Why 30 day turns?

[Meagher]

I am a bit disappointed by the long turns in AJE. If there is one thing I would change in ACW, it would be to reduce the turns to one week. Instead the turns are even longer here. The main disadvantage of long turns is that you can't react to your opponent's moves for an entire month. This makes it very difficult to engage a moving enemy because you have to guess where they will go, and if you are wrong you could end up a very long ways away. From central Italy, an army can get almost anywhere in Italy by multiple routes.

Playing as the Marius faction, I took control of most of Italy, but I have to concentrate my forces to have any hope of winning a battle. The Sulla armies roam around Italy with impunity, and it is only by luck that I can engage them. The AI will simply bypass cities I hold and show up at some random spot deep inside my territory. By the time I can get there, they may have taken the city or they could be far away besieging another city.

I don't see the advantage of long turns. Sure the game plays faster, but my goal is not to get it over with as soon as possible. Does anyone have plans to mod this?

[bob.]

I'd say

This makes it very difficult to engage a moving enemy because you have to guess where they will go, and if you are wrong you could end up a very long ways away.

sounds exactly like warfare during those times

[Meagher]

Perhaps you could point out a time or two when one army stole a 30 day march on another nearby army. Did commanders look at their enemy across the Tiber and say, "We have to march all the way to the Alps if we hope to keep up with them." only to discover the enemy had instead gone to Sicily by the time they could react?

[Durk]

30 day turns make the game very dynamic, especially given the open maneuvering you mention.
Actually in Roman times, lots of examples of stealing a 30 day march exist. For instance, Hannibal on his most famous Alps move. Sulla coming to Italy.

I am sure the distances you discuss make the option of moving your force to the unit you want to intercept and dropping on the unit so the orders are to intercept the moving force are not working for you. This is one option I use. If you are literally looking at your opponent across the river, drop your force on his and you will engage it.

Another option is to have a force under a leader with the ability to move quickly or who has a high engagement value placed in a central strategic area.

I know, the purpose of you post wasn't to figure out how to respond, but to mod the time frame. Modding 30 days to 15 is an option you can do with little pain. There is lots of support in the mod forum. I play with people who are excellent at making such a change, but can only point you to the mod portion of the forum, as I work too closely with data bases in RL and prefer to just relax with my games. If you choose to mod, make a complete backup of the files you are changing in case odd things happen.
Others might chime in, otherwise a bit of searching will lead you to a 'how to do it."

[Meagher]

I think that with fog of war, inactive generals, and the evade combat order, there is plenty of opportunity to represent a dynamic leader getting the jump on the opposition. The reason I don't like 30 day turns is that the inability to react has nothing to do with the skill of the generals or the circumstances. There is always a 30 day lag in reacting. I'm sure I could come up with examples where an army reacted more than once a month to changing circumstances, but that is impossible in the game.

As for telling a unit to intercept, that is a very risky thing to do because you could end up chasing them for 3 weeks only to have them combine with another unit that is entrenched and rested. You wouldn't have the opportunity to call off the attack, no matter how suicidal. On the other hand, the unit might split and you end up chasing the wrong target. It is no substitute for being able to react.

I am hoping that someone will make a mod that rebalances the game to accommodate two week turns. I'm afraid changing only that would upset other aspects. I'm also curious what others think of the difference.

[vonBredow]

I agree, 30 days-turns are way too long.

Could it somehow be made optional? Like you can also select 15 days in the game? Too hard to implement?

[El Nino]

I agree, 30 days-turns are way too long.

Could it somehow be made optional? Like you can also select 15 days in the game? Too hard to implement?

We have made a 30 days turn after many talks, thinking on all the roman campaigns. If you think that a 30 days turn is too long, just wait for the First Punic War (more than 23 years !!!) who is coming at the end of this month. Imagine just if we have chosen the 15 days turn !

We must make concessions in a game creation. It's just logical.

[yellow ribbon]

good point,

after the Pride of Nations 1600 turn problems, it was logical to stick with the 30 days / about 100 turns campaigns...

