Trait: Dislikes Gunpowder

[Gustav II Adolf]

Regarding those who fear gunpowder combat will be nothing but "stand and shoot"; if you think about it you could equally well argue that melee combat is nothing more than "stand and chop". On some level it's true, but the whole point of tactics is trying to engineer it so that when it comes time to do the chopping, it's your guys who are left standing afterwards.

My thoughts exactly. It is of course much a matter of taste. You might prefer clashing long swords and the medieval feel rather than canon balls plowing through the lines and men dropping from thundering salvos. The issue of tactics and complexity though is not. The time frame of ETW enables new tactics, giving more depth than any of the previous games. Even though there is less variety in units we will hopefully have more variety in winning the battles and being forced to think in new ways to defeat our enemy. Standing an shooting until rout is a poor way of winning because it will lead to alot of casualties on both sides. Assaulting a disciplined infantry formation in order will also be risky. A good combination of several ways of attack might be needed. For those of you who like melee Sweden should be your faction in the game. In the early 18th century the Swedish king Charles XII employed very successfully aggressive tactics where he minimized ranged combat striving for quick decisive blows.

However, in all previous TW games you could win almost every battle against the AI with the same tactic and never needing any ranged unit. You just lined up the infantry with strong cav on both sides and then executed a frontal assault combined with flanking maneuvers. I will be quite disappointed if this works as easily in ETW. I wish for more complexity.


G