Friendly Fire - Too much micro-management

[Didz]

So far I've been really impressed with ETW, although I'm still on my initial campaign.

About the only criticism I have so far is that friendly fire is not being handled very well be the AI.

I've noticed that units can and do fire through each other, which is not historically or practically feasible in real life. Also the tendency for units to continue to fire into melee's etc. is much higher than on previous TW titles and I don't really see this as an improvement in any sense of the word.

Previous TW did at least hold fire unless you specifically order them to fire. Now I find myself having to intervene constantly to tell my units to stop firing, which is really annoying mico-management that I could frankly do without.

Apart from that awesome game.

[Fisherking]

It is unfortunate but formations in the rear should have their fire at will turned off. The exception is when deployed on a slope so they have a clear field of fire.

It is tough in this game to avoid it and in a tight situation it gets really bad.

[Dayve]

You just have to turn off fire at will... i always turn fire at will off for every unit except the front liners, and then when i move the reserve units up, THEN you put fire at will on.

If you think it's bad in this game though... does anybody remember back in the day when Rome first came out? Friendly fire was atrociously buggy, a unit of archers positioned behind a unit of infantry would wipe out 40% of the infantry unit in front of them when they fired a volley, even if they were firing the arrows way over their heads at targets very far away!

[antisocialmunky]

I don't mind losing a few guys. I feel bad about it when my cannon crews are retarded and continue firing when I move a unit past them. However, if you can crowd control enemy AI units the FF goes down fairly drastically.

[quadalpha]

Seriously people, what did you expect it to be like? How is the AI supposed to know when you don't want units to fire when there's a friendly unit in front of them and when you do?

[antisocialmunky]

They did that decently in the last few games but this has HtH. You cna always switch to mortars I guess and not LOS kill your guys.

[Didz]

You just have to turn off fire at will... i always turn fire at will off for every unit except the front liners, and then when i move the reserve units up, THEN you put fire at will on.

My point is that it shouldn;t be necessary to have to do such micro-management.

It never was in the previous TW titles and I don't really know why Creative Assembly would have got lazy with the AI on this game.

I just think it's poor programming or design that ruins an otherwise perfect game.

[antisocialmunky]

The AI is exactly the same only now all your long range is instadeath artillery and your units don't engage in melee so you can't simply set a 'no shoot' flag on units you've engaged in in a shooting match with.

[Husar]

Seriously people, what did you expect it to be like? How is the AI supposed to know when you don't want units to fire when there's a friendly unit in front of them and when you do?

Vectors, basically the same way the game/AI knows whether a shot hits an enemy or not, it worked in previous games.
As a general rule I'd say I want to tell my soldiers what to do and not constantly tell them all what not to do, if you turn fire at will off that will make them more vulnerable if the enemy can get some unit to them unnoticed and they won't fire back etc etc.

[Didz]

The AI is exactly the same only now all your long range is instadeath artillery and your units don't engage in melee so you can't simply set a 'no shoot' flag on units you've engaged in in a shooting match with.

Thats not true either.

The artillery in MTW was long enough ranged to have been affected but this same problem and yet it wasn't, and units do engage in melee in ETW, in fact some units such a cavalry and sword armed infantry can;t do anything but engage in melee. And even musketeer units melee in this game rather than break and run as they would have done in real life.

So, the game itself has the same conditions occurring as in other versions of TW, and its prefectly simple to detect 'Is Target in melee' (In fact the game does detect it becuase it actually sets a little 'melee flag' in the unit icon (the little crossed swords symbol actually indicates, 'This Unit is in melee') so all the AI needs to do is have a line of code added saying 'Do fire on an enemy unit when its melee flag is set, unless told explictly to do so.

This would actually solve the problem and return the game to how it has worked in previous versions.

if you turn fire at will off that will make them more vulnerable if the enemy can get some unit to them unnoticed and they won't fire back etc etc.

To be honest that isn't a viable option. 'Fire at Will' in the previousl versions of TW worked as mechanism for allowing units to look after themselves and didn't even need to be turned off to order a units to focuss fire on a specific target.

Turning 'fire at will' off would require yet another level of micro-management that would make the game unenjoyable to play. I want to feel like I'm commanding an army not its servant, and constant use of the 'pause' button just disrupts the game flow.

Units in ETW should be able to look after themselves at least to the extent they have done in the past, and to be honest I would have expected some improvements in unit AI. Such as sensible reactions when skirmishing and threatened by cavalry.

[Swoosh So]

And the lesson learned is dont walk infront of a cannon thats firing?

[Husar]

And the lesson learned is dont walk infront of a cannon thats firing?

