Where\' s my reinforcements?

[hach]

Invaded a province and when i lose any units i get no reinforcements even though i have plenty of spare units?

Where are they?

Hach

[MagyarKhans Cham]

timewarped to the Crusader game?

[Lord Aeon]

I have to admit, they DO take awhile to show up... but maybe this is more a function of how many troops are presently engaged in the battle (yours and the enemy's sides), more so than the time it takes for the reinforcements to show themselves.

In other words, the system can only accomodate so many units on the field at one time, right?

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"You have offended my family, and you have offended a Shaolin temple."

[Ii Naomasa]

One thing that I noticed is that when I used the 'swap unit out with reserve unit' option at the beginning of a battle (a nice new feature, btw...if the computer doesn't give you the first 16 units you wanted, it's nice to hand pick them), my reinforcements never seem to appear. I was winning, but had a decimated unit run away. No reinforcements arrived for the remaining five or so minutes it took to wipe out all of his. I haven't given this a thorough examination, but I'm hoping the new feature doesn't somehow flag the units you exchange as already used.

Regularly, though, it seems like reinforcements do take some more time than before (where their symbol replaced the retreated unit's symbol in seconds)...maybe it's because of the time they take running around the border finding some odd location to show up .

[hach]

This Sux!!!

I routed guys at the start just to get better units and nobody showed up for the party.

Whats this swap out option?

Hach

[Anssi Hakkinen]

Just something freaky I thought of.

Did these events of reinforcements not showing up both occur in *really* big battles? And were there masses of dead enemies on the field already?

And, most importantly of all, has anyone had a crash in one of these massive, drawn-out battles since getting MI?

Because, as you may recall, there have been periodic complaints at the tech forum about the game crashing in massively large battles due to running out of texture memory. It could be the developers have, to fix this, added a filter which would prevent new units from entering the field when the texture buffer is full.

No, I don't know where I'm getting this. Just a thought.

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"Sincere diplomacy is no more possible than dry water or wooden iron."
- Josef Stalin

[TakeshidaSo]

That's a good idea, to possibly explain things. If it's the cause, then sprite casualties could appear for every 5-6 losses, as an example, for a possible fix. The sprite casualty "atmosphere" is nice and all, but as someone once said, does it really "need" to be.

[Ii Naomasa]

hach, the 'swap out' feature is the new icon that appears to the right of the 'fire at will' toggle icon once the weather is selected for a battle (on the screen that has the message box telling you to select a formation). It's the only icon available on attack before you select a unit to give it its specific hold/fire at will commands (therefore, the only in color) and it's a black background with two rows of three soldiers with a red arrow curving from one to the other.

I only discovered it when glancing around the screen before a battle...took me delightfully by surprise. One of the many things people wished for and most probably don't even know it exists.

After testing this a bit further by engaging a lot of gigantic battles, swapping troops, then withdrawing the swapped troops, it doesn't seem that it causes a problem...in fact, reinforcements came up quite quickly. Glad to know the function actually doesn't break anything.

Anssi, I don't believe I hit any kind of sprite count in the one battle I had problems...in fact, the computer's reinforcements were more than happy to come out and play. Then again, given as how I can't recreate the situation, it was probably just a quirk.

[Algesan]

Ii Naomasa, does this feature appear when you are on the defense?

Just for my clarification, when you use this function, reinforcement are appearing for you in a timely manner?

Thanks

[Kiwi]

The swap function works perfectly and is instantaneous. You can just keep selecting the units you do not want and hitting the button until you get what you want. ONE VERY CLEAR WARNING - do not group your units before doing this. I did and was kicked out of the game.

As far as the re-inforcements go there is a serious problem. In two games that I played last night on river provinces I did not receive one re-inforcement during the entire game. And I went through the entire time. One game I withdrew (not swapped as I forgot the new function) a HC unit of 10 men (yes a dead Daimyo's unit) at the very beginning and I never received a replacement!!!!

This is a serious problem as the AI had lots of replacements and I ran out of time trying to run them down with 'totally exhausted troops' as I could not replace the remaining 6 units I had.

So if it is simply a texture problem why does the AI get units?

I know there is a lot of talk about where re-inforcements come out on the screen, but I consider it a greater problem to not receive any at all while your opponent is getting what they want.

[hach]

I agree Kiwi

Getting no backup sucks!!

Hach

[Ii Naomasa]

Algesan
I would assume so. I didn't get a chance to entice the enemy to attack any of my provinces that had 17+ units in it, so all I get to test was attack (and it took storming castles to get them to not run away), so that's why I only mention attack. I assume it would be available on the same screen for defense...otherwise, it would be quite silly (though not beyond the scope of programming goofiness ).

I played a little past my post last night and haven't found a direct correlation between any occurence and the reinforcements, or lack of such. I do concur with some other observations that problems with player reinforcements do not seem to be global, as the AI seems to be able to spill them out. Unfortunately, I only had one battle last night that I had problems with reinforcements. In the rest (perhaps 10-15 of them, both very large and medium), troops reinforced fine. Now, the only thing that may be in affect here is that as far as I can remember, I ordered my troops to retreat (they didn't rout off) in order to test reinforcements.

I would say maybe they tossed in some hidden, unmentioned 'feature' where troops don't like coming out when their side is getting clobbered, but I remember one game playing as the samurai vs. the Horde (my first large scale engagement against them) in the Mongol campaign where I got trounced (stupidly tried to run the Mongols off the map and got caught napping my MLC that reinforced on the sides) and even though eventually every unit routed off, all my reinforcements did appear (in single groups all over the map, which meant most got clobbered...I do like the wider variety of starting locations, but troops should not spread themselves out all over the place).

So it looks like the reinforcement thing is something of a random issue, which makes it all the worse, since you can't predict it.

[Algesan]

If I get a chance, I'll try to start a game that lets me see if it works on defense. Uesigi is good for that as Hojo always "attacks the bandits and ronin" plaguing him from Mutsu. Just need to spend some time turtled and teching up.