Annoying battle won criteria

[eds01]

One of the annoying things with playing nomadic factions is that you have to actually rout your opponents to win. If you use an intellegent tactic such as using horse archers fire arrows at the enemy and then withdraw from the battle when they're out of arrows, you lose the battle (dispite inflicting massive casualties and sustaining very few), and your general retreats. Is this behavior hard-coded, or could you change it that if you kill more then x% of the enemy and only sustain y% casualties and withdraw, then it's a draw?

[lobf]

It's hardcoded. And it's just words. The computer can say you lost, but you know that you really didn't. I know it sucks for your stats, but those aren't important if you're not Romani, right?

[tapanojum]

Wont a greater ammount of enemy troops recover if you lose the battle by withdrawing?

[Watchman]

Would sound logical certainly, since they're left in possession of the field and hence can recover their casualties at leisure.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

When I choose to retreat (especially with an all-horse army), I'll sometimes use the character_reset cheat on my army so that they aren't stuck in some stupid place with no movement points. I chose to to retreat, they didn't run for the hills until they couldn't run any more.

[Intranetusa]

Actually with horse archer armies, you might as well just use ur cavalry and charge the enemy after you've used up all your arrows and killed the majority of them. They would be weakened/exhausted to a point where they would rout easily if you surrounded them one by one with horse archers.

[mrtwisties]

Actually with horse archer armies, you might as well just use ur cavalry and charge the enemy after you've used up all your arrows and killed the majority of them. They would be weakened/exhausted to a point where they would rout easily if you surrounded them one by one with horse archers.

If you do that consistently, even when successful you'll wear down your stock of horse archers. That's fine if you're fighting on the steppe - they're cheap troops and easily replaced. But if you're fighting in the Peloponnese you'll need all of your men for the fighting on the way back out (unless you leave by boat, of course).

There are other solutions. But the main point here is that horse archers can't harass the enemy and withdraw in good order to harass again shortly thereafter, which is something that they do appear to have done historically.



I just don't know how important the tactic was (ie whether you could wipe out entire armies with it), and whether it therefore ought to be modelled by EB. But if it happened all the time, perhaps horse archer ammunition could be increased as a way of modelling the phenomenon?

[Intranetusa]

If you do that consistently, even when successful you'll wear down your stock of horse archers. That's fine if you're fighting on the steppe - they're cheap troops and easily replaced. But if you're fighting in the Peloponnese you'll need all of your men for the fighting on the way back out (unless you leave by boat, of course).

There are other solutions. But the main point here is that horse archers can't harass the enemy and withdraw in good order to harass again shortly thereafter, which is something that they do appear to have done historically.



I just don't know how important the tactic was (ie whether you could wipe out entire armies with it), and whether it therefore ought to be modelled by EB. But if it happened all the time, perhaps horse archer ammunition could be increased as a way of modelling the phenomenon?

Well, with proper micromanagement, charging and recharging enemy formations after you've run out of arrows results in minimum casualties. (ie in the strange battle formation, my 19 horse archer + 1 general and also another 17 unit horse archer + 2 dacian heavy cavlary merc + 1 general won various victories with less than 30 casualties per battle).

I mean, even horse archer armies would eventually lose troops, and you always have the option of hiring mercenaries.

[pezhetairoi]

pray tell, what is this character reset console command of which you speak? I've always had that problem with my horsearcher battles, and my siege assaults, when I just use up all my slingers' ammo and withdraw to have another go only to have my army retreat ALL the way back into my territory ensuring I waste another two turns setting up another siege.

[mrtwisties]

Well, with proper micromanagement, charging and recharging enemy formations after you've run out of arrows results in minimum casualties. (ie in the strange battle formation, my 19 horse archer + 1 general and also another 17 unit horse archer + 2 dacian heavy cavlary merc + 1 general won various victories with less than 30 casualties per battle).

This is true, I don't think anyone's disputing that horse archer armies are very capable. I imagine that most of us have had similar experiences, and I shudder to think what Persian Cataphract might be capable of. My favourite memory is of a horde chief with a drillmaster churning through five pantodapoi armies in one turn, losing only 3 men in the process. Not a particularly difficult task, but still exciting in its own way.

But this doesn't address the possibility that harassing and withdrawing is a significant military tactic that's not currently modelled and that perhaps could be.

The reset_character command sounds like it has interesting possibilities. It might be possible to work something into the EBBS script that detects when an all-cavalry army "loses" a battle with < 10% casualties, then resets the movement points of that army. Ideally, that process of resetting would also give the relevant character a movement penalty, to represent the fact that they had spent some of their turn skirmishing.

(I wonder if you could give HA troopers morale penalties, so that they would skirmish with you, retreat and repeat?)

My concern is that this on its own could make all cavalry armies significantly more powerful (perhaps no bad thing given the results of the AI Faction Progression thread). But it might be possible to balance them out again for player use by modelling some of their weaknesses. For example, a large all cavalry army needs good grazing lands. So if a large (>5) all cavalry army was operating in a province that didn't have the nomad/mixed resource, you could make them significantly more expensive to maintain (for your own territory) or make them suffer significant morale and movement penalties (in bad guy territory).

This would require me to adapt my tactics in order to campaign in western Europe with a HA faction.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

pray tell, what is this character reset console command of which you speak? I've always had that problem with my horsearcher battles, and my siege assaults, when I just use up all my slingers' ammo and withdraw to have another go only to have my army retreat ALL the way back into my territory ensuring I waste another two turns setting up another siege.

You just open the console and type in:

character_reset "Character Name"

Because you can't tell their names easily, it may be difficult to get this to work for the Romani, but it is pretty easy to figure out the names in other factions.

I will also use this cheat to move lone generals to a place to be governors (since it really shouldn't take a year to move a single guy across the empire).