Southern Hunter
04-22-2007, 04:41
Some time ago, I produced a version of this for RTR, but since I only play EB now, I thought I would move it across.
The idea is to have the troop numbers in battles be more accurately scaled to history, and also to improve the battle engine to make battles more historical as well.
Introduction
We all know that an army of 2 or 3 thousand soldiers can't possibly be the total field army for Rome or Seleucia or any other major nation of the time.
Therefore, the 'apparent' troop numbers must 'represent' a much larger body of troops in some way. While I understand this logic, it is applied very inconsistently, and the underlying simulation that CA have built, does in fact represent exactly the number of men shown, and no more.
The fact that we actually play battles involving hundreds or a few thousand soldiers on each side, contributes hugely to the inaccuracies of the combat model.
There is one simple way to fix this. CA could allow MUCH larger units to exist, say thousands per unit. I truly believe that this is the best and right solution, and that some peoples computers would actually handle it ok, if not now, then in the near future certainly.
Unfortunately, this route is not open to us as modders, and we must find another way.
I believe the solution involves a number of steps. Each of these steps has pitfalls and drawbacks, as well as its strengths. I therefore propose to develop a mod in three parts, with anybody interested able to download each part or the complete mod.
The steps are:
1. Adopt a consistent 'figure' scale; and
2. Adopt a consistent 'ground' scale to the figure scale.
3. Change the availabilities of certain troops to be more historically accurate (limited in number, etc)
Step 1. Adopting a consistent figure scale - Realistic Troop Numbers Mod
This is simply assuming that each 'figure' / 'model' in the game 'actually represents' a larger number of men, and scaling all unit sizes based on their historical numbers.
I have produced a few variants of this and have come around to a preferred number for the figure scale, which is 1 Model = 6 Men when playing at Huge scale.
The reasons that I like 6, rather than 8 or 10, 12 or 20 or some other number, are:
- 6 is roughly the right number to be able to represent the smallest effective tactical units (of around 150 men) to the largest (of 1,500 men).
So, based on our 1:6 figure scale, some polybian roman unit sizes should be:
Velites (for a legion) = 200 figures (representing 1200)
Hastati 200
Principe 200
Triarii 100
A full consular legion of 2 Roman and 2 allied legions can be contained in a single stack.
Note: I assume that 'Huge' unit size is selected to make this mod work. If you selected 'Large' instead, you are effectively making the figure scale double to 12:1.
Post Marian Cohort 80 Figures
First Cohort 132 Figures
Further note: How do we think of these 'ten men' being arranged? Well I don't think it is too important to worry about this. If you do, I think of them as being 2 deep and 3 men wide.
Therefore, the roman first line of 5 ranks (i know there are those who think it was 6) would be 3 figures deep. An 8 rank hoplite phalanx 4 figures, and a classic 16 man deep pike phalanx would be 8 ranks deep.
A Macedonian Pike Battalion was 1440-1500 men strong (and Alex had 6 of them in India) so 6 units of 240 figures (the numbers must be divisible by 4, since the number to be entered into the troops file is actually the normal size, which is then multiplied by 4 with huge unit size selected).
Alexander had 1000 archers, 500 of which were Cretans. Clearly two units of 80 figures each. And 1000 Agrianian Javelinmen, 160 figures.
A companion cavalry wedge on the other hand, was typically between 2 and 3 hundred men, so can be represented by 48 figures. Units cannot be less than 24 figures in RTW.
And this is right isn't it? That a companion cavalry unit should have 1/6 to a 1/5 of the men that a pike phalanx had, because in reality that's what they had?
I believe that by scaling each of the units in this way, based on their historical numbers (where documented), that we actually approach a more realistic and historical portrayal of the troops themselves.
Of course, the costs of the units also need to be adjusted in parallel to this scaling of numbers. This is straightforward and mechanical. After the scaling, there may be further argument to alter the costs for other reasons. I have not changed costs for other reasons as yet, simply allowing that EB has got it right to date.
