Opinions on forest battles

I have had a great deal of forest battles around central Europe, taken a couple of screenshots actually because I believe they looked quite epic. During battles with epic/forest/complicated terrain I try to role play a little. For example, (even though the RTW engine made this extremely difficult) I had a mostly plan map with a small group of rocks that created a U shape with raised ground in the middle, I put my small army there and made a stand with the archers on the raised ground (didn't work, but looked cool). However, with forest battles I tend to have quite rageful moments :<, I had a battle recently where the whole map was forest, huge trees everywhere with NO clearings. The only thing I could do was put my army into a suitable formation and then watch the unit cards as casualties were being taken and hoping that I was doing enough damage, which didn't happen and I ended up losing a full stack and not being able to do anything about it. I did have a nice battle with a clear/forest battle map where I split my forces into two waves (was trying to re-enact the first battle in Gladiator) and sent the first wave into the forest...and subsequently watched as they routed out of the woods into my second wave of forces. Just wondering what your experiences with forest battles have been and if you like them or not.

there is a fix that takes out those huge trees. just forests is no problem but those gigantic sequoia like trees is really annoying.

I HATE THEM!

I believe Jirysys developed a mod to remove the giant trees from the battle map, its available to download in the "Unofficial EB Mod" section of the forum.

EDIT: The Stranger beat me to it.

Well, I think I'll keep them. I love the aesthetics of a battle and I think the fighting in this huge trees looks pretty damn awesome (tactically it sucks but oh well), I have a mac so I think you can guess that I would prefer aesthetics over tactical significance haha. But thanks for the link anyway, I might look into it at some point :). Here is a screenshot of the battles where I split my army into two waves, you can see my units routing :<. Attachment 3802

I try to avoid engaging forces I do not need fancy tactics to defeat. So in a regular fullstack vs fullstack with a heavy infantry based army(with no more than 3 Archers/slingers, up to 5 units of cav and at least 7 Heavy infantry) I try to form a solid line inside the forest(shock inf on the flanks). Then I start the battle, zoom in on the radar map and as soon as the enemy line is close enough to mine order my line infantry to engage the enemy as favorable as possible (guys with axes vs armored dudes etc).
Then I zoom in more on the mini map until units are shown as little dots rather than arrows, this helps keeping an overview over the battle. When the enemy is engaged I do simple Hammer and anvil tactics with my cavalry and freed up infantry. When the odds are not too unfavorable(I have levy civilized infantry while the enemy is a central european Uber stack^^) i usually win those battles.
General rule:
Gaul<civilized<otherbarbarian<Gaul

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Originally Posted by Brennus

I HATE THEM!

I believe Jirysys developed a mod to remove the giant trees from the battle map, its available to download in the "Unofficial EB Mod" section of the forum.

EDIT: The Stranger beat me to it.

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Forest battles give me horrors because I just don't see anything, although I have to admit that both the RS II environment and Centurio Nixalsverdrus' (not jirisys ;-) ) "get rid of the giant trees" mod improve the situation significantly.
But still I can't count the stacks I lost (or that at least got heavily beaten) due to the "line of sight = zero" situations in gaul....

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Originally Posted by Shadowwalker

Forest battles give me horrors because I just don't see anything, although I have to admit that both the RS II environment and Centurio Nixalsverdrus' (not jirisys ;-) ) "get rid of the giant trees" mod improve the situation significantly.
But still I can't count the stacks I lost (or that at least got heavily beaten) due to the "line of sight = zero" situations in gaul....

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It's especially irritating when your playing as Gauls because I tend to rely so heavily on slingers and javellins. Having said that I just paused playing my Aedui game and thanks to forests I managed to severely maul several larger Roman armies.

The difficulties we have in EB with forest battles pale in comparison to the real-life command and control problems armies would have faced IF they were to fight in forests. For this reason, historical armies did not fight battles (not talking about ambushes) in forests. No Greek or Roman commander would have offered or accepted battle in a forest. Gauls fought in clearings for this reason as well. Famously, the Romans used the forest to limit their front when forced to fight Boadicea at her last battle. The Britons did not enter the forest to flank them.
Why?
Lack of command and control - frontal charge was deemed a better tactic.
I do not fight forest battles. Auto-win and move on rather than engage in this ahistorical BS. This is the main reason I abandoned my German and British campaigns (and have yet to play either Gallic).

Forest battles are ambush-friendly. Hence, I love them! ^_^. As long as there is at least one clearing I can place part of my army in to lure the enemy to, I'm happy. I do like the typical clear field, line to line battles, but there's just something about an ambush-friendly battle map that I love. Ambushing my enemy on the battle map is so much fun, and at times has also helped me win battles I should have lost.

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Originally Posted by Brennus

I HATE THEM!

I believe Jirysys developed a mod to remove the giant trees from the battle map, its available to download in the "Unofficial EB Mod" section of the forum.

EDIT: The Stranger beat me to it.

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Nixalsverdus and Konny did, not Jirsys. at least, the former was the first to do it.

as to forest battles: I typically avoid them like the plague these days, and look for clearer areas.

when I am in the forest, I keep them huddled close, so as not to have them pecked off by an enemy.

Its terrible. Even when using Lusotan and sweboz forces I still fight in clear area's. Forests are just annoying.

Is there any way to abstract them a little? Make spreadout trees with some ground colour change to represent a forest?

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Originally Posted by Ibrahim

Nixalsverdus and Konny did, not Jirsys. at least, the former was the first to do it.

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No, not me. I had solved the problem by (re-)using the Vanilla files for setting up terrain (but don't ask me which one are to be changed/deleted from EB, that was ages ago).

