Scourge of War Boards

Davinci, thanks a ton for this map! This is a beautiful map.

It is just mind-boggling how much this map changes the dynamics of play, and yes I think it improves the dynamics, i.e., makes them more realistic. When I first loaded it up I happened to be in one of the areas (think north) that is relatively flat and I was like "Ah shucks . . . he just made one big pancake?"

But then as I moseyed around and as I've played it a couple different times I realized, "Wow! He did a great job on this map!" The terrain is some of the most realistic I've seen in any game maps, the way it fades into rolling hills, forests, level areas, broad sloping areas, etc.

I think this map, or maps of this size have a lot of potential for a sort of "campaign" system in Single player.

If there is a way to make this size map tenable for MP play then IMHO, this size map really would be fantastic for MP play. Few questions:

1. What region or physiographic province was your inspiration for this map?

2. Did you work from a realworld map at all?

3. Is there something unique about how this map impacts exhaustion levels? Or is it just the long distances? Haven't really paid close attention to how exhausted troops get on other maps, but I was surprised when after moving only 1/4 to 1/3 of the width of this map, every single regiment and battery was totally exhausted.

This last point really influences how a battle can/should be fought and pretty much makes a 2 hour time limit untenable unless you spawn a "line of sight" sandbox (which would seem to be a bit contrary to the basic point of the map anyway).

I did one with the Glendale Jackson What If OOB no time limit, Hunt them down, one objective. Having noticed in previous quick plays that the map is really exhausting, I did not advance on the objective, I just moved my three corps forward a bit to good defensive terrain and waited for the rebs to come hunt me down.

I didn't even have all of my brigades and batteries perfectly set up how I wanted when the first rebs come down one of the roads. It was Whitings Division, but strangely there were no others behind it. They came right down a road to the south of a forest that had roads on three sides. I had wrapped the north and west side of this forest with Heintzelman's corp with arty and infantry interspersed right at forest edge. I had Sumner's corp east of them and covering north and Porter's corp southeast of Heintzelman and facing west. So basically no matter which way the rebs came I had a strong position.

Whiting's Div got enveloped and after about two hours (largely on sped up time setting) I had won a Major Victory without even engaging most of the Rebs.

My observations based on this:

A. Even just moving 1/5th the width of the map and getting setup in these defensive positions most all my regiments were exhausted, and it seemed to take them a long time to get rested up.

B. The rate of casualties seemed lower than in previous sandboxes I've played. After about 30 minutes of shooting there were only about 250 vs 500 casualties.

I would imagine the low casualty rates are accounted for by the fact that both the rebs and yanks were exhausted? Not sure if a map has any influence on exhaustion (apart from the sheer size) or casualty rates, but thought I'd ask.

Davinci, thanks a ton for this map! This is a beautiful map.

It is just mind-boggling how much this map changes the dynamics of play, and yes I think it improves the dynamics, i.e., makes them more realistic. When I first loaded it up I happened to be in one of the areas (think north) that is relatively flat and I was like "Ah shucks . . . he just made one big pancake?"

But then as I moseyed around and as I've played it a couple different times I realized, "Wow! He did a great job on this map!" The terrain is some of the most realistic I've seen in any game maps, the way it fades into rolling hills, forests, level areas, broad sloping areas, etc.

I think this map, or maps of this size have a lot of potential for a sort of "campaign" system in Single player.

If there is a way to make this size map tenable for MP play then IMHO, this size map really would be fantastic for MP play. Few questions:

1. What region or physiographic province was your inspiration for this map?

2. Did you work from a realworld map at all?

3. Is there something unique about how this map impacts exhaustion levels? Or is it just the long distances? Haven't really paid close attention to how exhausted troops get on other maps, but I was surprised when after moving only 1/4 to 1/3 of the width of this map, every single regiment and battery was totally exhausted.

This last point really influences how a battle can/should be fought and pretty much makes a 2 hour time limit untenable unless you spawn a "line of sight" sandbox (which would seem to be a bit contrary to the basic point of the map anyway).

I did one with the Glendale Jackson What If OOB no time limit, Hunt them down, one objective. Having noticed in previous quick plays that the map is really exhausting, I did not advance on the objective, I just moved my three corps forward a bit to good defensive terrain and waited for the rebs to come hunt me down.

I didn't even have all of my brigades and batteries perfectly set up how I wanted when the first rebs come down one of the roads. It was Whitings Division, but strangely there were no others behind it. They came right down a road to the south of a forest that had roads on three sides. I had wrapped the north and west side of this forest with Heintzelman's corp with arty and infantry interspersed right at forest edge. I had Sumner's corp east of them and covering north and Porter's corp southeast of Heintzelman and facing west. So basically no matter which way the rebs came I had a strong position.

Whiting's Div got enveloped and after about two hours (largely on sped up time setting) I had won a Major Victory without even engaging most of the Rebs.

My observations based on this:

A. Even just moving 1/5th the width of the map and getting setup in these defensive positions most all my regiments were exhausted, and it seemed to take them a long time to get rested up.

B. The rate of casualties seemed lower than in previous sandboxes I've played. After about 30 minutes of shooting there were only about 250 vs 500 casualties.

I would imagine the low casualty rates are accounted for by the fact that both the rebs and yanks were exhausted? Not sure if a map has any influence on exhaustion (apart from the sheer size) or casualty rates, but thought I'd ask.

