Reinforcements delayed?

[ziegenpeter]

Good day fellow EB-Fans!
I never got this message during a battle and yesterday I got it twice, once for me and thats why I had to loose this battle and the second time for my enemy, which was of course ok for me.
So why is this happening? I have a checkmark at "Unlimited men on battlefield" (so its TRUE un preferences).

Thank you guys!

[Antonivs Silvicola]

AFAIK its a random thing that happens during battles. There were many times in ancient battles that reinforcements either didnt show or were late. I think it just kind of recreates that unknown. If your own do not show up then you have to quickly revise your strategy and if the enemy comes up short it makes victory more certain for yourself. Ive had it happen both ways several times and had reinforcements show up late as well. Just part of the fun to me. I like the uncertainty of battle.

[Subotan]

Sometimes it happens to the AI. Fun times :D

[ziegenpeter]

Ok I was astonished, because it never occured unitl yesterday... It made me stand around for an entire battle waiting for those roman lazybones to help me (or do the biggest part of the job ) killing off some crazy epeirote Elite fullstack. I did't want to shed my blood because I was helping the romani to lift a siege, but they never came. I wasn't aware that "delayed" means in TW terms "not coming at all". Or do they sometimes come?

BTW, about reinforcements: I got the feeling that the checkmark box for letting the ai control reinforcements is screwed. Usually it is no checkmark=you control the forces right?
And unlimited men on battlefield unchecked changes what?

Thank you

[alexanderthegreater]

Ummm if you had a full stack and took control of the reinforcements then they would just wait at the red line because you cant control more than a fullstack. Maybe thats what happened.

[ziegenpeter]

Sorry, but to what question does your answer exactly refer?

[Cambyses]

They will come when enough pixel people have died for the reinforcements to arrive without crashing your computer.

I had the same issue recently, the ticked box not allowing unlimited men. The solution for me was to go into the preferences file and manually change the "Unlimited men" to TRUE. For some reason that hadnt happened when I ticked the box. So dont assume, go check :)

My understanding is that there is no random, will they come?, issue. Its all about computer performance specs. Unless you are playing with BI and are fighting night battles of course.

[satalexton]

it gets annoying, especially when u NEED those men to fight those 3 grey death stacks marching towards you.....heroic victories don't come -that- often....

[Silence Hunter]

IMHO the reinforcements delayed thing is random to stimulate uncertainty of reinforcements arriving on time as Antonivs Silvicola already mentioned.

The unlimited men on the battlefield option allows more than 20 AI units to enter the battlefield. Otherwise they wait at the border and enter once you kill enough of the enemy. I once had a battle against fullstack of Ptolemaioi + halfstack of Ptolemaioi + fullstack of Pontus (Ptolemaioi allies) attack me at once. My 1.5 stack army had no chance of victory and heroicly stood to the last man.

As for the tick box before battle - it's bugged. If you tick it and then check the composition of enemy army it resets. So you have to redo the thing again, otherwise AI will take control of your reinforcements (=say goodbye to your valuable men).

[ziegenpeter]

OK guys lets not confuse the "reinforcements delayed" thing with the general issue whether reinforcements come or not.
I thought "reinforcements delayed" is a random thing, can occure whether UMOBF is checked or not.

But actually I had to change it in the preferences. Thank you Cambyses. Since I am not into the balloon thing, you can choose between a pink elephant or 1/6 of the village people:

[vartan]

IMHO the reinforcements delayed thing is random to stimulate uncertainty of reinforcements arriving on time as Antonivs Silvicola already mentioned.

The unlimited men on the battlefield option allows more than 20 AI units to enter the battlefield. Otherwise they wait at the border and enter once you kill enough of the enemy. I once had a battle against fullstack of Ptolemaioi + halfstack of Ptolemaioi + fullstack of Pontus (Ptolemaioi allies) attack me at once. My 1.5 stack army had no chance of victory and heroicly stood to the last man.

As for the tick box before battle - it's bugged. If you tick it and then check the composition of enemy army it resets. So you have to redo the thing again, otherwise AI will take control of your reinforcements (=say goodbye to your valuable men).

Let's get this straight. If I have two armies, am I supposed to tick the box or not? I can't control over 20 units, so if I don't tick the box for AI to control the rest of the army, I'll be sitting there, 1 army, against 2 or 3, and only get units replaced as they die off...

