-33% penalty for being in open terrain a bit silly?

[TheBlackAdderBG]

Does the defender suffer the penalty if he Fortify before that?

 

[Jolly Rogerer]

Through most of history (until Napoleon) there are two factors that led to this:

Factor 1: Pitched battles tended to be fought only by consent. The reason for this is that it was difficult until fairly modern times to deploy an army from the march into combat formation without also allowing the enemy to flee (in march formation the whole time) if they chose to. The ratio of force to space was tiny in comparison to that of modern times, so maneuvering your enemy into a trap (say by pinning them against a deep river) was extremely difficult. There was simply too much space for your enemy to flee into most of the time.

Given that battles tended to be fought by mutual consent, attackers would often not consent to battles where the defenders deployed in terrain that gave them an obvious advantage. As most armies lived off the land, they had to keep moving in order to eat. Refusing a battle where the pursued army had set up in a strong position was usually a matter of waiting a few days until their supplies ran low. Most land campaigns between mobile armies consisted of a lot of marching, some skirmishing, a lot of foraging for supplies, and eventually a return to winter quarters as either your supplies, your war chest, your army, good weather, or the enemy army was exhausted.

This changed a lot in the Napoleonic era as armies learned to deploy from column to line very quickly. Armies also became a lot larger through population growth from the agricultural revolution and conscription (increasing the ratio of force to space), which made it easier to force combat on an enemy army. Also the introduction of canned foods and the potato reduced the need to spend as much time foraging for food. By World War I logistics had improved and the ratio of force to space was so large that the opposing armies on the Western Front confronted one another in a continuous line from Switzerland to the English Channel.

Factor 2: It was almost impossible to control an army deployed in anything but open terrain until fairly modern times. If a commander wanted to control his whole force in a battle, it had to be visible to him. It is for this reason that even the large armies of ancient times deployed almost entirely within the line of sight of the commander. Breaking the army into detachments risked defeat in detail and required a level of trust in one's subordinates that was often lacking historically.

Large all-cavalry formations tended to be able to get away with deploying in detachments because they were usually capable of avoiding combat (and the potential for defeat in detail) via their speed. But they more than any other arm prefer to fight in open terrain.

It wasn't until Napoleon that this changed significantly, and even the corps of his armies tended to deploy within ear-shot of one another so they could march to the sounds of the cannon fire of another detachment when it got into combat. This sometimes allowed his corps to pin an enemy formation in combat directly from the march long enough for another corps to join the battle from an unexpected direction, which would often rout the enemy force as it was flanked or surrounded.

 

[drbloom]

It makes sense, stop picking apart the game. There are 100 other things more important than the combat modifiers right now.

Heh, 100% right on buddy. This game is glitched like Cheech & Chong on weed. If only I could smoke the box, I'd feel I got some value out of this wasted 55$

 

[jjkrause84]

Now -- this really depends on your interpretation of history. Yes, most of Europe's battles were fought on open fields, but remember. Both sides were fighting on open fields. However, in the French and Indian War, the British showed that they were heavily inadequate in the American terrain, filled much with forest. When the American Revolution and the War of 1812 came along, however, the Americans showed that they could use the forest terrain to their advantage in order to defeat the much larger, more powerful British Army in those open fields. Of course, the tides were turned in the Vietnam War, when the Vietcong ravaged the American Army in the forests.

However, if an army doesn't really know how to use guerrila tactics, and such army just coincidentally was fighting out of a forested terrain against an open terrain, I do rather agree that a -33% penalty wouldn't be fair automatically. Rather -- I would have it so that there should be more bonuses for units that wanted to concentrate on using guerrila tactics, and those bonuses would only apply in forested areas.

One bonus that would be nice would be for a unit with such bonus to be invisible in forested areas.

If the British were inadequate fighting in Nort America during the 7 Years War then whywere they so astoundingly successful?

Also, American rebels using guerilla tactics did not beat the British army "in those fields". Think about it. One army is in the woods....the other is in the fields. How do they meet? American guerilla tactics were important but are far overplayed in modern US memory. Open battles were still of crucial importance (And don't get me started on the importance of French involvement in the war! )

It's not about "not knowing" how to fight guerilla war it is about war aims and maximizing the efficiency of given arms-systems. Guerilla war demands a highly detailled knowledge of the terrain and a high level of popular support from non-combatants.....neither of which the British could consistently rely on. Their numbers and firepower lent themselves to set-piece battles and, thus, this is what they sought.


I do like the idea of invisible guerilla units though....it would add a really interesting element to combat.