By providing a scale to the units, it also allows large barbarian units to truly be 'large' in comparison to for example the Roman units which we have very firm documentation for. If we want a 'large warband' to contain 1500 men, and there is historical evidence for this, then they indeed can have the largest unit of 240 figures, which dwarfs some of the roman units size wise.
This also leads to a further modification that can be made to the campaign, to enable larger barracks in larger cities to produce larger units. Surely this is the realistic impact of having a more concentrated population and larger training facilities. We could easily introduce new units that use the same models and troop types, but simply have size variants.
For example, a small gallic village produces a small warband (500 men?), a medium town produces a medium warband (1000 men?) and a large town can produce a large warband (1500 men?).
This might even apply to some of the 'regular' armies, and hoplite morae, etc
Thus we can give each nation all of their troop types at the start of the game (as is realistic) but allow them to progress to build bigger armies later in the game. As comrade Stalin taught us, quantity has a quality all its own.
To summarise the first mod idea, we need to research the actual number of troops in each unit, and then scale it appropriately.
The factors that must be changed in descr.units.txt are: Number of men (or engines or animals), number of ranks default, costs.
I have done this for EB81a and attached the file here:
export_descr_unit.txt:
http://files.filefront.com//;7305644;;/
The changes I have made in this version of the file include:
Making Camillan units 900 strong
Making Polybian units 1200 strong, 600 for Triarii
Making roman light artillery 5 engines strong, representing the 30 engines that normally accompanied a legion
Making Marian units 480 man cohorts and 800 for 1st cohorts (actually, there are no 1st cohorts in EB at the moment, so anyway)
Making most greek hoplites 800 strong morae, and Spartans 384 men strong.
Reducing the size of most slingers and archers to around 300-500 men.
Reducing the size of hellenic cavalry units like Hetario to around 300 men (48 figures)
Changes to Roman cavalry to fit history
Parthians have been changed to a 1000 man unit as they historically used. Lookout for the cataphracts!
I haven't done much with the tribal and african factions, because I dont have the history and evidence to do it. If somebody else does, great, we can update it.
I don't have any kind of monopoly on the right answers for unit sizes. If there is scholarship that indicates different unit sizes than i have made, I can change the numbers.
Step 2. Adopting a consistent ground scale - Epic battles mod
This mod is going to be a lot more impactful and problematic. Some people don't like to play like this, but I love it.
If we really want to say that 'those 240 men are really representing 1440 men' then we also need to adopt a consistent ground scale.
This means thinking about that figure actually representing 6 men in the same area. Those 6 men must be really small, in fact less than 1/2 the size of the current model. If we are now talking about 6 men who are actually much smaller than the model, then the rate at which they walk, range at which they fire, etc, must also be scaled. In fact it needs to be scaled to the same degree, i.e. the square root of 6, about 2.4.
In order to make this work then, all we need to do superficially, is to change the movement rates to 1/2.4 the vanilla level. I have done this and it works a treat.
There are a number of other issues that need addressing though:
- Ranges of all missiles must be reduced to 1/2.4 of current (but not less than 20, which causes a CTD). City walls cannot be adjusted, making them much longer range than they are now, in comparison to the troops. I don't see any problems with this.
- Charge distance needs to be divided by 2.4 as well. This works well without problems.
- Hit Points may need to be adjusted? Because we are now talking about a figure actually representing 6 men, in at least 2 ranks, really only a half of that figure can 'strike at the enemy' at any one time. So effectively the casualty rate needs to be halved from what we see in the current battle model. To simulate this, i am experimenting with doubling all HP to 2 for normal men. Indeed this slows down the casualty rate substantially (as you would expect for an epic battle that we are now playing).
I have made all these adjustments and played through the battles, and in my opinion, they play much more realistically, and at a much more reasonable 'pace' for a large battle spread over a large linear area. Sending cavalry from one wing to another takes most of the battle, because effectively the battlefield is now 6 times bigger in area than it was previously.
Troops are very slow to maneuvre and change formation. The simple act of moving makes this slow. Therefore, once you have established your formation, it is difficult to maneuvre in the face of the enemy. You cant just change the number of ranks in your phalanx on a whim.
