Episode 246: Commentarii de Bello Gallico

[Rob Zacny]

 

Rob and Troy go deep into Roman history to talk about the expansion to Total War: Rome II - Caeser in Gaul. Has Creative Assembly turned their trimreme around? Listen in to see if Rob is less irate and hear Troy drop the best sound bite in the history of the show.

 

Alternate title: You've Got Some Gaul

 

Listen to it here.

[hexgrid]

I'd actually be really interested to hear Troy go into more depth about how the systems are broken.

 

I've only read an english translation of Bello Gallico. I had my latin class shot out from under me in high school (three students in the class, they spiked it and the school never offered latin again), and never really had time to learn in university. I did have the book as a text in one fascinating history course (History of Warfare, taught by a prof. Goering, no less...).

 

That was a really good course, by the way. The source material was, (from memory):

 

- the book of Judges from the Old Testament

- The Iliad

- Commentaries on the Gallic War

- The Song of Roland

- The Prince

 

The prof had several axes to grind, but one of them was looking for things the authors glossed over. In Caesar's work, one of the things he pointed to was a bit where Caesar and his people had obviously fallen afoul of a guerrilla campaign and clearly didn't know what to do about it. The book mutters a bit about cowardly dishonorable foes attacking foraging parties and then quickly glosses over it and leaps forward in time.

 

I do remember it being a really great read, even in English, though. I have half a memory that Garret Mattingly's "Defeat of the Spanish Armada" was in there as well, and it's another excellent book. Every time I read it I want to turn it into a game.

[EmperorNortonI]

I've never played a Total War game.  I didn't have a good enough PC for the first few releases, then I was busy, and now I'm region locked out - Steam won't sell them to parts of Asia, for whatever reason.

 

However, the discussion of the tactical battles, and their difficulties, reminded me of a game which I quite liked, King Arthur.  Anyone here play it?  King Arthur had a turn-based strategy overlay and tactical battles, but also a bunch of fun RPG stuff.  Well, the tactical battles in King Arthur were really, really fun.  Different unit types mattered, cavalry was useful in some situations but not others, archers were deadly and set the form and pace of the battle, your heavy infantry got tired out if it had to run too much.  Terrain was also critically important - some units were great in forest, others were crap, hills and slopes made a big difference in all kinds of ways, and maneuvering your units so as to start the battle where you wanted to start it was a big part of winning battles.

 

One reason the battles were reliably interesting was that you were fighting on pre-created maps.  Sometimes you got to choose the map, and sometimes you didn't.  No matter where your forces were started on the map, their design was such that the battle had some interesting maneuvering.

 

Of course, there was one great big problem with the battles in King Arthur - magic.  Offensive magic spells broke the game, and rendered all the fun stuff pointless.  I found a way around that - I just didn't spend points on offensive spells, and resolved not to use them, and instead put points into nullifying magic so the enemy couldn't spam lightining bolt and dark circle.  However, this only worked on Normal difficulty, and it only worked if you were willing to bring Old Faith heroes into your court.  Old Faith heroes had all the good anti-magic - which was totally bizarre, because that really seems to fit the Christians, thematically.  Whatever.

 

Aside from arbitary mechanics for map or terrain selection (defender chooses, for example), I'm not all that sure that the choice of the battlefield is something that's ever been simulated well in a game.  I suppose this would be a place for abstract "spy" or "scout" units, and RPG-style general stats, to play a role.  Depending on how they match up against the enemy force, you'll have more or less control over where the battle is fought.  If you're really outclassed, this might allow the enemy to place hidden units in spots to ambush your forces.  It might be interesting, at any rate.

 

Speaking of the general lack of difficulty in Rome II, do y'all think it was more due to a dearth of creative and design attention, or that it was a deliberate decision to make the game "more accessible" in some way that only ever makes sense to the suits in marketing and finance?  I mean, it's not like a challenging and diverse tactical battle engine has never been designed before.

[Valorian Endymion]

I think I know why terrain are getting more flat...

One thing that plagued early days of the Fall of the Samurai (later one they fixed it) was the "Line of Sight" bug, by some strange reason, terrain could break unit line of sight, even is there wasn´t anything really between the unit and its enemy. You would order the unit to fire, but instead, it just moved toward the enemy until it got very very close or entered in melee. Uneven terrain (like cliffs, steps, elevated terrain, depressions) increased this issue, I remember a couple maps where that used to happen, you put units, but depending of the position, they just won´t fire or some others where, without much clear reason, they would fire.

Flat terrain make easier to avoid this, still is a strange, slight lazy solution. But, if Rome II was really rushed, I could understand they taking such path to avoid even more issues. Also I can see rough terrain causing Camera issues and too much woods/cover making seeing the units very hard (let´s remember their focus on visual of the units).

In King Arthur terrain was so wild (which wasn´t bad), that sometimes you can´t really tell what´s going on, because combined with that you got the bad camera controls, I remember one battle, where you rescue Gwenavier, the terrain was so covered in woods and with such mountains, that it made very difficult to control and play it since I had to zoom out it a maximum (despite all of their work on the units, textures, armor design, camera controls and terrain forced you to zoom out so you won´t see most of that).

