Thoughts on COW (warning possible Game wreckers)

[lancerunolfsson]

First I really liked this game and have spent probably well over 40 hours playing it. I certainly don't feel like I wasted any money buying it. I don't like long games so will never probably play the grand or advanced campaigns but will stick to the regional maps even then for a couple of hours of play before the end of a campaign I start playing real sloppy;^)

There are though a few things that could use revisiting as either a patch or a Mod.

1, The Skirmisher problem, once I can build Hupshu it seems like the only reason to build or up grade anything else is just so I can build more than 1 unit a turn at a given town. it seems like just about the only Hostile units I run into before I win are Peasants, Militia spear skirmishers, auxiliary and very rarely a battle cart. The Hupshu kill all of these if the ratio is close to 1 to 1 by unit count.

Honvedseg suggests a partial fix for these problems which I quote here from another thread

"I made two simple modifications to the game to suit my tastes. The first was to reduce the ammo in "squads.txt "for all of the skirmish units, javelins to 5 and archers to 10. The close-ranked archers were not modified, as these troops were not required to run forward, shoot, and then run away if attacked, so ammo weight was less of a concern. The second change was to require a unit of population for the production of peasants, also in the squads.txt file, by changing "requires_population_unit" (or something similar) from 0 to 1. This did two things: one, it allowed the player to move excess population from one city to another, and disband the unit to recover the population; and two, it prevented the AI from churning out enormous waves of peasants, by depleting their cities of free population. After a little trouble at the start, the AI seems to recover and begins building other more sensible combat units, making for a better overall game than the repetitive "human wave" attacks by 3 or 4 full stacks in rapid succession with 8 peasant units each. My experiments with using a population unit for ALL military units, as in Legion, were relatively unsuccessful, as it did realistically simulate the depletion of manpower due to military recruitment, but it hurt the AI too badly, especially on higher difficulty levels. "

It would be nice if different start years and levels of tech could be selected at the beginning of a game.


2, The economy problem. It hardly makes sense to build anything different from military building after you figure out the first turn you dump all your resources except Gems and Buy all the Gems you can. The price inflates the next turn so you sell all your gems and buy a turns worth of food. This strategy can be extended to other commodities but initially Gems seem to work best, food works the worst, copper usually works pretty good once you can buy at least one thousand in a turn. Incense seems sometimes to work as well as Gems but don't count on it on every map.

So there needs to be a correction for the amount of manipulation of the market that a player can do, I don't have the discipline to ignor an exploit that works.


3, The majority of the battle maps are way too choked with terrain for battle cars and chariots to operate. Only one fix here more maps with more clear terrain.

4. There really needs to be some sort of battle log accessible during the game trying to hunt down armies that need healing that are in towns is really boring.

5. I really like the way the battles work but It would be nice if there was a skirmish order for missile troops so that they don't go in to hand to hand so easily.

I really like the idea of not having any control after issuing battle orders this is very realistic for battles before radios. However It would be nice if the General in command could be stationed with a particular unit that could be committed as a reserve after the battle begins. The long hold is not really the same thing and this would not be unrealistic.


Any way Spartan just showed up in the mail so I have to give that a spin:^)

[IainMcNeil]

Thanks for the feedback. CoW is pretty old now though so the chances of us going back to that code are very slim. I think you'll find the balance a lot better in Spartan, missile troops are not the masters any more - Hoplites are

We've fixed the trade exploits as well!

[lancerunolfsson]

Thanks for the reply. I really hope you guys go back to this period somtime I know I would spring 50 bucks for a Gold version including the fixes above. I think game companies (and there customers) often get real hung up on the, more features is better, idea rather than making what they have work better. Classic example Loved Shogun Total War and Medival through viking invasion. Rome total war became way too clutered for me to bother figuring out how to make it run on my primary PC. Spartan is looking like it may be a little that way too. But I have not been able to get it to run on my primary PC so have not spent much time on it yet. Thinking I should order Legion.