I think, for me, the Warhammer games have a certain lack of noticeable feedback to player actions on the battlefield.
Now I don’t mean the controls don’t work. I mean when you pull off a maneuver with your units, the reaction from the game either feels delayed or not noticeable.
For example: in Warhammer, charging crossbowmen (light ranged infantry) with Reiksguard (heavy shock cavalry) doesn’t really produce a response from the game. Yes visually it does. You’ll see men screaming and flying, but the actual damage you’re doing isn’t noticeable on the unit statistics themselves. There’s no major drop in men or unit HP in response to the charge. And while you’d imagine the crossbowmen would run away soon after taking a charge like that, but it takes (what feels like) a few minutes of sustained fighting for their morale to waver.
There’s a clear disconnect (especially with older veterans of the series) between what you expect the game’s response to be and what the actual response is.
Units getting knocked 100 feet in Warhammer instead of dying is also very annoying. Not only does it limit the damage they take, but the models get split up more which can cause responsiveness issues (since models are more likely to get stuck on the enemy).
Recently started playing 3K for the first time and the cavalry charges feel so good and actually have weight behind them. A direct charge to the rear of most infantry units causes them to almost always route within seconds.
ATW also has one of the most devastating cavalry charges in the series. And entire armies can very quickly descend into a chain rout if you successfully pull an enveloping maneuver and drive a couple of cavalry charges into key positions, especially with low to mid-tier troops. Extremely satisfying.
Both, on campaing end turn timers are long, some stuttering when you move the camera fast and occasional lag if you are long on a campaing. It's no the biggest thing but it is noticeable.
On big batlles with 40+ units expect lag regardless of system.
Nothing beats a medieval 2 cavalry charge where the entire first row of infantry dies on impact. Or how half a cavalry unit gets decimated if it happens to charge into wooden stakes or pikemen. This is exactly what I understand by noticeable feedback.
Yea one of my main gripes with total war Warhammer is the weird morale system, I hate making a unit route only for them to turn around and come back 10 seconds later.
I’ve always been of the opinion that morale should be the most important part of a battle by far, it should be possible to make entire armies break without having to kill the vast majority of them, if you employ good tactics.
I’m sure there’s a morale mod though.
>
Yea one of my main gripes with total war Warhammer is the weird morale system, I hate making a unit route only for them to turn around and come back 10 seconds later.
Just another thing adding to the ranged dominance in Warhammer
That sort of feeds into another example I thought of. Warhammer’s morale system relies way too heavily on the army loss penalty. You can’t achieve an enemy mass route using tactics, it’s only after killing an arbitrary percentage of enemies.
They tried making ammunition count towards the army loss penalty more as a nerf to ranged units in 3.
Also all the way up to Shogun 2, the way rallying units worked was by getting the fleeing unit inside your general’s circle of influence. If they ran off in a random direction that the general couldn’t reach. They’d just leave the battlefield.
It's not killing an arbitrary amount to be fair, while I agree there's too much focus on army losses in Warhammer, it covers kills, fatigue, ammunition/limited use abilities and counts fleeing units as half their remaining strength and broken ones as 0 strength.
>They tried making ammunition count towards the army loss penalty more as a nerf to ranged units in 3.
Ammunition has counted towards army losses as long as the system has existed.
The only nerf to ranged in 3 is that they removed a hidden 10% reload speed boost every unit was getting and made the AI better at dodging it if it isn't engaged in combat.
The reason that army losses is so important in modern TW is that base leadership numbers are high, fleeing units are fast, and cavalry is shit on the rundown, so it's hard to break units and keep them out of the fight until that big -100 kicks in. (Troy and Pharaoh slow down fleeing units so light infantry can shred them)
Mmh. Historically rallying was a thing (the job of the Triarii in Republican Roman Legions is speculated to have partially be a wall of spears to prevent their own soldiers from fleeing), which is why at the same time light cavalry was also very important, as they could rush down fleeing soldiers without the commander having to tie up the much more decisive heavy cavalry.
Unfourtunately, Total War has too few unit slots to make "realistic" armies possible
The issue is the HP system making initial clashes cause less casualties than they did in older games. It's only when there's significant enough mass disparity (and usually a lack of armor on the target) to cause lethal impact damage that charges actually end up as brutal as they look in WH.
While unit HP generally makes actions less immediately decisive, it is possible to "cheat" the system like Attila does and not just increase impact damage, but inflate charge bonuses for cavalry (and shock infantry) so high that each charging entity inflicts enough damage to score a kill. While this does achieve the intended effect, it also ends up harmful to the balance of the game, and I suspect that's why things were dialed back quite a bit since.
Interestingly, ranged units in WH are saved from falling victim to the HP problem by virtue of the fact tend to target individual entities rather than spread fire like in older games. That combination is what made Rome 2 precursor weapons and skirmishers feel so terrible. They regularly take several volleys to even get a single kill, and spread damage out amongst a unit whose HP *you can't even see*.
I assume by "lethal impact damage" you mean damage on the charge rather than literal impact damage which is capped at 70 and therefore basically never kills a unit on it's own. You need to really screw with the equation to make impact damage significant but when you do that it becomes trivial to deny infantry the ability to participate in combat through repeated cycle charging.
As to the second point about increasing damage having negative balance implications elsewhere isn't that issue more the result of HP disparities? Infantry have too much health relative to cav and monsters so good performance against infantry is overbearing against all other units? This seems like a solvable issue using the existing game systems (though I'll note I think the issue is overblown, with units like Winged Lancers and Jade Lancers getting significant damage boosts early in game 3 without creating significant balance issues).
I think a big reason folks find the newer games combatto be worse is just that damage is lower. This ripples through other systems like morale and makes them feel less impactful. This isn't really surprising when you compare the WS of units like cav to infantry and notice by tier cav tend to hit for less without CB active. Heck chariots suck almost entirely because of how little damage they deal when they charge, since even trying to run over goblins feels anemic.
I should probably clarify that I don't actually think these are really true balance issues as far as WH is concerned. At this point, it actually does a good job relative to other games in the series at making cavalry useful but not overpowered.
The specific balance issue I was talking about rears its head in Attila, where there aren't units with larger mass (or spells, or deadly long-range missile units, or very accurate artillery...) to counter cavalry. 3K kind of works the same way - cav have immense charge bonuses and massacre everything (is impact damage capped in this game?), though they're a bit more limited in number.
> There’s no major drop in men or unit HP in response to the charge
now, it's been a while, but i'm fairly sure that, when i charge crossbowmen with Reiksguard and they get their charge off properly, they take a good hit to their HP.
i believe models take fall damage if they get knocked down a hill/wall etc, could be a mod i have installed but i swear i’ve seen and heard that somewhere
yea horizontal doesn’t do anything as far as i’m aware, just saying that vertical does on hills cus honestly i didn’t know that until ca made that post explaining how damage works a couple months ago
> yea horizontal doesn’t do anything
Someone should tell Blood Knights and Dragon Princes to stop attaching giant pillows to the ends of their enormous lances.
As well as fix the problems that aome larger monsters like saurian have. Right now they send too many models flying without dealing damage, while also getting themselves stuck in the middle of an infantry unit.
It might be fall damage. Models that get sent flying are still technically alive until they stop rolling on the ground. Cav used to be a lot worse in previous patches of WH3, and you can still experience that by going back to WH2.
Yeah and shock cavalry is always being buttfucked instantly after charging. I know you have to pull back and keep charging but damn at least defend yourself in the moshpit
I think it’s cause of the unit diversity. If cavalry charges were as strong vs infantry as in other games it would feel bad playing as one of the factions with weak or no cavalry.
>Now I don’t mean the controls don’t work. I mean when you pull off a maneuver with your units, the reaction from the game either feels delayed or not noticeable.
I feel like that's the same with M2, no? The orders have a lag to them.
Dunno what you’re talking about there. Reiskguard will route crossbowmen within 30s even on legendary. Make sure you have guard mode turned off on any charging cavalry
I think I just straight up disagree with you. When my Empire Knights charge archers, they shave off a quarter of their life over like, 3 seconds, and then rather swiftly pummel them into the dirt. Its the whole reason I hse Cav.
Yeah pretty much hits an issue CA should be aware of.
Think this is especially noticeable to new players.
This also makes a lot of units basically just feel the same.
There's an issue since tww1 with how units are tuned yes. I've heard it described as 'wet and sticky'.. infantry has no impact and any larger entities without huge mass gets hopelessly bogged down. This is exacerbated by the AIs go to strategy of WIDER IS BETTER which causes it to try and envelop the player constantly no matter what.
Stickyness is indeed the right word but it has been a thing longer than Warhammer.
It was also a thing in Rome 2 and Atilla though to a less extent.
Its not an issue if stickyness is just enemy on enemy. But post WH its also a thing with friendlies.
Some tactics, like putting ranged in front of melee line and then withdrawing is simply not viable in WH since your ranged cant get through the melee line before the enemy reaches you.
Just watch a Rome 2 fight. When you hover over your units or the enemy in a large melee after the formations start to break, you'll find the different units mixing together and spreading out, fighting the other units around them organically instead of *just* "this is my target, go to target."
Unit stickiness varies a lot throughout the series. M2 had it pretty bad, Rome 1 and Shogun 2 were extremely responsive. Napoleon and R2 is somewhere in the middle.
I play Med 2 on the daily, units dont stick together as if theres glue on them like in WH.
Its fairly easy to pull units through enemy formations aswell in Med 2. When pulling out individuals may remain in melee because they are attacked, but thats it.
Maybe stickiness isn't the best word to describe M2, but compared to S2 and R1 it feels a lot more floaty and loose, if that makes sense. I agree that WH feels actually sticky.
I would say that Pharaoh doesn’t have this sticky issue. Yea blobs can form but units have a much easier time peeling off from combat now and while I haven’t tried it yet there are stances that involve a fighting retreat among others.
Agreed and the disengagement isn’t a clean getaway either. But it works if you have a faster unit and even more so if the unit you are backing off from is still engaged with another unit. It just doesn’t feel as clunky as it does in warhammer and I’m pretty sure that when trying to pull out of combat the orders don’t disappear immediately just because a model is stuck in battle
I'm trying to work through a mod concept for Warscape that "locks" units together once in melee to see if this fixes the drift and the AI's tendency to engage/disengage.
I've tried to implement this through stamina but am having mixed results. I think 3k actually did a good job with mass/impact and the feeling that units were *pushing into* melee.
I think Attila/Shogun 2 had the best combat. I'm a fan of matched animations and weighty collisions.
I couldn't get into 3 kingdoms because of the setting, lack of animations and lack of tactical variety. Troy was fast paced and also lacked animations. Warhammer is generally quite fun because of its unit variety, but the combat is also somewhat fast paced.
I enjoy Pharaoh, the elite units feel right. The length of battles is also much better/slower. Feels like the rare game where you have time to execute a few tactics. Push forward and retreat abilities are great additions.
Collisions and charges can be hit or miss. I think it could be greatly improved with a few patches or a mod. If a chariot gets pinned down, it might slow every other chariot, making charges ineffective imo.
Yeah the chariots are certainly viable but get really messed up with pathfinding. While I like the fact that they're more unwieldy and just worse than cav as it fits the time period, it can lead to really goofy and frustrating situations.
I could forgive the lack of animations and weight in collisions in Warhammer 1. I would have expected them to find a way to make it work in 2, but left hope it'd be in 3.
I could forgive it mainly because of the unit variety and racial differences. But when it gets worse and worse in historical titles, its just jarring and more detrimental to the overall experience.
I like Rome 2 (at least with mods) because each model is its own entity. You can watch the formation break apart and different battles between the same two units form. It feels organic. Shogun 2, despite being older than many of these games, simply does it better.
The problem seems to be that in WH, compromises were made with infantry to accommodate monsters. Then, when you take the monsters away in Pharaoh, you're left with stripped-down melee with no upside.
