Reinforcing armies

Huh.

You just gave me an idea for EB2.

I need to test something.

Darn, this guy above is tempting us with tantalising glimpses again. Why does all the mod team do this? XD

Serious note. The idea is nice. I'd certainly like to see that ingame. It would put a whole new spin on the time element, and tie armies much closer to settlements than they already currently are.

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Extended lack of supplies could result in direct attrition, in other words, declining number of troops - this would not only represent extreme things such as starvation, but as well ammunition and equipment running out, soldiers falling sick due to bad nutrition etc.

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iirc, MTWII with its feature of defecting units (due to delayed, slow advance of Crusades) could allow this part of the idea to be implemented. not sure about the rest though.

Hi,

no-one seems to have mentioned 'rallying points' ?... unless I missed it ... it saves some of the micro-management by allowing you to set several cities to send their reinforcements to a fixed point, 'a depot city ' where your replacement troops will therefore congregate without you having to move them there each go.... then you just move them the final leg up to the front to reinforce your battered armies...


cheers,


Pobs

Are you saying Rallying points exist or should exist?

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Originally Posted by LuciusCorneliusSulla

Are you saying Rallying points exist or should exist?

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they do. alt + right click

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Originally Posted by Majestic7

Despite this being my first post on these forums, I've been playing Total War series since Shogun. Excellent mods like EB and RTR have made the games even more enjoyable. I decided to post my question/request at EB forums simply because this mod is the one I play most nowadays. I even uninstalled MTW2 and Kingdoms since their battles didn't feel "right" after getting used to the combat model offered by RTR and EB.

Simply put, I'm very, very annoyed about the way reinforcing your armies works. If your forces suffer losses, you must walk them home to the nearest city that has sufficient infrastructure or the right location to build the unit to get them back at full strength. Don't get me wrong - I like the way EB handles recruitment in a more realistic way, not allowing you to recruit, say, Italian elite troops from an Indian city month after you've conquered it. However, moving units or armies back and forth for replacing losses is simply annoying from a gamist perspective. It requires such obscene amount of micromanagement and consumes gaming time that the game becomes less fun. Often when my empires grow larger I tend to stop playing because I can't be bothered to spend hours just to move armies back home for retraining or the like.

This has left me wanting for a better way to handle replacing losses, that will take less time. It would be nice if a player could retrain his troops in any and all cities on the map. However, the retraining process should take more time and money the further away you are from the closest province capable of producing the unit being retrained. The money and time taken would represent the reinforcements travelling where the unit is based. The said process might as well make the unit disappear from the map completely, thus abstracting the process of the troops moving back home, being filled back to full strength and marching back. The real point is to have a way to refill your stacks without micromanagement. I want playing a game to be fun, not feel like work - and moving those units back and forth is tedious and boring.

So, please enlighten me oh wise modders of this community - is a such change even possible? Does the game engine itself somehow prevent this wish of mine from reaching reality? Is there somewhere a mod that changed the retraining method to what I'm describing - either for RTW or MTW2? Is there perhaps a minimod that does this to EB? In my opinion, EB would be pretty damn close to perfect if the retraining was just a bit easier to accomplish.

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There's a simple solution - don't retrain! Instead send units to the front and refill. You just need to retreat the armies to just behind your "frontline" and safely put them into the army. Additionally, you need to use more mercenaries. Do like this: fill your army with mostly your own troops. Go on the offensive. As casualties mount, replace by mercs for as long as possible, and then fall back and join some newly trained troops from home. The logistical difficulties have two other great effects on the campaigns:
1. you will not just move up to engage the nearest enemy army at all times. You need to manouvre, carefully await a good opportunity, to keep casualties down, and only go to battle when you've got a good chance of winning.
2. you will actually spend a lot of time NOT conquering, but instead trying to hold off enemies. If you lose an entire army in a disastrous defeat battle, you're likely to lose many settlements before you can replace the army. This forces you to not blitz over the map, but sometimes wait for the enemy to attack you instead.

I have a tactic that I hope to try out where I combine units and send those couple of fractional sized units you end up with back to the nearest town. In the same turn I build reinforcements which get sent down before or just as my wearied troops arrive. I keep combining the fractional units into fullsize ones and eventually can just send those down rather than waiting a turn or more to recruit new ones. I still pay a little more in upkeep, but the initial training cost is murder when you want to build infrastructure. I call it the piggybank tactic.

I can see why you posted this thread.
Well, everyone feels the same way about re-recruiting armies. However, the game itself can not be modified and it is the most realistic way.

In history, Alexander the Great actually ordered one of his generals to come back to Greek Peninsula and sail back to Asia minor with native-greek reinforcements. And then he filled other parts of his armies with mercenaries and Asia-natives. EB's intention of not allowing players to re-recruit armies right away in conquered lands is to apply this historical facts.

I know it can be pretty painful to go through this process, but what can i say? You just have to get used to it. This is way EB is the best mod :)

Also it really makes you to prepare more carefully for an invasion or war.

ENjoy :)