Auto Battle is great! It’s very fast, and the friendly AI doesn’t make too many bonehead decisions in my experience. However, the AI is reckless with its units and easily outsmarted. Of course, it’s very satisfying to do so. But I worry that the AI doesn’t seem to understand how to utilize terrain well enough and is easily bullied with high ground, river crossings, etc. 

By the same token, I LOVE how important terrain has become! It’s great to have to think things like “From which direction should I attack this city?” or “How to best cut off this retreating force?”

KingPiggyXXI wrote:
Anti-Cavalry is substantially cheaper than Cavalry, while still having the same amount of Combat Strength. A Spearman has only 1 less Combat Strength for half the price of a Horseman, and it'd even be going against a Unit that's an Era ahead. Pikemen have the same Combat Strength as Knights, while being four times cheaper. If you compare two Spearmen against a single Horseman, then the Spearmen will win. If a person spamming Anti-Cavalry fought against a person spamming Cavalry, the Anti-Cavalry player would easily win. 

Making 2 spearmen vs 1 heavy cavalry isn't that easy as comparing only the production cost. If you need 2 anti-cavalry units to face 1 heavy cavalry, in the long run, at those eras you won't have enough population to outlast that cavalry. Also you need to consider the terrain. Cavalry ignores zone of control and have a lot of movement. Your spearmen will almost always defend in inferior terrain. And this is one example why we need more traits and they need to be more meaningfull.

Being attacked by a large army of ranged units gives the attacker too much of a benifit. 1: You cannot call reinforcement. 2: they can pick off all your strongest units. Example: Ive been rushed by a hunic horde (the only unit the AI builds) It concerned three full 5 unit armies against three. My main army had a fort and highground and included mainly musketman. The horde diminished the army before i could call in reinforcement.

Ciabat wrote:

bingbongler wrote:
Had some bugs in the closed beta where my units wouldn't act on the command I gave them. They would just have that buffering symbol on them and then the action would resolve itself without any of the animations playing out.

Anyway, the only thing I'd like to see in the game for launch is probably going to rub some people the wrong way, but I don't care. It's realistic and would balance the game better.

Make cities harder to capture. This is far too easy in the closed beta and Victor open dev was the same. I would suggest making walls stronger and giving more defensive bonuses on districts too. I would also make it so the attacking units cannot move into the city while the walls are still standing. Siege engines are kind of pointless right now. You don't need them to win and I think more emphasis needs to be placed on getting at least one of these built before you attack. Breaching the city walls is important and it's far too easy right now because it doesn't matter if they are at 0% or 100%. If there is a free hex, attackers can move into the city with full strength walls. That's not a good thing. Now, I'm not saying if a defending unit and an attacking unit are next to each other with a wall between them they shouldn't be able to attack. They just shouldn't be able to move past a wall that wasn't destroyed. Attackers definitely shouldn't be able to start within the city walls either on the setup.

This would just work so much better. Taking a city should NOT be an easy thing.

It is a point here, sieges should be hard and competitive, I think that walls standing == unable to enter the castle for enemy is great idea, 

they will have to make a hole in walls to enter and this will be more aesthetic and not confusing for players on the map too;) now everybody stands where they want, enemies, allies and it is hard to tell if they are defending on those walls or what ...

 but then siege engines should be more tanky now, because if you loose it you cant take the city

I remember criticising how ineffective walls were in the previous open devs as well. So far the only change seems to be that cavalry units cannot move past them. Which is a step in the right direction but I definitely agree that this should be the case for all units.

The only change I would make from this is maybe give melee units the ability to directly attack the walls to do minor damage in an attempt to bring them down, so that if siege engines are lost there is still a potential way inside. For palisades this would be fairly plausible but could take a while. For stone walls, good luck, maybe come back with those siege engines or just wait out the seige in an attempt to starve out the population inside. 

FinalFreak16 wrote:
The only change I would make from this is maybe give melee units the ability to directly attack the walls to do minor damage in an attempt to bring them down, so that if siege engines are lost there is still a potential way inside. For palisades this would be fairly plausible but could take a while. For stone walls, good luck, maybe come back with those siege engines or just wait out the seige in an attempt to starve out the population inside. 