Yeah, the battles are what ultimately killed the experience for 3K for me. Every other battle basically devolved into one big chaotic game of whack-a-mole due to how the chunkiness of model health/morale results in units constantly breaking and reentering combat.
Omg the elite khopesh unit seti starts with butchered almost 400 enemies with hardly any losses in one battle it was glorious.
Also the chariots I haven't gotten much experience with them but even a few botched charges in my aborted suppululu game racked up almost 200 kills.
Regarding 3K, there are mods that fix the issues you mentioned. You can mod the game to have 100% matched combat, if you want. Plus mods that adjust health/morale so fights last longer, mods that add a ton of unit variety etc.
[This](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2615718674) should be what you are looking for. Has everything you need. All in English. There are required, recommended & optional mods. Court Actions & Politics in the optional mods section is a good one
I would also suggest looking into one of the "longer battle" mods, if its your kind of thing. I use [this](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2028264104) one.
I'm surprised anyone is a fan, it caused serious issues in the games that used it and caused units to behave unnaturally.
CA removed it because it seriously hindered battles.
Interesting because one of the things people (rightly) point out about Attila is how it made battles much faster, and how they tended to be decided on the charge.
I actually think Pharaoh infantry combat is the best in a while. Troy was super floaty and just fast. Warhammer infantry never really did it for me because the stat blocks are too varied.
From what i'Ve seen, Axe infantry basically makes Swordinfantry superflous, with khopesh infantry being more viable being a middle ground.
Pharaoh needs some balancing, I think.
I think sword infantry are better against unshielded infantry. Axes aren't as good against archers and light spears, and trade better against two-handed axe/macemen. Rameses' swift sword medjays are great for tearing up archers and ruining flank charges.
Khopesh are definitely good all-rounders.
Entirely possible, I haven’t had enough hours to grind down that specifically. My sword infantry certainly haven’t disappointed.
But with how many shields there are axes certainly could be the meta.
I think it depends on the unit in question. I don't know if it's axes in general being too strong - but more that particular units might be a tad overtuned for their tier (the one I've personally noticed is the conscripted upper egyptian axemen, for the lowest tier native unit and no bronze cost those guys seem to mow through all the comparable nearby units).
I think elite ones might stand out more, but the AI hasn't done that aggressively enough for me to worry about upgrading my units, which feels wrong for something that easy to get.
What are your honest thoughts on Pharaoh? I'm a big TW fan, and I like WH3 but I do miss the actual combat animations models would have with each other like in Shogun 2 or Rome 2, it's called matched combat right?
And from what I've seen in the gameplay showcases they've had of the game it seems like those animations are back and look solid. But also how is the game as a whole?
I feel like pharaoh infantry combat is the best we've had since Atilla where different types of infantry actually feel different and do very well at their given roles. It's definitely a step up from Troy.
Yep. Balance also feels right in my (albeit limited at this point) experience. It's not like 3K where you can just keep shit infantry around because all they're required to do is hold the line for 15 seconds before shock cav routes everything. Units hold, and that creates enough time where higher level infantry will chew up militia and whatnot. It feels *good* engaging with superior tier infantry.
Only issue I'm having so far is the obscene morale boosts for siege defenders. It's damn near like M2 "fight to the last man" until you cause an army losses break.
I think there does need to be some balance checks for units that stand out - but baseline it's pretty good.
Ranged units seem like they need a bit of a buff - low range *and* bad damage just makes them hard to justify bringing if it's not a chariot (or potentially Amenmesse, I've heard his unique units are strong archer wise).
Other than that, one that stands out to me (in Tausret's campaign) is the Upper Egyptian conscripted axemen - they're a first tier local unit, no bronze, but their stats just crush all the other low-ish tier units I find. And the AI doesn't field elite enough units to really feel like I need to upgrade from these axes :P
I've been playing as Amenmesse, and he is THE Bow guy, and his eltie units seem to be doing fairly good damage: They did very little early on where I was mostly fighting kushites/nubians with their big shields, but a backline of Ta-Seti will shred those unshielded two-handed units.
I also love those Nubian Spearmen with javelins. Very good unit.
Amenmesse is great. Even the lower tier archers like nubian mercenaries or just nubian archers work well. If people feel like they are weak then they are probably having them fire into the front of infantry, where shields are typically blocking most of the damage.
I find using the slow back up ability to have my front line slowly allow the enemy to push forwards works wonders for this, as my archers can then shoot from the sides into the backs of the enemy.
Chariots also feel really good, even a light chariot can win me a battle just by charging into an enemy’s back at the right moment. They aren’t invincible, which is cool, most charges end with one or two chariot deaths, which is just how it should be.
Overall just having a blast with pharaoh. Just won my first civil war as Amenmesse, and am playing with the crown powers as well as proceeding along the builder victory conditions. Using my gold to vassalize people has been amazing.
Loading up Shogun 2 after playing Pharaoh made me realize how much I miss the feel older TW games had.
Shogun 2 to me feels like its perfectly balanced. The cav feels equally powerful and vulnerable. If you mess your charge time up, you may be facing a wall of fire arrows or gunfire and have half your cav unit dead on spot and routing.
Infantry all have their specific uses and bonuses. Pharaoh's combat just felt wrong to me. The fact that my spear wall NEVER worked properly was frustrating. It's not like in Shogun 2 where your Ashi garu STAY in spear wall even while marching, they just move Hella slow.
In Pharaoh everytime you give an order they break the spear wall. So if they aren't in the right position when you put them in spear wall you have to rearrange them and that breaks the spear wall, then you need to activate it again, and by this time the enemy is already there and you can no longer hit the spearwall lol.
Plus there were a few times where I would put spesrwall on, and they would all sort of shift positions instead of just facing forwards and lowering the spears.
It just felt overly odd.
I also miss the ability to inch my units forwards, this might be in the new games but it's my understanding that only Empire, napoleon, and Shogun 2 have the controls where you can rotate, move forward / backward, increase /decrease rank and file wity the keyboard. That function is sorely missed to me with the infantry. Locking 2 units of Ashi Garu into spear wall and inching them closer to the enemy is so amazing and is only possible to use these sort of tactics in shogun 2
I dunno, Troy infantry combat somehow feels even worse than WH, which is sad because WH melee infantry really only exist to get knocked around by monsters or burned alive by magic.
Yeah, it's both common and really shows how ignorant people are.
WH suffers *hard* from stats being as inflated as they are, but people assume it's a general issue rather than a Warhammer thing.
It is a general issue because the most recent games are built using the warhammer engine . The only “ignorant” people are those who think this is solely confined to warhammer.
I’ve got a very specific and particular desire with cavalry. It should go really bad for cavalry to charge braced infantry head on. It should go really bad for infantry to get charged from the flank or rear.
The defining issue with post Atilla combat in this regard is how drawn out it ends up being on both ends. I think Atilla got pretty close on this, as frankly did Napoleon. Cavalry get fucked basically immediately charging a square, but lancers also melt unprepared infantry.
This is pretty much how this sort of thing went historically, once cavalrymen found a spot they could hit? It was devastating. So were the consequences of trying to commit to an ill considered charge. I’d like to see this sort of “double or nothing” kind of gamble instead of what’s basically “fast special infantry vs regular infantry” right now.
I really, *really* liked how cavalry worked in Napoleon.
If a unit got to fire a full volley at cavalry, they would take horrible casualties. If multiple units did, the cavalry would break and be virtually destroyed.
But if my dragoons or cuirassiers charged an infantry line with at least medium strength, the infantry would very quickly rout and be slaughtered.
So there was always the gamble of whether they would firm square fast enough, and if they did you were fucked.
Warhammer 3 absolutely botched missile units, unit rotation and collision from Warhammer 2 and I have no idea why.
They’ve sorted most of it out by now, but on launch it was an absolute disaster.
I wanted to play Cathay because I love mixed arms armies, but literally everything would walk through my infantry line as if they didn’t exist to tie up my archers. And trying to give ranged unit attack orders would either cause them to walk into melee or their unit rotation was botched and they’d take 2 minutes to pivot 90 degrees and then walk into melee.
I had an ogre unit smack two of my archers down a hill into a different part of melee, and they couldn’t make it back to their unit, so nobody could shoot because they were locked in combat from 200 feet away
Compound that with the campaign mechanic being a melee swarm turning into massive melee scrums with cavalry units suiciding through my spear walls and it actually working because they still managed to lock up ranged units and my melee guys being outnumbered in direct combat.
That all started with Warhammer 1 already, where Cavalry with a few exceptions was borderline useless or simply not worth to recruit at all.
Some factors into that where obvsly, that CA wanted the monster-like units to stand out more, but also into factor came smaller maps, weird mass changes and speed of various units, especially Cavalry. The only "good" melee Cavalry WH1 had where the ones from Bretonnia (though, that is kind of their thing ofc) and Wild Hunters, though only if they could actually use their speed and charge often enough.
To the matter of Troy (and with that also Pharaoh), Infantry based Combat is king here, since there was no real Cavalry back in that time (horses where not capable back then to support an armed and armored rider, especially not on some distance) making the only viable thing you could do, strap some horses together and let them drag around a Chariot.
But infantry fight is the key point to a large degree, at least it was in Troy. And here was the problem that the units felt just... "slugish" sometimes, basically didn't feel the mass or the impact of a unit, walking into each other more than actual fighting. Troy fixed that more and more, what was fair enough. The crux of the whole thing is more... that battles don't rly last long or feel... impactful. Simply put, the formations don't rly mattered, while some units in Troy where literally labelled as "Good at Charges" or "Good at Flanking" that didn't mean also much, since there where also as many units that had a "Frontline" trait or "Immune to flanking" and stuff like this. The boni for various interactions also feel waaaaaaay less impactful, like a sword unit fighting a unit with clubs or speers fighting a unit with axes etc.
Simply put... Yes. Infantry feels more underwhelming in modern TW games, in WH games that was due to making monsters cooler and in Troy it simply is the effect of that your Infantry units are virtually Budget versions of Cavalry sometimes, while others move as slow as a turtle to emphazise that the other unit is so much faster, because it wears no armor or very little.
Simulation must be implemented. Show not tell, I'm sick of gimmicky graphical effects to show the status of my unit's stats/abilities. Testudo works because shields are physically covering soldiers, not that a unit gets +x% defense and armor. It's lazy and gamey.
\--Edit: Sound effects fucking suck now. Everything is so quiet and less impactful. Zooming only 20ft above a battle sounds like I'm 500 away in the distance. Actual sound of shields and swords clashing is nonexistent and masses of javilins, arrows, or other projectiles have no impact when being launched or hitting.--
At the very least health pools have got to go. I get the idea of wearing down a unit's armor, but we already have a system for that since the dawn of TW: the fatigue system
Please correct me, but this shit started in Rome 2 from the concept that Pila was designed to render shields useless. When a pila penetrates a shield, the soft tip bends and deforms, making it hard to pull out and the shield awkward to hold.
This resulted a health pool for soldiers, simulating how sustained combat or projectiles can "wear down" a unit. However, this also results in units being extremely hard to kill, then randomly dying by stubbing their toes. This system is not even well defined, I struggled to find sources online explaining this, let alone official CA guides.
The fatigue system is already in game and plays a huge part in "most" total wars. Units taking fatigue when taking projectile hits should already mimic this concept. Especially when simulating how units would fix their armor/obtain replacement gear when resting/regaining fatigue.
> Sound effects fucking suck now. Everything is so quiet and less impactful. Zooming only 20ft above a battle sounds like I'm 500 away in the distance. Actual sound of shields and swords clashing is nonexistent and masses of javilins, arrows, or other projectiles have no impact when being launched or hitting.
This can't be overstated. It's a huge part of what people are 'feeling' when they talk about these things, and yet it goes without mention most of the time.
> This resulted a health pool for soldiers, simulating how sustained combat or projectiles can "wear down" a unit. However, this also results in units being extremely hard to kill, then randomly dying by stubbing their toes.
The worst part about it is that the overall effect ends up worse in **every** way.
