Scourge of War Boards

Artillery changes.

These are temporary, ugly changes that are meant to keep the game fun until we can mod and do this stuff right.

All guns in game will use rifled cannon as their weapon. To make the different guns different, their stats (marksmanship, reloading, horsemanship, drill) will be offset in battle depending on what their gun type is supposed to be (the name of the unit that you see). You won't see these offsets when you look at their experience number on the website.

So for instance, a 12pdr Napoleon could use the 20pdr parrot weapon, with increased horsemanship, decreased accuracy.

This allows me to drop the extreme artillery stat increase we used to have, that attempted to make napoleons OK by generally giving them 9 of each stat, as we saw that didn't really help. I don't claim that these changes make it work more realistically. Some realism factors like the extremely long range of the whitworth had to be dropped in order for the whitworth to be able to kill anything. The goal is not to make the numbers fit reality, but to make our usage of the guns, and their effects in the battle, more fun.

So the new cannon breakdown with these changes is as follows:

3in Ordnance Rifle
Fast reload, deadly

10pdr Parrott
Slower reload

20pdr Parrott
Slower reload, more deadly than 10pdr Parrott

James Rifle
12pdr Napoleon
6pdr M1841
Less accuracy, more mobility

12pdr Howitzer
Decent reload

24pdr Howitzer
More deadly but slower reload than 12pd Howitzer

12pdr Blakely
Fast reload (breech-loading)

Whitworth
Best accuracy

A few changes since the last post.

Regimental commanders that die are listed on the battle reports. The replacements will likely be a lower rank, though they do get promoted over time. Regimental commanders are explained here.

Artillery crews will bring 12 men to battle, I'm trying this to see if it makes counter battery fire more common, since apparently we all fire at infantry.

Lots of other little changes are not listed here.

Today I added desertions for the losing side during battle, objectives that appear during the battle so you don't know where they will be right at the start, and some slight imbalance in the numbers on each side favoring the side that starts further from the objectives overall. You can read the details of how these work in the Battle Results and Objectives pages of the wiki.

A rather important new change:

Guns that are either captured or routed in battle will be temporarily lost. Each turn they'll have a 33% chance of begin returned. Guns on the winning side in a battle will have a 20% chance of not being lost when captured/routed to represent the winning side holding the field.

Another thing we'll try, to make objectives work better, is that objectives now have a 30 yard radius. Meaning your regiment and commander holding the objective must be within 30 yards of it to hold it.

The hoped for result is that our tactics for taking objectives will change from a last minute rush, we'll have to drive the enemy away from it ahead of time. It also means if your front line is on the objective, the enemy might attack it and the regiment that is on the objective may rout or fall back, which would lose it. So hopefully to hold objectives we'll need our line somewhat in front of them so the regiment on the objective isn't exposed to fire.

We'll see how it goes.

True.. I haven't been posting here about changes lately, but this one's interesting enough to merit a post. This afternoon I learned some Flash and made a map display that shows the starting locations of the divisions and objectives in the battles. Also have a script plowing through the old scenario files to make these for all the previous battles, not just the new ones.

Here's the one for Battle 1487 of Tuesday night. (Scroll down)

Like most everything, it doesn't just work in internet explorer. I don't have time now to find out why, so get a different browser like everyone else.

Well get it fixed for IE, I can't change my work computer :silly: Had too many problems with other browsers before anyway. Is this animated, or basically just an overlay of troop positions and objectives? I always found the simple animated graphics of battles to be high entertaining (simple minds and all that).

Would be sweet if there was a record of where the units were at different points, and perhaps someday they'll make it so I can dump the startlocs file in a scenario command and then have the Launcher take these and turn it into a record so we can have an animated recording of the battle.

But it's not possible now.


Are you saying you use IE at home on purpose too? It's not that the thing is broken for IE, it's that IE is broken and to make most things work in IE I have to find hacks and then make sure they don't mess things up in other browsers.

Hard to believe they force you to use IE at work.. but maybe that's Texas? Where I work most things aren't even supported in IE.