With this you also need to have the option to retreat from active combat. Without that destroying siege engines will just wipe your army in few turns, or block them in place forever.

Someone may have brought this up already, but the AI currently only uses siege artillery to attack tiles with units in them. If I hide my units on the opposite side of the city outside of the siege equipment range then the AI never breaks down the walls to get access to the city (in particular when using an army of horsemen or mongol/hun units which can not access the city without a broken wall).

FinalFreak16 wrote:

Ciabat wrote:

bingbongler wrote:
Had some bugs in the closed beta where my units wouldn't act on the command I gave them. They would just have that buffering symbol on them and then the action would resolve itself without any of the animations playing out.

Anyway, the only thing I'd like to see in the game for launch is probably going to rub some people the wrong way, but I don't care. It's realistic and would balance the game better.

Make cities harder to capture. This is far too easy in the closed beta and Victor open dev was the same. I would suggest making walls stronger and giving more defensive bonuses on districts too. I would also make it so the attacking units cannot move into the city while the walls are still standing. Siege engines are kind of pointless right now. You don't need them to win and I think more emphasis needs to be placed on getting at least one of these built before you attack. Breaching the city walls is important and it's far too easy right now because it doesn't matter if they are at 0% or 100%. If there is a free hex, attackers can move into the city with full strength walls. That's not a good thing. Now, I'm not saying if a defending unit and an attacking unit are next to each other with a wall between them they shouldn't be able to attack. They just shouldn't be able to move past a wall that wasn't destroyed. Attackers definitely shouldn't be able to start within the city walls either on the setup.

This would just work so much better. Taking a city should NOT be an easy thing.

It is a point here, sieges should be hard and competitive, I think that walls standing == unable to enter the castle for enemy is great idea, 

they will have to make a hole in walls to enter and this will be more aesthetic and not confusing for players on the map too;) now everybody stands where they want, enemies, allies and it is hard to tell if they are defending on those walls or what ...

 but then siege engines should be more tanky now, because if you loose it you cant take the city

I remember criticising how ineffective walls were in the previous open devs as well. So far the only change seems to be that cavalry units cannot move past them. Which is a step in the right direction but I definitely agree that this should be the case for all units.

The only change I would make from this is maybe give melee units the ability to directly attack the walls to do minor damage in an attempt to bring them down, so that if siege engines are lost there is still a potential way inside. For palisades this would be fairly plausible but could take a while. For stone walls, good luck, maybe come back with those siege engines or just wait out the seige in an attempt to starve out the population inside. 

I think maybe they could add a siege ladders tehcnology with different levels. For example you could climb the normal palisade with foot units in 1 turn but if it gets upgraded to walls you would need that tech. Further upgrades in the fortification would require a +1 level in the siege walls tech to be able to get in as you can now. I think cavalry units should still not be able to cross walls of any type.

Good changes to combat overall!  My only major complaint is with naval battles, which I used heavily this game.

First (off-topic?), naval units still don't have much use outside of battle.  Not sure if this is the right place to say it.  I feel like at the bare minimum I should be able to ransack harbors, if not siege cities with longer-ranged ships (see American revolution).  Since naval units can't engage land units (even if they are in range), they only serve as a hard counter to land unit transport over water.

Second, they can't hit land units AT ALL.  At least the Bireme (with range 1) cannot reach land units.  This was DEVASTATING when I engaged a 5 unit transport with my 5 Biremes, and a single English longbowman joined from the shore.  That one longbowman could reach nearly anywhere in the battlefield, had damage that easily outclassed my biremes (sure, he should), and I had no way to retaliate even though he stood right on the shore.  It seemed like my only "winnable" option was to take the enemy base (I was attacker) and then hide in a far corner, bleeding slowly.  Since rounds continue through 3 turns, this didn't seem like an option.  Either do something to reduce land vs. water combat, or at least allow water vs. land combat.  As much as I'd love to keep the two separate, they are inevitably linked through many situations.  I'm okay with ranged land as a soft counter to naval units (somewhat...) but at least give the naval units an option to fight back or retreat, don't lock them next to the coast with no cover and no ability to fight back.