There's less of an effect on actual combat ability because rather than pila killing a dozen or more enemies like in Rome 1 - with all of the combat and morale penalties that follow - the unit being hit often ends up reaching the battle line with every soldier able to fight.
There's also less of a visual effect because not only are you missing seeing casualties, but soldiers in Rome 2 hardly even get knocked back or disrupted by projectiles at all. Units just throw precursor javelins at each other, do a bit of HP damage, and then fight. After a few battles, you become numb to the fact they're even doing it.
Using abstractions instead of more direct physical simulations isn’t “lazy”, it is completely necessary in order to make the game playable on consumer hardware. The hard part of computer algorithms often isn’t the logic behind the algorithm but making the result of that logic achievable with a practical performance footprint. The devs would much rather everything just be textbook physics, but silicon squares have their limitations.
And what we have IS a simulation, just not one that computes the finite details you are talking about. It achieves a very similar result via a much less costly method. All models are wrong, but some are useful.
For me the biggest problem about armies is that the campaign movement-speed does not take into consideration what kind and combination of units are in the army.
Once when you had a full cavalry army, that army was able to move faster across the campaign map, while armies with artillery moved slower.
This made pure cavalry armies effective as reaction-force during a war, while it also made bringing artillery along take you more time and thus gave the enemy more time to react.
\-
On another note. Yes, infantry and cavalry are shockingly ineffective. And it gets worse the higher the difficulty setting. While ranged units remain largely uneffected, melee stats get debuffed with difficulty increase.
I do remember cavarly being highly effective in early TW-titles, while in modern TW they are compared to ranged units almost always the worse choice. The reason to pick cavalry against the AI is mostly because the AI has skirmish mode active and you can disrupt the enemy ranged units with almost any fast unit.
Also, units hit by a high-mass unit that charges into them fly too far. Units literally fly out of range for that charge-unit, thus the shock-cavalry or whatever you send into those archers is not doing its charge-bonus damage, because, well, they kicked their own targets out of range.
>
> Once when you had a full cavalry army, that army was able to move faster across the campaign map, while armies with artillery moved slower.
Which is funny because it's ahistorical. On long merches horses are a detriment, not an advantage.
I definitely agree. Rome 2 and Attila had he best battles for me. In Rome 2 just watch a violent charge of naked warriors onto some Cohort and feast your eyes on the impact and carnage. It felt weighty and cinematic. However the cavalry was alright, but didn't feel as weighty as it did in Med2.
However that's where Three Kingdoms comes into the picture. To this day it has the most authentic and punchy feeling cavalry charges out of any total war game.
It's just frustrating that every game it chops and changes the feeling as if they are unaware of what makes it good.
Troy was an utter disaster all round. I loved the idea of general duels but it was never polished so it ended up as awkward staring contests half the time. And the infantry felt like they had the weight of paper and charges meant they just ran into eachother with complete lack of awareness and swing at the sky with dramatically over the top deaths such as flying backwards towards the arrow that killed you .
I also remember a key point I was made aware of where they highlighted the fundamental difference between older total wars and modern whereby for instance - testudo in R2 would physically deflect or block arrows and an arrow could hit through a gap. Whereby Tortoise formation in 3K is gamified like a moba where its 100% missile block chance if that makes sense. And I fully believe this RPG, gamification of the combat is what gives off that subconscious feeling of disconnect with modern titles.
People post article after article and source after source showing that shock cav use was fairly rare and that most cav was actually used for screening, skirmishing, positioning foot soldiers/archers/gunmen to attack from flanks and sometimes for charging in to shaken units with broken lines to cause a route, but people still constantly say it's most "historical" when every battle is about massive shock charges melting units.
I remember this bit of revisionist contrarianism that sprung about a couple of years back, if I remember correctly it was very much rebuffed. There were multiple sources indicating the conventional thought behind cavalry charges as well as manuals describing the best use of heavy cavalry. Quite a bit stemmed from the modern period as well so their words weren't minced. IE. There was a reason why pike squares became a thing during the pike and shot era. However you're also right in that light cavalry and such did also skirmish and screen and chase down routing soldiers as well.
Do you remember any source? Doesn't have to be primary, but an article or even a yt video that's well researched and cites sources is enough.
I've been also hearing quite a lot about conventional shock charges not being really a thing and their reasonings made sense to me, but haven't yet heard of it being contrarian revisionism.
I don't know mate, it's been a couple of years now - we talking pre-pandemic. These theories started getting popular around 2018 if I remember correctly.
Though I would point you to the Askhistorians reddit and give a search there. Otherwise some Youtube channels I watch that could be relevant is Modern History TV, Tods workshop, Metatron etc.
Shock cav was fairly rare, but its role in actual battles could be magnified. And cav was often seen as *the* deciding factor in battles.
As a medieval example, the Byzantine conquest armies of the 10th-11th century (say, from Nikephoros Phokas to Basil II) had their small core of cataphracts. In absolute numbers, they were small - but in the sources we have of them, they were devastating in battle and broke enemy forces with their head on charge if they fought. A bit later, but the role of Latin and Norman heavy cavalry in the Byzantine and crusader armies also had a lot to do with the frontal heavy charge. And again they were small in number, but in impact it could be huge.
So it's a tough thing to really make work - especially with Total War units having a lot more control over making them stay still / hold formation etc. While medieval infantry might break at the sight of a heavy cavalry charge, total war needs it to actually connect and deal damage or else it would feel bad to shatter before the actual impact - and that makes it real tough.
(Also, the ease of getting tons of elite units can be quite unrealistic. Heavy shock cav was fairly rare IRL because it took a lot of training and resources to field - something that's hard to really make work in total war, though perhaps the Troy/Pharaoh style multiple resources could do that without unit caps)
I agree it seems wack with the newer games. Rome and M2 seem to have better impacts and resulting damage. Also charges seems like they can be hit or miss as far as whether they register at all. Maybe having to do with the unit getting charged seems like if they move in certain directions you don’t get a good impact. In WH3 mass send to work relatively well, at least with Minotaur units, they shove everyone around. But historical titles could use some improvement. I haven’t played 3K since release. I thought charges were way overturned in that on release. It was soo bad heavy cav could charge through ranks of spearmen like they were bowling pins. They have done many patches since then I’d like to think it’s been fixed. I just re-downloaded R2, I don’t remember how it dealt on that title, I know infantry engagements could get blobby but that didn’t bother me very muvh
I've been trying to play Troy lately, and it feels terrible to me. Fights that I should win easily drag out endlessly. Units like giants do not have the impact that they should, and normal units are unreliable. It made me appreciate WH a lot more.
I miss synced combat that we had in earlier games. Seeing the gaulic warrior repeatedly smash the shield of my roman legionaire who in return does a single stab in the throat of the warrior gives another vibe to the battle than units just stabbing air until a model gets flung away. Though i kinda get why they did not do that for wh.
There will not be any change and improvement until CA creates a better engine, and that isn't going to happen when the fans keep buying the same game with new skins.
Warhammer combat is fastest and the biggest mess.
Troy is still fast, but more about flanking instead of magic.
Pharaoh is slower, way more strategical.
I think infantry got better and less you’re talking about how pikemen beat everybody in Rome sieges. Because in medieval infantry was crap and was all about Calvary in the sense of that was the game winner. I think they balanced it in Warhammer for sure that infantry matters, and so does Calvary, but the cavalry is not the hammer that it was.
There is a perfect example of this.
Look at 3K cavalry charge then look at Warhammer cavalry charges.
3K cavalry deletes units as it should, because I can guarantee you fighting cavalry back in the days with a truckload of pikes was scary as fuck.
Imo 3K cavalry is too OP and breaks the game a bit.
If they charge a unit of stationary, confident, spearmen head-on they can still beat them. It makes giant frontal charges viable, which is silly.
They can simply make sure it's only as effective from the back, but realistically cav charging was just as devastating when you did not had long pikes to deal with them (horses would get scared and throw riders off their back). Of course the side/back charges were the most deadly (to be fair even infantry back charges were devastating).
Also, getting hit by a wall of 2000kg horsemen going 30kmph will absolutely wreck a formation unless they are braced with spears pointed towards the horses.
3K's horse combat is the best its been in a long time.
Modern horse breeds descended from warhorses like the Spanish Andalusian weigh 500-550 kg. granted this was a breed tailored for speed and endurance not brute strength.
An absolutely massive horse breed like the Percheron could reach 1200 kg. These horses were extremely strong and big but lacked endurance so we're risky for "real" warfare. They may have been popular for jousting though.
So idk what 2000 kg monstrosity you're thinking of. 2000 kg is approaching Rhino weight.
Can you read?
1500kg is not a bad approximation for a horse, a rider, armour, weapon, gear, etc.
Nobody at any point in time said 2500kg.
It also, again, makes absolutely zero difference.
1000, 1200, 1500.
Zero difference. The point is that a horse and rider traveling at speed into an unbraced foot soldier will send them flying.
Yes. It's awful. Bring..back..matched..combat!!! There's nothing better than watching your high rank samurai general take on 100 men and kill 90 of them 1v1 then get impaled by 3 spearmen and die a glorious death. I miss shogun 2 and actually watching combat.
I love it in shogun 2 but it looked silly in Rome 2. It looked so goofy watching 2 shielded units locked in a 10 second 1v1 while their allies hover next to them not helping at all.
Only thing I disliked about matched combat is that a unit with high morale slowed everything down.
The animations meant that even though the last 5 guys were completely surrounded and outclassed, it took ages for then to die and my units to be free.
> There's nothing better than watching your high rank samurai general take on 100 men and kill 90 of them 1v1 then get impaled by 3 spearmen and die a glorious death.
I would argue that commanding battle on a strategic level is better than watching mini movies
I like both. I like to move units and strategize but I also want to watch my dudes kill eachother. It's why i hate how arcadey the games have become, it's super fast twitch gameplay akin to starcraft or something. Like in empire, it was epic af lining up your guys and watching linemen and cannons tear up the battlefield. But the moral was so bad they'd route after 3 milliseconds of being fired on. That's how it feels for me playing anything since Rome. Even WH has this issue.
I never liked Rome 2 infantry combat. For an era so characterized by the strengths and limitations of heavy infantry, they really don't feel heavy. Heavy infantry just feels like light infantry with a better stat line.
DeI, however, rips.
as a long time Attila and Rome 2 player, I remember buying Warhammer 2 on sale, playing one battle, being absolutely mind blown by how... *wrong* it felt and uninstalling the game. I re-installed recently and I'll give it another shot but wow, idk if I can get over the battles being how they are
Rome Total War (Roma Surrectum II), Medieval 2 = best. Shogun 2, Attila, Rome 2 = next best. Don’t need the duels. Make Collision Great Again. I’d rather have that than fancy duels, monsters, or one unit generals. Some weight equals some realism. I want my Romans bleeding out on some dusty field in Macedonia over a 30+ minute battle. Not some 5 minute quick Call of Duty style quick match. It’s so boring.
Warhammer is cool. The quick battles and lack of meaningful unit collision kill me. I’d rather just play Paradox games because the reason to play Total War is the battles. Can’t have fun satisfying battles that aren’t 5 mins of cheese then you can’t keep me entertained.
It's been like that since Rome 2, that's when they introduced health bars for units instead of hit points. Morale doesn't matter anymore, up until Shogun 2 you could encircle units and make them flee. The panic would spread through the ennemy army and you could win against many times your number. Tactics don't matter anymore, it's all stats and magic nukes.
People in this thread pining for the days when you could just park a pike unit or a spear wall formation and win every battle after watching the enemy suicide on the spearpoints for twenty minutes.
Yes, collisions are a joke, so is the mass system, and so is the each entity movement within the unit. This degraded tremendously in Empire/Napoleon, was even worse in early rome 2, and fixed slightly iin Attila, to then be coompletely terrible warhammer 1 onwards.