***************

vonBredow, to make it optional it would need two versions of ALL files which use indices of time:

weather / map aleas

events

decisions

regional decisions

etc

you see, if working over that kind of files, changing the TURN INDEX for all this files and setting the game to 14 days is possible (mods exist therefor since October), but if you would make it optional, it can go slightly out off hands.

the last forum members stopped the request when i told them what would be needed of invested time.

[vonBredow]

Hmmmm, alright, all are valid points. I yield...

Though, in general, I hate every kind of time limit in games. It makes me nervous and I try to rush everything :/

Anyway, thanks.


One question: Will the DLC have the other 2 Punic Wars as well? Hannibal?

[JacquesDeLalaing]

I have to say that I fully agree with Meagher. There has been a similar thread in which I made clear why (especially post #12): http://www.ageod-forum.com/showthread.php?26543-March-in-AJE. I really doubt that general A was leaving Rome, eager to engage the enemy in the alps and went like: "Oops, missed them. Damn! Now they're in Sicily" (intentionally exagerated example ). Keeping on an armys' tail shouldn't be as difficult as hitting the funnel-tube with your jetplane in an inflight-refueling-attempt. Enagging it in battle is, of course, a different matter, but there are separate mechanics for that (combat-stances and retreat-attempts prior to battles; force marches, clever use of terrain/roads, etc.).

The campaign-length is not really an argument for me. I won't care about finishing a campaign if the gameplay feels arbitrary. The priorities need to be set differently in my opinion. The campaign-length wouldn't be a problem if there were more smaller scenarios.

[HanBarca]

I've never tested it exstensively, but the game mechanics allows to intercept an enemy army quite well, if you have a good detection / hide ratio. You need detection - in real terms, that means scouting forces.

You need to:
- send fast, high detection value forces ahead of you
- target the enemy army with your main force

A good approach could be:
Scout Force: 1+ cavarly forces, in defend-retreat if engaged mode, intercepting the enemy army
Main Force: your main force, in attack mode, intercepting the enemy army

The scout force should move ahead of you, detect the enemy, stay in contact and keeping it detected.
The main force, having the enemy detected, should move to intercept it.

[ess1]

I have to say that I fully agree with Meagher. There has been a similar thread in which I made clear why (especially post #12): http://www.ageod-forum.com/showthread.php?26543-March-in-AJE. I really doubt that general A was leaving Rome, eager to engage the enemy in the alps and went like: "Oops, missed them. Damn! Now they're in Sicily" (intentionally exagerated example ). Keeping on an armys' tail shouldn't be as difficult as hitting the funnel-tube with your jetplane in an inflight-refueling-attempt. Enagging it in battle is, of course, a different matter, but there are separate mechanics for that (combat-stances and retreat-attempts prior to battles; force marches, clever use of terrain/roads, etc.).

The campaign-length is not really an argument for me. I won't care about finishing a campaign if the gameplay feels arbitrary. The priorities need to be set differently in my opinion. The campaign-length wouldn't be a problem if there were more smaller scenarios.

+1

[wodin]

Maybe SOP's you can set that will be implemented during the turn if the conditions are met? That way during the turn processing things can be abit more dynamic..i.e a unit could actually set out after a unit as the conditions for the SOP where met. If you get what I mean...

[Meagher]

I should not have focused my initial post on intercepting armies. The fundamental problem is the inability to react to circumstances. Ageod games strive for realism; that's why I love them. I just feel that waiting a month between turns detracts from that. So many details are well done, but in the big picture, the turn length is a major factor in gameplay, and long turns prevent realistic outcomes. Furthermore, it is frustrating as a player to see clearly on day 1 that you guessed wrong and then watch helplessly for 29 days before you can interact with the game again.

The latest example I encountered was with storms at sea. I sent a fleet from A to B in early spring and was careful to stay along the coast where I had friendly ports all along the way. The next turn my fleet and the soldiers on board were gone. In the message log I saw that they had been sailing (rowing) into storms for a month straight. There were at least half a dozen announcements of my fleet taking damage over the course of the month. Why didn't they call port when the storm came up or at least after taking heavy damage? I don't mind taking some losses when fate is against me, but it isn't realistic that my fleet and army are obliterated. Superstorms that take out whole fleets without notice are rare in the Med. This seriously limits the gameplay regarding naval transport and makes intermediate ports useless, unless you want to sail for a week, wait for 3 weeks, then sail another week. (I replayed the turn and even 2 weeks ravaged my ships and men.) As a side note, it would be nice if having a friendly port adjacent to a sea zone prevented some damage from storms, ideally causing slower movement instead.

