Macro vs. Micro battle management

[DensterNY]

Would you prefer having a macro-management of battles over what we have now which is micromanagement?

As it stands we have to position exactly each of our units, direct them exactly where to move and instruct them on whom and how to attack. However, in actual war there is of course never that level of management because of the fog of war, overall confusion and also the difficulties in trying to communicate in the chaos of a fight. Don't get me wrong I still love the Total War series, with one of the best battle engines ever devised.

I was thinking though perhaps in the future you could play more of the role of an actual general and set the overall strategy for your troops and then adjust tactics depending upon the course of a battle. In the moments prior to engagement you would have a meeting with all of your officers where you'd evaluate your opposition, your own camp make-up and from there develop an overall strategy and assign different roles for your units.

When the battle begins you'd watch as your units do their best to carry our their assignments and you get to adjust what they're doing with general instructions rather than direct control. (i.e.. tell your infantry reinforcements to flank left around breaking enemy line) Plus, to keep things a little realistic have a small chance of miscommunication and also delay instructions to units depending upon their distance to your general.

[DVX BELLORVM]

It is a good idea, I'd like to see it happen. It would certanly add to the realism. But I think it would be a bit of a hard core to a casual gamer, because it would require more planing and strategic thinking than now when you directly control each unit. And since the most part of the game consumers are just casual gamers, it probably wouldn't sell.

I remember a certain game back from late 80s, called Waterloo, which had a similar concept. It was a turn based game, each turn was 15 minutes game time. There was only one battle to play, battle of Waterloo (obviously). Before the battle you could issue orders to your generals, or keep the historic ones. And during the battle you would give orders (by typing!) to corps generals , and they would relay them to brigade generals. The whole process took time, and some orders never reached destination. You could actually see the horsemen carrying orders

This is how it looked:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[PrestigeX]

I think i prefer the Micro Management..

I can see what you're saying about 'the fog of war',
... however, it can be possible for individual units to really distinguish themselves in a micro-management battle set up... Like if you had a unit of , Almughavars or something.. you'd definantly want them on micro management..
Also, most of the time it is a form of Macro management with many players because we group units togther, so instead of controlling , all the units in the battle..
you are sending general orders to the Spear group, or Heavy Cav group, or Assault infantry group, etc ...

[TheLastPrivate]

A lot of the order and command was done by flags and horns and predestined signals and such which allowed direct orders somewhat possible. Of course the confusion level was immense and most of the time generals would stick to their original plans and the better plan that counters theo ther would often win because impovision on battlefield was not something readily done.
But still I like to be able to give direct orders to my men..

[DensterNY]

Well, I got the idea from an English show that I caught once called Time Commanders. In it a team is elected to play out a historic fight against the computer AI and the team is divided into ranks which also determine how much of the battlefield they can see. For instance, the general gets to see the entire battlefield, next in rank sees his division area, next are the captains who can only see restricted from their unit location.

The general outlines the overall strategy and then everyone else does their best to carry out orders. As battle progresses the general who has full view sends out orders to his first rank officers (with say a 10 second time delay) who interprets them and then sends out orders to the captains (with another 10 second delay). This simulates people running messages during a real battle.

As you can imagine those 20 seconds are crucial and at times what the general sees and responds to has changed by the time the field captains have received orders. This can result in total confusion or a captain having to use their own judgement instead based upon what they see from their position. The whole process is quite amazing and it shows you how chaotic trying to carry out a battle can be.

I was thinking about this yesterday in my Britannia campaign, as I deftly defeated a Welsh force twice the number of my English army because I was able to move my units around with surgical precision. It was fun and gratifying but I achieved this victory because I was able to micromanage every step of the way.

[hrvojej]

Slitherine software makes this sort of games you are talking about. As for me, I dislike this sort of 'fire and forget' combat.

[TevashSzat]

IMO, macro battle management will not work given the level of the ai in M2TW.

Think about this: You perfectly manipulate the campaign map to get a large advantage, you position your army perfectly on the battle map, and suddenly the micro ai messes up and all of your archers get killed in the first charge or your general unit is committed too early and dies. How frustrating would that be?

True, you can give orders, but they delay and the ai will make it quite frustrating to do anything

[Si GeeNa]

There's a way of increasing FoW in the current Totalwar engine.

1. Switch off the Radar screen.

2. Play with General's Camera only.

DVX, there's actually 3 battles, Austerlitz, Borodino and Waterloo. I had the game but due to my youth (10-12), I was too impatient to understand the game.

[hrvojej]

IMO, macro battle management will not work given the level of the ai in M2TW.

Think about this: You perfectly manipulate the campaign map to get a large advantage, you position your army perfectly on the battle map, and suddenly the micro ai messes up and all of your archers get killed in the first charge or your general unit is committed too early and dies. How frustrating would that be?

True, you can give orders, but they delay and the ai will make it quite frustrating to do anything

This is what's bothering me the most about EU3. You spend so much time working on making your empire great, but when you get to the battle and everything is at stake, you can only watch two sprites going "piff-paff" at each other. I still play EU3, but after that much work I prefer the hands-on control, thank you.

[Jason X]

an English show that I caught once called Time Commanders.

they used the rome tw engine for the battles in that show!

[Rozanov]

ah memories

Dr Peter Turcan's great (for the time) wargames ...

who can forget being told after 15 minutes that due to a routing unit running through the HQ staff you couldn't issue any more orders for that turn, (ie another 15 minutes) ... over and over as more units routed through the HQ unit.

Anyone ever tried waterloo, borodino, austerlitz, gettysburg (the game could never understand the 90 degree angled front-line it seems) or even Armada on an ST emulator to see if it was much quicker?