It is very possible to lose one wing, hold the centre, win the other wing, using this scale. Battles become much more linear, and maneuvring along the battlefield left to right becomes a long term prospect.
There is one problem, and it is nasty. There is an existing bug which means the AI will happily march its army towards you (defending) up hill and down dale, to the point of exhaustion and beyond, without ever stopping to recover. In this new battle system, where the distances are 2.4x what they used to be, this results in the AI always being exhausted by the time it arrives at your lines.
I have considered making all troops 'hardy' or 'very hardy' to overcome this problem, but it doesn't work. I find no way to make the AI conserve its freshness. I have also tried playing with the weather model to produce less fatigue, but I can't do anything which slows it down. It means that fatigue ends up giving the player an 'easy win' on a lot of battles.
The alternative is to turn fatigue off. That is now how I play. To balance it, the morale of troops needs to be taken down, since they would normally be losing morale due to fatigue.
So the plan is for Part 2 to:
- Change Battle Map Movement Modifiers text file to slow things down
- Turn Fatigue off in preferences
- Change EDU with Morale changes, Range and Charge distances.
Step 3 - Changing Troop Availability
I believe there is a case to reduce troop availability in certain areas, and this would produce more realistic armies. At the moment, it is possible in EB to hire entire armies of mercenaries in certain locations, as well as filling armies with niche troops like slingers and cretan archers. This was never historically desirable nor feasible.
My plans would involve changing which units are allowed at certain MICs, as mercenaries, different mercenary recharge rates, and even changing costs and stats of the units.
I am not sure how much work is involved in changing all these things, especially in the context of EBs quite complicated recruitment model, so I don't know when I am going to get around to doing part 3.
Summary
I believe that this mod significantly improves the historical realism of EB, as well as providing a more realistic 'large battle' feel to the combats. The first mod (consistent figure scale) seems to me to be something that most people will be interested in. The second mod will interest some and be annoying to others (hence, different mods).
Be interested in people's comments and suggestions.
Hope to post something for Epic Battles (Step 2) for people to try out, sometime soon.
UPDATE: Posted below a version of the Epic Battles Mod. Also note that you need the Elephant model bug fix installed to make either of the mods work (I think!).
The idea is to have the troop numbers in battles be more accurately scaled to history, and also to improve the battle engine to make battles more historical as well.
Introduction
We all know that an army of 2 or 3 thousand soldiers can't possibly be the total field army for Rome or Seleucia or any other major nation of the time.
Therefore, the 'apparent' troop numbers must 'represent' a much larger body of troops in some way. While I understand this logic, it is applied very inconsistently, and the underlying simulation that CA have built, does in fact represent exactly the number of men shown, and no more.
The fact that we actually play battles involving hundreds or a few thousand soldiers on each side, contributes hugely to the inaccuracies of the combat model.
There is one simple way to fix this. CA could allow MUCH larger units to exist, say thousands per unit. I truly believe that this is the best and right solution, and that some peoples computers would actually handle it ok, if not now, then in the near future certainly.
Unfortunately, this route is not open to us as modders, and we must find another way.
I believe the solution involves a number of steps. Each of these steps has pitfalls and drawbacks, as well as its strengths. I therefore propose to develop a mod in three parts, with anybody interested able to download each part or the complete mod.
The steps are:
1. Adopt a consistent 'figure' scale; and
2. Adopt a consistent 'ground' scale to the figure scale.
3. Change the availabilities of certain troops to be more historically accurate (limited in number, etc)
Step 1. Adopting a consistent figure scale - Realistic Troop Numbers Mod
This is simply assuming that each 'figure' / 'model' in the game 'actually represents' a larger number of men, and scaling all unit sizes based on their historical numbers.
I have produced a few variants of this and have come around to a preferred number for the figure scale, which is 1 Model = 6 Men when playing at Huge scale.
The reasons that I like 6, rather than 8 or 10, 12 or 20 or some other number, are:
- 6 is roughly the right number to be able to represent the smallest effective tactical units (of around 150 men) to the largest (of 1,500 men).
