FYI the enchantress is able to knock down the doors by herself. Ignore ladders/towers/whatever and have her do that. Move your trebuchets and archers outside the firing arc of the towers. Once the door is down, have her gather everything in a giant ball inside the gates and have them get pounded. Enchantress is surprisingly tanky especially once you get a few armor items on her (she has somewhere around 35% native ward resist [?] + items = tank).
Also for the 20 turn orc start, do not focus on public order. Actually its better to reduce public order even further so you have as many orc stacks spawning as possible to kill and loot. Aim for one revolt a turn! Can have dudes leveled into the high teens or even 20s by the end of things if things go perfectly.
I’ll try that, but early Bretonnian infantry is such trash. I’m kind of scared to use them in seige battles.
The point about the 20 turn start is that i can’t do anything but whack Orc spawns. I usually encourage public disorder but… that’s still 20 turns of sitting around. That does get you quite a lot of experience, cash and honor.
… which honor I then lose at turn 50 when two allies declare on each other. Sigh. But i’ll try using the Enchantress as a gate-breaker!
I’m not up to that Felix + Gortek book. I’m at the one where you meet Tetris and find out he’s the nerdy, unpopular brother of Tyrion who’s so effortlessly charming passing elven ladies can’t wait to drop their clothes.
It’s also the one where you first learn about the Old Ones and the whole move-continents-around-because-they-weren’t-in-the-alien-overlord-blueprints bit so I finally found the book I wanted when I started reading the series!
I mucked around a bit with the Laboratory DLC but all of the sliders are oriented so that they increase the speed and chaos of battles, as opposed to making the battles more focused and deliberate, as discussed in the TW:Rome 2 thread. Want your cavalry to fling infantry through the air like Luke Cage riding the Incredible Hulk? CA has you covered. Want your archers to spit our arrows like bullets from the Punisher’s machine gun? Check.
Want a slower, more strategic pace? Nope.
In theory you could maybe slow things down by ramping up the unit size to very high levels but my brief experiments in that direction quickly hit the limits of my machine’s power.
If you wanted to boil down the core flaw of the whole TW engine, it would be that the speed of the units, pace of the battles and size of the maps are scaled to battles of historical size (often 10s of thousands of soldiers) while the engine itself can only handle army sizes of a few thousands. So your battle lines are always shorter than would be historical (or in the case of WH, verisimilitude), flanks are relatively more exposed, and in general the scale is just about an order of magnitude small for the pace of the game.
Obviously, as a gamer, I would love if they could get a larger scale engine to work, with the Romans fielding 20,000 to 30,000 troops, the Empire fielding god knows how many, etc. As a practical matter, that’s probably beyond current PC technology, unless CA comes up with some sort of godlike optimization. The solution then IMO is to slow the pace a bit so that the pace of the game matches the smaller size of the units.
On a different topic, I just learned more specifics on how the battle difficulty bug works. It doesn’t just make hard battles easy, it makes easy battles hard. Which means the recent campaigns I’ve played with Hard Strategic setting and Easy Battle setting were actually Hard/Hard. So that Vera battle I described upthread was not on Easy difficulty as I thought but on Hard. No wonder those rats were such beasts. Until they fix it, I think I will go with Normal battle settings.
This battle. which answers your question about detail: no not as detailed. The game is called Ultimate General btw.
Looks more fun and more like an actual battle though imho.
Nitrous engine stress test video, showing quite a few units. This is space though so one could make the argument about it being easier not having to show off grass etc.
Anyway, my original point was that yes our pcs could handle a historically accurate (regarding size) ancient era battle. I don’t think CA will ever make such a thing because flashiness sells.
Since battle difficulty is reversed, ( it campaign) the AI gets massive battle buffs on easy, CA still hasn’t fixed this. Enidigm, play the dwarves, they are the easiest to play, when leveling your heroes, buff their units not the leader battle skills. Buy quarrellers and rock lobbers and start winning impossible battles.
Orcs can do the same. But skip archers and bring extra lobbers.