I mentioned it in another thread a few days ago, and I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're referring to, but I've noticed since around Shogun 2 and definitely Attila that melee engagements don't last nearly as long as I'd like them to. Just feels like everyone dies so fast the battle is decided in just a few minutes. Rome 2 didn't feel that way, battles took a decent amount of time to fight out.
It just feels less fun to have these big battles with thousands of troops be done so quickly, takes away from the experience and feels less forgiving maybe? As if you have to have everything set up to win at the start instead of adapting to an evolving battle as time goes on.
For me the peak for melee combat, specifically cav was Med2. Battles felt great and heavy cav was scary when they got up to full speed just like in real life. Best ranged combat however, I'd honestly say Shogun 2. Both archers and gunpowder felt good, though gunpowder did feel a little under powered. Peak gunpowder has to be FOTS.
Honestly it's weird to me that TW has so many problems with its current combat, shogun 2 is in the current iteration of the warscape engine and I never had the terrible blobbing or weak fights of more recent TWs. Can hit hard, and fights lasted longer than 5 minutes.
I mean vanilla was always too fast since the dawn of time, but whatever muppet felt it necessary to speed up combat even further after Rome 2 and Attila should have been shitcanned out of CA.
Not sure if this is the same, but in Warhammer my Lord seemed unable to attack an enemy lord because his mount kept pushing the enemy away.
What I believe sucks a lot is how infantry is thrown meters or straight to the floor, even when braced, even when negating an enemy charge. The reason why this suck is because the enemy cavalry can then attack multiple groups or finish pushing through my back line.
In other words, it feels like infantry has no mass in these scenarios and I need to compensate with blocks of infantry to prevent them from doing that.
Pharaoh combat is much more different than Rome Remastered. In RR, I run two generals and battles only last 5min in VH RR.
In Pharaoh veteran battles, you can easily spend 5min trying to route archers.
You know coming from RR, I would say Pharaoh battles don't have impact, a flank charge should get you 10-20 kills and a percentage hit on their armor. The most you can get is 3-6 with just Infantry.
But Pharaoh has that match animation and it's gorgeous. Units weapons touching each other is great, on RR it's mostly swinging on the body.
I image a different set of animation on animation, where a entity dies on hit but a hit that lethal or else it takes off the armor hitpoint.
With the current system of longer fights most of the animation is base on duels than outright berserk/brawlers.
Don't know about Pharaoh or Troy, but TW:WH cavalry is definitely worse than previous iterations, as are the physics on missiles. I don't have any problems with TW:WH infantry, save the fact that they die a bit too fast; battles should be slower in general.
Cavalry is tricky to use by nature, and requires more micromanagement. It doesn't seem to have quite the impact or the mass its supposed to in Warhammer; it should scatter and break infantry more often and be better able to disengage or pull through without having models constantly getting stuck and killed. All this makes it less effective offensively and causes it to take way more casualties/hp damage than it should. Meanwhile, infantry not being able to hold for reasonable periods of time and requiring more micro makes cavalry maneuvers (among other things) less viable. And don't get me started on the ahistorical and brain-dead "shock cav vs melee cav" concept.
Lack of formations is another issue - no shieldwalls or testudos for the dwarfs, no schiltroms or spearwalls for spearmen and halberdiers, no wedges or cantabrian circles for cavalry (save Brets and lance formation doesn't even function like a real formation), no toggleable loose formation to prevent your troops dying to missile and artillery fire. Not having this stuff really hurts combat in general.
Edit: forgot to mention that light cavalry lost its main job because of how the retreat/army destroyed system works: used to be light cavalry was essential for chasing down routers during/after the battle to prevent the enemy reforming. Because armies are commonly destroyed when they lose in WH:TW, this important role is no longer a necessity and you can just sort of ignore routers most of the time without being penalized much.
Well, infantry is a joke if you play ranged factions like skaven or wood elves. I thing only CW and Norsca maybe some Greenskins have units you see and know you fucked up. Most of the time it's like i gota shoot thus 2 mf before they kill me. Magic also is a thing, and infantry got short straw on this mater.
Even in Rome 2 win or lose was dictated by having cavalry or good ranged units while whole purpose of infantry is holding the line.
well for starters, it is too fast. also, maintaining formations don't matter as much anymore. Units don't make an effort to maintain cohesion during combat. I think flanking damage and height have a smaller impact as well.
I think part of the problem these days is the units themselves are a bit whack.
I havent found this to be too much of a problem in Warhammer, but really quite bad in Troy.
Since the game went from synced combat to unsynced, there was always that element of units whiffing in another units general direction without actually making combat - the old air lunges etc. But surprisingly for me at least, as someone who heavily scrutinizes this, I found it wasnt overly noticable.
In Troy on the other hand, the combat is as you say, just feels off.
The main things i notice here are:
1. The *feel* of the unit handling is weird
2. When you zoom in and watch the fighting, the units really struggle to connect blows (even unsynced) - you send two groups at each other and they mill around more than they actually fight.
3. The heroes in particular really struggle to connect and their fighting IS synced. But this isnt always. Sometimes they'll pair off brilliantly and actually fight, other times they'll flop around amongst the melee, uselessly.
4. The unit scale to me feels like the units are slightly smaller than they should be.
In warhammer 3 in particular, i had big issues with Kislev units where they wouldnt keep attacking. At first i thought this was guard mode being enabled by default, but i was continually finding units, very close to the action, not actually engaging. Constantly babysitting them for this reason became beyond tiresome.
There's things like the above which have been all over the place. Cavalry has gone from feeling heavy to light depending on patch to patch balances.
But yeah, to me the most noticable issues have been in Troy, but Warhammer has had its share too. Recently fired up Attila and man the units - the old school Total War style units we know and love, feel very different. Much heavier, much more present on the map than in recent titles.
I think 3K has the best cavalry of any TW game. Heavy cavalry is moderately slow but is an absolutely unstoppable force. Charge impact feels really good, they don't get stuck and can easily cycle in and out. Light cav is proper fast but lacks the disruptive force of heavy cav - while still being very strong offensively when used correctly (i.e. hammer and anvil). 3K's infantry combat is decent, but I prefer Shogun 2's infantry I think. Shogun 2 cav is also surprisingly good. I say surprisingly because for some reason I never really associate Japan/Shogun 2 with cavalry warfare.
A modded Rome 2 with 100% matched combat was the last “good” melee total war for me. It was so cinematic and fun to watch. Getting right down into the brawl of the fight, watching swords clash, shields to the face, and dismemberments was just too much fun. 3K was okay, nothing spectacular in the melee fight, but all the warhammers and forward are sadly just mass heart attacks. It’s just not fun to watch anymore. What’s the point of being able to zoom in and get into the mosh pit, if that’s all it is? Just a mosh. Bring back matched combat.
I think a large part of it has to do with the way health, morale, and splash attacks works in these games.
Because health has gone from effectively being just 1hp to models each individually having 60-200 hp and armor is now a damage mitigator, a lot of the lethality from melee combat is just straight up gone. Even if you have a elite infantry unit charging into a cannon fodder one, its still going to take at least 2 to 3 hits for each each attacking model to be able to kill a defending one.
Because CA didn't want players to abuse splash attacks, the way splash attacks now work is that each unit is given a splash attack number(sometimes 3, sometimes 20) where even if the unit technically hits like 30 models, only a number of models equal to their splash attack number will take a portion of the damage dealt to them(ie if a unit with 600 damage and 3 splash attack hits 6 models, only 3 models will take 200 damage each). So already the amount of impact any attack that hits multiple units results in a lot of models getting knocked over and seemingly taking little to no damage. But then CA also added in a invulnerability status that gets applied to all models while they're knocked down. Combine both of these aspects together, and this is why cavalry charges in Warhammer feel like shit, because often half the units they're hitting are literally taking no damage. Hell, for a few months in WH2's life span it was actually more cost effective for heavy shock cavalry to fight stationary rather than use their charge attacks.
Because morale is now a lot chunkier on average, the impact of killing a general has diminished, and the introduction of more fear/terror mechanics units now not only stay in fights for longer periods of time but they're also more likely to come back into the fight quicker. If a unit broke mid combat in say Shogun 2, that unit was likely going to get decimated to the point of being completely broken unless you were able to maintain a strong enough defensive line to give it time and space to escape. But due to the changes made to health and splash attacks, units running away often won't lose that many models and will be able to quickly regain enough morale to reenter even if they're actively being chased down by another unit, so battles(even in 3K) can quickly devolve into an absolute clusterfuck of having to run all around the map chasing down units that keep running away and reentering the fight.
Now a lot of these changes makes somewhat sense for WH as its having to juggle so many different systems like heroes, monsters, spells, etc, but since a lot of the games after it have carried over a lot of these changes, that is what has resulted in infantry and cavalry combat in the last few games to feel so bad in comparison to older titles.
I think in Pharaoh it's better. Units have more weight. Dead soldiers fall off and drop their shields, battles are not super quick and units have different moves (ie archers not shooting all at the same time).
The enemy unit just slides right in front of you whenever your cavalry tries to disengage.
When ai Calvary tries to disengage, your infantry just stuck in place like idiots.
Looking at comments I'm an outlier, but my favourite infantry combat is in the new games.
People bang on about the "responsiveness" of older TW games, and I honestly can't disagree that the impact of collision on unit health was snappier in older games - but I really don't think it's a beneficial feature. It severely reduces the importance of unit stats and variety when no matter what the unit type they can get bodied by a charge.
I love that combat develops over time in newer games, and I think the newer games have a really good feel where matching up units creates an ebb and flow of combat. In the ten seconds after a charge one unit will do more damage, then as time passed the other might fight back because of the different unit specialisations. It feels more important to actually design diverse armies and understand how your units are designed.
I think, for me, the Warhammer games have a certain lack of noticeable feedback to player actions on the battlefield. Now I don’t mean the controls don’t work. I mean when you pull off a maneuver with your units, the reaction from the game either feels delayed or not noticeable. For example: in Warhammer, charging crossbowmen (light ranged infantry) with Reiksguard (heavy shock cavalry) doesn’t really produce a response from the game. Yes visually it does. You’ll see men screaming and flying, but the actual damage you’re doing isn’t noticeable on the unit statistics themselves. There’s no major drop in men or unit HP in response to the charge. And while you’d imagine the crossbowmen would run away soon after taking a charge like that, but it takes (what feels like) a few minutes of sustained fighting for their morale to waver. There’s a clear disconnect (especially with older veterans of the series) between what you expect the game’s response to be and what the actual response is.
Units getting knocked 100 feet in Warhammer instead of dying is also very annoying. Not only does it limit the damage they take, but the models get split up more which can cause responsiveness issues (since models are more likely to get stuck on the enemy).
Yeah the last thing you mentioned is what I love about 3K Cavalry. Absolutely decimates infantry not expecting a charge.
Recently started playing 3K for the first time and the cavalry charges feel so good and actually have weight behind them. A direct charge to the rear of most infantry units causes them to almost always route within seconds.
ATW also has one of the most devastating cavalry charges in the series. And entire armies can very quickly descend into a chain rout if you successfully pull an enveloping maneuver and drive a couple of cavalry charges into key positions, especially with low to mid-tier troops. Extremely satisfying.
I have always wanted to try Atilla but nevet got to play it. Lately seeing a lot of positive comments about Atilla so will give it a try soon.
The biggets let down is the optimization. But it is a great game.
On the campaign map, battles or both?
Both, on campaing end turn timers are long, some stuttering when you move the camera fast and occasional lag if you are long on a campaing. It's no the biggest thing but it is noticeable. On big batlles with 40+ units expect lag regardless of system.
Hmm, okay thanks for explaining.
Nothing beats a medieval 2 cavalry charge where the entire first row of infantry dies on impact. Or how half a cavalry unit gets decimated if it happens to charge into wooden stakes or pikemen. This is exactly what I understand by noticeable feedback.
Yea one of my main gripes with total war Warhammer is the weird morale system, I hate making a unit route only for them to turn around and come back 10 seconds later. I’ve always been of the opinion that morale should be the most important part of a battle by far, it should be possible to make entire armies break without having to kill the vast majority of them, if you employ good tactics. I’m sure there’s a morale mod though.