[Andronikos]

It depends if you want the AI to berserk your reinforcements into enemy units and lost most of them, especially if enemy has phalanxes. If the victory is important and only one army can't handle the enemy, I would do it, otherwise, not, running away like scared chicken, no, no, I wanted to say tactical retreat would be better option.

[ziegenpeter]

O.k. guys we got two scenarios:

I1a
You have UMOBF checked, you got less than a fullstack attacking, and unchecked ai-control of reenforcements before battle: You play your Army+reenforcements up to 18 units TOTAL

I1b
You have UMOBF checked, you got less than a fullstack attacking, and checked ai-control of reenforcements before battle: You play your Army, all the reenforcements paticipate on the battle.

I2a
You have UMOBF checked, you got a fullstack attacking, and unchecked ai-control of reenforcements before battle: You play your Army, no reenforcements arrive.

I2b
You have UMOBF checked, you got a fullstack attacking, and checked ai-control of reenforcements before battle: You play your Army, all the reenforcements paticipate on the battle.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________
II1a
You have UMOBF unchecked, you got less than a fullstack attacking, and unchecked ai-control of reenforcements before battle: You play your Army+reenforcements up to 18 units TOTAL

II1b
You have UMOBF unchecked, you got less than a fullstack attacking, and checked ai-control of reenforcements before battle: You play your Army, No reenforcements arrive? Or only up to 18 units on your side total?

II2
You have UMOBF unchecked, you got a fullstack attacking: No reenforcements what so ever.

Do I get it right?

[Aemilius Paulus]

The message occurs when the computer recognises the reinforcements are too much for the system to handle. You can get a message of a similar nature when you are creating the custom battle and you pick too many units, which results in that pop-up stating your system cannot handle all that. It is not random, and and what I said is the reason for this control is in that game settings .txt file somewhere in the folder of you RTW.

There have been numerous threads on this before, but I believe the search functions on this forums was recently disabled (uses too much resources), so one cannot search for old threads through this site.

[Blxz]

The message occurs when the computer recognises the reinforcements are too much for the system to handle. You can get a message of a similar nature when you are creating the custom battle and you pick too many units, which results in that pop-up stating your system cannot handle all that. It is not random, and and what I said is the reason for this control is in that game settings .txt file somewhere in the folder of you RTW.

There have been numerous threads on this before, but I believe the search functions on this forums was recently disabled (uses too much resources), so one cannot search for old threads through this site.

I don't think that is the only reason it happens. I had had reinforcements delayed before and then less than 3 or so minutes into the battle before anyone was even killed (coz i retreated to the corner to dishonestly win) the reinforcements arrived and started marching onto the field. So while you may be right about the system not handleing it, I think that is only one possible cause for it.

[Macilrille]

It is definately not. I have had a four unit stack waiting for six other units to come and had two enemy 5-8 unit stacks with only one turn up.
I think it is to simulate the uncertainty always prevailing on battlefields and I like it either way- well I hate it when it costs me the battle, but c'est la guerre....

[SwissBarbar]

Reinforcements that are delayed can join the battle still later.

[Drag0nUL]

TBH, I like the uncertainty that this feature adds to the game. It's more realistic IMHO.

What I don't like is the way AI is affected by this sometimes: if I'm siegeing a city with a large force of enemies inside, I have to fight several battles against 1-2 enemy units, just beacuse the AI 'thinks' the army inside the city will join too.

[Cambyses]

OK guys lets not confuse the "reinforcements delayed" thing with the general issue whether reinforcements come or not.
I thought "reinforcements delayed" is a random thing, can occure whether UMOBF is checked or not.

But actually I had to change it in the preferences. Thank you Cambyses. Since I am not into the balloon thing, you can choose between a pink elephant or 1/6 of the village people:

I think I would prefer the elephant

IMO, there is no random element whatsoever. As others have mentioned, you can only control 20 units on the battlefield at any one time. If the "Unlimited Men on Battlefield = FALSE" in your preferences.txt then the AI may only be able to bring the primary stack into the battle against you. This happens for many computer specs on huge settings. If you change the UMOB to TRUE in preferences.txt then the AI will bring everything that it can into the battle against you. You will still only be able to control 20 units however. Sometimes geography prevents units listed in the pre-battle summary from actually arriving, but this is extremely rare.

