Slitherine

Hi gents,

It landed past monday. I have been playing the Roman campaign. Battles are slow when unit experience grows, so it's still quick and fun but more realistic that the impression I had when played the demo. This is a GREAT wargame, and I can't wait for Legion II as combining strategy and this battle system will be awesome.

Here are many things I would love to see in a future patch or expansion:


-A button to slow down the battle (its already there to speed it up only)
-A strong loss of experience for destroyed units (It losses from all to half of its experience levels -abilities- as units hardly were entirely destroyed, stragglers, wounded, missings, etc)
-A loss of experience for hardly depleted units (if more than 50% of the unit strenght is lost, the unit loses his last upgraded ability for example. ie 1 level lost)
-A variable loss of experience for a killed leader (as the replacement second-in-command leader takes command)
-The ability to upgrade units of the same type (upgrade hastati to Cohorts), but not to a different type (light infantry to heavy cavalry, for example)
-Campaign editor
-Battle editor
-Map editor
-Unit editor
-Skirmish mode (solo battles against the AI)
-Campaign generator (ala Steel Panthers: You select your side, up to three enemy opponents (IA controlled), set begin and end dates, max number of battles, etc..)

Thanks again for a great game

Hi

Glad to see you manage to get it...my postman is a pain in the neck, Thursday and still haven't got the game....can't complain, though. I received RTW:BI one month later than expected...

Anyway, having a battle editor/campaign editor would be nice (but maybe too costly, Slitherine is very small), I don't think a skirmish mode will work. I mean, you have played 100 or so battles with romans or celts...what difference could make having skirmish? You can start it all over again...in a higher difficulty level (I noticed some different battle objectives in the demo, so the experience will be different). Ok, skirmish is allright, if you've got the people and the time to do it, it is a real bonus, but it's not the case.

About the slow button (bullet time? ) I agree with you. I happen to like the graphics (unlike the reviewers) and I would like to take a closer look at the action if I can without having to hurry back to move that flanking cavalry. When the demo was out, I asked for a replay of the battle, but I would be happy with the slow speed too.

I also like the idea of upgrading the unit to a different unit (hastatii to principes and then triarii?)

The loss of experience for routing/destroyed units is a great idea too, but in higher difficulty levels, not in normal

Bye.

You can pause the battles at any time with the space bar. I use this to zoom and and see what's happening. It's not exactly what you're asking for, but sort of works

How would a campaign/battle editor work? Like designing your own missions, sort of?

Oh, and I can assure you a skirmish-mode would work! You may have fought a lot of campaign missions, but with skirmish, you can choose your enemy, the map, the settings, the troops on each side, their strenghts, their looks etc. makes one hell of a difference. That's like saying there's no need for a multiplayer...


BTW, what's a unit editor? Like creating new units from scratch or something? I may ask something stupid now, but would that mean simply editing units' stats, or creating new skins as well?

Hi inferiorbeing,

All these gadgets (scenario and campaign editor, etc) are already out there. Those are the tools designers used to create the game, the units, the campaigns, and the battles of the campaigns. Battles are designed individually at first, and branched together into the campaign path later, I think. The difficult side of including those tools in a future patch/expansion is to make them highly user-friendly, with a good and intuitive UI, etc.

But all of this is pure guess

How about on small downloadable add-on pack with most of the great ideas miki had.

Like Miki said we have all those tools but without a huge amount of support from us you wouldn't be able to use some of them and other tools could only be used by experienced developers of 3DS MAX. They are not at all user friendly and it could end up causing us lots of problems if people expect us to help them work out how to use them. There is also very little feedback when things go wrong so if you don't know what you're doing it is very frustrating.

Hi Iain,

I have finished the Roman campaing now. Awesome and extremely funny. Those last civil war battles are simply great.

Now I'm in the fith battle of the Celtic campaign. Wow!

I can live without campaign editor (sigh, not at all actually ) but I REALLY NEED MORE CAMPAIGNS!

