Different Solution to Mass Routs [Archive]

Skomatth

12-05-2002, 01:40

Since mass routs seem to be the major complaint of those wishing to take online playing to the next level, the obvious solution to stops the routs is to give +2 morale. I.E. Giving longer fights and more chance to flank.

However, a problem with this arises. Since the units are fighting longer, the number of men the rout starts with will be smaller, thus reducing a chance of a rally. It also makes those regrouping battles less exciting because everyone has less units.

My solution, would be to lower the chance to kill (if you can do that). This would make engagements last longer and thus give players a greater chance to get units in position.

The threshhold at which units rout could be lowered also, but I came up with that as I was writing this message and so I can't really comment on it.

Puzz3D

12-06-2002, 04:53

Hi Skomatth. Good idea

What we did in the WE/MI v103 stat to make it more of a flanking game was to increase the defend parameter of each unit. That effectively reduces the chance to kill, and it worked very well to reduce the speed of combat. One problem with this approach is that the attack/defend parameters can only be integers so the smallest change you can make is 1 which is a 20% change in change to kill. An interesting consequence of slowing combat is that not only is there more time to make the initial flanking move, but there is also more time to make a counter flanking move on the flanker, and you have a better chance of attacking the flanker from the rear since it has probably already rotated something like 90 degrees. This can lead to very interesting flank upon counterfank upon counterflank skirmishes, especially with cav which is 20% faster than the cav in MTW. I've seen these cav furballs quite often in WE/MI v103 games that I've played. You can get them at times in MTW since combat speed is fairly slow, but cav speed is also slow which cuts down the chances of getting one going.

Lowering the rout point is preferable to raising morale because units become impetuous above a certain value. The reason increasing the defend value worked so well in WE/MI v103 is that, due to a bug fix in the network code, the game played faster than STW. It wasn't 20% faster, but was maybe more like 10% to 15% faster. We dropped infantry foot speed by about 15%, and left cav spedd about where it was. So, we ended up with something that was maybe 5% to 10% slower in combat, about the same in inf foot speed and 15% faster in cav speed than MTW. Units stood and fought longer than 5% to 10% because the dynamic morale penalty due to casualty rate was less, and we raised the morale on some indivudual units. Casualty rate from guns was also cut down about 25% from the WE/MI v102, but was still about 3x what it was in STW.

The speed of combat in MTW seems pretty good to me, and about the same as STW, but the average morale is definitely lower because we buy units at valor 0 instead of honor 2. It also appears to me that the rout point has been raised from the -24 it was in STW and WE/MI to -16 in MTW. That's a big change if I'm correct. This more fragile morale in MTW has the consequence that units quite often rout before contact when out of position. It means you have to fight in a more compact formation than you would have to if units didn't rout so easily. Raising morale (i.e. lowering the rout point) would mean you would have to accumulate more morale penalties before you would rout, and would thus cut down on positional routing and chain routing. Slowing combat by reducing the chance to kill would not help much with this issue, although, the dynamic morale penalty due to rate of casualties would be less so engaged units would be less likely to rout due to an approaching enemy.

I think the first step would be to adjust the morale level to give the desired amount of positional routing, and then adjust the chance to kill to give the desired flanking ability. After that, you would have to check the balance of the units because some of them might become too strong given their new ability to stand and fight. One of the things we had to do to keep cav balanced in WE/MI v103 was to increase the cav's charge parameter since the overall higher defense and higher morale negated it's ability to rout some units that it should have been able to rout.

MizuYuuki ~~~
Clan Takiyama ~~~