The Game is Broken

[rahamy]

Thank you for the clarifications, Greg. When designing a game there is the interesting conundrum of trying to meet every players expectation. Some want a simple, very playable game even if this means a slightly unrealistic version others only perfect representation of historical fact is acceptable. Some want to play the game under challenging circumstances others want consistant predictability in every move. The sensible balance is always somewhere between the extremes but the optimum is also very difficult to judge. The skirmishing issue has been hotly debated within the Ancient Warfare team and some wanted light units always to be able to skirmish away. This did cause its own problems - if they always managed to avoid contact they became invincible and a player would only need to use his light troops. There needed to be a possibility that the light units could be caught and the result would be a slaughter as you said was the case at Pharsalus.

The A.I. is built with a degree of random behaviour to ensure different results occured each time you replayed a battle. If not you only needed to play 2 or 3 scenarios and you would from then on always defeat the A.I. This way, a player sees the A.I. as regularly creating a challenge. The A.I. is set with a number of options (usually 2 or 3) under each possible combination of events and it chooses at random which to initiate in the early moves but reduces to more consistant responses to options as the battle goes on.
The Roman option of 'Retire Front Line' does not always work as units in combat conduct morale tests and may not respond to the order given. However, if you could support your point with historical text references that Roman units no longer performed such a tactic then HPS are happy to adjust the game for historical accuracy.

We believe your point on 'Uncontrolled' units is very valid and will be taken into account on the next update in 2009. Thank you for your input, we appreciate such support as it allows HPS to develop better games.