I thought it was don't fire a cannon when your friends are walking in front of it?

[Ciaran]

Don´t you know that artillery doesn´t know friend or foe, just worthwhile targets ?

[A Very Super Market]

I think "Fire by Rank" limits FF somewhat. I just had a game where a unit maneuvred in front of another, and the only half of the back unit fired, to avoid FF. Both were line infantry units... with 2 chevrons...

[quadalpha]

So what happens when you've tied down an enemy unit with cheap fodder of your own and you want to shoot at it? If the AI refuses to fire at friendly units, you won't be able to use that tactic. Also, CA have stated that the flight of each bullet/shell is individually modelled, and so the AI doesn't know if it's going to hit anything or not when it's fired.

To me, it sounds a lot like people are wishing the game would play itself to some extent. Setting dispositions to avoid friendly fire is a part of commanding an army.

[Jeroen Hill]

Seriously people, what did you expect it to be like? How is the AI supposed to know when you don't want units to fire when there's a friendly unit in front of them and when you do?

Bollocks!

Back in 1999 Sid Meier's gettysburg was released, a RTS wargame. Units in that game stopped firing automaticly when their field of fire was blocked by a friendly unit.

So why cant a game 10 years later do that as well...

[quadalpha]

Bollocks!

Back in 1999 Sid Meier's gettysburg was released, a RTS wargame. Units in that game stopped firing automaticly when their field of fire was blocked by a friendly unit.

So why cant a game 10 years later do that as well...

*Points to the rest of the thread.*

[janjacobsv]

The worst is when your artilery is aiming to its left using canistershot and the most right one wipes out the rest of the artilery unit, that is the most rediculous friendly fire i can imagine, it demands some kind of fix.

[Didz]

So what happens when you've tied down an enemy unit with cheap fodder of your own and you want to shoot at it? If the AI refuses to fire at friendly units, you won't be able to use that tactic. Also, CA have stated that the flight of each bullet/shell is individually modelled, and so the AI doesn't know if it's going to hit anything or not when it's fired.

To me, it sounds a lot like people are wishing the game would play itself to some extent. Setting dispositions to avoid friendly fire is a part of commanding an army.

No, actually I would just prefer the game to play the way it always has played up to now.

Namely, that 'Fire at Will' made a sensible judgement as to whether the target was in line of sight, or masked by friendly units and would not fire at a unit it could not see or which was engaged by a friendly unit unless the player explictily ordered it to.

So, the tactic you describe has always been possible, it just didn't happen by accident as it does in ETW.

I also notice that the AI expliots the lack of proper LOS by stacking its units one behind the other in order to allow each to fire on the frontage of one unit, which somewhat undermines the disadavantages the French sufferred by employing column attacks. I bet Napoleon would liked real musketry were capable of being employed in this way.

Well I've amost finished the independance campaign, and had a dabble with the grand campaign and I'm pretty dissappointed so far. I was expecting an improvement on MTW2 and the campaign sode does seem to be well done, but they have really screwed the UI for the battles in my opinion. Far to much micro-management required and the UI is fiddly and unresponsive.

Stupid things like the 'fire at will' and 'skirmishing' not working, no 'open order' option. The artillery don't limber when you tell them too, or limber, and then unlimber again, so that they bombard the place you told them to move to (I've lost a lot of men due to that), and I've just discovered that you can only use cover on one side (or at least I've yet to find out how the choose which side of a wall one can deploy behind.

The UI is just generally poorly designed and unhelpful, which means everything has to be done by hand and monitred to make sure units are doing what you thought you had told them too. Certainly not as good as the previous titles in the series.

[quadalpha]

D: Maybe I missed something, but I don't remember any TW game where range units gave two shillings about whether it was firing into a friendly unit. Didn't we have archers that would cause casualties in its own unit if you deployed them too deep?

I'm not sure what you mean with your Napoleon point.

I thought the UI was pretty much the same as always. There is still a minimal UI option if you want it to look like MTW. There are however bugs with certain options when the game is paused. Specifically, some toggle-able options like "light infantry tactics" and "limber/unlimber" work fine for the first unit you give the order to, but they don't refresh when you select the next similar unit until you unpause. I only figured this out last night, and it solved all my limber problems. So just make sure you limber without pausing, or unpause and pause again between units.

I don't think I've had any problems with skirmish or fire at will. What is this "open order" option?

You can tell whether you're ordering the artillery to move or fire by your cursor. Move orders have the green circley thing.

You can choose which side to take cover on by holding the right mouse button and moving it around. This was in one of the hints your advisors give, or might have been the tutorial. I'm sure you'll get used to the UI eventually.