[Narwhal]

The 1 month long turn is something that cannot really be changed, but the "friendly" port thingis an excellent idea.

[Bertram]

I, on the other hand, think that reaction times are still way to quick in this game.

In a current PBEM game, for example, I landed and African (Pompeian) force in Sicily. Next turn an enemy force from Rome arrived to fight me. The distance between Rome and Messina is (according to Google) 760 km. Even at the famous 40 km/day speed of the Roman army this is 19 days marching. As I landed late in the turn, I have to believe that not only a messager went from Messina to Rome to tell them an invasion force had landed, but also that the senate came together and decided on sending the troops and who commanded them (leaving Rome almost unprotected), that the troops (40.000 men) had been collected, that food for 40.000 men had been ordered up along the route, and that sea transport across the street of Messina was provided - all inside 11 days. And then this army was in shape to engage my troops on the day they arrived.

I think a modern army would be pretty hard pressed to make this happen, let alone a Roman army. And that is disregarding that that 40km might be good for a unit, but impossible for an army (Caesar himself remarks somewhere in the Belli Gallici that his army was so large that he effectively could march only half days, as the last men were still breaking camp, when the first men arrived at the next place set aside for camping. Don't forget that an army of 40.000 men, marching 4 abreast, has a 10 km length (at 1 m/person), and that is not counting mules (one each 8 men, or one each 4 men, depending on the era we are talking about), seige engines, weagons, whores, and other essential support personel).

[JacquesDeLalaing]

Most of what you mention here is not so much a matter of reaction time, but rather of setting movement-speed and the duration of some actions (e.g. embarkation) right.

But what you say about messengers going to Rome etc: That's a good point, Bertram. It actually shows why I think that the AGEOD engine would benefit from a smaller scale. In my opinion, portraying wars that went on for several years across all of Europe and the mediterraenean theatre, and in which mid-term political decisions and "recruitment" of new troops interfere with what I still hold as the core of the game, namely warfare on the operational level, is not the best way to go. I’d actually love to have games based on single campaigns, rather than on entire wars. We would need smaller, but more detailed maps, shorter round-intervalls. However, I also understand that this would probably require a different kind of research-work (less but more details to research) and that many players, especially if we’re talking about attracting the “main stream”, would be turned off by a smaller scale.

But with the current scale the problem remains that some reaction times are clearly too fast, while others are clearly too slow. A general that camps but a few kilometers from his opponents’ camp will be able to react faster to his opponents’ actions than the senate in Rome. While a game (with shorter round-intervalls than we have now) would portray the information-reaction-flow for the general in loco rather well (instant information, so to speak), it doesn’t when it comes to decisions that are made at the political center hundreds of kilometers away. Right now the turn-length seems to be set to a compromise between those different levels of action, not coping too well with either of them. The overall game-design, however, seems to fit better to the smaller, purely operational military scale and the generals’ in loco role, so to speak. True, in reality, especially in Rome, generals were politicians, but when it comes to making a game, I think it would benefit from singling out only one aspect, while treating the overall political-strategical aspects as an “external” factor. For example: low strategic ratings to portray situations in which military decisions have to be made at the political center – Frederick II had a higher strategic rating than most of the poor French and Austrian generals, who depended more on the decisions made in the “center” and who had to keep up communication with the center, whereas Frederick was the center in person and in loco. The player should have to cope with those aspects (I also count “unit production” in here), but I don’t know if he should really be able to influence them.

[Emx77]

In my opinion, portraying wars that went on for several years across all of Europe and the mediterraenean theatre, and in which mid-term political decisions and "recruitment" of new troops interfere with what I still hold as the core of the game, namely warfare on the operational level, is not the best way to go. I’d actually love to have games based on single campaigns, rather than on entire wars. We would need smaller, but more detailed maps, shorter round-intervalls.

You've just described all what Napoleon's Campaigns (NPC) has. And NPC seems to be the least popular game in Ageod's portfolio. Most players like strategic layer which includes political decisions and recruitment (among other things).