I REALLY did love combat this playthrough, but that one naval combat really impacted the whole experience.  I ended up reloading and waiting until the longbowman entered the water, then engaged them all and won hands-down.  Which just kind of emphasizes how broken the land vs. water combat can be.

As a short addendum to my previous post, naval combat ended up being worth it when it finally happened.  The mediterranean-style map (shared water coast inlet) allowed me to beat an empire that would otherwise have dominated by demolishing ~15 high-tech units while they embarked to reach me/their besieged city using ~6 ships.  As it should be!

Not sure where this should be put -- in all three games I played through completely I researched "Three Masted Ships" but was never able to build a Caravel.

Combat is much improved from Lucy, although certain units are currently overpowered still such as the hunnic horde, I was able to take an enemy capital with around 9 of them as the enemy sortied out, with an initial deployment of only 5; killing 20 enemy units with only 2 losses of my own (which were instantly replaced & then some thanks to the colossal food reward afterwards). Some of this could be fixed by trying to ensure the AI builds more balanced forces, there was only one anti-cav in the AI's entire military when I fought them, but around 9 or more swordsmen.

Elsewhere, I see people are still complaining about the rivers; to me, they're fine and make absolute sense. If you're "defending on the other side of the river", then you should be deploying your troops on the other side of the river, not in it. Trying to make complicated rules about when sitting in a river is meant to be defensive or not seems much less intuitive to me than clearly demonstrating that river tiles are a terrain malus. A more informative combat tutorial might be needed still for such people who think positioning troops in rivers instead of spaced back from them is a good idea. Currently they're the only terrain malus I know of in HK, and I treat them much the same as I'd treat Marsh in Civ, it's not that big a difference.

FaeBriona wrote:

Not sure where this should be put -- in all three games I played through completely I researched "Three Masted Ships" but was never able to build a Caravel.

This issue is the result of the unusual naval system in the game. Basically, there are two types of boat you can research. The first is the kind of boat your city builds that appears in your harbor when it is completed. The carrack is an example of a city-built boat. The second is the kind of boat your military units turn into when they hop into the water. The caravel is an example of a unit boat. When you research caravels, your military units will turn into a caravel when they get in the water. They get this free unit-boat upgrade immediately upon completion of caravel research.

The Huns are stupidly overpowered. I played a game where I went hittites and rushed the huns on Empire. Once I got a couple hordes going, I split them up and started my attack. They do good damage, but the really overpowered part is how you can basically attack with all of the units and get back into a defensive position. Since you get a ton of units with the huns, you can get a lot of attacks. A lot of attacks means easy victories. Easy victories means more units. I wiped out green with some mercenaries, a couple non-horde units, and my horde. I was unstoppable. After destroying green in 2 wars I set sight on black. I had fought them a lot in my last match so I wanted to get rid of any stronghold on my landmass. However, since I wasn't focusing on tech like last game, I couldn't embark. Oh well, I declared war on orange and his vassals and I easily won. They usually retreated every chance they got, while my army got bigger and bigger from my many Ordus and pillaging. I still had to do manual battles to exploit the fast movements of the hordes, who seemed only slowed by rivers, but it meant I only lost a handful of units. The only downside with a very large upkeep, but I got a lot from reparations so it wasn't an issue. I only had a few territories in my cities, but when you have an unstoppable army, who cares? I eventually went into the medieval era as the Umayyads for their insane science for large land. I eventually won the war, accepting a surrender not realizing I wouldn't keep my conquered lands. But I got orange, yellow and purple as vassals, solving any money issues. I got ready to invade black as I finally got the tech that let me embark (This is not clearly indicated on the tech tree, at all. I had to guess what got me the ability to embark) and ready to see how far I could push the grand mosque by making all my land one city, but the beta closed.

I wish I could have finished the game, as I enjoy the Umayyads and I had fun, but it was a disguistly overpowered fun.