Scourge of War Boards

Hello!

Now that I've had the chance to try out the Napoleonic mod a bit I also think that a new generation of this game desperately needs some order/cohesion status.

I love the idea and implementation of HITS. It's the biggest strength of the game. When it comes to the micro-level, however, i.e. when I want to control my brigade and individual units, the outcomes of the simulation is often quite weird in my opinion. Battalions moving through each other is a well-known problem. But movement in general could need a revamp.

In my opinion, units turn, pivot and change formation by far too quickly and easily. I'd kill someone for a game that actually treated the transition of one formation to another as a seperate "satus" of a unit, rather than just having every man walk to his new position. It doesn't need to show how individuals companies split off and find their way to the new position, but in terms of game-mechanics, in the background,there is room for a transitorial status. E.g. whenever you click to change formation, a timer could set in. Even though your men seem to be already in their new position, make them unable to move, more prone to morale shock and their fire having less effect. The duration of the timer could depend on drill status and terrain.

Another big issue for me is the constant pivoting that I see in the game. The cause seems to be that units orientate only on the flags of enemy units. I'm looking forward to experiment a bit with unit sizes. Especially units with a wide front (ín skirmish formation) are totally inflexible because of this mechanism.

And of course cohesion has been mentioned. Fatigue is not a good representation for cohesion. As far as I've understood this game, fatigue doesn't really matter at all anyway. The only thing you can't do once you#re out of breath is to run and to charge. We'd need morale mali, fire effectiveness mali, and also more vulnerability to cavalry (thinking "napoleonic" here) if we wanted fatigue to represent cohesion. I'm not versed in the American Civil War at all, but speaking in terms of 18th century, we'd need something to show the breakdown of fire-effectiveness over time. As it is now, neither morale nor fatigue (as cohesion) leads to a decrease of firepower. Also, I don't think that the cohesion loss for crossing an obstacle is not even nearly represented in an adequate way by the accumulation of fatigue (for the time the "flag" of the unit crosses the obstacle...). Not even to speak of the importance of "cohesion" for anything related to cavalry.

We'd need morale mali, fire effectiveness mali, and also more vulnerability to cavalry (thinking "napoleonic" here) if we wanted fatigue to represent cohesion.

Just FYI -- this can be modded already. In GCM I have units firepower decrease steadily down to 10% when exhausted. As well as decreasing melee effectiveness and making them likely to retreat. With that done, fatigue does work somewhat. And you can change the rate units fatigue in different terrain when doing different things.


I agree on how formation changes would be best with a game mechanic independent of the movement of the sprites.

Thank you for your answer, Garnier. Indeed I took a closer look into the logistics files (esp. unitattributes) and there's quite a lot of important stuff related to unit status that can be modified. I just need to tinker around a bit.

Still having something like cohesion/disruption would greatly enhance the (micro-)tactical aspect of the game. Things like changing formation under fire, moving under fire (esp. artillery fire), opening fire too early, moving over rough terrain, etc. should all have consequences.

And the lack of a collision between units has quite severe consequences as we all know. In combination with the incredible movement flexibility of the battalions, I think it is incredible hard to outmanoeuvre the opponent (on a smaller scale, i.e. I'm not refering to flanking movements of corps). Everyone can from a brigade from column to line and vice versa in a matter of a minute, while I think it should be a quite important (and not easily undone) decision when and where to form up for battle. Though I still lack experience to make up my opinion (and I guess it can be much better with HITS activated ).

PS: Offtopic-side-question: Is there a logistics-file named "arsenal" somewhere? I've seen it mentioned in some of the other files. Apparently it controls small arms fire accuracy, but I can't find it anywhere?

"arsenal" may be the old name for what is now "rifles.csv".