiently diversified (namely in battles where it's my defense garrison vs the enemy stack).

I also often have difficulty telling when everyone's actually made their attacks, especially when charging multiple units of cavalry. Like, there will often be three units that I'm charging, each with like 10 models each, but I'm never sure whether I need to wait for all three of them to make contact with the archer unit, or whether I can move on to the next closest guy.

Also i don't think I have a good grasp of when to walk vs run to the destination. I tend to walk just because I'm paranoid of fatigue. Often this results in spears not getting to archers in time when enemy is sending shock cav at them.

The game also tells me that range units are good against shock cav, but I tend to not see much in the way of dramatic HP drops when I get my archer militia to group fire against shock cav. Especially in cases where they're trying to run shock cav at my archers. Or is this generally not that kind of game where you fire off a super-effective move and it kills like half the other guy's health?

Yes, battle lines inherently become less "lines" as the fighting goes on. Don't worry too much about it happening, it's an inevitability. Because of the aforementioned difficulty of moving engaged units around, avoid moving infantry units that are in combat unless you can get another unit to move in behind the engaged unit you want out - the new unit will be able to occupy the space that the engaged unit was in which prevents the enemy from stabbing them the retreating engaged unit in the back as much thereby minimizing casualties. Cavalry units should similarly have support if disengaging from an equal head-on fight especially against other cavalry, but won't need it from rear-charging enemy infantry as their speed minimizes casualties decently.

For when you don't care about logic and niceties, outnumbered Total War defensive battles can always have this simple solution: CORNER CAMPING. Though I'd definitely say to make sure that your army has as many polearm units as it has other infantry, or the other infantry has a general giving them charge defence as getting charged by cavalry without these things is a terrible, terrible time.

The inherent depth and formation of units in the game usually means that only units with barely any men left are going to have the chance to have every live man in the unit to reach contact and use the charge bonus - the real thing to remember is that after around 10 seconds, no units are going to have much of their charge bonus left empowering their attacks at that point (it just degrades over a period of like 13 seconds), so if the enemy unit isn't wavering by this point, any cavalry unit is probably better off disengaging against any infantry unit to charge again right after. That being said, if enemy ranged units are nearby but not next to each other, most ranged units won't really do a thing stopping cavalry units in melee as the cavalry puts their backs to them, so feel free to have cavalry charge into a ranged unit and then a bit later charge into another nearby ranged unit without outright disengaging to tie up as many ranged units as quickly as possible.

Entertain yourself as units take their long advance toward the enemy by sporadically pressing the run/walk key. Units' stamina refreshes (though slower than while at a pause) while walking so just having infantry run/walk/run/walk/run/walk the entire time beforehand will not cause them to even go to the Active level.

I can definitely agree on the archers v. shock cavalry assessment though. While archers will certainly kill them faster than shielded cavalry, archers will still be fortunate to do much damage against them before they get into charge range which probably even a single militia lancer at 30% health has a pretty good chance of beating a single militia archer unit it has charged into. This probably has to do with the inherent cost disparities between the units, as technically any shock cavalry unit should be significantly outnumbered by archers via the cost invested and then be a lot less likely to win when they're properly spread out, though naturally the campaign mechanics don't cause this quite like multiplayer does.

All the new characters. Guo Si is pretty conspicuously missing despite being close partners with Li Jue, and what I thought to be Cao Ren in the trailer looks like just an update to Dian Wei's design. Zhou Tai should've been a Champion, IMO - Wu isn't exactly lacking in Vanguards.

And the MK 1212 team is releasing an art book, THIS IS NOT A DRILL

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 7th 2020 at 4:21:44 AM

Sun Ren and Cao Ang successfully completed Cao Cao's dream of unification.

I think I may have encountered a bug where there's two Sima Yi available. I recruited him the first time, he ran off, joined Ma Chao, but there was a second one available (I knew it wasn't the same guy because Sima Yi was leading a field army I was fighting at the time). Upon recruitment, his portrait becomes one of those generic garrison commander portraits.

I have no idea what the intention of naval fights are meant to be though. They can't reinforce each other, so it seems like you only naval fight if the other guy isn't traveling with a full stack, or if you just want to play heads or tails with two evenly matched stacks.

Also, multi bolt crossbows seem really overpowered, to the point that I'm not sure what I ought to be doing if the computer ever fields more than one them against me...I almost always have one of each siege equipment in battles and it kills or mauls like 2-3 units before everything else hits. Had a hilarious fight for a livestock farm where I had two of the things, and I think they literally killed or put to flight half the garrison with maybe a little help from the two units of archers and crossbows.

On that note...is there any reason to get spear type infantry that aren't spear guards on account of their arrow defense?

Edited by PRC4Eva on Mar 9th 2020 at 10:07:49 AM

Addendum: what's actually the purpose of the +population growth buildings? Like, what benefit do they confer that makes them better than the ones that give additional income or boost income percentage or increase public order or decrease recruitment time etc?

Edited by PRC4Eva on Mar 11th 2020 at 2:14:37 AM

Your cities can be upgraded to the next tier when they hit a certain population threshold. Population+ buildings help that to happen faster, and then you can just tear them down when your cities get to the highest tier.

...I thought it worked the other way around, where commanderies would just naturally grow and you have to upgrade the city once population outstrips the current city capacity.

Started a new campaign as Liu Bei playing on Romance mode, the way Romance of the Three Kingdoms was meant to be played. Forgot how painful early game settlement fights can be, when I don't have flaming arrows or high level trebuchets, just my early militia dudes. We'll see if I prefer this one over Records as it goes on.

Oh, Three Kingdoms? I was thinking Warhammer.

I haven't played much Three Kingdoms, though I really should.