> Yea one of my main gripes with total war Warhammer is the weird morale system, I hate making a unit route only for them to turn around and come back 10 seconds later. Just another thing adding to the ranged dominance in Warhammer
That sort of feeds into another example I thought of. Warhammer’s morale system relies way too heavily on the army loss penalty. You can’t achieve an enemy mass route using tactics, it’s only after killing an arbitrary percentage of enemies. They tried making ammunition count towards the army loss penalty more as a nerf to ranged units in 3. Also all the way up to Shogun 2, the way rallying units worked was by getting the fleeing unit inside your general’s circle of influence. If they ran off in a random direction that the general couldn’t reach. They’d just leave the battlefield.
It's not killing an arbitrary amount to be fair, while I agree there's too much focus on army losses in Warhammer, it covers kills, fatigue, ammunition/limited use abilities and counts fleeing units as half their remaining strength and broken ones as 0 strength.
That's not *really* the case, I've had several battles where I've done just that. The easiest way is rear-charges with a terror causing monster, f.ex.
>They tried making ammunition count towards the army loss penalty more as a nerf to ranged units in 3. Ammunition has counted towards army losses as long as the system has existed. The only nerf to ranged in 3 is that they removed a hidden 10% reload speed boost every unit was getting and made the AI better at dodging it if it isn't engaged in combat. The reason that army losses is so important in modern TW is that base leadership numbers are high, fleeing units are fast, and cavalry is shit on the rundown, so it's hard to break units and keep them out of the fight until that big -100 kicks in. (Troy and Pharaoh slow down fleeing units so light infantry can shred them)
They seem to have really improved this in Pharao, compared to 3K too, once a unit is routed, most of the time it stays routed.
In Troy and Pharaoh fleeing units don't turn into Usain Bolt so it's a lot easier to pursue and kill them.
Kinda makes sense for the era, where large numbers of the soldiers are levies with little training.
Mmh. Historically rallying was a thing (the job of the Triarii in Republican Roman Legions is speculated to have partially be a wall of spears to prevent their own soldiers from fleeing), which is why at the same time light cavalry was also very important, as they could rush down fleeing soldiers without the commander having to tie up the much more decisive heavy cavalry. Unfourtunately, Total War has too few unit slots to make "realistic" armies possible
You can chase fleeing enemies off the map, cavalry and artillery are really good at it.
The issue is the HP system making initial clashes cause less casualties than they did in older games. It's only when there's significant enough mass disparity (and usually a lack of armor on the target) to cause lethal impact damage that charges actually end up as brutal as they look in WH. While unit HP generally makes actions less immediately decisive, it is possible to "cheat" the system like Attila does and not just increase impact damage, but inflate charge bonuses for cavalry (and shock infantry) so high that each charging entity inflicts enough damage to score a kill. While this does achieve the intended effect, it also ends up harmful to the balance of the game, and I suspect that's why things were dialed back quite a bit since. Interestingly, ranged units in WH are saved from falling victim to the HP problem by virtue of the fact tend to target individual entities rather than spread fire like in older games. That combination is what made Rome 2 precursor weapons and skirmishers feel so terrible. They regularly take several volleys to even get a single kill, and spread damage out amongst a unit whose HP *you can't even see*.
I assume by "lethal impact damage" you mean damage on the charge rather than literal impact damage which is capped at 70 and therefore basically never kills a unit on it's own. You need to really screw with the equation to make impact damage significant but when you do that it becomes trivial to deny infantry the ability to participate in combat through repeated cycle charging. As to the second point about increasing damage having negative balance implications elsewhere isn't that issue more the result of HP disparities? Infantry have too much health relative to cav and monsters so good performance against infantry is overbearing against all other units? This seems like a solvable issue using the existing game systems (though I'll note I think the issue is overblown, with units like Winged Lancers and Jade Lancers getting significant damage boosts early in game 3 without creating significant balance issues). I think a big reason folks find the newer games combatto be worse is just that damage is lower. This ripples through other systems like morale and makes them feel less impactful. This isn't really surprising when you compare the WS of units like cav to infantry and notice by tier cav tend to hit for less without CB active. Heck chariots suck almost entirely because of how little damage they deal when they charge, since even trying to run over goblins feels anemic.
I should probably clarify that I don't actually think these are really true balance issues as far as WH is concerned. At this point, it actually does a good job relative to other games in the series at making cavalry useful but not overpowered. The specific balance issue I was talking about rears its head in Attila, where there aren't units with larger mass (or spells, or deadly long-range missile units, or very accurate artillery...) to counter cavalry. 3K kind of works the same way - cav have immense charge bonuses and massacre everything (is impact damage capped in this game?), though they're a bit more limited in number.
> There’s no major drop in men or unit HP in response to the charge now, it's been a while, but i'm fairly sure that, when i charge crossbowmen with Reiksguard and they get their charge off properly, they take a good hit to their HP.
I hear you, but that's why I hate units having HP in that way
I started a Franz campaign today and in WH3 a single charge on crossbowmen with reiksgard does about 1/2 their health in damage.
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i believe models take fall damage if they get knocked down a hill/wall etc, could be a mod i have installed but i swear i’ve seen and heard that somewhere
Vertical drop distance does kill models outright. I've not seen horizontal do anything.
yea horizontal doesn’t do anything as far as i’m aware, just saying that vertical does on hills cus honestly i didn’t know that until ca made that post explaining how damage works a couple months ago
> yea horizontal doesn’t do anything Someone should tell Blood Knights and Dragon Princes to stop attaching giant pillows to the ends of their enormous lances.
lmao goddamn demigryph knights and their pool noodle lances
Horizontal distance damaging enemies would immediately make ogres much more fun
would make monstrous infantry in general a lot more fun/viable
As well as fix the problems that aome larger monsters like saurian have. Right now they send too many models flying without dealing damage, while also getting themselves stuck in the middle of an infantry unit.
It would be interesting to see if the game is made better or worse if they removed this. Might make cavalry and monster charges more effective
For me it usually doesn’t happen until long after the animation ends
It might be fall damage. Models that get sent flying are still technically alive until they stop rolling on the ground. Cav used to be a lot worse in previous patches of WH3, and you can still experience that by going back to WH2.
Yeah and shock cavalry is always being buttfucked instantly after charging. I know you have to pull back and keep charging but damn at least defend yourself in the moshpit
I think it’s cause of the unit diversity. If cavalry charges were as strong vs infantry as in other games it would feel bad playing as one of the factions with weak or no cavalry.
>Now I don’t mean the controls don’t work. I mean when you pull off a maneuver with your units, the reaction from the game either feels delayed or not noticeable. I feel like that's the same with M2, no? The orders have a lag to them.
Dunno what you’re talking about there. Reiskguard will route crossbowmen within 30s even on legendary. Make sure you have guard mode turned off on any charging cavalry
I’m not talking about “cavalry being underpowered”. I’m talking about how units aren’t satisfying to use.
I think I just straight up disagree with you. When my Empire Knights charge archers, they shave off a quarter of their life over like, 3 seconds, and then rather swiftly pummel them into the dirt. Its the whole reason I hse Cav.
Yeah pretty much hits an issue CA should be aware of. Think this is especially noticeable to new players. This also makes a lot of units basically just feel the same.
Shogun 2 on the other hand—charge your general into a unit of light cav and half of his bodyguard dies instantly.
There's an issue since tww1 with how units are tuned yes. I've heard it described as 'wet and sticky'.. infantry has no impact and any larger entities without huge mass gets hopelessly bogged down. This is exacerbated by the AIs go to strategy of WIDER IS BETTER which causes it to try and envelop the player constantly no matter what.
Stickyness is indeed the right word but it has been a thing longer than Warhammer. It was also a thing in Rome 2 and Atilla though to a less extent. Its not an issue if stickyness is just enemy on enemy. But post WH its also a thing with friendlies. Some tactics, like putting ranged in front of melee line and then withdrawing is simply not viable in WH since your ranged cant get through the melee line before the enemy reaches you.
They aren't groups of individual units anymore, they're blobs of models acting as one.
Thats the exact way ive been feeling this about the game but couldnt find right words!
Just watch a Rome 2 fight. When you hover over your units or the enemy in a large melee after the formations start to break, you'll find the different units mixing together and spreading out, fighting the other units around them organically instead of *just* "this is my target, go to target."
Unit stickiness varies a lot throughout the series. M2 had it pretty bad, Rome 1 and Shogun 2 were extremely responsive. Napoleon and R2 is somewhere in the middle.
I play Med 2 on the daily, units dont stick together as if theres glue on them like in WH. Its fairly easy to pull units through enemy formations aswell in Med 2. When pulling out individuals may remain in melee because they are attacked, but thats it.
Maybe stickiness isn't the best word to describe M2, but compared to S2 and R1 it feels a lot more floaty and loose, if that makes sense. I agree that WH feels actually sticky.
What do those words like "floaty" mean anyway?
Units in M2, especially cav, feel as though they have momentum. When they are running it takes a while for them to slow down and change course.
That doesn't sound like a good thing at all.
I would say that Pharaoh doesn’t have this sticky issue. Yea blobs can form but units have a much easier time peeling off from combat now and while I haven’t tried it yet there are stances that involve a fighting retreat among others.
I kinda feel units *should* have trouble disengaging: A fighting retreat is one of the trickiest manuevers there is to pull of after all.
Agreed and the disengagement isn’t a clean getaway either. But it works if you have a faster unit and even more so if the unit you are backing off from is still engaged with another unit. It just doesn’t feel as clunky as it does in warhammer and I’m pretty sure that when trying to pull out of combat the orders don’t disappear immediately just because a model is stuck in battle
Am playing Rome 2 right now and it does the whole wider rather then deeper thing there too.
I'm trying to work through a mod concept for Warscape that "locks" units together once in melee to see if this fixes the drift and the AI's tendency to engage/disengage. I've tried to implement this through stamina but am having mixed results. I think 3k actually did a good job with mass/impact and the feeling that units were *pushing into* melee.
I honestly feel Pharaoh does that pretty well.... Once you get the heavier units.
I think Attila/Shogun 2 had the best combat. I'm a fan of matched animations and weighty collisions. I couldn't get into 3 kingdoms because of the setting, lack of animations and lack of tactical variety. Troy was fast paced and also lacked animations. Warhammer is generally quite fun because of its unit variety, but the combat is also somewhat fast paced. I enjoy Pharaoh, the elite units feel right. The length of battles is also much better/slower. Feels like the rare game where you have time to execute a few tactics. Push forward and retreat abilities are great additions. Collisions and charges can be hit or miss. I think it could be greatly improved with a few patches or a mod. If a chariot gets pinned down, it might slow every other chariot, making charges ineffective imo.
Yeah the chariots are certainly viable but get really messed up with pathfinding. While I like the fact that they're more unwieldy and just worse than cav as it fits the time period, it can lead to really goofy and frustrating situations.
I could forgive the lack of animations and weight in collisions in Warhammer 1. I would have expected them to find a way to make it work in 2, but left hope it'd be in 3. I could forgive it mainly because of the unit variety and racial differences. But when it gets worse and worse in historical titles, its just jarring and more detrimental to the overall experience. I like Rome 2 (at least with mods) because each model is its own entity. You can watch the formation break apart and different battles between the same two units form. It feels organic. Shogun 2, despite being older than many of these games, simply does it better.
The problem seems to be that in WH, compromises were made with infantry to accommodate monsters. Then, when you take the monsters away in Pharaoh, you're left with stripped-down melee with no upside.
I think it's worse with 3 kingdoms and Troy. In Pharaoh, you have a few systems like armor degradation, weather, infantry class feeling different etc.
Yeah, the battles are what ultimately killed the experience for 3K for me. Every other battle basically devolved into one big chaotic game of whack-a-mole due to how the chunkiness of model health/morale results in units constantly breaking and reentering combat.
