Chasedowns

[Tamur]

After all the archer experimenting today, I was reminded of the MTW days when you could target a skirmishing unit and expect that they'd skirmish opposite to where your unit was charging them from. So, if you could get a skirmishing missile unit between two charging melee/cav units, you were guaranteed a skirmish sandwich, so to speak, and a quick rout.

Not so with RTW! You go for the sandwich maneuver and the skirmishing unit just slips out one open end or the other and pegs your now-tired units with javelins/arrows. Yowch.

Excellent AI work by the Assembly team on this -- it's VERY hard to out-maneuver these guys now. Cavalry work great against them, or out-missiling works well too, but that's about it.

[son of spam]

Damn, now how will I be able to kill those HAs? Roman archers are useless!!

[Colovion]

I like and dislike this. It's great that they now have some mobility but it's annoying that I"ll have to deal with it. Hehe.

[Sir Moody]

just smash em with a good cav charge

[Lonewarrior]

Agreed, through out my testing I have found that a good cav charge does indeed get the job done easily.

[The_Emperor]

Yes those skirmishers are pretty flexible. On playing the Trebbia battle one day I was amazed by the way the Velites moved.

I brought up the armoured elephants on the Carthaginian Right, ready to do a nice storming charge on the left of the Roman Heavy inf... The Velites reeled around their formation to avoid the elephant charge and then threw their javelins at the elphants almost as soon as they went by!

Then the Elephants smacked into a unit of Hastati that the AI put there to protect the Heavy inf I was aiming for... The Armoured Elephants quickly ran amok.

I was not best pleased about this and ended up sending Hannibal over to run the Velites into the dirt and keep that flank together!

[Oleander Ardens]

The skirmishing sounds very good indeed, seems to work similar to the system I posted at the .com a long time ago. I actually wrote a very long post how to resolve the issue that skirmishers would only flee from their target, not from nearby flanking units. Lot's of math. calculation, perhaps it influenced the work of CA - in any case I'm glad

Hopefully I have still a copy of it around, my HDD of my "working" comp crashed two days ago

A here it is:

"A novel approach to skirmishing

All of us MTW players share the same problem when telling skirmishers to skirmish. Your unit of Bulgarian Bandits evades the fearsome peasant unit just to run into a full nice stack of Janissary Heavy Infantry… So a effective use of many skirmishers did mean especially on thing: much much mircromanagment. But how could we avoid this sometimes unsuccesful and often frustrating clickfest?

The solution is quite simple; Enable them to skirmish not just against one but against all enemy units which come to near. This means that the the skirmisher falls back in the opposite direction when a unit crosses it’s “safe distance” setting, trying to reestablish with a buffer distance which enable it to turn and shoot

So far so good but what happens when two enemy units come from two different directions too near? Easy the computer calculates the distances between your Unit S, Unit A and Unit B and than selects point C, which is in the center of line AB. Than it orders your Skirmisher to fall back in the opposite direction of point C.

An example will get the point across. Imagine your Balearic Slingers come from the North and attack some Velites in the south. The Balaearic slingers skirmishs against a unit of Velites. Both are equally fast, so that when the Velites try to engage the your Balearic Slingers, they simply run away in the opposite direction, also northwards with the velites chasing them. The distance between remains stable, let’s say 50m. Suddenly an hidden Velite unit charges out of some scrub and attacks the Balearic slinger from Eastnortheast. Once they cross the “safe distance radius” of the Slingers the computer calculates Point C which lies in Eastsouteast, with the result that the Slingers turn towards Westnorthwest; Result: your valuable Balearic funditores escape…

If more than two units engage your unit the procedure remains the same as in any case the distance between a pair of units which is the greatest will determine point C. This system works fine as long the enemy are of equal speed or slower that the Skirmisher, and as long the enemy doesn’t encircle him, but this not a question of AI but of HI.

So this system works beatifully, but what if a Velite and a Numidian horse do engage your Sythian Horsearchers? As before the the computer takes into account the distances between the three units after the Numidian horse and the Velites crossed the “security radius” of the Skythians (unit S). But as the Numidian Horse (unit B) closes faster in as the Velites (unit B), thus with a smaller growing distance between the Numidian Horse and the Slinger, with the distance Velites – Slingers remainig constant. Only initially point C is in the center of the line VN (Velites-Numidian horse), as it shifts toward the Numidian Horse. Why? Point C is determined by the relation between distance AS and distance BS. Initally we have a 50m:50m (1:1) relationship, but as the Numidians come nearer also distance BS becomes smaller, with the relation changing after five seconds in a 50m:25m. (2:1). Point C will therefore shift over this five seconds proportionally toward unit B, the Numidian horse, until the line BC is just half as long as line AC. Accordingly The Scythians will change direction and run away more from the more dangerous Numidians than from the Velites, withour getting closer to them or any other enemy unit, if possible. Plus the Sythians will increase their speed to reestablish the safe distance between the Numidians. To sum it up: the skirmisher skirmish in a intelligent way, avoiding elegantly all enemy units…at least as long they are fast enough and don’t get engaged from all sides. But this is a question of HI not AI…

But what happens when three or more units attack our poor Scythians from three greatly different directions, let’s say Velites drive them from West eastwards towards an unit of Hastati in the Southeast and Numidian horse in the Northeast? The Numidians close faster in than the Hastati and the Velites, becoming danger Number one. Now the computer calculates once again the distances between all the units, but point C lies on the longest line between the nearest enemy unit and an other enemy unit, in this case between the Numidians and the Velites.

This pocess is calculate again after a certain amount of time with the result that the Skirmisher gets almost of all weird situations out as long he is fast enough. If implementated this System RTW will have the first intelligently skirmishing units in a computergame, with them acting in a realisitc way. The result would be an enhanced gameplay with less frustration and more strategy."

Don't have the demo here, do they really skirmish in that way? Thanks

Cheers

OA

[Bob the Insane]

All of us MTW players share the same problem when telling skirmishers to skirmish. Your unit of Bulgarian Bandits evades the fearsome peasant unit just to run into a full nice stack of Janissary Heavy Infantry… So a effective use of many skirmishers did mean especially on thing: much much mircromanagment. But how could we avoid this sometimes unsuccesful and often frustrating clickfest?

Just as a side note, in MTW your skirmishers would run away from all enemy units until you targeted them towards a specific enemy unit, at which point they would only run from that enemy unit ignoring all others...

[Tamur]

Don't have the demo here, do they really skirmish in that way?

Yes indeed, exactly like that. Although I avoided cavalry in my tests, I did try a couple of three-direction attacks against the archers with two units of triarii and one unit of velites. In both cases, the Archers skirmished out between the two units of triarii, completely avoiding the faster-moving Velite unit.

Nice writeup! I wouldn't have thought of factoring in the velocity of the approaching units.

[Oleander Ardens]

Wow, glad that I possibly did something good. There wasn't any direct response from CA, but a great deal of people supported it. BTW I did also suggest to let some slingers pick up stones, in my great slinging thread. It's good that CA seems to listen to it's fans

The idea came when I had to skirmish manually with +8 HA, impossible to control them all at once against many attacking infantry units. I remembered the geometry lessons and implemented also the knowledge of "vectors", my brother even created a small programm which was lost in the HDD crash

@Bob the Insane: Yes, thanks for the sidenote, perhaps I could have made the point clearer - in any case he was just able to skirmish away from a single unit

In any case it finally makes more sense to let the AI skirmish, especially on a wing against superior infantry. A good example would be 2 HA against 4 HI: Against the AI it will be very easy to take some guys out of combat

Cheers

OA