Re lower casualty rates if you are using my peninsula campaign mod this is possibly due to my oobs setting the quality of the troops as being quite inexperienced in some cases the troops were new regiments who were fighting for the first time in combat so their hit rate and accuracy was far less effective. However if the troops are marching considerable distances over Davinci's epic sized map this would also effect their performance ....it is a great map to behold

Can't be the Peninsular OOB mad for low casualties, I play with Anthropoid all the time and we always use the Pen Mod OOB. We have taken 15,000 yank and inflicted 34,000 reb casualties in those battles in co-op. Really love the mod by the way. I did post a issue we 2 of your OOB's in you mod thread, 2 of the OOB are not courier equipped so we cannot really use those in our play style. Bummer as we really wanted to play those 2.

Or maybe I shot you a PM about it here. Cannot remember which.

If there is a way to make this size map tenable for MP play then IMHO, this size map really would be fantastic for MP play. Few questions:

If I had to guess I would have stated that there is probably no way that this map would work in MP.

The coordinates go from 0,0 too 524,288, 524,288 . So even without the houses, and the trees it would still be quite demanding. I would advise reducing the amount of soldiers which will be the biggest FPS hit. The trees and the weeds are roughly two FPS depending on the Computer. The Road-Marching is probably the most demanding but that depends on the amount of soldiers.

1. What region or physiographic province was your inspiration for this map?

2. Did you work from a realworld map at all?

3. Is there something unique about how this map impacts exhaustion levels? Or is it just the long distances? Haven't really paid close attention to how exhausted troops get on other maps, but I was surprised when after moving only 1/4 to 1/3 of the width of this map, every single regiment and battery was totally exhausted.

1) It's been a while but I think that it is a converted Pipe-Creek Map.
2) Same as above.
3) Yes, I'm in Linux at the moment, so I can't see the game files, but the Mapname.csv file controls this. I just can't tell you which column at the moment.

This last point really influences how a battle can/should be fought and pretty much makes a 2 hour time limit untenable unless you spawn a "line of sight" sandbox (which would seem to be a bit contrary to the basic point of the map anyway).

True, I play a lot different than just about everyone here, so My games are real long with a lot of marching around before contact is made. Sometimes, I forget to re-adjust the columns in the Mapname.csv file, so this is probably the problem that you are having.

I did one with the Glendale Jackson What If OOB no time limit, Hunt them down, one objective.

Hmm, I've been playing on this map for over a year and have never played with an Objective, since I didn't want to influence the AI into marching to a particular spot.

A. Even just moving 1/5th the width of the map and getting setup in these defensive positions most all my regiments were exhausted, and it seemed to take them a long time to get rested up.

B. The rate of casualties seemed lower than in previous sandboxes I've played. After about 30 minutes of shooting there were only about 250 vs 500 casualties.

A) This is changeable in the Mapname.csv file in one of the columns. It might be named fatigue , I'm not sure.
B) This is also changeable in the Mapname.csv file. Also in on e of the columns.

Basically, what I did was to give the entire map a defensive-bonus to bring down the casualties. This is why you will see the defensive-bonus on any unit on the map.

The Version #3 is still pending at the moment, it has a lot of different trees by Myself, 2ndTexas, Jolly and Crikey.

Also has six-thousand fences, and 1100 structures, so it will not run any better than the previous one.

I'm getting three-four FPS marching, and roughly six-eight FPS while fighting. But that seems to work for Me, I'm sort of used to it.

Thanks, for the Comments!

davinci

Anthropoid - Finally back in Windows, here are the two columns that I mentioned above.

10MileMapV2.csv file :

Column C You can replace all of the values except any road with -0.1

Column H You can replace all of the values with -1.0

This should help to speed up the men and also reduce the fatigue.

Another idea would be for Me to eliminate all of the different street \ road names, and also all of the different farm and woods names.

That might give you a few more FPS, due to the CPU not going through all of those names per cycle. But it wouldn't be that big of a boost!

davinci

Here are some of the latest experiments with the trees. davinci

Really nice, Dav.

I like the underbrush effect a lot!

Is there any chance you could take some screen shots showing troops deployed INSIDE the woods? It would be good to see the effect the underbrush has on line of sight etc and also to get a feeling of scale.

Cheers

Is there any chance you could take some screen shots showing troops deployed INSIDE the woods? It would be good to see the effect the underbrush has on line of sight etc and also to get a feeling of scale.Cheers

For You , Absolutely!

The first three are from My-Side, the last two are from the enemies-perspective. davinci

Sorry Dav, Forgot to thank you for these latest pics and your speedy response.

The extra vegitation really does make a difference and I expect they would add a little extra fog of war.

Is there any effect on FPS?

The extra vegetation really does make a difference and I expect they would add a little extra fog of war.

The fog-of-war-effect takes a bit to get used to especially when trying to align the Brigades besides each other in combat while in the wooded areas.

I will usually place the first Brigade inside of the woods, and then position the next brigade near the edge of the woods and move them slowly forward, left, or right.

The soldiers will usually spot the position of the enemy before I do and start firing, their line-of-sight is a lot better than mine.

Is there any effect on FPS?

Yes, and No answer here.

I'm testing with unpacked sprites since I'm still working on them, so yes I have loss a FPS or two from when I first started.

But, I'm not sure if that is due to the unpacked trees, or if it is due to the increase in objects that I have placed down on the map. Total objects are now at 1141 .

But, I will add that Norb has made an incredible game here, there doesn't seem to be a breaking point.

I'll know more once the trees are packed, but if I remove all of them with the T \ Key the FPS only increase by 1-2.

EDIT Post to add this................................................................

Grog I didn't think about this until after I posted the above. But, adding the small vegetation or limps to the trees doesn't seem to make the size of that particular file any larger.

So, I'm not sure if the results would make that much of a difference pertaining to the FPS.

To put that another way, if tree1 is 256kb without the underbrush, it will still be 256kb with the underbrush added. Since I'm adding the additional graphic to the empty portion of that file.

I hope that I explained that correctly.

davinci