Scenarios

[JC Edwards]

Strange..........Estabu, Ephrum, Little Powell, Phantom Captain and so many other's make me look like some type of merciless, blood thirsty engineer of mayhem, bedlam and chaos.......... B)

[Ephrum]

JC Edwards wrote:

Strange..........Estabu, Ephrum, Little Powell, Phantom Captain and so many other's make me look like some type of merciless, blood thirsty engineer of mayhem, bedlam and chaos.......... B)

If the shoe fits....................:woohoo::P

We have nothing but respect and appreciation for you Sarge!!

Not in spite of you being the MAD ONE, but because of it!!

[Civilwar803]

for the one scenario of the peach orchard..is the whole attack on the union left flank in that scenario or is it included in another scenario?

[Gfran64]

In the scenarios, can captured artillery be added to existing batteries in the artillery reserve and used against the enemy in future scenarios? I think that would be a great addition to the game. Or another way to handle this may be to use the captured artillery to replace lost guns in existing batteries attached to divisions.

Lets say you captured 10 enemy guns and had four of your guns destroyed by enemy counter battery fire and one was captured by the enemy. 5 of the guns you captured would replace the ones in your batteries that you lost and 5 would be attached to the artillery reserve batteries, one to each battery there. Also, don't attach the guns to one battery within the division that captured them as you wind up with one battery that has 14 guns in it and that battery wouldn't have had sufficient reserve men within the battery to man all those guns.

Dos this make any sense?

Greg

[dale]

It was quite common for infantry units to supply the artillery with extra men to make up for losses at the end of the day and sometimes in the midst of battle.

Ironically, the horses that were lost were more irreplaceable, especially on the Confederate side. During the battle of Deep Bottom (Aug 1864) a battery of four very large howitizers was stranded between the lines by the Confederates. It had to remain there for several days because the Confederates did not have enough horses to retrieve it. The Union was eventually able to take them away.

There was an artillery battery that served beside the Iron Brigade so often that they were considered a sister regiment. The Wisconsin regiments often sent men over to man the guns when they became shorthanded during battle.

If the scenarios ever do run more than one day in an extended campaign the batteries should be replinished to a full complement of men for the following morning.

[estabu2]

We have not begun to test the scenerio's, so can't really comment on that sort of thing.

[MarkT]

Civilwar803 wrote:

for the one scenario of the peach orchard..is the whole attack on the union left flank in that scenario or is it included in another scenario?

Multiple scenarios cover this fight. Also a modder can "create" any scenario that is desired.

An all day scenario can be created and played limited only (as Jim said) by the AI doing its thing. But with controls in the scenario, one can limit the chaos.

As in TC2M the door will be open. for the modders and such.

The hard thing about scenarios making is when you make it, you know its weakness, thus you play it "tainted". But it gives you more loop holes to fill.

[MarkT]

dale wrote:

If the scenarios ever do run more than one day....

Interesting. A lot of interest in an all day fight. I for one like the Idea.... But for a moment, lets put things in perspective.
If we create a full day scenario with the carryover command, and it was July 1st 6 AM.

In real ife, a General would insert fresh troops, rest tired troops (or they would rest themselves), position re-position, wait, wait, wait, they would mostly follow out dated doctrine from the Napoleonic wars where the killing ratio was nowhere near as high as the breaking point of an army. They would plan attacks (more waiting) and plan to receive attacks (more waiting). These were citizn soldiers, not really inclined to fight, but knew they must. But their ability to kill the enemy was astounding.
On the other hand, the player would launch his troops at his opponent and rest when they break. They would employ a World War II strategy of continual pressure, and destroy not only his troops, but most of the enemies troops.

In this scenerio, there would be no second day. There would be no armies left.

The sustained assault on the federal left on the second day lasted from approximately 4pm to 8pm. four hours of continual fighting in one sector is an exception, not the rule in a Civil War battle Even then there were "time outs", shear exaustion, where the troops, (and any officer worth a grain of salt) simply stopped.

TC2M was broken down to fit the battle of 2 Bull Run... Gettysburg is much, much trickier.

[dale]

I see your point, Mark.

What I mean by the scenario lasting more than one day is that the position won during the previous evenings engagement would be the starting point for the following day. For example, suppose Hill's men had pursued the XI Corps all the way through Gettysburg and onto the ridge at dusk on July 1? Second, the batteries disabled or captured, or surrendured regiments should not be in enemy OOB for the following morning.

In Second Manassass you had a scenario were Hood was to attack as far down the turnpike as he could to set up the starting position for the next day's counterattack. How I yearned for my results to be reflected in the following day. Taking out the same artillery twice was not good for the morale of Hood.

[Janh]

Unfortunately MarkT is right. One day scenarios, or a three day scenario that could mimic the battle would require the human player to stick to mid-19th century military doctrine. Troops saw much more idle times than fighting, and for a player who just wants to play and win indeed just keeping up the pressure would lead to most unreasonable results. However, it would still be awesome to have 3 "one day" or a "3 day scenario" for those who can stick to such "realistic behavior". To me it gives a more realistic feeling of responsibility than the carry-over idea, and appears to allow more freedom for tactics...
But maybe such scenarios are rather a thing for modders as they would require a single large map with less detail. What I hope for in War3D is that you guys will spice up the scripting language so that long scenarios can be handled and basically every property can be "checked" or "set" from the scripts.

I am playing around with an extended 3 day scenario on an extended version of Davinci's excellent Gettysburg map in TC2M for quite a while and fine-tuned pretty much everything (aside from map, weapons, speeds, view, fatigue, moral, stance etc.). I achieved this effect by making everything, particularly shooting and melee much more fatiguing than in stock and moral and fatigue recovery slower. Not only the human player has to put troops to rest for half a day or a day, but AI surprisingly also does. It also avoids routing of units (barely any units really rout now, and thus can be recovered, but the retreat till far out of sight, which nicely mimics rallying in some sense).
I tuned down fighting casualties, too, in order to prevent total annihilation of units too quickly. This way I get very close casualty numbers to the historical ones (also AI does not sacrifice units, i.e. with stock values Heth or Reynolds would often be only a skeleton on the 3rd day). Also I tuned art a bit to indeed be able to fend off enemy art at long range in a reasonable time frame, and to break infantry attacks without totally annihilating them (~30% casualties, but that is enough). Giving art batteries 16 men per gun (32 per section) seemingly did they trick that the would mostly retreat instead of rout when suffering losses.

The way I tuned the parameters was by following the historical script, i.e. I tried to reenact history by making the corresponding historic moves at the right times, and seeing how every part of engagement differed from historical outcome and whether this was reasonable. With a little "luck" and AI choosing the right measures, I can "reenact" the 1st day now, and even the 2nd still looks pretty good. Then the scripting functions in TC2M become clearly insufficient to do such a long engagement.
Also, it work better for player==CSA as TC2M AI seems to handle defensive stances quite well, but attacks often end up piecemeal (this is were more "eventhandlers", conditional statements, variables etc would come handy for scripting AI; for instance statements like the "evtobjarmy" having return-values like the name of the unit holding/conquering it, strenght of CSA/USA in its radius etc).

So I think it would not be entirely impossible to mod long scenarios, particularly if the Gettysburg AI will itself already be better (which shall not mean it was bad in TC2M!) and it will be more modable. I am really looking forward to the new game!
Jan