00:00Peggy 12
00:22Today I'm going to talk to you about the sharp end of politics, that is warfare.
00:40War has always been central to the previous games and we've added a little extra effort
00:44to this time to make it more engaging and feel a bit more like you're actually fighting
00:48wars in the renaissance era and what drove conflict in this era was of course men and
00:53money.
00:54This is a concept we had in the previous games and we wanted to sharpen it a bit and make
00:58it more important to the player and what we did for example with the men is that we have
01:03the concept of manpower that we always had and as you lose soldiers you will have to take
01:07it from your manpower pool to recover it.
01:10What happens in Europe in Rosales 4 is that the process of getting your manpower back is
01:14way way slower and this will really give you a feeling that if you fight the protracted
01:18war, if you lose a lot of men, if you say assault the fortress instead of sieging it slowly,
01:23if you fight costly battles, even if you win you can have this kind of lost generation
01:27that you need to contend with and then you might actually be out of the game for a long
01:31time so you really need to manage your manpower.
01:33And then of course there are ways to deal with this, natural ideas where you can create a
01:38nation that can bring more men out of the manpower pool for example and you can build certain
01:42buildings like training grounds to help train up your manpower pool faster.
01:46And then of course, depending on which country you play, if you're a small merchant republic,
01:51your manpower pool won't be very big even if you try to optimize it.
01:54But what if you are this merchant republic then what should you do?
01:57Well, you can do what they historically did, you can hire mercenaries.
02:00Of course they don't cost you any manpower, but they call it lots of money, so you have
02:04a choice there, you can still have an army even if you don't have any manpower.
02:07And money comes even more there because what we did, we felt that wars in the era was so
02:14expensive, I mean monarchs invented new taxation systems just to be able to fund their wars.
02:20So we wanted to make them more expensive, what we did was that reinforcements now cost very
02:26much more money than they did previously.
02:28So if you go into the war, you have a balanced budget for example and you have a nice war
02:35chest,
02:35you think that this will be fine, this war will be over, the boys will be home for Christmas.
02:40But as you fight the war and the men die off, you have to pay to train up new troops,
02:44reinforcements,
02:46costs, and they cost a lot.
02:48You will go into this war and feel that you have lots of money, especially compared to
02:52the previous games, and you will enter the war having taken lots of loans and be close
02:56to bankruptcy.
02:57You can use your money to get the war started, but if it goes on for very long, you will
03:02really
03:02really start to think about the economy.
03:04And we feel that these kind of changes that we made, the small changes but important changes
03:09with manpower and the cost of war, will really help the player get more of a feel for the
03:15kind of trade-offs the Renaissance Prince had to consider before he went off into war.
03:22One thing I should mention there of course is that what the Renaissance Prince did and what
03:26any modern ruler would do if he has no money is that he would take loans.
03:29And we tried to help the player there by making it cheaper to take on loans.
03:34In the previous games it was more like if you took a loan that was a loss.
03:38Now you're always deficit spending because you need to fund the wars.
03:42And that can be nice for a while, right?
03:44But if you take lots of loans and the inflation clocks up, then you will end up in problems
03:48later.
03:49You have all these kind of nice trade-offs all the time between short-term benefits
03:53and long-term problems.
03:55And that's the strategic part where we hope that the feel of fighting the war will be
04:00much more different.
04:01And then of course on the tactical side we've done some changes as well just to improve how
04:06to get the feel right for how it should feel to fight a war in this era.
04:12If you're a ruler of course, being a soldier is not very nice.
04:15What we wanted was for the battles to be a bit more decisive.
04:20So for example we added a mechanic called shattering in the sense that when you march
04:23your army into battle and you lose, before it just retreated a little bit and then you
04:28can fight again.
04:29But now if you lose decisively the army can shatter and that means that your soldiers will
04:34break and run and they will run all the way back until they find a safe province before
04:38you can stop them.
04:39And there they have to stay a bit and recover their morale.
04:42And of course that makes the battles more decisive without actually making it so that
04:48you can lose your entire army at the roll of the dice.
04:50Because when your army or when the enemy's army is shattered the winner can sort of use
04:55this time to siege down provinces and to take fortresses and to really decide the war
05:00based on one battle.
05:01Another concept we added here to sort of give the same feeling is the concept of an army being
05:06being disorganized.
05:08We wanted to get away from the thing where you chase armies too much all over the map
05:12and to sort of slow the whole thing down a bit so you have the chance to think so that
05:16if an army loses too much morale it becomes disorganized and it can't move.
05:22If you win a battle but you had to spend your entire army to do it and your army is
05:26exhausted
05:27then it will be locked in place for them to recover.
05:30So that the battles will be more decisive but you will spend less time running after armies
05:36and trying to chase them down.
05:38We have this kind of concept and on the surface of it feels fairly complicated but we really
05:42want the player to understand what happened so we've redone the entire combat interface
05:47so that anything that happens and that decides a battle should really be visible on the map.
05:53There should be no more instances where the player don't really understand why somebody won
05:57and why somebody lost.
05:59It should feel sort of the same as in the previous games but it should feel much more
06:04if you know what I mean.
06:05It should be more decisive battles, they should cost you more money and you should feel more
06:12pain when you lose the soldiers in the field.
06:15And I really feel that this has made the game so much more fun.
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