durbal
Sergeant
Right now the bandaids for the AI like their zombie instant respawns, Harry Houdini prison escapes, and problems such as their armies full of recruits are caused largely by this one issue. Then you have it when the player loses a battle -- boom, whole army gone. Rebuild it all because game says so. Battle was down to 5 guys fighting it out? Too bad. One army is deleted and the other one remains.
It also causes other issues such as:
- Reluctance to take any risky battles (player might lose entire army)
- Reluctance to join AI armies (same as above)
- Campaign move speed being king of everything (and the ancillary issues such as absolutely requiring you to have a horse for every man in your army) because it allows you to choose only winning battles
It doesn't even make any sense. The fundamental problem is that battles are one big swirling melee of cavalry buzzing around a big blob of infantry hacking away at each other. Aside from slaughtering recruit armies with cavalry and medieval machine guns (aka bows), armies will never break. They fight to the absolute last man standing. One horse archer vs. 20 bows and 15 cavalry? No problem. He'll shoot off arrows as if nothing has changed since the battle started. A bigger issue is that there's no opportunity for units to flee due to how fast battles are, and when they do it's usually when they're at significantly lower strength to the point of being useless even if the few stragglers could escape.
Two things needs to change in order to have proper battles and actual routs, and they'll be a tough change to make:
- There need to be more units and the AI needs to know how to control them. Right now it's basically just one blob of infantry, one blob of bows, and one blob of cavalry that inexplicably rush ahead to their death (if any unit should rout you'd think it'd be cavalry since they can actually escape, but they tend to be the ones that will fight to the absolute last man).
- Battles need to last a lot longer. At least twice as long. Units need to be in a melee long enough to realize they're losing and flee. If battles aren't any longer, units will pretty much charge and the other unit will break and flee almost instantly. That might be fine for Palace Guard vs recruits, but in most battles it'd be too short and too frustrating since it'd limit player agency too much.
It also causes other issues such as:
- Reluctance to take any risky battles (player might lose entire army)
- Reluctance to join AI armies (same as above)
- Campaign move speed being king of everything (and the ancillary issues such as absolutely requiring you to have a horse for every man in your army) because it allows you to choose only winning battles
It doesn't even make any sense. The fundamental problem is that battles are one big swirling melee of cavalry buzzing around a big blob of infantry hacking away at each other. Aside from slaughtering recruit armies with cavalry and medieval machine guns (aka bows), armies will never break. They fight to the absolute last man standing. One horse archer vs. 20 bows and 15 cavalry? No problem. He'll shoot off arrows as if nothing has changed since the battle started. A bigger issue is that there's no opportunity for units to flee due to how fast battles are, and when they do it's usually when they're at significantly lower strength to the point of being useless even if the few stragglers could escape.
Two things needs to change in order to have proper battles and actual routs, and they'll be a tough change to make:
- There need to be more units and the AI needs to know how to control them. Right now it's basically just one blob of infantry, one blob of bows, and one blob of cavalry that inexplicably rush ahead to their death (if any unit should rout you'd think it'd be cavalry since they can actually escape, but they tend to be the ones that will fight to the absolute last man).
- Battles need to last a lot longer. At least twice as long. Units need to be in a melee long enough to realize they're losing and flee. If battles aren't any longer, units will pretty much charge and the other unit will break and flee almost instantly. That might be fine for Palace Guard vs recruits, but in most battles it'd be too short and too frustrating since it'd limit player agency too much.
) if anything I think too many soldiers survive... Speed of movement in battle though should definitely be reduced. Your formations should engage enemy formations, not this formation vs closest enemy. Formations should have some more depth to the shapes you can make your soldiers take form in. Also It would help if they`d make it possible for just the right edge of your army to engage a cavalry charge for instance instead of all of them, make it so the AI stops charging the enemies if more than 2:1 proportion is achieved and that should pretty much solve it.
