Scourge of War Boards

Couple clarifications con20or:

MinEnemy only affects AI controlled units.
canfight says whether a unit can shoot, so only line and skirmish use that
cancharge only determines whether a charge command can be given, it does not affect autocharge. Besides, since changing formation is instantaneous, this can never have any effect.

Crazy as it sounds, having 'CanCharge=0' for all infantry formations might actually produce results closer to historical events than the current setup.

It would be great to get rid of the autocharge too. Can it be turned off? Perhaps with infantry unable to charge the problem goes away.

Thanks Garnier.

Sounds like MP column charge could be eliminated with the cancharge option, but I dont see how you can get rid of charge entirely so thats probably not a runner.

Anyway - thats the limit of my modding knowledge, sorry.

My opinion on charging is this:

The real problem is how little penalty there is for large numbers of troops moving in a small area taking fire. Norb's solid shot change made a big improvement over the original game. Unfortunately musket fire and canister still don't do more damage against packed targets.

The idea that units should avoid melee is correct, but that can't be fixed easily, particularly since there are far too many opinions on how exactly it should work, only a few people will be happy with a change to this, and it could easily break gameplay for the rest. Thus it's best if it's left to the players to retreat their men.

This is what we have now. The only remaining problem is that retreating units run all over the place, often back toward the enemy. So players must use normal move orders to escape, and to avoid autocharge they must do it before the enemy gets too close. This is OK in my opinion. So I think the only problem is the lack of penalty for packing troops close together, and the inability to mod fire effectiveness separately at different ranges.

A penalty for packing troops together does not seem like it would be easy to implement. Hopefully it does get done eventually, such that the factor is mod-able so it can't break gameplay.

Sounds like MP column charge could be eliminated with the cancharge option, but I dont see how you can get rid of charge entirely so thats probably not a runner.

No, because you can always switch to a different formation instantly and then click charge. BUT, we did effectively eliminate maneuver column charge in GCM by making it less effective than column by divisions, so I think most of us agree that the whole maneuver column charge thing is no longer an issue.

Garnier wrote:

The idea that units should avoid melee is correct, but that can't be fixed easily, particularly since there are far too many opinions on how exactly it should work, only a few people will be happy with a change to this, and it could easily break gameplay for the rest. Thus it's best if it's left to the players to retreat their men.

I disagree. The real problem is that too many people play games such as Total War and/or believe what they see in Hollywood movies. They cannot bring themselves to accept the fact that mass hand to hand fighting ended when black powder weapons came to be widely used. It is rather stunning that for all the effort that has gone into making the behavior of the units in this game behave as humans do, this fantasy play has been allowed to continue.

So you think there's an easy fix that most people will like and that won't break the game for very many people?

Garnier wrote:

So you think there's an easy fix that most people will like and that won't break the game for very many people?

Yes, a no melee switch. However, the correct solution is to add moral checks to both attacker and defender which would ensure that one or both would retreat or the attacker would stop mid-way and begin firing. For those that can't tear themselves from the grip of fantasy, they need to play a game such as TW Rome where hand to hand is not only appropriate but a lot of fun to watch.

MTG - Are you using the latest beta patch? You'll notice something different about melee's. At least in our testing, they don't last near as long as they used to, and regiments will often fallback before engaging. I'm not sure if this change was even intentional, but while Norb was working on something else, melee's have now become much more realistic, and we all agreed during our testing that they are just where they need to be.

LP - that's interesting... yes, I think I had gained the vague perception that melees recently had been ending more quickly, and that once one side retreated it didn't do that horrible "charge back in" thing, making the melee resume. If some code has been tweaked to cause this then my thanks go to Norb for implementing it as it is a big improvement.

A melee that lasts 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes is much better, thank you.

I still feel though that units approaching very close to an enemy, whether the subject of a deliberate charge order or not, should take a morale check (the game knows very well how close an enemy is and what unit type it is and whether and how much fire it is putting out, so these checks should be do-able drawing from the existing game data). Then if an advancing unit passes the morale check, the unit(s) it is advancing towards should check. Only if all checks are passed should a melee result.

If the attacker fails his check by a small amount he should halt and refuse to go forwards for a certain time, something like the "fixed in place rallying" rule. If he fails by a big margin, he should retreat, perhaps no more than to just outside musket range and again, rally. If a defender fails the morale check, he behaves as per the retreat of about 150yds above.

If the melee duration could be reduced even further (the "two guys bayonetted" idea or the "small handful of men scuffling around the colours" description that MTG has metioned being mostly, it seems, representative of actual ACW handto-hand fights) then that would be good too.

Finally, can the autocharge range be reduced even more? I think a week or two ago you said it was at 35 yards. If it could be set to about 10 yards it would still serve its purpose of not permitting a units flag marker to pass through any enemy sprites, which I think it was originally implemented to stop, but it would also cause fewer units to inadvertently initiate melees when the owning players didn't wish to. This has become something I have noticed a lot more since I've started playing HITS; because a player's POV is so limited its easy to click on the terrain and send a unit forwards, only to have it hit an enemy unit you did not intend it to.

LittlePowell wrote:

MTG - Are you using the latest beta patch? You'll notice something different about melee's. At least in our testing, they don't last near as long as they used to, and regiments will often fallback before engaging. I'm not sure if this change was even intentional, but while Norb was working on something else, melee's have now become much more realistic, and we all agreed during our testing that they are just where they need to be.

Yes I am using 1.4026. I still see on average 4-6 melees per division size battle. By any measure other than the TW series, that is very unrealistic. If you have data that show that the number of melees were that frequent, please give it. No author I can find agrees with your conclusion. In fact authors such as P. Griffith, D. Chandler categorically state that they were very rare occurrences in black powder warfare. The myriad reports in the OR also support that conclusion. If 5 melees per division is accurate then there would have been ~100 melees at Gettysburg rather than the 5 or 6 actually recorded.

One thing I noticed that seems to bring on many of these melees is a brigade commander that orders his regiment to advance to a certain spot. While that regiment is advancing, the enemy also decides to advance. The result is that one or the other regiment blunders into the other. It's as if the obstacle checking routine is not invoked. That would be something worthwhile for Norb to check.