Expanded Toolbar - Grog

[walkingwolf01]

I am not "dumping" on his hard work. The toolbar is superior to the stock thats why I use it. But as I stated 95% of the stuff included in the mod is not needed. Things like trees, scenarios ect. Map folders contain the trees needed for that map, so it's not needed in a tool bar. Scenarios are a different folder as well and are not needed in a tool bar mod. All the formations make it a pain to set up formations quickly. One click is enough. Basic historical formations are all I ask for.

If yall think historically militaries would be able to do all these formations it's laughable. Even the disciplined Prussians couldn't do certain formations at times under pressure. Try going from a column to a line under fire. Than back again. When people start taking fire they huddle together. Read the article I posted it explains it well. Now they are taking fire from a enemy line, cannon, ect even the most disciplined armies loose that discipline and refuse to change formation. Now expect them to know 50 different formations. That's why in the Civil War you only have a few formations, column of 4 and line being the two most popular. Column of 4 for marching and line for fighting. In war there are only a few men brave enough to actually fight. The rest are only there and get there courage from the pack. But what do I know, I've only done 12 years in the Army, years as a firefighter/EMT, and studied Napoleonanic tactics since I was a kid.

[DarkRob]

I am not "dumping" on his hard work. The toolbar is superior to the stock thats why I use it. But as I stated 95% of the stuff included in the mod is not needed. Things like trees, scenarios ect. Map folders contain the trees needed for that map, so it's not needed in a tool bar. Scenarios are a different folder as well and are not needed in a tool bar mod. All the formations make it a pain to set up formations quickly. One click is enough. Basic historical formations are all I ask for.

If yall think historically militaries would be able to do all these formations it's laughable. Even the disciplined Prussians couldn't do certain formations at times under pressure. Try going from a column to a line under fire. Than back again. When people start taking fire they huddle together. Read the article I posted it explains it well. Now they are taking fire from a enemy line, cannon, ect even the most disciplined armies loose that discipline and refuse to change formation. Now expect them to know 50 different formations. That's why in the Civil War you only have a few formations, column of 4 and line being the two most popular. Column of 4 for marching and line for fighting. In war there are only a few men brave enough to actually fight. The rest are only there and get there courage from the pack. But what do I know, I've only done 12 years in the Army, years as a firefighter/EMT, and studied Napoleonanic tactics since I was a kid.

I was not referring to you in my posts. If you look, you'll see I was quoting a completely different guy. I really didn't take issue with anything you said, and I even pointed out that at least you cited what you were talking about. Please don't take anything I said, as being directed at you, because it wasn't. Mark T pissed me off so I lobbed some heavy shells his way, but none of it was meant for you.

To some degree, some of what you're talking about doesn't really have anything to do with the Grog Toolbar, and is simply, the way the game is. Yes, units can and are able to change formations under fire with astounding speed in this game. A unit getting bombed on by close range artillery and infantry and skirmishers can still change to square in a matter of seconds, at just the approach of enemy cavalry. Is this realistic? Probably not, but it's not the fault of the Grog Toolbar, it's simply the way the game is.

Most of the formations in the Grog toolbar are some variation of line, column, or square. There are different formations at different levels of command, there are also variations on single formations. Also not all of these are meant to be combat formations. Some are just neater deployment formations, some help you consolidate a large number of troops into a small area, some have different effects on movement etc etc.

For instance, there are 3 variations of the column by division formations, and they actually do have different gameplay functions, with the fully open interval moving the fastest, the medium one moving a little slower, and the fully closed one moving the slowest, but hitting the hardest. Are these things truly accurate? Honestly, I couldn't tell you. But they work well within the game and give you options, options you don't have with the stock toolbar.

As to why the scenarios come loaded with the mod, well honestly, they have to. Because the Grog toolbar is a mod, it can't be used through the Waterloo battles tab, and at the time the game was launched, that was the only place the games scenarios were located. The only choice was to include the scenarios with the mod so that the toolbar could be used with the games scenarios through the user scenarios tab. This was also confusing so in one update Reb simply eliminated any reference to the user scenarios tab once the mod was activated, and now it's just called scenarios, but it still needs to be there if you want to play the games stock scenarios using the grog toolbar.

I hope this at least answers some of your questions. I cannot speak as to whether everything in the toolbar is exactly historically accurate, and I would suggest that there probably has never been a game ever who's historical accuracy was faultless.
But I can tell you that Reb put a great deal of time and effort, and his heart and soul into making the Grog Toolbar the very best it could be.
I'm sure it's not perfect, but neither is the game it was created for. Games, like all things have flaws, and hey, I've exposed more than my fair share of them.
But nothing was ever just thrown into the toolbar willy nilly. Everything in it has a specific gameplay related reason for being there, even if not everyone agrees all the time.