I don´t see much a problem with using satellite scan or whatever CA is using, but they need to tweak that data more, change a few things maybe... because it still better that having the same battle in same map over and over again (this happened to me with King Arthur) but sure I agree with Rob and Troy, that some well planned and designed maps/battles could be a good change.

[itsamoose]

I haven't played Rome II as extensively as most (only about 20 hours at this point) but I find myself less enthused each time I load up the game.  My room mate on the other hand has put in about 180 hours into the game so far (Steam says 360 hours, but he tends to leave his PC on for long stretches of time).  I watched him play a bit last night, and it seems like even that far into the game the experience doesn't really change from the beginning.  He's unable to field the size of an army he needs, is constantly dealing with revolutions and uprisings and at this point is really just treading water.  The whole game seems like effort was spent on marginal changes that in aggregate could greatly affect the game, but are so convoluted that they can't be understood.  I got the same feeling playing Rome II as I did playing Ryse--the designers really like the movie Gladiator.  While I enjoyed some of Ryse's absurdities (they were largely tangential, mostly big burly guys growling about honor and vengeance and a bit of gore), the number of levers and minute considerations it leads to in this game seems completely unnecessary.

 

I've been a big fan of the total war games up until this point, but I can't shake the feeling that there was little oversight on this project.  I still can't really figure out how the orientation of my house really affects the game, and all the upgrades and other trinkets you get along the way seem to make little difference in the way the battles unfold.  There is even a feature where you can

as if you were a third person shooter.  I feel a bit like a bully at this point for ganging up on the game, but I can't shake the feeling that no one was at the helm for this game's development.   I'd really like to hear the reasoning behind these kinds of decisions from the designers themselves if you can manage to get one of them to appear on the show.  From the outside it seems like the developers were more concerned with the appearance of the simulation than the actual simulation.

 

I'm hopeful to here that Caesar in Gaul addresses some of these issues, but at this point I just don't think I'm willing to slog through the rest.

[Gormongous]

Despite Troy's excellent arguments to the contrary, I think I agree with Rob in terms of Creative Assembly's crush on Roman legionnaires.

 

Sure, Roman legions reliably excelled when under competent generalship, but with the way the Total War games are increasingly designed, it's virtually impossible for the player to be an incompetent general. If a unit gets put in an untenable position, it'll fight hard all the same (and often the opposing forces will not take advantage of its exposure or exhaustion, but meet it on favorable terms). Since the player is not really given the option to mismanage a battle to the point that the legions' abilities are wasted, the legions always excel, which in practice begins to resemble board and video games' crush on the Tiger II.

[Valorian Endymion]

I've been a big fan of the total war games up until this point, but I can't shake the feeling that there was little oversight on this project.  I still can't really figure out how the orientation of my house really affects the game, and all the upgrades and other trinkets you get along the way seem to make little difference in the way the battles unfold.  There is even a feature where you can

as if you were a third person shooter. 

 

That "feature", while very impratical, did make slight sense in shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai, where taking control of a gun could be helpful (in one of the historical battle, using this could speed the thing a bit, since you hit ther towers in castle more fast) and at least using the gatling gun was quite fun. But again, it was impratical, since you could not control or see what going one while you are on this mode. Which is the same problem with Rise and Fall hero system, taking control of a hero in Dynasty Warrior style was a nice idea on the paper, but while in this mode you couldn´t control anything. I just wonder if CA is thinking abount somewhere down the line to do something like this... (well they already tried it with Spartan and Viking).

 

In Rome II, does not help much or make much sense. They also "improved" the first person view mode for units, to be fair, for sword infantary units it´s quite cool, you see the commander rising his sword in the air while turning his head toward his men leading the charge, for the other units was quite like "meh", the elephants where a huge let down, archers in top of them just stand there while in this mode, instead of using their bows.

By the way, I too read de Bello Gallico and wonder if instead CA created campaign divided as each chapter (or each campaign begin a couple of chapters), much like they done withe Napoleon. It would allow to a more focused design and more unique battles and situations.

[Rob Zacny]

...with the way the Total War games are increasingly designed, it's virtually impossible for the player to be an incompetent general. If a unit gets put in an untenable position, it'll fight hard all the same (and often the opposing forces will not take advantage of its exposure or exhaustion, but meet it on favorable terms). Since the player is not really given the option to mismanage a battle to the point that the legions' abilities are wasted, the legions always excel, which in practice begins to resemble board and video games' crush on the Tiger II.

 

This is a critical point. Rome 2 is a return to the bad old days of Rome 1 in some key ways, when battles were decided quickly as the AI came headlong into the player's position. It's much better now, because the AI can dress a battle line and use formations, but the fact remains there's not really a dance of units in Rome 2. Once two armies get near each other, they almost magnetically attract and smash into one another.

 

And yeah, at that point, the legionaries do great because they just wear down the enemy. Even if their position sucks, they don't panic until they've killed a lot of enemies. Heck, a lot of times they fight to the last man. Rome 2 tries to solve this by making them a really expensive unit, so you don't have TOO many of them. But they're so cost efficient that you might as well spend the extra money and just count on them to grind through the enemy.