AI with sandbox battles

[Bloody Bill]

Hey guys. I was wondering if there is a mod or something that makes sandbox battles better. If I want a faster game and I play a div size battle with the in sight option the enemy always marches away and gets on a road. Is there any fix with this at all. I play a lot of TC2 so this problem is new to me as this does not happen with TC2.

[Bloody Bill]

Another question maybe somebody can help with. I was playing a random map battle. I had a Regiment 56 Penn. I think around 250 men and quality [4] Militia. They were on a heavily wooded hill in skirmish order. They were in a firefight with one of Avery's brigade regiments that was in an open field no bonuses. My Regiment in skirmish order took horrible losses at 32 and only dished out 2 hits on the enemy who was in line formation in the open. Does not make mush sense to me.

I thought it was just a isolated event. I then proceeded to test this theory over and over and in almost all situation I tested the unit in skirmish took heavy losses. Any known reason for this? Does a unit in skirmish get penalized for anything? Do not understand the heavy losses of a unit in the woods on higher ground in skirmish order compared to a unit in line no cover only taking very light losses.

[cliometrician]

I've experienced the very same thing. Hope you get an answer.

[Saddletank]

The game apparently makes no distinction at all between a line and skirmish order. They take casualties and hand out fire at the exact same rate, or so it seems. In your cases maybe the opponent was better quality or maybe the fire of more than one enemy unit was directed at yours.

In our latest testing/messing around with the Napoleonic mod we gave infantry in skirmish order a 15% bonus on fire effectiveness because we wanted to encourage players to use skirmish order more. We also made the skirmish formation much deeper/denser and thus th eline length shorter than the vanilla one because that was unusuable tactically. For some weird reason and we do not know why, our skirmishers are now extremely effective and will take out dozens of men in a close order formation without suffering a single casualty!

We ran a test combat between two battalions of opposing skirmishers and after 15 minutes shooting at under 100 yards there was not a single casualty on either side. We did notice though that the morale of one side had become somewhat "tender".

I have no idea why this is, though we rather like these results and think they are an improvement on the 'useless' skirmish order we had before. We're continuing to test but SoW does deliver some surprising results when you begin tweaking the values of things.