In general I agree with Kormulan: Historical commanders would had never fought in dense woods (save for some very rare exceptions). This has a couple of reasons, such as rendering cavalry and missle useless, making it impossible for any form of command & controll, making it impossible to delpoy in any kind of formation etcpp. In general a forest was considered an uncrossable obstacle and armies moved around it, if anyhow possible.

This means, even when the campaign took place in forested regions, the battle finally was fought on flat open ground (usually).

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Originally Posted by PetiteWolf

Forest battles are ambush-friendly. Hence, I love them! ^_^. As long as there is at least one clearing I can place part of my army in to lure the enemy to, I'm happy. I do like the typical clear field, line to line battles, but there's just something about an ambush-friendly battle map that I love. Ambushing my enemy on the battle map is so much fun, and at times has also helped me win battles I should have lost.

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Welcome PetiteWolf! Hope you find the org a useful resource.

Thanks! :D

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Originally Posted by konny

No, not me. I had solved the problem by (re-)using the Vanilla files for setting up terrain (but don't ask me which one are to be changed/deleted from EB, that was ages ago).

In general I agree with Kormulan: Historical commanders would had never fought in dense woods (save for some very rare exceptions). This has a couple of reasons, such as rendering cavalry and missle useless, making it impossible for any form of command & controll, making it impossible to delpoy in any kind of formation etcpp. In general a forest was considered an uncrossable obstacle and armies moved around it, if anyhow possible.

This means, even when the campaign took place in forested regions, the battle finally was fought on flat open ground (usually).

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that's why I mentioned you actually (the bold part). you arrived at a solution, though of course Centurio was the one who popularized a method for fixing that problem.

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Originally Posted by konny

In general I agree with Kormulan: Historical commanders would had never fought in dense woods (save for some very rare exceptions). This has a couple of reasons, such as rendering cavalry and missle useless, making it impossible for any form of command & controll, making it impossible to delpoy in any kind of formation etcpp. In general a forest was considered an uncrossable obstacle and armies moved around it, if anyhow possible.

This means, even when the campaign took place in forested regions, the battle finally was fought on flat open ground (usually).

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I just hope that EB2 will take tis point into account and design the battle maps so that even in a forested area on the stratmap the actual battlefield will be more-or-less clear with forest just on the margins. Fingers crossed! :thumbsup:

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Originally Posted by Blxz

Its terrible. Even when using Lusotan and sweboz forces I still fight in clear area's. Forests are just annoying.

Is there any way to abstract them a little? Make spreadout trees with some ground colour change to represent a forest?

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Haha I'm glad I made such horrors, it was my idea to increase the density and size of them so that forest battles are more difficult to organize and realistic.
Like konny says, forest battle would have been rare and when they happened it would have been chaos.

However it was just a quick solution until we wanted to redo the vegetation in later releases, which sadly didn't happen...

BTW isn't there a mini-mod which uses the RS2 tree for Eb?

i never lost a forest batle in my life
simply because most of my infrantry have javelins and i always place my infantry in a perpidencular way to the enemies line using my general and my slingers/archers to lure the enemy where they can be crushed from behinde
not even the arevaci made me tremble they normally die very fast from 2 soliferums in the head

i mean they died of natural causes i never seen anyone survive a soliferum beteween the eyes so it´s a natural death i mean it´s natural they die if they are hit with a sollid javelin of iron or something similar

I kind of like forest battles, but only in MP, in SP it's chaos and normally I just charge head on lol

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Originally Posted by moonburn

i never lost a forest batle in my life
simply because most of my infrantry have javelins and i always place my infantry in a perpidencular way to the enemies line using my general and my slingers/archers to lure the enemy where they can be crushed from behinde
not even the arevaci made me tremble they normally die very fast from 2 soliferums in the head

i mean they died of natural causes i never seen anyone survive a soliferum beteween the eyes so it´s a natural death i mean it´s natural they die if they are hit with a sollid javelin of iron or something similar

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Exactly! I love this. I especially love luring the enemy in to a position past my hidden Skirmishers, so they can just swing in to position behind them and pelt them with javelins from behind.

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Originally Posted by PetiteWolf

Exactly! I love this. I especially love luring the enemy in to a position past my hidden Skirmishers, so they can just swing in to position behind them and pelt them with javelins from behind.

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I struggle to see how you can even select your units without using the unit cards. I am totally incapable of seeing anything in these battles. Makes barbarian factions less fun because I need to engage in the open even though my guys get bonuses from forests. The bonus is not enough to outweigh the fact that I cannot give orders but the AI is unaffected.

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Originally Posted by Blxz

I struggle to see how you can even select your units without using the unit cards. I am totally incapable of seeing anything in these battles. Makes barbarian factions less fun because I need to engage in the open even though my guys get bonuses from forests. The bonus is not enough to outweigh the fact that I cannot give orders but the AI is unaffected.

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I don't find it all that difficult to command in forest battles. Hitting the + button on the minimap a couple times helps to discern where units are, btw :). I guess I just like it cause I'm more an ambushy player anyway. I'm less "hold the line" and more "Come here my pretty, and get stabbed in the back by my hidden units". I'm also odd in that I LOVE that the Casse have Chariot Generals. But that is completely off topic. Honestly, I prefer if there is a little bit of open area I can set up a small amount of units in to set my trap, but it isn't really necessary.

edit: if you can figure out how to maneuver in the forest easier or simply place your force near some trees and hide a couple troops ready for an ambush, it really helps if those troops have javelins. A volley of javelins in the back does some serious damage.

Just to clarify, I didn't create the mod itself. I just added it to my mod pack.

Centurio N. created the mod.

~Jirisys ()