My first thoughts about EB

[fallen851]

Fallen851 the post you cite from QM talks about randomness in the result of cavalry charges, not archery. He is not wrong about that, since melee combat in EB is essentially a moral contest. Whether cavalry breaks an enemy with a flank attack will depend on a lot of morale modifiers such as command stars, relative casualties, fatigue, positional factors etc. These things will not be fully captured by a simple cold "one-on-one" custom battle experiment. The actual initial casualties are almost secondary - they are certainly much lower than I've experienced in Goth's all factions mod for BI[1] where a whole unit can die in 3 seconds in similar circumstances. In my experience with EB, either the defenders break quickly or it soon gets ugly for the cavalry.

[1]Goth's mod is excellent, BTW, although as you can tell the combat model differs substantially from EBs.

This is exactly what I mean with EB's response to criticism, it is like you guys don't even read or think about people's posts.

Whether cavalry breaks an enemy with a flank attack will depend on a lot of morale modifiers such as command stars, relative casualties, fatigue, positional factors etc. These things will not be fully captured by a simple cold "one-on-one" custom battle experiment

I hate to quote myself, but if you had read you would have seen:

The differences are in what happens in the battle, not some magic randomness

Everything of what you said, is not randomness, it is what happens on the battlefield. Morale, fatigue, positional factors and command stars are not random conditions. Your general's command stars do not randomly go up and down during battles do they? I dare you to answer that question, but I don't think you will.

I shouldn't even have repond to the first part about cavalry charges because it was in my last post. I did charge bonus tests, and guess what? There was no randomness. Every time barbarian cavalry hit a warband from the rear there was a certain number of losses. There was a little bit of variance, but not much.

I would really love to see some replays of all this randomness, it simply doesn't exist. If a battle goes a certain way, and everything happens the same the next time in terms of movements and decisions, the outcome will be the same. It is how replays. If you take a replay, and then go and change the stats of units, the replay will look totally different. That is because the replay repeats all the movements made, losses will differ slightly. Replays are not movies, they are repeat battles fought in the same way. Now take that replay and watch it over and over it will differ slightly, but the result will always be the same (unless it is so close that a couple of men makes the difference). If you watch a replay of a cavalry charge into a flank over and over, one time it won't kill 200 men, and the next time only 5 men, that randomness does not exist in the RTW engine, I'm sorry, but it doesn't.

As a final response, anticipating your next post, your not actually going to tell me that men dying has nothing to do with morale? Deaths effect morale, perhaps it is the most powerful factor? Thus if cavalry is only killing 5 men hitting the rear of a unit, it isn't doing as much damage to the morale as it did 25 kills.