[Didz]

D: Maybe I missed something, but I don't remember any TW game where range units gave two shillings about whether it was firing into a friendly unit. Didn't we have archers that would cause casualties in its own unit if you deployed them too deep?

There has always been the potential for friendly fire casualties in TW games.

As you say if you deployed your archers in a formation which was too deep and then deployed the formation on a slope so that the trajectory of the arrow passed through the head of the archer in front then the result would be one dead archer.

Likewise, if you deployed missile armed troops on either side of a target and fired at it you would always lose a few men from stray shots, and of course artillery were notorious for being such bad shots that any unit near the target were likely to suffer from a stray round.

However, these were realistic results arising from the way that Creative Assembly tracked the trajectory of each missile fired.

The issue I have with ETW is that it has changed the 'Fire AT Will' function so that units no longer take into account whether their target is masked or in melee with friendly troops. That never used to be the case, and it represents a significant 'dumbing down' of the AI in favour of imposing a micro-management penalty on the player.

I'm not sure what you mean with your Napoleon point.

The Napoleonic point I mentioned relates the the basic tactical pro's and con's of employing columns on the battlefield. It was an issue that the armies of the Napoleonic period struggled with through the Napoleonic wars with the French, Austrian, Prussian and Russian armies all dabbling in different tactical variations and employments to minimise the disadvantages whilst retaining the advantages. The British tended to stick with their linear tactic's and rely mainly on firepower to win through.

However, all of this innovation and basic Napoleonic tactical consideration becomes irrelevant if units can simply fire through each other at a single target. Under such circumstances the viable tactical expliotation becomes stacking ones units is as dense a column as possible so as to bring maximum firepower to bear upon a single point. In fact, the exact reverse of the dynamic that drove tactical thinking in the Napoleonic period. The AI has already learnt this trick and you will see it employ the unit stacking expliot constantly during its game play to overwhelm your troops with firepower.

It just wrong, and unrealistic as it currently stands.

I thought the UI was pretty much the same as always. There is still a minimal UI option if you want it to look like MTW. There are however bugs with certain options when the game is paused. Specifically, some toggle-able options like "light infantry tactics" and "limber/unlimber" work fine for the first unit you give the order to, but they don't refresh when you select the next similar unit until you unpause. I only figured this out last night, and it solved all my limber problems. So just make sure you limber without pausing, or unpause and pause again between units.

I find now that I can't trust the UI to do as its been told, even when you have clicked the right sequence of buttons. Artillery is the worst. The new Limber/Unlimber function seems to cancel itself, so you tell an artillery battery to limber, you watch it limber up (annoying to have to do that but its the only way to make sure it actually does it) then you scan across the map to right click where you want it to move, you right click again to tell it to move and a few seconds later a full artillery baggage descends on the spot killing any friendly troops in the area, because as soon as you took your eye off the ball the artillery command decided arbitarily to unlimber again.

Why, the limber/unlimber fiunction is not just an automatic function of being told to move I'll never know. Does a general really send orders to his artillery reminding them to use their limbers when he wants them to move?

I don't think I've had any problems with skirmish or fire at will. What is this "open order" option?

Well I haven't had any problems simply because they no longer exist.

Skirmishing basically doesn't work. It was always a bit finicky even in the perious versions, but in ETW you may as well forget the button as it doesn't do anything.

'Open Order' and 'Close Order' are the two basic deployment states employed by troops in this period. It basically determines whether the men stand should to shoulder or spread out so that one mans width is kept between each man.

Open Order was the standard for skirmishers as it enabled them to take more advantage of any cover and allowed the 'buddy system' of firing by pairs to function. Close Order was used by troops in the main battle line to maximise volume of fire over the unit frontage.

Without 'Open Order' skirmishing troops are as vulnerable to enemy fire as line infantry and the whole purpose of skirmishing is lost.

The whole point was that troops in open order take less casualties and therefore can pick off men in the main battle line whilst not presenting a viable target themselves. The only counter being to deploy cavalry to drive off the skirmishers, or screen your line infantry with your own skirmishers. (That was why units like the 95th Rifles were formed)

At present in ETW there is no difference, open order does not exist, therefore line infantry simply blast the hell out of any unit trying to skirmish against it, and the skirmishing function is so poorly programmed that it doesn't react to the fact that its unit is being slaughted so skirmishers just become suicide troops in ETW.

You can choose which side to take cover on by holding the right mouse button and moving it around. This was in one of the hints your advisors give, or might have been the tutorial. I'm sure you'll get used to the UI eventually.

