Armies Too "Fragile?"

[NimitsTexan]

I have been noticing that, in proably 9 out of 10 battles (talking field battles, not sieges) the enemy army is completely destroyed on the strategic map (though not, necessarily, on the battle map). Even though they have units "successfully" rout of the field with still alive, and the after battle screen will show a couple of hundred men left, the stack dies. I have also noticed, in many cases, where my units routed after severe casualties, they dissappear as if destroyed. In one specific exampe against the Prussians, after the infantry and calvary routed, the Prussian general (who was still alive) decided to withdraw his artillery. But on the campaign map, the "stack" dies and the surviving artilllery, as well as the rest of the units that routed off, are gone. It is almost as if, instead of recovering wounded, troops in badly damaged units are just being automatically written off . . .

[BeeSting]

Tactical retreat has been somewhat lacking with CA games.

If the unit has been shattered with few survivors, it's lost for good i think.

[Cecil XIX]

I noticed this too. In a battle I lost, I had a unit of artillery withdraw from the field without losing anyone. But the results panel indicated they lost about eight men or so anyway.

[Zim]

This came up in a thread in another TW forum. A CA rep said that a few men from routing units automatically die after the battle.

I can link to the post, assuming we're allowed to link to TWC again.

[NimitsTexan]

Well, that explains it, then . . . have to say though, that was a poor (and senseless) design decision on CA's part. Units/Armies already tend to be near destruction after being defeated . . . it seems it would make for better game play to have them recover a bit after the battle (recuperating wounded, POW Exchange) than to make them more brittle.

Related to this, I am noticing, when auto-resolving battles, even naval battles, its the same thing: the loser is pretty much annihilated and, as often as not, there is nothing left on the losing side to attempt to retreat. Maybe I have having a rose-colored-glasses moment, but it really seemed to be that in RTW and M2TW, if a defeated army could manage to get its troops off the field, it could remain viable. Cetainly, it was quite difficult (and rightly so) to destroy navies in the previous title.

It's not that I mind so much the occasional Cannae or Leyte Gulf, but when every battle is fought to annihilation, that takes some of the fun out of it. I would prefer, at least on occasion, an extended campaign with some back in forth, instead of all wars being decided in one or two battles.

[Polemists]

This is mostly do to complaints of MTW2

In MTW2 you would often times have to chase a single unit of calvary or 3 units across the map as you tried to kill one prince. Even the execute option in the final battle screen would usually not eliminate the entire army.

So rather then having all kinds of minor scattered armies marching around, armies that lose with only a hundred or two hundred men die.

Which is fine by me, I have no desire to go back to map chasing.

[NimitsTexan]

Ugh . . . I generally like the M2TW army management in that respect . . . and I never made it a primary goal to destroy an entire army (in the sense of annihilating them . . . certainly wanted to render them combat inneffective).

Anyway, the AI needs to get a better sense of self preservation, both on and off the field. When it is down to two or three regiments left, and all my regiments are still on the field, you'd think it would get a clue and try and fight another day.

[Polemists]

Really?

Because I never get that clue?

If I have 3 units and the enemy has 20 my logic is to inflict as many casualties as possible.


The devs once said they tried put into place a AI system where the Ai would know which engagements were vital and which were not, a prority set, but I havn't seen it in play anywhere or heard of it yet.

MTW2 had a nice system of ransom, release and execute.

This is not MTW2 tho , and no one in ransoming back prisoners, at best they are getting put on prison ships, at worst executed.

My goal was often to not have armies keep attacking me and so the easiest method was to eliminate them whether that be ETW or MTW2.

To let some 3-4 stacked army wander off on the edge of my border only to attack the next turn never made much sense to me. I'm glad to no longer chase armies.

[Kulgan]

Armies usually have 5-10% surviving troops after losing a battle. Reading battle reports from the time period the amount of survivors would be much much higher. Maybe not directly accessably to the commander but in ETW time lapses, after one season of recuperating they should be once more ready.

[NimitsTexan]

Well it comes down to this: Destroying an enemies main army should be a major undertaking; even if we allow that in the end the limitations of the AI mean the player will be successful in the end, it should take some effort to accomplish. Older TW campaigns, by making the armies more survivable made it harder to eredicate an enemy's field army, and in that sense made the game more challenging, "deeper" even. Even if you blitzed from siege to seige, there was a good chance the AI had some forces availabe to try and lift a seige and/or interfere with a castle assault. Now, you simply march a decent sized army into the enemies homeland, find and annihilate their main army, then march on their captiol (or whereever else you want to go) unopposed.

And, if a battle is going badly, I always try and disengage and retreat as many troops as I can. It just seems E:TW makes this harder to do than the previous games.

Armies usually have 5-10% surviving troops after losing a battle. Reading battle reports from the time period the amount of survivors would be much much higher. Maybe not directly accessably to the commander but in ETW time lapses, after one season of recuperating they should be once more ready.

The "survivors" (in the sense of combat effectives) from a major European battle where generally 60%-80%. It was extremely difficult, and in many cases, borderline impossible, to destroy a 18th century army.

[PBI]

I'm of the view that replacing multiple, drawn-out, relatively bloodless and uneventful battles with a single battle of annihilation is an area where the TW series (not just Empire) makes an acceptable break with reality. Similarly in most periods armies would suffer more losses to disease than enemy action, but the TW series has very sensibly for the most part ignored this fact. I don't want to play Empire: Total Logistics.