So, based on our 1:6 figure scale, some polybian roman unit sizes should be:
Velites (for a legion) = 200 figures (representing 1200)
Hastati 200
Principe 200
Triarii 100
A full consular legion of 2 Roman and 2 allied legions can be contained in a single stack.
Note: I assume that 'Huge' unit size is selected to make this mod work. If you selected 'Large' instead, you are effectively making the figure scale double to 12:1.
Post Marian Cohort 80 Figures
First Cohort 132 Figures
Further note: How do we think of these 'ten men' being arranged? Well I don't think it is too important to worry about this. If you do, I think of them as being 2 deep and 3 men wide.
Therefore, the roman first line of 5 ranks (i know there are those who think it was 6) would be 3 figures deep. An 8 rank hoplite phalanx 4 figures, and a classic 16 man deep pike phalanx would be 8 ranks deep.
A Macedonian Pike Battalion was 1440-1500 men strong (and Alex had 6 of them in India) so 6 units of 240 figures (the numbers must be divisible by 4, since the number to be entered into the troops file is actually the normal size, which is then multiplied by 4 with huge unit size selected).
Alexander had 1000 archers, 500 of which were Cretans. Clearly two units of 80 figures each. And 1000 Agrianian Javelinmen, 160 figures.
A companion cavalry wedge on the other hand, was typically between 2 and 3 hundred men, so can be represented by 48 figures. Units cannot be less than 24 figures in RTW.
And this is right isn't it? That a companion cavalry unit should have 1/6 to a 1/5 of the men that a pike phalanx had, because in reality that's what they had?
I believe that by scaling each of the units in this way, based on their historical numbers (where documented), that we actually approach a more realistic and historical portrayal of the troops themselves.
Of course, the costs of the units also need to be adjusted in parallel to this scaling of numbers. This is straightforward and mechanical. After the scaling, there may be further argument to alter the costs for other reasons. I have not changed costs for other reasons as yet, simply allowing that EB has got it right to date.
By providing a scale to the units, it also allows large barbarian units to truly be 'large' in comparison to for example the Roman units which we have very firm documentation for. If we want a 'large warband' to contain 1500 men, and there is historical evidence for this, then they indeed can have the largest unit of 240 figures, which dwarfs some of the roman units size wise.
This also leads to a further modification that can be made to the campaign, to enable larger barracks in larger cities to produce larger units. Surely this is the realistic impact of having a more concentrated population and larger training facilities. We could easily introduce new units that use the same models and troop types, but simply have size variants.
For example, a small gallic village produces a small warband (500 men?), a medium town produces a medium warband (1000 men?) and a large town can produce a large warband (1500 men?).
This might even apply to some of the 'regular' armies, and hoplite morae, etc
Thus we can give each nation all of their troop types at the start of the game (as is realistic) but allow them to progress to build bigger armies later in the game. As comrade Stalin taught us, quantity has a quality all its own.
To summarise the first mod idea, we need to research the actual number of troops in each unit, and then scale it appropriately.
The factors that must be changed in descr.units.txt are: Number of men (or engines or animals), number of ranks default, costs.
I have done this for EB81a and attached the file here:
export_descr_unit.txt:
http://files.filefront.com//;7305644;;/
The changes I have made in this version of the file include:
Making Camillan units 900 strong
Making Polybian units 1200 strong, 600 for Triarii
Making roman light artillery 5 engines strong, representing the 30 engines that normally accompanied a legion
Making Marian units 480 man cohorts and 800 for 1st cohorts (actually, there are no 1st cohorts in EB at the moment, so anyway)
Making most greek hoplites 800 strong morae, and Spartans 384 men strong.
Reducing the size of most slingers and archers to around 300-500 men.
Reducing the size of hellenic cavalry units like Hetario to around 300 men (48 figures)
Changes to Roman cavalry to fit history
Parthians have been changed to a 1000 man unit as they historically used. Lookout for the cataphracts!
I haven't done much with the tribal and african factions, because I dont have the history and evidence to do it. If somebody else does, great, we can update it.
I don't have any kind of monopoly on the right answers for unit sizes. If there is scholarship that indicates different unit sizes than i have made, I can change the numbers.