Yeah noticed that, another combination button to have to remember and master Again I can't see why lining a unit along a wall would not imply that troops use it for cover, do generals really need to order units to duck.

[quadalpha]

Someone else will have to comment on whether other TW games' FAW order took into account friendly units, because I must admit I've never found that it does. Sames goes for column fire - it seems you can choose to accept the friendly losses for greater firepower too.

Open order is available for light infantry as the "light infantry tactics" command. Did line infantry ever fight in open order?

The artillery behaviour is part of the new "attack ground" feature that people have supposedly been requesting.

Holding the right mouse button is already used for practically every other move command. C'est pas rocket science.

[UltraPig]

FF when you have given orders is reasonable. You made the choice. However only a small amount is reasonable when fire-at-will is on. The units should have a little bit of common sense. Artillery is a particular problem at the moment as they ignore the fire-at-will setting and generally ignore orders.

I had a bunch of artillery along a hill top like this: | | | | | |

One enemy soldier walked passed the end of the line: | | | | | | e

The gun at the other end decided to fire on it: - X X X X X e

Bye bye all my artillery.

This also makes it very difficult to keep a unit of infantry behind your artillery and move them forward quickly when the artillery is threatened. That worked fine in previous games.

[Dead Guy]

My opinion.

Fire at will: I guess the "at will" is debatable. Does it mean you should always shoot at an enemy in range? If it kills your mates, you should probably wait for orders to shoot.

I order you to shoot: Shoot whatever I told you to.

You can still shoot at an enemy you've locked in melee with your fodder, just order them to. But soldiers should need orders to do so before they start risking the lives of their friends. And the arty that shoots at a cannon in its own unit is just retarded. The unit should reposition or only the cannon at the right end should fire. Please don't try to argue that that's part of commanding an army. I really hope they had more capable captains or whatever in place than that.

In previous titles, archers would stop firing at will into a melee, but they would usually get a volley off into the melee before they stopped anyway.

[magnum]

In the original TW (STW and MTW) friendly fire worked much as it does in ETW. The difference was is the player had in the Options screen a toggle to turn Friendly Fire off. Basically if an arrow or cannon hit a freindly unit the damage was ignored.

When RTW came out, it originally also had friendly fire like ETW currently has. The player community got upset to large numbers of casualties from it and CA patched it to reduce the amount of friendly fire that occured. What we ended up with is the possibility of friendly fire, but the AI did try to avoid it (i.e. changing targets if friendly units in the way or in melee with target).

A certain amount of FF I can live with. But the current level, especially in regards to artillery fire, is a bit much for me. It is annoying the level of micromanagement I have to do in order to keep my artillery from slaughtering my own units.

[quadalpha]

Remember that projectiles are individually physically modeled in ETW, so I'm not sure if the AI knows beforehand whether they're going to hit a friendly or not.

[crpcarrot]

personally i dont mind a bit of micro management but understand the people who find it irrrtable.

what i do find quite absurd is when your Arty make a 90 degree turn following some unit thats trying to flank it and them shoot eachother!

at the moment trying to advace while u arty is firing is a very dangerous tactic. arty also doent seem to take into account the lay of the land and even if a frendly unit is on a bit of slightly high ground 50 yards away and the arty is firing at an enemy unit which is beyond the friendly unit. someties the canon balls are shot right through the friendly unit probably wiping it out in a few seconds if you are not paying attention.

[Didz]

I'm amazed at how many people claim to have played the previous versions of TW and yet believe that 'Fire at Will' didn't work properly in those version either. I've played every version of TW since STW and 'Fire at will' has functioned correctly in every version barr this one.

But regardless, of whether it used to work, the fact is its broken in this version and seriously needs a fix.

[quadalpha]

I'm amazed at how many people claim to have played the previous versions of TW and yet believe that 'Fire at Will' didn't work properly in those version either. I've played every version of TW since STW and 'Fire at will' has functioned correctly in every version barr this one.

But regardless, of whether it used to work, the fact is its broken in this version and seriously needs a fix.

Perhaps this should be a poll: Does anyone remember units on FAW stopping just because a friendly unit is in the way?

Personally, I find it eminently reasonable to expect friendly fire casualties when you decide to leave your units to their own devices.

[crpcarrot]

i dont remeber being FAW ebing a click and forget utility Mocro managing was also necessary. of course artillery was never this extensively used in prior versions so i dont think it a direct comarative is possible. even with archers ai always stopped FAW once mellee was engaged if not you could rout your own troops. thats what i rmeber from playing since STW. didnt play RTW much though so cant really give an opinion.