Quote Originally Posted by Sand
I believe the command star bonus is to attack, which would explain why when fight the AI generals their equivalent units can rip you a new one in a straight up fight.

Ive not encountered too many phalanx vs phalanx issues to be honest - a Phalanx will only suffer badly if its going up against a superior phalanx [ Levies vs Pehzatoi or Elites] and even then the loss rate is low enough that by the time your heavy cavalry has driven off the enemy cavalary and is carrying out 400 man charges into the rear of the enemy line, your phalanx will have suffered only 30-40% casualties absolute max.

Sorry but its not...

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showp...4&postcount=19


Originally Posted by JeromeGrasdyke
Just to clear this up ( as requested ;-) ), from the old code on my machine at CA the General's command modifier on attacks is still there in the last version, but it only applies to melee attacks and it is -inverted- so the quality of the defender's general is applied as bonus directionless defense for the defending soldier. It is also rescaled to range from -6 to +6, changing quickly at low bonus levels and then slowing down towards the top of the range. The idea was to limit the number of stacking bonusses which speed up the battles, i vaguely remember.

Also, the bonus is not limited by physical distance, and is supposed to represent a good general's ability to get superior performance from his troops through training in small scale maneuvers. The only way for this bonus to result in faster combat death rates rather than slower ones is if the defender's general has bad command traits...

If you want to test it, I would suggest a battle between some big peasant units, fighting the units 1v1 and timing the length of time to rout; then repeat giving each army a 10 star general. You should see a slower time-to-rout with the generals. In the end though 6 pts is not enough to make up huge troop quality differences, so don't expect to see miraculous differences.