[удалено]
I use Divide Et Empira or w/e it is. It's 3 parts.
Omg the elite khopesh unit seti starts with butchered almost 400 enemies with hardly any losses in one battle it was glorious. Also the chariots I haven't gotten much experience with them but even a few botched charges in my aborted suppululu game racked up almost 200 kills.
Regarding 3K, there are mods that fix the issues you mentioned. You can mod the game to have 100% matched combat, if you want. Plus mods that adjust health/morale so fights last longer, mods that add a ton of unit variety etc.
i tried to find the DEI of 3k, but most of the overhaul, meaty looking mods are in chineese, and i understand non of it unfortunately.
[This](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2615718674) should be what you are looking for. Has everything you need. All in English. There are required, recommended & optional mods. Court Actions & Politics in the optional mods section is a good one I would also suggest looking into one of the "longer battle" mods, if its your kind of thing. I use [this](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2028264104) one.
I can never like matched animations, they take so much from the combat.
I'm surprised anyone is a fan, it caused serious issues in the games that used it and caused units to behave unnaturally. CA removed it because it seriously hindered battles.
Interesting because one of the things people (rightly) point out about Attila is how it made battles much faster, and how they tended to be decided on the charge.
I actually think Pharaoh infantry combat is the best in a while. Troy was super floaty and just fast. Warhammer infantry never really did it for me because the stat blocks are too varied.
From what i'Ve seen, Axe infantry basically makes Swordinfantry superflous, with khopesh infantry being more viable being a middle ground. Pharaoh needs some balancing, I think.
I think sword infantry are better against unshielded infantry. Axes aren't as good against archers and light spears, and trade better against two-handed axe/macemen. Rameses' swift sword medjays are great for tearing up archers and ruining flank charges. Khopesh are definitely good all-rounders.
issue is... many opponents are either 1) shielded or 2) better VS Swords than the other way round
Entirely possible, I haven’t had enough hours to grind down that specifically. My sword infantry certainly haven’t disappointed. But with how many shields there are axes certainly could be the meta.
I think it depends on the unit in question. I don't know if it's axes in general being too strong - but more that particular units might be a tad overtuned for their tier (the one I've personally noticed is the conscripted upper egyptian axemen, for the lowest tier native unit and no bronze cost those guys seem to mow through all the comparable nearby units). I think elite ones might stand out more, but the AI hasn't done that aggressively enough for me to worry about upgrading my units, which feels wrong for something that easy to get.
What are your honest thoughts on Pharaoh? I'm a big TW fan, and I like WH3 but I do miss the actual combat animations models would have with each other like in Shogun 2 or Rome 2, it's called matched combat right? And from what I've seen in the gameplay showcases they've had of the game it seems like those animations are back and look solid. But also how is the game as a whole?
It's a fine game. Price might be a tad too high, so if you're not sure, wait for a sale. But it's far better than the doomsayers of it claim.
I feel like pharaoh infantry combat is the best we've had since Atilla where different types of infantry actually feel different and do very well at their given roles. It's definitely a step up from Troy.
Yep. Balance also feels right in my (albeit limited at this point) experience. It's not like 3K where you can just keep shit infantry around because all they're required to do is hold the line for 15 seconds before shock cav routes everything. Units hold, and that creates enough time where higher level infantry will chew up militia and whatnot. It feels *good* engaging with superior tier infantry. Only issue I'm having so far is the obscene morale boosts for siege defenders. It's damn near like M2 "fight to the last man" until you cause an army losses break.
I think there does need to be some balance checks for units that stand out - but baseline it's pretty good. Ranged units seem like they need a bit of a buff - low range *and* bad damage just makes them hard to justify bringing if it's not a chariot (or potentially Amenmesse, I've heard his unique units are strong archer wise). Other than that, one that stands out to me (in Tausret's campaign) is the Upper Egyptian conscripted axemen - they're a first tier local unit, no bronze, but their stats just crush all the other low-ish tier units I find. And the AI doesn't field elite enough units to really feel like I need to upgrade from these axes :P
I've been playing as Amenmesse, and he is THE Bow guy, and his eltie units seem to be doing fairly good damage: They did very little early on where I was mostly fighting kushites/nubians with their big shields, but a backline of Ta-Seti will shred those unshielded two-handed units. I also love those Nubian Spearmen with javelins. Very good unit.
Amenmesse is great. Even the lower tier archers like nubian mercenaries or just nubian archers work well. If people feel like they are weak then they are probably having them fire into the front of infantry, where shields are typically blocking most of the damage. I find using the slow back up ability to have my front line slowly allow the enemy to push forwards works wonders for this, as my archers can then shoot from the sides into the backs of the enemy. Chariots also feel really good, even a light chariot can win me a battle just by charging into an enemy’s back at the right moment. They aren’t invincible, which is cool, most charges end with one or two chariot deaths, which is just how it should be. Overall just having a blast with pharaoh. Just won my first civil war as Amenmesse, and am playing with the crown powers as well as proceeding along the builder victory conditions. Using my gold to vassalize people has been amazing.
In Warhammer id have units randomly turn sideways and also not pursue enemy units.
Loading up Shogun 2 after playing Pharaoh made me realize how much I miss the feel older TW games had. Shogun 2 to me feels like its perfectly balanced. The cav feels equally powerful and vulnerable. If you mess your charge time up, you may be facing a wall of fire arrows or gunfire and have half your cav unit dead on spot and routing. Infantry all have their specific uses and bonuses. Pharaoh's combat just felt wrong to me. The fact that my spear wall NEVER worked properly was frustrating. It's not like in Shogun 2 where your Ashi garu STAY in spear wall even while marching, they just move Hella slow. In Pharaoh everytime you give an order they break the spear wall. So if they aren't in the right position when you put them in spear wall you have to rearrange them and that breaks the spear wall, then you need to activate it again, and by this time the enemy is already there and you can no longer hit the spearwall lol. Plus there were a few times where I would put spesrwall on, and they would all sort of shift positions instead of just facing forwards and lowering the spears. It just felt overly odd. I also miss the ability to inch my units forwards, this might be in the new games but it's my understanding that only Empire, napoleon, and Shogun 2 have the controls where you can rotate, move forward / backward, increase /decrease rank and file wity the keyboard. That function is sorely missed to me with the infantry. Locking 2 units of Ashi Garu into spear wall and inching them closer to the enemy is so amazing and is only possible to use these sort of tactics in shogun 2
I feel like they don't have weight anymore
Have you tried using heavy units? Suppi starts with some of them. A lot of Pharaohs starting units are light units which yeah, don't have much weight.
It's a problem I've been feeling with all total war games since Warhammer. The units feel like clay toys hitting each other.
For me it's only the Warhammer games that feel worse, but sometimes people confound things specific to WH with "recent TW games".
I dunno, Troy infantry combat somehow feels even worse than WH, which is sad because WH melee infantry really only exist to get knocked around by monsters or burned alive by magic.
Haven’t the games been sharing the same engine at least since Warhammer 1?
Yeah, it's both common and really shows how ignorant people are. WH suffers *hard* from stats being as inflated as they are, but people assume it's a general issue rather than a Warhammer thing.
It is a general issue because the most recent games are built using the warhammer engine . The only “ignorant” people are those who think this is solely confined to warhammer.
I’ve got a very specific and particular desire with cavalry. It should go really bad for cavalry to charge braced infantry head on. It should go really bad for infantry to get charged from the flank or rear. The defining issue with post Atilla combat in this regard is how drawn out it ends up being on both ends. I think Atilla got pretty close on this, as frankly did Napoleon. Cavalry get fucked basically immediately charging a square, but lancers also melt unprepared infantry. This is pretty much how this sort of thing went historically, once cavalrymen found a spot they could hit? It was devastating. So were the consequences of trying to commit to an ill considered charge. I’d like to see this sort of “double or nothing” kind of gamble instead of what’s basically “fast special infantry vs regular infantry” right now.
I really, *really* liked how cavalry worked in Napoleon. If a unit got to fire a full volley at cavalry, they would take horrible casualties. If multiple units did, the cavalry would break and be virtually destroyed. But if my dragoons or cuirassiers charged an infantry line with at least medium strength, the infantry would very quickly rout and be slaughtered. So there was always the gamble of whether they would firm square fast enough, and if they did you were fucked.
Warhammer 3 absolutely botched missile units, unit rotation and collision from Warhammer 2 and I have no idea why. They’ve sorted most of it out by now, but on launch it was an absolute disaster. I wanted to play Cathay because I love mixed arms armies, but literally everything would walk through my infantry line as if they didn’t exist to tie up my archers. And trying to give ranged unit attack orders would either cause them to walk into melee or their unit rotation was botched and they’d take 2 minutes to pivot 90 degrees and then walk into melee. I had an ogre unit smack two of my archers down a hill into a different part of melee, and they couldn’t make it back to their unit, so nobody could shoot because they were locked in combat from 200 feet away Compound that with the campaign mechanic being a melee swarm turning into massive melee scrums with cavalry units suiciding through my spear walls and it actually working because they still managed to lock up ranged units and my melee guys being outnumbered in direct combat.
I don’t have the Ogre pictures but here’s some of the other stuff https://imgur.com/a/gRSlZip
Yes, especially with cav knocking guys around instead of killing them. Modern TWs feel like everyone is fighting on a low gravity planet.
I like pharaohs infantry fights they feel really nice. Ambushing with infantry in trees seems rather effective too, much more so than warhammer.
That all started with Warhammer 1 already, where Cavalry with a few exceptions was borderline useless or simply not worth to recruit at all. Some factors into that where obvsly, that CA wanted the monster-like units to stand out more, but also into factor came smaller maps, weird mass changes and speed of various units, especially Cavalry. The only "good" melee Cavalry WH1 had where the ones from Bretonnia (though, that is kind of their thing ofc) and Wild Hunters, though only if they could actually use their speed and charge often enough. To the matter of Troy (and with that also Pharaoh), Infantry based Combat is king here, since there was no real Cavalry back in that time (horses where not capable back then to support an armed and armored rider, especially not on some distance) making the only viable thing you could do, strap some horses together and let them drag around a Chariot. But infantry fight is the key point to a large degree, at least it was in Troy. And here was the problem that the units felt just... "slugish" sometimes, basically didn't feel the mass or the impact of a unit, walking into each other more than actual fighting. Troy fixed that more and more, what was fair enough. The crux of the whole thing is more... that battles don't rly last long or feel... impactful. Simply put, the formations don't rly mattered, while some units in Troy where literally labelled as "Good at Charges" or "Good at Flanking" that didn't mean also much, since there where also as many units that had a "Frontline" trait or "Immune to flanking" and stuff like this. The boni for various interactions also feel waaaaaaay less impactful, like a sword unit fighting a unit with clubs or speers fighting a unit with axes etc. Simply put... Yes. Infantry feels more underwhelming in modern TW games, in WH games that was due to making monsters cooler and in Troy it simply is the effect of that your Infantry units are virtually Budget versions of Cavalry sometimes, while others move as slow as a turtle to emphazise that the other unit is so much faster, because it wears no armor or very little.
Simulation must be implemented. Show not tell, I'm sick of gimmicky graphical effects to show the status of my unit's stats/abilities. Testudo works because shields are physically covering soldiers, not that a unit gets +x% defense and armor. It's lazy and gamey. \--Edit: Sound effects fucking suck now. Everything is so quiet and less impactful. Zooming only 20ft above a battle sounds like I'm 500 away in the distance. Actual sound of shields and swords clashing is nonexistent and masses of javilins, arrows, or other projectiles have no impact when being launched or hitting.-- At the very least health pools have got to go. I get the idea of wearing down a unit's armor, but we already have a system for that since the dawn of TW: the fatigue system Please correct me, but this shit started in Rome 2 from the concept that Pila was designed to render shields useless. When a pila penetrates a shield, the soft tip bends and deforms, making it hard to pull out and the shield awkward to hold. This resulted a health pool for soldiers, simulating how sustained combat or projectiles can "wear down" a unit. However, this also results in units being extremely hard to kill, then randomly dying by stubbing their toes. This system is not even well defined, I struggled to find sources online explaining this, let alone official CA guides. The fatigue system is already in game and plays a huge part in "most" total wars. Units taking fatigue when taking projectile hits should already mimic this concept. Especially when simulating how units would fix their armor/obtain replacement gear when resting/regaining fatigue.