Step 2. Adopting a consistent ground scale - Epic battles mod
This mod is going to be a lot more impactful and problematic. Some people don't like to play like this, but I love it.
If we really want to say that 'those 240 men are really representing 1440 men' then we also need to adopt a consistent ground scale.
This means thinking about that figure actually representing 6 men in the same area. Those 6 men must be really small, in fact less than 1/2 the size of the current model. If we are now talking about 6 men who are actually much smaller than the model, then the rate at which they walk, range at which they fire, etc, must also be scaled. In fact it needs to be scaled to the same degree, i.e. the square root of 6, about 2.4.
In order to make this work then, all we need to do superficially, is to change the movement rates to 1/2.4 the vanilla level. I have done this and it works a treat.
There are a number of other issues that need addressing though:
- Ranges of all missiles must be reduced to 1/2.4 of current (but not less than 20, which causes a CTD). City walls cannot be adjusted, making them much longer range than they are now, in comparison to the troops. I don't see any problems with this.
- Charge distance needs to be divided by 2.4 as well. This works well without problems.
- Hit Points may need to be adjusted? Because we are now talking about a figure actually representing 6 men, in at least 2 ranks, really only a half of that figure can 'strike at the enemy' at any one time. So effectively the casualty rate needs to be halved from what we see in the current battle model. To simulate this, i am experimenting with doubling all HP to 2 for normal men. Indeed this slows down the casualty rate substantially (as you would expect for an epic battle that we are now playing).
I have made all these adjustments and played through the battles, and in my opinion, they play much more realistically, and at a much more reasonable 'pace' for a large battle spread over a large linear area. Sending cavalry from one wing to another takes most of the battle, because effectively the battlefield is now 6 times bigger in area than it was previously.
Troops are very slow to maneuvre and change formation. The simple act of moving makes this slow. Therefore, once you have established your formation, it is difficult to maneuvre in the face of the enemy. You cant just change the number of ranks in your phalanx on a whim.
It is very possible to lose one wing, hold the centre, win the other wing, using this scale. Battles become much more linear, and maneuvring along the battlefield left to right becomes a long term prospect.
There is one problem, and it is nasty. There is an existing bug which means the AI will happily march its army towards you (defending) up hill and down dale, to the point of exhaustion and beyond, without ever stopping to recover. In this new battle system, where the distances are 2.4x what they used to be, this results in the AI always being exhausted by the time it arrives at your lines.
I have considered making all troops 'hardy' or 'very hardy' to overcome this problem, but it doesn't work. I find no way to make the AI conserve its freshness. I have also tried playing with the weather model to produce less fatigue, but I can't do anything which slows it down. It means that fatigue ends up giving the player an 'easy win' on a lot of battles.
The alternative is to turn fatigue off. That is now how I play. To balance it, the morale of troops needs to be taken down, since they would normally be losing morale due to fatigue.
So the plan is for Part 2 to:
- Change Battle Map Movement Modifiers text file to slow things down
- Turn Fatigue off in preferences
- Change EDU with Morale changes, Range and Charge distances.
Step 3 - Changing Troop Availability
I believe there is a case to reduce troop availability in certain areas, and this would produce more realistic armies. At the moment, it is possible in EB to hire entire armies of mercenaries in certain locations, as well as filling armies with niche troops like slingers and cretan archers. This was never historically desirable nor feasible.
My plans would involve changing which units are allowed at certain MICs, as mercenaries, different mercenary recharge rates, and even changing costs and stats of the units.
I am not sure how much work is involved in changing all these things, especially in the context of EBs quite complicated recruitment model, so I don't know when I am going to get around to doing part 3.
Summary
I believe that this mod significantly improves the historical realism of EB, as well as providing a more realistic 'large battle' feel to the combats. The first mod (consistent figure scale) seems to me to be something that most people will be interested in. The second mod will interest some and be annoying to others (hence, different mods).
Be interested in people's comments and suggestions.
Hope to post something for Epic Battles (Step 2) for people to try out, sometime soon.
UPDATE: Posted below a version of the Epic Battles Mod. Also note that you need the Elephant model bug fix installed to make either of the mods work (I think!).