And it certainly was the case in Rome and M2 that if an army suffered more than about 20% losses it would be destroyed, providing there were no surviving family members in it. This meant that large battles would almost always result in the annihilation of the loser, and eliminating any serious field army was thus actually fairly straightforward. The problem was trying to eliminate individual roving bands of cavalry, where reducing the unit to 10-20% would be very difficult and, if it was a family member, you could guarantee that the general would be the only one to escape. I just don't find having to delay my campaign by several turns just to chase a lone regenerating family member round in circles fun.

Similarly, my understanding is that naval battles in the 18th century were almost always rather cagy, indecisive affairs, with neither side being willing to risk its expensive ships in a decisive encounter, and the weather gauge being so important that the side with it wouldn't be willing to risk losing it and the side without it being unwilling to engage without it. While I'm not sure I approve of the rather simplified manner in which naval battles are depicted I have no issue at all with the process of having to chase a beaten fleet around the ocean for twenty years before you could finally neutralise it being a thing of the past.

Ultimately, the Total War series are games, and for a game to be successful it needs to be fun. Real warfare is notorious for not being fun at all, so major liberties do need to be taken. Raising the stakes in battles, so that good tactical play gives real, very substantial rewards, is one way of doing this.

[NimitsTexan]

Okay, here is an example of what I am talking about. In RTI French and Indian War, Washington's command is holed up in a wooden fort, assaulted by a two-"stack" French force that outnumbers them 3-1. Washington's make a good fight; French knock down a couple of sections of wall, but British troops repel first two charges, despite running out of ammo. At this point, the AI get's confused and starts running troops back and forth; I decide to simply fast forward to the end of the battle and claim the (mostly deserved) victory.

Now, at the end of the battle, while several French units have routed, the French still have probably half a dozen non-routed infantry regiments that are still between 25% and 50% strength, plus at least one battery of artillery that is solely intact; all in all probably at least 400 men left on the field with decent morale (and not counting a similar number that have routed off the field alive). The Relative Strength bar is still noticably in France's favor When I go to the after battle screen, however, the game has somehow decided all those men are dead, at that the French army only has about 100 men alive. And then, of course, it decides that those 100 men are not enough to sustain their units, and the whole stack dies. So out of 1900 men in two French commands that had at least 400 men (and most probably more) get off the field alive, and against a enemy that was still numerically inferior at the end of the battle, the game simply decided to eradicate them all, giving me a free shot to Quebec.

[Polemists]

I"m not arguing the history of it, I am arguing the playability of it.


This goes back to horse archers in RTW. Could they just run around the map constantly and shoot you? Yes. Did that make for fun battles when you had 600 legoniares you just marched around for 50 minutes in a magical square as you tried to corner them or wait till they ran out of arrows? No


Your points may be valid for history but the AI was never aggressive enough to use those small armies to strike you. Which meant they'd just sit there with 14 archers and a prince and annoy you.
Is that really resistance? No. Is that annoying? Yes

I don't want to hop chase armies, it's just not any fun. If the AI retreated and replinished and restruck sure, but to just endless chase 100-200 men armies with full stacks would bore me to tears.

Plus do to the fact you now have a "Ring" of attack the AI army has to move so far back it's beyond words the distance.


If you really want more logistics and less fragile armies I'd suggest you either find a mod group or go create one with a similiar interest. Yet I see no reason for the core of TW to change.

[NimitsTexan]

I'm not talking about a couple dozen soldiers surviving or not. What I am talking about is the case of Armies that have had up to 50% of their strength survive the battle, and the game decides to remove them, kill them off. Now, maybe their is just some mechanic I am missing, but it seems to me that if 40%-50% of an army survives the battle . . . that army should be able to withdraw and the AI be able to rebuild it. Again, not talking about a legitimate Cannae where you really did kill everything off, but where a viable force, to all appearences manages to exit the battlefield, but the game decided to wipe it out anyway.

People complain about the campaign being too easy, but then we have mechanics that are making it even easier (like armies dying after every defeat).

[andrewt]

It's fine. I really love this change. I remember in MTW2, I'd create a few armies of nothing but 4-6 family members. I'd run them around the map killing brigands, the randomly spawning rebel stacks and the remains of enemy armies. The reason I did is because family members auto-replenish and they're strong enough I could either auto resolve or just set the speed to max, run around and keep charging. It's just annoying to keep fighting so many meaningless battles against brigands and mopping up the remains of enemy forces I've already defeated.

Honestly, the brigands and mop up duty are why I didn't play MTW2 as much. I just found them too annoying. They're not challenging. They're extremely tedious. There's a huge difference them. Challenges I want to overcome. Tedium makes me start up a different game.

[NimitsTexan]

But if they have 500-1000 left, and you have 500-1000 left, that is not a meaningless battle, is it? That gives the defender a chance to regroup and make one more stand, perhaps.

One of the advertised features of this game was that the AI could make the decision to retreat to fight another day, but between the AI's unwillingness to retreat and the games killing off of defeated armies, that features seems completely missing.

[Polemists]

Well I don't think the math your talking about works as you say. I had a battle as Poland against Sweden last night. All 4 cities in a big gaint war.

In 4 battles the casualties were

1000 v 1000=Lost, 200 men left =My army died
2000 v 1500= Won, 400 enemy left=Survived, went back to replinish
800 v 500=Won, 350 enemy left= Survived, went back to replinish.
1500 v 500= Won, 30 enemy left=Army died


So as you can see some armies do survive this is not a instant kill feature. Usually 500 or more is the rule, but i've seen as low as 300 survive. Which is reasonable. If your surrounded by 1000 or 2000 men and you only have a 100 left and are losing, it's doubtful you'd survive long.

[KozaK13]

When you auto resolve the enemy usually has survivors that you have to chase across the campaign map if that makes you feel better.