Artillery crews sheltering squares

[con20or]

1) Try to limber and flee (if unsupported?)
2) Defend their guns (if very closely supported - friendly infantry within 50 yds?)
3) Run away on foot to seek the protection of the nearest friendly infantry unit (say within 100 yards)

1 and 2 have been greatly improved in Waterloo. You now have to support artillery to get them close to enemy lines and they will hold much longer if they have backup.

[Saddletank]

Having the crews separate from the guns is not question of will (our list of "desiderata" for the future is very long) but a technical contraint. Now guns and crews are a single object, composed by different sprites but always a single object. Is not a simple question of animation or a split of the same object type like for the skirmishers, the two have to become different objects types, one of them "frozen" like the graphical dead bodies, the other with new different AI logic and formations. The change is massive also for a so little effect, because it hits deep inside the engine, and changes like this need weeks of testing because they can create problem to the layers of engine above them. You cannot imagine how many crashes the testers found and Norb corrected caused by the skirmishers splitting before all the side effects of this thing were resolved and it was one of first functionality done.

It is not like it will never be done, but having not 100 developers like the CA for the TW, we cannot do all what we projected in a single step.

In this case I'd modify my suggestion that you don't split the crews and gun sprites, but have the situation I described in my post - just teleport the gunners to a nearby infantry unit with no sprites showing and have a "dead" cannon sprite (effectively just a dead body) where it was.

This change surely is much easier?

Alternatively just kill the unit completely, leaving a "dead gun" sprite and do away with this terrible point blank canister duelling between a freshly captured gun and the remaining uncaptured ones. Truly guys, I wince each time this happens, it shouldn't be in a wargame of this quality.

[con20or]

The unfortunate reality is that no changes are easy. Every change then needs to be tested to make sure it hasn't broken something else. If we removed it entirely, I can guarantee that we would then have requests to allow people to capture guns. The best we can do is to say that if it emerges as the everyone's No.1 wish after release we can look at it then.

[Marching Thru Georgia]

Likely the first mod I will do is to get rid of gun capture. It it the purest form of fantasy in the game.

The teleport idea has a lot of merit. If there is a square within 100 yd. replace the arty unit with a lone gun. When the cavalry threat passes and the square automatically forms into line, replace the lone gun with the arty unit. This way, spawning of new independent units is avoided and all the logic is based on the square being present.

[Saddletank]

if it emerges as the everyone's No.1 wish

That will never be true, people always want different things, as I'm sure you are aware. What NSD should do is listen to every suggestion, discuss their merits among themselves and rate them in terms of difficulty of implementation and desirability by way of gameplay improvement while staying focussed on how a Napoleonic battle should be portrayed in an RTS like this.

Given how cartoony the current gun capture mechanism is I would have thought it would be high on the list of things that need to be improved. I don't see the SoW series as a game akin to anything like Total War with all its horrible gameplay decisions to meet the needs of a mass market. SoW is definitely a niche game and offers many things that other RTS games do not. With its courier system, very good AI, proper command structure, enormous sized battles and HITS it stands alone among RTS games and is clearly leaning its appeal towards a more mature and historically aware customer. The current gun capture mechanism just does not fit right with that profile. Replacing it with something very simple like killing the gun dead upon capture would do wonders for maintaining the suspense of disbelief while playing the game.

A player still gets to do the glorious and heroic charge against the guns to achieve this; a bonus is all the micromanagement of the captured guns is removed as well. The captured guns rarely do any harm to an enemy anyway and in the inevitable "canister duel" are destroyed quickly - why not skip that part, save yourself some AI routines and get to the desired end result

Please be aware I'm not moaning here or being critical for the sake of making your lives harder. SoW is a fantastic game; I only want it to improve. These posts are an honest intent to do that.

[mitra76]

This change surely is much easier?
.

No unluckily is not easier, crews are always sprites and the gun is the flag, they cannot move to a separate location, they follow formation positions

[Saddletank]

crews are always sprites and the gun is the flag

Then a destroyed gun sprite is what? Just a dead body after the unit is killed? Or routed? You could easily replace the capture mechanism you have now with an abandoned (aka dead) gun sprite and eliminate the unit.

Also "the gun is the flag" I don't understand. Surely the flag is the flag, every gun and crew has one.

[Jim]

What I think Mitra is trying to convey is that the gun is a single unit to the game engine. It is represented on screen by a complex and memory-hogging animation. The 'Beam me over, Scotty' option is one possible solution but is equally if not more cartoonish than the gun capture. Historically not all gun crews did take cover in squares. Read the Mercer diary for one instance. There are secondary implications that also have to be considered. If a running gun crew does not make the square in time we have to pull infantry routines to calculate casualties from the melee. This creates more complications and needs even more testing. The AI routines are very complex already and changes need to be carefully planned and heavily tested.

Overall, we got in a good chunk of the core elements needed to fight a end of NW era Napoleonic battle. That said, the list of things we wanted to get in but could not due to lack of time is quite long. While we started from the framework of Gettysburg, this is closer to CWBR in its state of maturity. It is not perfect and we know that better than anyone. The 'wish list' for Patch 1 is very long right now and still growing. What will go into the next patch is not certain and depends on what issues emerge after you all start playing. If only minor issues are found, then we can wait longer and get more features in.

-Jim

[Saddletank]

Thanks Tim, that helps. I know for Mitra English isn't his first language, maybe I misunderstood what he was conveying.

I am of the opinion (as you well know) hat literally ANYTHING would be better than the current capture mechanism. It seems to me that the run to square method would indeed be very heavy on team workload, AI calculations and impact on other parts of the game, so just losing the gun and crew dead to both sides when melee'd would be an improvement. Having an abandoned gun sprite with a couple of dead gunners by it would be a nice touch to show the ebb and flow of battle.

There could always be the try-and-limber-and-run option as well which was mentioned above.

Anyhow, its on your list from me now, so I'll take a long hard look at the game when it comes out and see if its a game-breaker or not after all.

[Reisman17]

I agree with the artillery should not be able to be captured and turned against the enemy especially by cavalry. They would not have any training in how to use artillery and would be very dangerous to force them to try to use it. Could they send some more experienced troops that have artillery experience to take over the enemy artillery, yes but in the concept of a battle they would not have to opportunity to do this quickly and even then the ammunition was usually different between the sides. I think destroying the guns seems most logical to me so the enemy could not recapture them or use them again. Thats what I normally expect my my cavalry charges and succeeds in engaging enemy artillery and I still feel (at least from the footage I have seen so far) that the capture mechanic is very slow. I think that a unit of cavalry would easily over-run and kill a complete gun crew very quickly (just the number of combatants involved - the cavalry would greatly outnumber the artillery). Thats my feeling.