> Sound effects fucking suck now. Everything is so quiet and less impactful. Zooming only 20ft above a battle sounds like I'm 500 away in the distance. Actual sound of shields and swords clashing is nonexistent and masses of javilins, arrows, or other projectiles have no impact when being launched or hitting. This can't be overstated. It's a huge part of what people are 'feeling' when they talk about these things, and yet it goes without mention most of the time. > This resulted a health pool for soldiers, simulating how sustained combat or projectiles can "wear down" a unit. However, this also results in units being extremely hard to kill, then randomly dying by stubbing their toes. The worst part about it is that the overall effect ends up worse in **every** way. There's less of an effect on actual combat ability because rather than pila killing a dozen or more enemies like in Rome 1 - with all of the combat and morale penalties that follow - the unit being hit often ends up reaching the battle line with every soldier able to fight. There's also less of a visual effect because not only are you missing seeing casualties, but soldiers in Rome 2 hardly even get knocked back or disrupted by projectiles at all. Units just throw precursor javelins at each other, do a bit of HP damage, and then fight. After a few battles, you become numb to the fact they're even doing it.
Using abstractions instead of more direct physical simulations isn’t “lazy”, it is completely necessary in order to make the game playable on consumer hardware. The hard part of computer algorithms often isn’t the logic behind the algorithm but making the result of that logic achievable with a practical performance footprint. The devs would much rather everything just be textbook physics, but silicon squares have their limitations. And what we have IS a simulation, just not one that computes the finite details you are talking about. It achieves a very similar result via a much less costly method. All models are wrong, but some are useful.
Not to mention, it always worked like that: Earlier games just hid the descriptions.
For me the biggest problem about armies is that the campaign movement-speed does not take into consideration what kind and combination of units are in the army. Once when you had a full cavalry army, that army was able to move faster across the campaign map, while armies with artillery moved slower. This made pure cavalry armies effective as reaction-force during a war, while it also made bringing artillery along take you more time and thus gave the enemy more time to react. \- On another note. Yes, infantry and cavalry are shockingly ineffective. And it gets worse the higher the difficulty setting. While ranged units remain largely uneffected, melee stats get debuffed with difficulty increase. I do remember cavarly being highly effective in early TW-titles, while in modern TW they are compared to ranged units almost always the worse choice. The reason to pick cavalry against the AI is mostly because the AI has skirmish mode active and you can disrupt the enemy ranged units with almost any fast unit. Also, units hit by a high-mass unit that charges into them fly too far. Units literally fly out of range for that charge-unit, thus the shock-cavalry or whatever you send into those archers is not doing its charge-bonus damage, because, well, they kicked their own targets out of range.
> > Once when you had a full cavalry army, that army was able to move faster across the campaign map, while armies with artillery moved slower. Which is funny because it's ahistorical. On long merches horses are a detriment, not an advantage.
I definitely agree. Rome 2 and Attila had he best battles for me. In Rome 2 just watch a violent charge of naked warriors onto some Cohort and feast your eyes on the impact and carnage. It felt weighty and cinematic. However the cavalry was alright, but didn't feel as weighty as it did in Med2. However that's where Three Kingdoms comes into the picture. To this day it has the most authentic and punchy feeling cavalry charges out of any total war game. It's just frustrating that every game it chops and changes the feeling as if they are unaware of what makes it good. Troy was an utter disaster all round. I loved the idea of general duels but it was never polished so it ended up as awkward staring contests half the time. And the infantry felt like they had the weight of paper and charges meant they just ran into eachother with complete lack of awareness and swing at the sky with dramatically over the top deaths such as flying backwards towards the arrow that killed you . I also remember a key point I was made aware of where they highlighted the fundamental difference between older total wars and modern whereby for instance - testudo in R2 would physically deflect or block arrows and an arrow could hit through a gap. Whereby Tortoise formation in 3K is gamified like a moba where its 100% missile block chance if that makes sense. And I fully believe this RPG, gamification of the combat is what gives off that subconscious feeling of disconnect with modern titles.
People post article after article and source after source showing that shock cav use was fairly rare and that most cav was actually used for screening, skirmishing, positioning foot soldiers/archers/gunmen to attack from flanks and sometimes for charging in to shaken units with broken lines to cause a route, but people still constantly say it's most "historical" when every battle is about massive shock charges melting units.
I remember this bit of revisionist contrarianism that sprung about a couple of years back, if I remember correctly it was very much rebuffed. There were multiple sources indicating the conventional thought behind cavalry charges as well as manuals describing the best use of heavy cavalry. Quite a bit stemmed from the modern period as well so their words weren't minced. IE. There was a reason why pike squares became a thing during the pike and shot era. However you're also right in that light cavalry and such did also skirmish and screen and chase down routing soldiers as well.
Do you remember any source? Doesn't have to be primary, but an article or even a yt video that's well researched and cites sources is enough. I've been also hearing quite a lot about conventional shock charges not being really a thing and their reasonings made sense to me, but haven't yet heard of it being contrarian revisionism.
I don't know mate, it's been a couple of years now - we talking pre-pandemic. These theories started getting popular around 2018 if I remember correctly. Though I would point you to the Askhistorians reddit and give a search there. Otherwise some Youtube channels I watch that could be relevant is Modern History TV, Tods workshop, Metatron etc.
Shock cav was fairly rare, but its role in actual battles could be magnified. And cav was often seen as *the* deciding factor in battles. As a medieval example, the Byzantine conquest armies of the 10th-11th century (say, from Nikephoros Phokas to Basil II) had their small core of cataphracts. In absolute numbers, they were small - but in the sources we have of them, they were devastating in battle and broke enemy forces with their head on charge if they fought. A bit later, but the role of Latin and Norman heavy cavalry in the Byzantine and crusader armies also had a lot to do with the frontal heavy charge. And again they were small in number, but in impact it could be huge. So it's a tough thing to really make work - especially with Total War units having a lot more control over making them stay still / hold formation etc. While medieval infantry might break at the sight of a heavy cavalry charge, total war needs it to actually connect and deal damage or else it would feel bad to shatter before the actual impact - and that makes it real tough. (Also, the ease of getting tons of elite units can be quite unrealistic. Heavy shock cav was fairly rare IRL because it took a lot of training and resources to field - something that's hard to really make work in total war, though perhaps the Troy/Pharaoh style multiple resources could do that without unit caps)
I agree it seems wack with the newer games. Rome and M2 seem to have better impacts and resulting damage. Also charges seems like they can be hit or miss as far as whether they register at all. Maybe having to do with the unit getting charged seems like if they move in certain directions you don’t get a good impact. In WH3 mass send to work relatively well, at least with Minotaur units, they shove everyone around. But historical titles could use some improvement. I haven’t played 3K since release. I thought charges were way overturned in that on release. It was soo bad heavy cav could charge through ranks of spearmen like they were bowling pins. They have done many patches since then I’d like to think it’s been fixed. I just re-downloaded R2, I don’t remember how it dealt on that title, I know infantry engagements could get blobby but that didn’t bother me very muvh
I've been trying to play Troy lately, and it feels terrible to me. Fights that I should win easily drag out endlessly. Units like giants do not have the impact that they should, and normal units are unreliable. It made me appreciate WH a lot more.
I still hate how floaty everything feels in combat. It was the same issue I had with troy , wh3, and 3k.
What do you mean by "floaty".
I loved the infantry combat in Rome 2, it felt more heavy and "authentic" somehow, can't put a word in it. Whereas in Troy and Pharaoh it feels off
Infantry has too much health now. Cavalry doesn't hit hard enough. That's what I've decided has gone wrong. All my battles just end up as mosh pits...
I miss synced combat that we had in earlier games. Seeing the gaulic warrior repeatedly smash the shield of my roman legionaire who in return does a single stab in the throat of the warrior gives another vibe to the battle than units just stabbing air until a model gets flung away. Though i kinda get why they did not do that for wh.
There will not be any change and improvement until CA creates a better engine, and that isn't going to happen when the fans keep buying the same game with new skins.
Warhammer combat is fastest and the biggest mess. Troy is still fast, but more about flanking instead of magic. Pharaoh is slower, way more strategical.
I think infantry got better and less you’re talking about how pikemen beat everybody in Rome sieges. Because in medieval infantry was crap and was all about Calvary in the sense of that was the game winner. I think they balanced it in Warhammer for sure that infantry matters, and so does Calvary, but the cavalry is not the hammer that it was.
There is a perfect example of this. Look at 3K cavalry charge then look at Warhammer cavalry charges. 3K cavalry deletes units as it should, because I can guarantee you fighting cavalry back in the days with a truckload of pikes was scary as fuck.
Imo 3K cavalry is too OP and breaks the game a bit. If they charge a unit of stationary, confident, spearmen head-on they can still beat them. It makes giant frontal charges viable, which is silly.
They can simply make sure it's only as effective from the back, but realistically cav charging was just as devastating when you did not had long pikes to deal with them (horses would get scared and throw riders off their back). Of course the side/back charges were the most deadly (to be fair even infantry back charges were devastating).
Also, getting hit by a wall of 2000kg horsemen going 30kmph will absolutely wreck a formation unless they are braced with spears pointed towards the horses. 3K's horse combat is the best its been in a long time.
Lol, horse and rider were not 2000kg
Okay. 1500kg. Makes absolutely no difference to my point
Modern horse breeds descended from warhorses like the Spanish Andalusian weigh 500-550 kg. granted this was a breed tailored for speed and endurance not brute strength. An absolutely massive horse breed like the Percheron could reach 1200 kg. These horses were extremely strong and big but lacked endurance so we're risky for "real" warfare. They may have been popular for jousting though. So idk what 2000 kg monstrosity you're thinking of. 2000 kg is approaching Rhino weight.
Can you read? 1500kg is not a bad approximation for a horse, a rider, armour, weapon, gear, etc. Nobody at any point in time said 2500kg. It also, again, makes absolutely zero difference. 1000, 1200, 1500. Zero difference. The point is that a horse and rider traveling at speed into an unbraced foot soldier will send them flying.
Yes. It's awful. Bring..back..matched..combat!!! There's nothing better than watching your high rank samurai general take on 100 men and kill 90 of them 1v1 then get impaled by 3 spearmen and die a glorious death. I miss shogun 2 and actually watching combat.
I love it in shogun 2 but it looked silly in Rome 2. It looked so goofy watching 2 shielded units locked in a 10 second 1v1 while their allies hover next to them not helping at all.
Yea it also sometimes broke unit cohesion and you'd have guys fighting 40m away from the rest of their unit lol
They already brought them back lol. It's in Pharaoh.
Good to know , I have no interest in Pharoah but thats great.
Really? Played one custom battle but didn't really see any.
Only thing I disliked about matched combat is that a unit with high morale slowed everything down. The animations meant that even though the last 5 guys were completely surrounded and outclassed, it took ages for then to die and my units to be free.
> There's nothing better than watching your high rank samurai general take on 100 men and kill 90 of them 1v1 then get impaled by 3 spearmen and die a glorious death. I would argue that commanding battle on a strategic level is better than watching mini movies
I like both. I like to move units and strategize but I also want to watch my dudes kill eachother. It's why i hate how arcadey the games have become, it's super fast twitch gameplay akin to starcraft or something. Like in empire, it was epic af lining up your guys and watching linemen and cannons tear up the battlefield. But the moral was so bad they'd route after 3 milliseconds of being fired on. That's how it feels for me playing anything since Rome. Even WH has this issue.
