For discussion.

I've been thinking about battle tactics lately in anticipation of the new patch, and have been concentrating mainly on the subject of archers and ranged combat. I'll prefix this by stating that I'm not even close to the best player out there, but I can hold my own.

I realized that my tactics in both RTW and M2TW tend to be somewhat "zerglike" in approach, in that in RTW I'd crank out entire stacks of Hastatii and use a flood type approach. The downside of this is the lack of unit diversity and the fact that against certain stack compositions, I'd take heavy casualties or just lose outright. The upside is that I could very easily retrain my depleted stacks on site instead of having to send them home. Using that logic and once I had Greece under control, it was pretty much game over as I could crank stuff out like there's no tomorrow. In M2TW, I found my general army to be a bit slightly more diversified, but in general I'd have some type of militia coupled with a roughly even number of heavy mounted knights (playing as English mainly). So get to the damn point! you say. The point is that I don't use ranged units, hardly at all.

In deference to Mr. DougT and the other HA fanatics hanging around, I've tried using heavily biased ranged armies, mainly in RTW, and by god it does work. The problem and the core of what I'm getting at is that more often that naught, when using a heavily arty based stack, you'll be able to kill upwards of 1/3 to 1/2, sometimes more, of an opposing stack before you run out of ammo. Now, realizing the situation you're in and that you're most often heavily outclassed in melee, the smart thing to do would often be to retreat and take the loss, giving the opponent the field and position, however it's arguably a victory for you, and a best a pyrrhic victory for your opponents. No matter what happens though, you'll still get slammed with a loss during the post-battle calcs and report. This to me is really the biggie, about the loss and the affects to your captain/general by having a loss.

The idea that I'm getting at here is allowing for this type of tactic and having a "more intelligent" post-battle calculator. If I go and attack a full melee stack with a full archer stack of my own, and I end up killing 1/2 of his stack yet retreating with 0 losses of my own, who won that battle? I'd call that a draw personally, as I didn't give up space but I didn't exactly gain any territory or capture anything. Kill 3/4 of his stack? I'd call that a victory. Here are some key points to this.

1. Movement points left is important. If your archer stack initiates the combat but does so on it's last movement point, and you attempt to retreat, logically you'd lose your entire stack as normal because you don't have the points left to retreat. If you attack with movement points left but tactically retreat, my thoughts are that all stacks involved should remain where they were pre-battle, to indicate that no ground has been taken/given. Another possible alternative is to have the retreating army move back 1 space.
2. The retreating force should not be able to recover captured men, as they are giving the field to the opponent when they retreat. Injuries I can see as it's possible to haul off an injured man while retreating, but this should be done in a sane way.
3. The AI should be able to do this as well, or at least attempt it.

Thoughts? Please note that this is entirely disregarding any multiplayer issues or balancing, this is SP discussion only.