Since I made the above change to the preferences.txt file I have never had a reinforcements delayed issue. To emphasise, it is the preferences.txt that must be correct. The little flash pop-up EB preferences thing you can get via the start menu does not appear to work for everyone. Ignore it.

Oh, and of course BI does do things differently, most notably with night battles.

[ziegenpeter]

Ok, so Reenforcements Delayed can also appear, when you have UMOB:true? Because it never occured to me and I recently reinstalled eb and always had UMOB:true before.

Reinforcements that are delayed can join the battle still later.

So it happend to you, that you got the message (Reenforcements Delayed) and they actually came?
We're not talking about reenforcemnts, that are lingering at the edge of the battlefield to join you when one of your units routs/dies.

[SwissBarbar]

So it happend to you, that you got the message (Reenforcements Delayed) and they actually came?

Yes exactly. I am speaking about the AI-controlled reinforcement. For example yesterday there was a cool battle between me as Roma and Carthage:


1. The message came "reinforcements delayed"
2. The message came "enemy's reinforcements delayed"

2. I started to fight the battle on my own with my 2 Legions (fullstack), with the one enemy army (fullstack), well it was more a skirmish, not many casualties on both sides, each side waited for the other to attack, and tried to outflank the enemy with cavalry and some smaller combats between single untis who had separated from the main force had happened. (most I won ;-) )

3. The message came "enemy's reinforcements arrived". (almost fullstack)

4. The real battle started. The enemy's reinforcements instantly attacked, of course I attacked back. This was kind of a sign for the first hostile army, they also started to attack. My center-formations held their ground well, but the flanks got pushed back slowly. The fighting was quite balanced.

5. The message came "reinforcements arrived" (fullstack)

6. Some enemy units turned agaist my reinforcements but were almost instantly defeated. My reinforcements simply crashed in the enemys flanks and - after quite high losses, due to 2 units of elephants - my 4 legions made the enemy army vanish from the face of the earth. ;-) And so the city of Quart-Hadast fell to Rome (well after 1 turn of siege, they only had very few units left...)

[ziegenpeter]

And you are playing with UMOB true or false?

[SwissBarbar]

I have absolutely no idea ^^

[Cute Wolf]

Weird... just weird.... I Never have a Delayed reinforcements, except in Siege Battles.... (or Siege relieving battles)

[ziegenpeter]

I have absolutely no idea ^^

Uh, do you use your Preferences? There is a shortcut coming with the other EB-shortcuts or you can check it in EB\preferences\preferences.txt. A lot of useful stuff there. You can disable those ugly banners and arrow markers, f.e.

[jirisys]

well, i for once, have the unlimited men on the battlefield option on, but once, when i was laying a siege, some men waited behind the line because they were already 20 cohorts on my side, even if you turn that option on, does that still happen or i have a problem?

[ziegenpeter]

Well if you didn't put them under ai control but yours, its normal they wait. But thats NOT "Reenforcements Delayed"!
"Reenforcements Delayed" means you get a message (like "Unit Routs" or "Heroic Death!") and you can't even see them behind the red line.

[Paltmull]

IIRC, in M2TW, the "reinforcements delayed" message also tells you that you should check your graphics settings, and RTW probably uses the same mechanism. At my old computer "reinforcements delayed" occured from time to time, but since I got a more powerful computer this has never happened. So i guess Cambyses et al. is right.

Kinda weird that UMOB doesn't work though...

[Yarema]

My experiences showed something entirely different - the reinforcements are delayed when the weather is bad, for example heavy snowfall or heavy rain with fog and limited visibility. i never noticed that this is random, only really bad weather condiotions delay reinforcements.

i play rtw.exe or alex.exe, units scale huge, highest detail, and i sometimes fight multiple fullstacks in one battle - so i'm sure it's not fault of a weak system. Pretty sure it's the weather. That would seem realistic, too.

[Silence Hunter]

Kinda weird that UMOB doesn't work though...

Well it does, but for AI, not you. Engine does not allow you to control more than 20 units at once, so no matter how many reinforcing armies you have, you still can use only 20 units. However with UMOB:TRUE AI can attack you with as many armies as it has at once. This leads to interesting battles when you have a fullstack, but are still outnumbered 1:5 or even more. Gets even more interesting when you are attacked by combined forces of 2 factions..