Scourge of War Boards

When playing HITS, how do y'all get a commander to break contact and disengage? I find it almost impossible to do. I am sympathetic to whatever anybody wants to say about the historical difficulty of such maneuvers, etc., but such a feat was possible and was ordered quite frequently. After a lot of time playing SoW, it does not seem possible to perform a withdrawal without TCing, forming column, and sprinting downrange. Unfortunately, this can't really be done while playing HITS. Any thoughts?

Hmmm, well not telling you anything that you haven’t already figured out, but micro-managing the troops will probably be the only way to disengage.

I’m not sure how you would go about this playing hits , but try to keep several regiments engaged, and then pull everyone else back behind those two.

The AI will concentrate on them while you try to gain some-type-of-control over the forces that you are pulling back.

I wouldn’t use the retreat option too much; this function will cause your units to run back and forth if they do-not have room to retreat.

Once you have the majority of your forces pulled back, set up another line to act as a sort of rear-guard, and then try to pull back the first two units that are still engaged behind that line.

Basically, some of your units are going to have to be sacrificed to perform this maneuver.

davinci

Yeah. . . unfortunately, if you order an un-tc'd regiment to fall back, when they get out of range, they retreat. And we all know what that can lead to. . . .

So the best way to break contact is to tc the regiments and order them to withdraw while firing.

That would be a good thing to fix: un-tc'd regiments retreating after falling back and getting out of rifle range.

Yeah. . . unfortunately, if you order an un-tc'd regiment to fall back, when the get out of range, they retreat. And we all know what that can lead to. . . .

So the best way to break contact is to tc the regiments and order them to withdraw while firing.

That would be a good thing to fix: un-tc'd regiments retreating after falling back and getting out of rifle range.

Additionally, once a regiment is out of musket range, get them into the column of fours so they can get further away not only faster, but with far less pathing issues. Once you have your line disengaged, get your next one set up and work on getting your rear guard (if you used one) out of range as well and get them to safety. Identify which of your regiments are in the worst shape and try to place them in a place on the line where they won't be taking much more punishment.

I finding that selecting 'fallback', then 'justrun' gets engaged regiments straight back in the fastest time (no formation changing slowdowns), and usually out of harms way.

For the next B&F upgrade, I'm thinking of putting a split button for 'fallback', so, front half 'fallback', back half 'fallback-justrun'. Feedback please, yea or nay. You can still do it manually on the toolbar, so you have the option to wait on your 'justrun' after initiating 'fallback', plus, you can check out the location of your 'fallback to' arrow.

I like your idea of splitting the buttons.

Every thing you add improves the game in my view, Reb.