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Comment by jakubmazanec | Hacker News Reader

When I was playing Medieval: Total War (both I and II), the bows and crossbows were very effective against an enemy attacking me. Now I wonder if the game modeled the arrow barrage realistically, or to align it with our movie-based perception of medieval archers.

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There’s a rock-paper-scissor game design in Total War, and in video games in general. They tend to distort things quite a bit in order to make it more interesting from a gameplay perspective. In general, no, it is not realistic.

Total War (at least RTW and MTW2) is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design. It's situational instead.

Like, spearmen are kinda even with swordsmen in a pitched battle, and you can run either down with cavalry if they're tired or disorganized, but you usually can't leave cavalry committed. There are only a couple of minor damage bonuses for balancing, not like AoE where you have the "anti-cavalry spearmen" etc.

> Total War is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design.

Total War definitely has an element of rock-paper-scissors design (particularly between cavalry/archer/spears), pretty sure its even referred to explicitly as such in some of the official strategy guides for titles in the series.

(It's also not an RTS franchise, its RTT + TBS.)

> There are only a couple of bonuses like spears vs cavalry, and the rest is mostly situational.

That some of the advantages are properties of interactions off basic traits and not explicit class v. class bonuses doesn't make it not a rock-paper-scissors design.

You can use archers to kill cavalry or the other way around. It's just that you don't want any kind of melee-capable enemy reaching your archers.

From Rome 2 multiplayer, I remember spearmen absolutely not even with swords :P My server played with swords limit, because then everyone would pick only them!

Spearmen purpose was to buy you time and for other units to tire out, before you'd bring in your swords :D

Yeah idk about Rome 2, never played that one. It sounds like the game is unbalanced if an all-swordsman army is best and nobody has come up with a counter. Then again I doubt any of those games are very well balanced for pvp battles.

We had like, 10 pages of rules.

And every community had their own...

WH 3 basically solved this issue by making MP battles be capture the points style - genuinely, it freed us from having to make house rules.

Probably one of them has to do with camping, since defending armies have an advantage. Eh, most pvp video games aren't fun when people treat it like a job.

There's a variety of essays on Total War and various infantry types, how well the tactics are modeled, etc.: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Facoup.b...

Their essay on composite infantry types is interesting as a Crusader Kings II player, because the game has tons of historically accurate mixed units you can recruit that combine archers and heavy infantry/pikes, but virtually all of those units suck because the combat mechanics still enforce a rock-paper-scissors dynamic.

https://acoup.blog/2022/04/01/collection-total-wars-missing-...

Specifically, every 15 days, your army rolls a "combat tactic" (based on number of troops) that buffs certain types of units and nerfs others. "Advance" buffs heavy infantry, "force back" buffs pikemen, and "charge" buffs cavalry. Then if an army uses "advance" goes up against "force back", they get an additional boost. Likewise, for "force back" against "charge" or "charge" against "advance". There are also archer-specific tactics that don't play a role in this triad.

The simplified combat tactics to enable rock paper scissors matching is what makes the historically accurate archers + pikemen trash. No matter what combat tactic I roll, I would rather have either additional archers or additional pikemen because only one gets boosted at any given time. The game does not model the mutually reinforcing nature of diverse armies because it could break the rock-paper-scissors triad that says certain troops should defeat other kinds of troops.

In fact, having a diverse army is penalized because you will "roll bad tactics". If I used China's 250 archer : 100 pikemen retinue, they will correctly alternate between pike (the force back tactic) and shot (barrage tactic), then get slaughtered by another army that had 250 pikemen : 50 archers because their 250 pikemen was getting buffed 24/7 by force back instead of having to share the limelight with my archers.

Btw, the Europa Barbarorum 2 mod for MTW2 is amazing. It turns the game into a more historically accurate and overall better version of Rome TW... but archers still do volleys, which even if they wanted to avoid, is probably part of the game engine.

Interestingly, mounted archers don't do volleys in those games.

i remember a history channel show using the total war games in order to determine the best type of bow. I'm not sure how accurate it was

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