Hi guys,
Can you help?
I'm a bit confused about squad specialisation. If a squad has used it's promotion options to select mutiple specialist
skills, ie. anti-infantry and anti-cavalry, do these skills cancel each other out? If true, then I guess the first promotion should be a specialist skill, yes? Can you delete extra specialities, lose a level?
I'm really enjoying Legion Arena, just reached scenario #25, got my butt kicked first time, finally cracked it.
After completing the battle against the Samnites my fame was 14,245, how does that compare with you guys, pretty badly I guess.
I recruited two cohorts of Hastati yesterday, boy can those guys kill! Has anyone got any favorite units?
Do any of you have any recommendations as to the best sequence of promotional skills.
Vale
M. Spedius Corbulo

Skills don't cancel each other out, so you can be anti infantry & anti cavalry specialist. I guess it's a bit weird thinking about it, but that's how it works!

I always look at it as training. You can be trained to deal with foot opponets and be trained seperately to deal with mounted opponents

My units need both

JDM

iainmcneil wrote:Skills don't cancel each other out, so you can be anti infantry & anti cavalry specialist. I guess it's a bit weird thinking about it, but that's how it works!

Thanx for your answer, it really did help. I was in a bit of a state trying to puzzle out the logic. But I get it now

Thanks again,

Vale M. Spedius Corbulo

jdm wrote:I always look at it as training. You can be trained to deal with foot opponets and be trained seperately to deal with mounted opponents

My units need both

JDM

My units need both too. I've started yet again, taking on board all I've learned in the last couple of days, and it's working . I'm only recruiting units that I would want in my final army and promoting them with all the anti skills available.

Vale

M. Spedius Corbulo

OK what about add-on campaigns, new periods. Is that difficult to do?

The level of compexity for more campaigns is reasonably scalable.

Hardest - historically researched battles, new linking movies, new units. Basically this is a full new game or an expansion pack and would take many months of work for the whole team. This would set back all other projects. This would have to be sold as a full boxed product to finance the work.
Easiest - fictional campaigns using the same unit set. Still a lot of work, but should not have a huge impact on other projects. This could be sold as a digital download as costs are lower so we don't need to sell so many or at such a high price to cover the costs.

There are obviously lots of levels in between, but this gives you a rough idea.

Thanks. IMHO the first thing would be to get the basic game right (following some of the suggestions here).

My main problems with the game at the moment are:

1) its too fast. When I play the PC Blitzkrieg I slow it down about 3 levels to make it more comfortable to play. Perhaps a scale of 6 levels of play. 3 up, 3 down, each a change of 50% over the previous version.

2) Generals experience should come from the success of their army, rather than HtH combat.

Apart from that its great. I have set up a trade deal and am starting to sell it through my own business.

I would like to see the main engine with more historical campaigns added. But if it has to be sold as a new game so be it. I think everyone at Slitherine should have a nice Christmas break and then get straight back to work.

I don't know about anyone else, but I would be willing to pay for an add-on with either more campaigns, or additional tools (skirmish, unit editing etc.) This is a great game, and all the REAL objectives have been kept in view. 1) Don't concentrate on graphics too much, 2) A simple, addictive gameplay (Pong FTW), 3) A reasonable price tag.

Some more campaigns, historical or fictional, would be great as would the ability to slow down battle speed a little. The abilty to put larger armies on the map would also be useful although I guess that would need larger maps. Essentially though I am really happy with the game I bought and felt it was very good value for the money, as well as highly entertaining.

There is room for some of both I think. There is a lot of potential for a variety of campaigns among the history of the Eastern Romans (Byzantines) that could be tapped. Even the crusades would make a good set of campaigns that would sure to raise a lot of publicity just from the topic alone.

iainmcneil wrote:The level of compexity for more campaigns is reasonably scalable.

Hardest - historically researched battles, new linking movies, new units. Basically this is a full new game or an expansion pack and would take many months of work for the whole team. This would set back all other projects. This would have to be sold as a full boxed product to finance the work.
Easiest - fictional campaigns using the same unit set. Still a lot of work, but should not have a huge impact on other projects. This could be sold as a digital download as costs are lower so we don't need to sell so many or at such a high price to cover the costs.

There are obviously lots of levels in between, but this gives you a rough idea.

The other course would be to polish up the editing tools a little more and release a downloadable mod package. The community should be able to hack out a few variants and extended campaigns to stretch a lot more milage out of what's already here.