Red Harvest
04-16-2005, 07:12
I decided to dust off the RTW disk and do some pushback tests. In the past I've seen some pushback effect due to mass in the regards that units actually do get forced forward or back, at least for the heavily armoured units. This has seemed important to me for phalanx units. And we all know what elephants and cav can do...
Tonight I decided to test some light falxmen, then phalanx pikeman each vs. their own, with the only difference being mass on each side (2.0 vs. 1.0 for the other.) I controlled Dacia for the falxmen (to avoid war cry usage by either side since the Thracian falxmen lack the ability.) I then reversed the masses and tried again. I have lethality cut by half.
Results:
Battles were very close, I seemed to detect a mass advantage for the charge fairly consistently. After that nothing was clear. The higher mass unit won 7 of 8 tests for falxmen but it was so close that it appeared the initial charge effect might have swung the balance somehow. For the phalanx pikes I only ran two tests, and the higher mass unit lost both (one with, one without guard mode on.) I was not seeing evidence of actual pushback, which surprised me. Only death was moving things, and since they were evenly matched, this was of little consequence.
Preliminary Conclusion:
Pushback is not a factor in the RTW combat calcs. It's effect on killing doesn't seem to be modeled (or my tests were flawed and failed to detect it.)
I would be interested in hearing if others get different results.
Background:
Common sense would suggest being force backward at the point of a weapon would put one at a serious disadvantage, weakening both attack and defense for individuals and seriously disrupting formations. Neither people nor formations are designed for operating at peak efficiency in reverse. Going backwards is prone to lead to losing balance or tripping which would likely prove fatal. I thought this was an important part of MTW's calcs, but I'm not intimately familiar with them.
Tonight I decided to test some light falxmen, then phalanx pikeman each vs. their own, with the only difference being mass on each side (2.0 vs. 1.0 for the other.) I controlled Dacia for the falxmen (to avoid war cry usage by either side since the Thracian falxmen lack the ability.) I then reversed the masses and tried again. I have lethality cut by half.
Results:
Battles were very close, I seemed to detect a mass advantage for the charge fairly consistently. After that nothing was clear. The higher mass unit won 7 of 8 tests for falxmen but it was so close that it appeared the initial charge effect might have swung the balance somehow. For the phalanx pikes I only ran two tests, and the higher mass unit lost both (one with, one without guard mode on.) I was not seeing evidence of actual pushback, which surprised me. Only death was moving things, and since they were evenly matched, this was of little consequence.
Preliminary Conclusion:
Pushback is not a factor in the RTW combat calcs. It's effect on killing doesn't seem to be modeled (or my tests were flawed and failed to detect it.)
I would be interested in hearing if others get different results.
Background:
Common sense would suggest being force backward at the point of a weapon would put one at a serious disadvantage, weakening both attack and defense for individuals and seriously disrupting formations. Neither people nor formations are designed for operating at peak efficiency in reverse. Going backwards is prone to lead to losing balance or tripping which would likely prove fatal. I thought this was an important part of MTW's calcs, but I'm not intimately familiar with them.