Scourge of War Boards

I got a crash for you. I don't think this mods for me I don't like the artillery mod.

Hi Roy

Thank you for trying it - your log did show me an error I made with the Aforcemove command but it should not have resulted in a crash. Could you tell me which options you selected at the beginning with respect to Optimising the Prussians, The French and the outcome at Wavre so I can try to track what might have been happening at around 12.30 pm

I note you do not like the effects of my artillery mod - it is intended to do two things, first to implement more accurate historical capabilities in terms of effective ranges and second to make the AI a better opponent because the AI typically leaves its guns too far from the action so the longer ranges help it.

The artillery mod does have an impact that I do not like myself which is to reduce the effectiveness of fortified buildings. Unfortunately the game engine is designed so that combat versus a unit in a building is resolved by firepower rather than the historic melee assault. As my mod makes canister firepower more effective it is not possible to hold buildings for long versus artillery as the defending units incur heavy casualties. In the cases of Hougoumont and LHS I have tried to offset this for the Allies by not trying too long to hold those buildings and for the French by changing the objective itself after its initial capture to one that has a much wider radius for the occupying force. This means that, unless the Allies approach, the French can hold the objective with units behind the buildings rather than inside them. It is a compromise as making the buildings' defensive value higher would prevent infantry on their own from taking them.

Regards

Mike

It was Optimising The French, I set all my officers to TC off & set an attack stance to see what would happen.
If you think its not your mod that is causing the crash you could be right. I have had a few crashes lately that I have been meaning to report, I've attached them hear in case you want to look at them. The cause of the first crash might be caused by a program called Google Drive, the second one I've no idea.


The artillery mod for me makes it far to easy to win by blasting every thing with canister from a far instead of having to bring my artillery right up close. Another thing is I TC all my officers making it near impossible to check who's being obliterated by shrapnel. I guess it just the way I play but I really appreciate the work you've put into your mod.

Have you updated your Cavalry mod regarding the lancers?

Hi Roy
I am afraid I cannot see anything too obvious from the two logs as to why the other examples might have crashed and it is entirely possible that something I have done in my Mod could make the game crash.

The aspect of the Mod that makes Lancers more effective on their first strike is unfortunately rather complicated to implement. If you are familiar with the various attributes that units have which are specified in their OOB entry, I have actually used the horsemanship attribute. This seemed both appropriate and not much used for other purposes and surprisingly horsemanship in the standard game has no impact on cavalry melee ability. I looked at the horsemanship ratings in the Waterloo OOB and found that no unit had a rating of 1 or 2. I went through all the good quality Lancer units and gave them horsemanship ratings of 2 and then had that improve their ratings for Melee strike hit by 30% but I added a 2 second delay to the time of their next hit. I gave elite heavy cavalry a 20% improvement in strike but no delay. I gave average Lancer units a 15% improvement in hit chance but a 6 second delay in subsequent hits by using the horsemanship attribute value of 1.

Thus in order to implement this differentiation for Lancers it is necessary to change the unitattributes file and the OOB file that is being used by the relevant scenario. My general cavalry Mod just needed a change to the statetables file and thus can be applied quite simply to effect all scenarios. To really complete the process neatly I would also need to add a new weapon type of Lances and Swords in the rifles.csv file and add that to all the Lancer OOB entries. Typically Lancers carried both Lances and Swords and were able to drop their Lances and melee with Swords after their first strike. However, that last change is not essential for the Mod to work.

Returning to your point about the artillery mod, you certainly can mow down the opposing forces but in my Waterloo the French can be outnumbered by a factor of two so you do need to mow down a lot to win. Also my AI will attack simultaneously in different parts of the battlefield to exploit the advantage it has over a human player in terms of speed of thought and knowledge of what is happening everywhere!

I also TC all my officers but I periodically pause the battle and page through all the Corps commanders and if I notice significant casualties since my last check I drill down the OOB until I see where they are occurring and take action as needed. Given the advantage the AI has in speed of thought and extra troop numbers I think it is a fair challenge to do that. The scenario is certainly challenging at the end if you optimise the Prussians but NOT the French when you will see Prussians attacking from both the East and NE and Wellington from the centre and NW.

regards

Mike

Hi Roy
I am afraid I cannot see anything too obvious from the two logs as to why the other examples might have crashed and it is entirely possible that something I have done in my Mod could make the game crash.

Do you mean your Cavalry mod?

Hi Roy

No I meant the other two logs you posted. I have tried my scenario using the Optimise French setting but there are quite a few random paths through the code so it might still have a serious bug that I have not yet encountered.

I have a new version that I am testing which includes Marshall Ney as a French Corps Commander. I created a Corps for him using Subervie's Cavalry Division and Girard's Infantry. Historically Girard was killed at Ligny and his Corps badly cut up and left at QB guarding Prussian prisoners, but that did not happen in my version of Ligny.

Regards

Mike

The other two logs where before your W10 mod.

Hi Roy

I did understand that there is something that is crashing your use of SOW not connected with my Mod , however, it is still possible that my Mod had something to do with the particular crash that happened when you tried it so I will keep on testing and will let you know if I find any other fault that could have done that.

regards

Mike