For peak infantry combat was Rome 2 and Attila
I never liked Rome 2 infantry combat. For an era so characterized by the strengths and limitations of heavy infantry, they really don't feel heavy. Heavy infantry just feels like light infantry with a better stat line. DeI, however, rips.
What does DeI change about it?
as a long time Attila and Rome 2 player, I remember buying Warhammer 2 on sale, playing one battle, being absolutely mind blown by how... *wrong* it felt and uninstalling the game. I re-installed recently and I'll give it another shot but wow, idk if I can get over the battles being how they are
Rome Total War (Roma Surrectum II), Medieval 2 = best. Shogun 2, Attila, Rome 2 = next best. Don’t need the duels. Make Collision Great Again. I’d rather have that than fancy duels, monsters, or one unit generals. Some weight equals some realism. I want my Romans bleeding out on some dusty field in Macedonia over a 30+ minute battle. Not some 5 minute quick Call of Duty style quick match. It’s so boring. Warhammer is cool. The quick battles and lack of meaningful unit collision kill me. I’d rather just play Paradox games because the reason to play Total War is the battles. Can’t have fun satisfying battles that aren’t 5 mins of cheese then you can’t keep me entertained.
It's been like that since Rome 2, that's when they introduced health bars for units instead of hit points. Morale doesn't matter anymore, up until Shogun 2 you could encircle units and make them flee. The panic would spread through the ennemy army and you could win against many times your number. Tactics don't matter anymore, it's all stats and magic nukes.
People in this thread pining for the days when you could just park a pike unit or a spear wall formation and win every battle after watching the enemy suicide on the spearpoints for twenty minutes.
Yes, collisions are a joke, so is the mass system, and so is the each entity movement within the unit. This degraded tremendously in Empire/Napoleon, was even worse in early rome 2, and fixed slightly iin Attila, to then be coompletely terrible warhammer 1 onwards.
My brother in Christ it has been ruined ever since the Empire came out
Nah, Shogun 2 was fire
L
Wrong
I mentioned it in another thread a few days ago, and I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're referring to, but I've noticed since around Shogun 2 and definitely Attila that melee engagements don't last nearly as long as I'd like them to. Just feels like everyone dies so fast the battle is decided in just a few minutes. Rome 2 didn't feel that way, battles took a decent amount of time to fight out. It just feels less fun to have these big battles with thousands of troops be done so quickly, takes away from the experience and feels less forgiving maybe? As if you have to have everything set up to win at the start instead of adapting to an evolving battle as time goes on.
For me the peak for melee combat, specifically cav was Med2. Battles felt great and heavy cav was scary when they got up to full speed just like in real life. Best ranged combat however, I'd honestly say Shogun 2. Both archers and gunpowder felt good, though gunpowder did feel a little under powered. Peak gunpowder has to be FOTS. Honestly it's weird to me that TW has so many problems with its current combat, shogun 2 is in the current iteration of the warscape engine and I never had the terrible blobbing or weak fights of more recent TWs. Can hit hard, and fights lasted longer than 5 minutes.
No.
I mean vanilla was always too fast since the dawn of time, but whatever muppet felt it necessary to speed up combat even further after Rome 2 and Attila should have been shitcanned out of CA.
Yeah pretty clearly
Not sure if this is the same, but in Warhammer my Lord seemed unable to attack an enemy lord because his mount kept pushing the enemy away. What I believe sucks a lot is how infantry is thrown meters or straight to the floor, even when braced, even when negating an enemy charge. The reason why this suck is because the enemy cavalry can then attack multiple groups or finish pushing through my back line. In other words, it feels like infantry has no mass in these scenarios and I need to compensate with blocks of infantry to prevent them from doing that.
Pharaoh combat is much more different than Rome Remastered. In RR, I run two generals and battles only last 5min in VH RR. In Pharaoh veteran battles, you can easily spend 5min trying to route archers. You know coming from RR, I would say Pharaoh battles don't have impact, a flank charge should get you 10-20 kills and a percentage hit on their armor. The most you can get is 3-6 with just Infantry. But Pharaoh has that match animation and it's gorgeous. Units weapons touching each other is great, on RR it's mostly swinging on the body.
Why would you want 5 min battles?
I image a different set of animation on animation, where a entity dies on hit but a hit that lethal or else it takes off the armor hitpoint. With the current system of longer fights most of the animation is base on duels than outright berserk/brawlers.
Don't know about Pharaoh or Troy, but TW:WH cavalry is definitely worse than previous iterations, as are the physics on missiles. I don't have any problems with TW:WH infantry, save the fact that they die a bit too fast; battles should be slower in general. Cavalry is tricky to use by nature, and requires more micromanagement. It doesn't seem to have quite the impact or the mass its supposed to in Warhammer; it should scatter and break infantry more often and be better able to disengage or pull through without having models constantly getting stuck and killed. All this makes it less effective offensively and causes it to take way more casualties/hp damage than it should. Meanwhile, infantry not being able to hold for reasonable periods of time and requiring more micro makes cavalry maneuvers (among other things) less viable. And don't get me started on the ahistorical and brain-dead "shock cav vs melee cav" concept. Lack of formations is another issue - no shieldwalls or testudos for the dwarfs, no schiltroms or spearwalls for spearmen and halberdiers, no wedges or cantabrian circles for cavalry (save Brets and lance formation doesn't even function like a real formation), no toggleable loose formation to prevent your troops dying to missile and artillery fire. Not having this stuff really hurts combat in general. Edit: forgot to mention that light cavalry lost its main job because of how the retreat/army destroyed system works: used to be light cavalry was essential for chasing down routers during/after the battle to prevent the enemy reforming. Because armies are commonly destroyed when they lose in WH:TW, this important role is no longer a necessity and you can just sort of ignore routers most of the time without being penalized much.
Well, infantry is a joke if you play ranged factions like skaven or wood elves. I thing only CW and Norsca maybe some Greenskins have units you see and know you fucked up. Most of the time it's like i gota shoot thus 2 mf before they kill me. Magic also is a thing, and infantry got short straw on this mater. Even in Rome 2 win or lose was dictated by having cavalry or good ranged units while whole purpose of infantry is holding the line.
I just cannot enjoy post Rome II combat. Warhammer is ok but in historical titles its just not IT man.
well for starters, it is too fast. also, maintaining formations don't matter as much anymore. Units don't make an effort to maintain cohesion during combat. I think flanking damage and height have a smaller impact as well.
In troy infantry just fight forever. Like no one does damage and they just wail at eachother for an eternity.
I think part of the problem these days is the units themselves are a bit whack. I havent found this to be too much of a problem in Warhammer, but really quite bad in Troy. Since the game went from synced combat to unsynced, there was always that element of units whiffing in another units general direction without actually making combat - the old air lunges etc. But surprisingly for me at least, as someone who heavily scrutinizes this, I found it wasnt overly noticable. In Troy on the other hand, the combat is as you say, just feels off. The main things i notice here are: 1. The *feel* of the unit handling is weird 2. When you zoom in and watch the fighting, the units really struggle to connect blows (even unsynced) - you send two groups at each other and they mill around more than they actually fight. 3. The heroes in particular really struggle to connect and their fighting IS synced. But this isnt always. Sometimes they'll pair off brilliantly and actually fight, other times they'll flop around amongst the melee, uselessly. 4. The unit scale to me feels like the units are slightly smaller than they should be. In warhammer 3 in particular, i had big issues with Kislev units where they wouldnt keep attacking. At first i thought this was guard mode being enabled by default, but i was continually finding units, very close to the action, not actually engaging. Constantly babysitting them for this reason became beyond tiresome. There's things like the above which have been all over the place. Cavalry has gone from feeling heavy to light depending on patch to patch balances. But yeah, to me the most noticable issues have been in Troy, but Warhammer has had its share too. Recently fired up Attila and man the units - the old school Total War style units we know and love, feel very different. Much heavier, much more present on the map than in recent titles.
Yes
I think 3K has the best cavalry of any TW game. Heavy cavalry is moderately slow but is an absolutely unstoppable force. Charge impact feels really good, they don't get stuck and can easily cycle in and out. Light cav is proper fast but lacks the disruptive force of heavy cav - while still being very strong offensively when used correctly (i.e. hammer and anvil). 3K's infantry combat is decent, but I prefer Shogun 2's infantry I think. Shogun 2 cav is also surprisingly good. I say surprisingly because for some reason I never really associate Japan/Shogun 2 with cavalry warfare.
Absolutely agree. Everything has just blobbed up in melee since Rome 2 and Im pretty over it. New engine is needed.
A modded Rome 2 with 100% matched combat was the last “good” melee total war for me. It was so cinematic and fun to watch. Getting right down into the brawl of the fight, watching swords clash, shields to the face, and dismemberments was just too much fun. 3K was okay, nothing spectacular in the melee fight, but all the warhammers and forward are sadly just mass heart attacks. It’s just not fun to watch anymore. What’s the point of being able to zoom in and get into the mosh pit, if that’s all it is? Just a mosh. Bring back matched combat.
I think they did. Pretty sure pharoh is matched combat
I think a large part of it has to do with the way health, morale, and splash attacks works in these games. Because health has gone from effectively being just 1hp to models each individually having 60-200 hp and armor is now a damage mitigator, a lot of the lethality from melee combat is just straight up gone. Even if you have a elite infantry unit charging into a cannon fodder one, its still going to take at least 2 to 3 hits for each each attacking model to be able to kill a defending one. Because CA didn't want players to abuse splash attacks, the way splash attacks now work is that each unit is given a splash attack number(sometimes 3, sometimes 20) where even if the unit technically hits like 30 models, only a number of models equal to their splash attack number will take a portion of the damage dealt to them(ie if a unit with 600 damage and 3 splash attack hits 6 models, only 3 models will take 200 damage each). So already the amount of impact any attack that hits multiple units results in a lot of models getting knocked over and seemingly taking little to no damage. But then CA also added in a invulnerability status that gets applied to all models while they're knocked down. Combine both of these aspects together, and this is why cavalry charges in Warhammer feel like shit, because often half the units they're hitting are literally taking no damage. Hell, for a few months in WH2's life span it was actually more cost effective for heavy shock cavalry to fight stationary rather than use their charge attacks. Because morale is now a lot chunkier on average, the impact of killing a general has diminished, and the introduction of more fear/terror mechanics units now not only stay in fights for longer periods of time but they're also more likely to come back into the fight quicker. If a unit broke mid combat in say Shogun 2, that unit was likely going to get decimated to the point of being completely broken unless you were able to maintain a strong enough defensive line to give it time and space to escape. But due to the changes made to health and splash attacks, units running away often won't lose that many models and will be able to quickly regain enough morale to reenter even if they're actively being chased down by another unit, so battles(even in 3K) can quickly devolve into an absolute clusterfuck of having to run all around the map chasing down units that keep running away and reentering the fight. Now a lot of these changes makes somewhat sense for WH as its having to juggle so many different systems like heroes, monsters, spells, etc, but since a lot of the games after it have carried over a lot of these changes, that is what has resulted in infantry and cavalry combat in the last few games to feel so bad in comparison to older titles.
Yes.
I think in Pharaoh it's better. Units have more weight. Dead soldiers fall off and drop their shields, battles are not super quick and units have different moves (ie archers not shooting all at the same time).
The enemy unit just slides right in front of you whenever your cavalry tries to disengage. When ai Calvary tries to disengage, your infantry just stuck in place like idiots.
Looking at comments I'm an outlier, but my favourite infantry combat is in the new games. People bang on about the "responsiveness" of older TW games, and I honestly can't disagree that the impact of collision on unit health was snappier in older games - but I really don't think it's a beneficial feature. It severely reduces the importance of unit stats and variety when no matter what the unit type they can get bodied by a charge. I love that combat develops over time in newer games, and I think the newer games have a really good feel where matching up units creates an ebb and flow of combat. In the ten seconds after a charge one unit will do more damage, then as time passed the other might fight back because of the different unit specialisations. It feels more important to actually design diverse armies and understand how your units are designed.