[JacquesDeLalaing]

Yes, I see what you mean. But perhaps it was not only the lack of the megalomanic campaigns that turned some people away from NCP. I haven't played NCP for a long time, so I can't quite remember what it was for me, but the lack of big campagins was certainly not amongst them. I think I felt overwhelmed with the huge amount of troops that had to be micro-managed in a negative way (micro-management can be positive; but here it felt like repetitive work) - the same problem that I have with my potential favourite RoP. There were also voices like caranorns':

2) Where I agree is that of course NCP's map scale did not allow a good representation of Napoleonic manoeuver and strategy. But the solution would not have been to up the scale to a more strategic level, but rather the opposite to make smaller regions to allow for manoeuver and look at ways for forces to react to the enemy, either automatically (based on leaders, doctrine and random factors) or semy-automatically (adding orders similar to the current stance and posture)...

I'm a fan of going "smaller", not "bigger", especially because I'd also like to delve into PBEM-games. I think that there is still a lot of depth to be discovered in the purely operational part of the game. But of course, it's also a matter of taste and preference. What the game needs, imho, is a reduction of scale and much much more feedback for the player, so that he can figure out what has happened during turn-procession and why those things happened. The core mechanics are great, operability is great (all you have to do is drag and drop; most of the time, you play the game by thinking, not by clicking), visual presentation is great (imho, please never ever change to 3d maps!), but documentation and feedback are a big problem, as well as the lack of small and manageable scenarios.

Concerning the latter point, not only the overall length of the campaigns and the turn-intervalls (as desribed above) are the problem, but especially the big army sizes can lead to a huge amount of tedious micromanagement - e.g. in RoP, as the "Austro-Russian-French-Swedish" ( you might guess why I feel overwhelmed...) player, you need quite a lot of time to rotate ca. 50 individual hussar/cossack-units around (back and forth from supply points). It's really hard work that massively turns me off. Yet I don't want to omit what should be a central aspect of the game (raiding, reconnaissance). It's a case in which I think the big scenarios don't fit to the "operability" of the game/ the scale of the mechanics at all. Having individual regiments of Hussars as the core unit is good for a game focused on a single army/campagin, but once you're in command in 8 armies, it is suboptimal to say the least. But then again less units are no solution either, because reconnaissance works via a certain balance (amount of units versus amount of regions - of course one could give scouting units a larger "field of view" - 2 regions instead of 1 - but this comes at the cost of operational fine-tuning and depth). Here the scale of the game/scenario simply does not fit to the mechanics, which results in horrible operationability (=tedious and repetitive micromanagement): if you want to make proper use of the depth that the mechanics allow, you will have to move around individual hussar units for ca. 5-6 minutes every turn. I think that NCP, with its rather large armies, suffered from the same problem.

So my personal wishlist is:
1) Shorter turn intervalls in order to let the great military/operational mechanics do their magic. Turn intervalls of 30 days might be nice for a Total War -series game, but it doesn't do justice to AGEODs game (in my opinion ). So many operational options and fine-tuned gameplay is lost to oversized turn-intervalls - this is my problem with AJE.
2) Smaller scenarios (not neccessarily less provinces, but especially concerning army-sizes; the level of detail of the current mechanics is perhaps too fine for grand campaigns - playing them requires too much micormanagement which distracts from the game and disturbs the "flow" of the game). Plus smaller scenarios also motivate for PBEM games. This is my problem with RoP.

[edited in order to stay on topic a bit more]

[wodin]

^+1 Smaller is better for me aswell...

[Vadim]

I agree with Bertram, I am always surprised/somehow frustrated by how the Messina straight works like a modern highway. In the great campaign, it is almost useless to try a landing when playing Pompeus because even caught by surprise the opponent can send an important force in two/three turns maximum ( unless Italy and Rome are left unguarded, very unlickely). But indeed, was it that easy to transport 40 000 something mens from one side to the other? I still believe than the use of fleet should be requierd, even if we can denie the access it s not enough. I feel that Sicily isnt as important as it should be in game, kinda loss it strategic value.

Also, maybe we can think about a speed penalty for larger army, this in the 30 days turn framework.