But yes I'd love not to have to do so much micro-managing, especially checking for stray men when you order units along walls; odd bods getting stuck on pieces of terrain or siege weapons; ordering cavalry to walk through stakes; and yesterday's prime annoyance: routing cavalry units re-grouping inside gateways leaving them wide open.

Be interesting to see if Empire Total War goes down this route: have corps commanders acting like AI controlled re-inforcements for all your troops. (Can't see how anyone will be able to fight Waterloo with 20 units per army?)

[econ21]

Be interesting to see if Empire Total War goes down this route: have corps commanders acting like AI controlled re-inforcements for all your troops. (Can't see how anyone will be able to fight Waterloo with 20 units per army?)

That's a good point - games which allow micro-management (battalion or regimental level) of Napoleonic warfare can't feasibly let you fight a full battle. They chop the battle into scenarios covering only a part of the field and are so less compelling for that reason. The disconnect between the historical size of the battles and the number of units available in a conventional TW battle will be jarring with ETW.

Brigade or divisional level Napoleonic combat might be best. You'd have enough units to make the battles (grand) tactical; you could model a decent sized historical battle; and the higher level of aggregation might assist in simplifying some of the more complex mechanics (skirmishers, formations, squares vs cav etc).

[DVX BELLORVM]

DVX, there's actually 3 battles, Austerlitz, Borodino and Waterloo.

You're right, but those are 3 separate games. There was another one from the same author, with the same engine, called Dreadnoughts. I think it was released in the early 90s, and focused on WWI naval battles.

[ReiseReise]

It would never work (ie sell millions of copies). People want ACTION, and they want to be in direct control of it. Look at the Rainbow Six series, in the early versions you would spend longer planning a mission than you would actually executing it. In the latest version (Vegas) there isn't even a planning mode, you jump straight to the action and give much less specific orders to your teams on the fly That series evolved from a hard core strategist game into a run and gun adrenaline FPS, because that is what sold.

[Rozanov]

About the only possible Napoleonic FPS would be a rifle brigade sim of sorts (as popularized by the Sharpe series of books) (Call it "Sharpe- shooter") A skirmishing game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rifle_Brigade

As for control well if one were to simulate Waterloo for example, one could allow Napoleon control of one Corps (though whether one would also simulate Nappie's piles I don't know. Would mean surrendering control to Ney with disastrous results.)

Anyway Napoleon's army was organised into 6 Corps on the day, each with approx 20 units (some had slightly more so if we have a 20 unit max per corps then extras can come on as re-inforcements.) If we amalgamate the 2 cavalry Corps that still means 5 corps with 20 or so units. Players won't want to control 100 units simultaneously - even allowing for the slower pace of battles. So the ability to give general orders to say 4 corps and allow Napoleon 1 (perhaps the Guards?) to control directly might make for an interesting game.

As for scale there is an obvious problem. With approx 200,000 troops (in all 3 armies) deployed on the day we either have to:

use much more powerful PC, monitors etc.

scale at approx 1:10 which looks a bit daft but can be done using the existing game engines

use a different game engine that aggregates casualties etc on a unit basis and we forego the individual level of combat.

Be interesting to see how Empire TW copes.

[El Diablo]

The fire and forget type of game engine is (to be best of my knowledge) very similar to the "History Channel battles of rome" game.

That game got LASHED at release because of the fact that you gather resources, set them up then charge. Thats it.

The ability to change tactics mid-battle are severly limited if not impossible.

(Think TW with every battle a naval one in which you have very little to no control over). Not good at all.

However, I do see what you mean, and I think that the "general cam" style of play would be ever better for MP where you could geniunely "surprise" the opposition with their limited line of sight.

It could also be frustrating essentially "leaving" one flank under the control of the computer. They would have to improve the AI thats for sure.

...an interesting thought though.

[icek]

I hate losing my men so i go for micro ;)

[Rhedd]

There's a way of increasing FoW in the current Totalwar engine.

1. Switch off the Radar screen.

2. Play with General's Camera only.

DVX, there's actually 3 battles, Austerlitz, Borodino and Waterloo. I had the game but due to my youth (10-12), I was too impatient to understand the game.

Exactly what I was going to say.

Follow step 1, follow step 2, then enjoy all of the realism, confusion, and even sometimes miscommunication which you crave.

I do this all the time. I love playing in General Cam view. Very immersive.

[regor]

When the battle begins you'd watch as your units do their best to carry our their assignments and you get to adjust what they're doing with general instructions rather than direct control. (i.e.. tell your infantry reinforcements to flank left around breaking enemy line) Plus, to keep things a little realistic have a small chance of miscommunication and also delay instructions to units depending upon their distance to your general.

You can (sort of) do this already. You can group your army into sensible sub-components (say: archers, cav, inf left flank, inf right flank, inf center), use the button 'Put the group under AI control', and then issue waypoints and attack orders, witch the group will then carry out with some degree of autonomy.

Haven't tried it yet, but have an inkling of what the results might be. I see a repeat of a 2vs2 multiplayer battle I played yesterday: my ally (the poor fool) charged his Spanish pikes into janissary archers and Turkish heavy inf with wild abandon and predictable results .

If you do give it a try, please tell how it went.

[Ciaran]

I´ve tried that feature in custom battles, and one thing I´ve found out is that the AI does a rather poor job if its troops are of only one type (i.e. only spearmen, cavalry or missiles etc.). Give it a miniature army with all types of units and it´ll fare better. However, twenty units are enough to be controlled manually, and don´t allow to form effective subdivisions.
It may be different with Kingdoms and the controllable reinforcements.