I continue trying to make the experience fun and rewarding: right now there’s a big problem; you can win just standing by (reminiscence of old Centurion: Defender of Rome, stand by tactics?) I can do better, but it’s not as simple as it sounds.

Spent some time with some tooling needed to simulate battles between huge armies, AI vs AI (briefly considered a hotseat mode but it might not be doable given the elements I’m starting adding).

Laid out a plan to improve the gameplay with chances for emerging gameplay; the first one was making it so that hits from the side or back deal more damage to the squad and caused a steep morale loss, so that maneuvering was more rewarding, but it had little effect.

Spent a lot of time simulating thousands of battles with slight variations trying to find a reason for the idle winner, at the end the only thing that changed it was allowing legionaries to launch their pila while marching, instead of only when stationary; the pila barrage legionaries were able to send into incoming squads was just too powerful.

This left the barbarians severely underpowered, still pending what their response to this is going to be, probably a charge impact bonus, or a similar on the run javelin throw…

However, before jumping into that, I will try something bigger: adding a fog of war so that you can only see what is in your commanders’ range, and cannot see inside forests.