 

[jjkrause84]

Through most of history (until Napoleon) there are two factors that led to this:

Factor 1: Pitched battles tended to be fought only by consent. The reason for this is that it was difficult until fairly modern times to deploy an army from the march into combat formation without also allowing the enemy to flee (in march formation the whole time) if they chose to. The ratio of force to space was tiny in comparison to that of modern times, so maneuvering your enemy into a trap (say by pinning them against a deep river) was extremely difficult. There was simply too much space for your enemy to flee into most of the time.

Given that battles tended to be fought by mutual consent, attackers would often not consent to battles where the defenders deployed in terrain that gave them an obvious advantage. As most armies lived off the land, they had to keep moving in order to eat. Refusing a battle where the pursued army had set up in a strong position was usually a matter of waiting a few days until their supplies ran low. Most land campaigns between mobile armies consisted of a lot of marching, some skirmishing, a lot of foraging for supplies, and eventually a return to winter quarters as either your supplies, your war chest, your army, good weather, or the enemy army was exhausted.

This changed a lot in the Napoleonic era as armies learned to deploy from column to line very quickly. Armies also became a lot larger through population growth from the agricultural revolution and conscription (increasing the ratio of force to space), which made it easier to force combat on an enemy army. Also the introduction of canned foods and the potato reduced the need to spend as much time foraging for food. By World War I logistics had improved and the ratio of force to space was so large that the opposing armies on the Western Front confronted one another in a continuous line from Switzerland to the English Channel.

Factor 2: It was almost impossible to control an army deployed in anything but open terrain until fairly modern times. If a commander wanted to control his whole force in a battle, it had to be visible to him. It is for this reason that even the large armies of ancient times deployed almost entirely within the line of sight of the commander. Breaking the army into detachments risked defeat in detail and required a level of trust in one's subordinates that was often lacking historically.

Large all-cavalry formations tended to be able to get away with deploying in detachments because they were usually capable of avoiding combat (and the potential for defeat in detail) via their speed. But they more than any other arm prefer to fight in open terrain.

It wasn't until Napoleon that this changed significantly, and even the corps of his armies tended to deploy within ear-shot of one another so they could march to the sounds of the cannon fire of another detachment when it got into combat. This sometimes allowed his corps to pin an enemy formation in combat directly from the march long enough for another corps to join the battle from an unexpected direction, which would often rout the enemy force as it was flanked or surrounded.

This is largely correct and well-written.

I would only argue that most armies did not live off the land but, as is logical when you think about it, would survive off of a mixture of baggage train and foraging (sometiems supply lines if they were in friendly territory or near their own borders). Yuval Noah Harari's "Strategy and Supply in Fourteenth Century Western European Invasion Campaigns" [The Journal of Military History, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Apr., 2000), pp. 297-333] very convincingly proves this point for the high middle ages (and the conclusions/data there strongly suggest that this was true for much of history).

I'm really glad yo ubrought up force-space in WWI. I'm a WWI guy and it's great to see that there are others out there who "get it" and don't think that the trenches was the result of idiocy/incompetence/what have you.

As for Napoleon you're essentially right but I would also consider the continuing evolution (since the Middle Ages) towards centralization, bureaucratization, etc. in governance (of all sorts...including over armies) as another essential part of the transformation you describe.

 

[Ravenal]

Yeah, it should be -25% and bonus from first round of fortification should be 33%.

That way you come out at the same ST as you started out with.

 

[Hawkwood]

Not to mentíon that the French actually had a chance at winning until Henry V ordered the Longbow to aid the Men-at-Arms in the melee.

 

[Alter Hase]

Like a lot of things in civ 5 this decision had little thought behind it and was just dropped ingame the dumbest, easiest, most convenient way, for lazy designers.

Open terrain should be neutral, with advantages for certain units.

For example cavalry should have the advantage, as all firearm type units, and not being penalized AND UTTERLY DESTROYED BY SWORDSMEN OR PIKEMEN (yes riflemen got defeated by pikemen which charged them on the open ground ).

I mean, they have a clear line of fire, duh.

 

[DaveGold]

In terms of historical accuracy, giving archers better ranged combat than riflemen is even more ridiculous. It's clearly there to provide some sort of balance before catapults are invented but surely it could have been done in a better way. Once again it shows that the abstract combat system was created, one size fits all, and then all the units were shoehorned into that system.

 

[jjkrause84]

Like a lot of things in civ 5 this decision had little thought behind it and was just dropped ingame the dumbest, easiest, most convenient way, for lazy designers.

Open terrain should be neutral, with advantages for certain units.

For example cavalry should have the advantage, as all firearm type units, and not being penalized AND UTTERLY DESTROYED BY SWORDSMEN OR PIKEMEN (yes riflemen got defeated by pikemen which charged them on the open ground ).

I mean, they have a clear line of fire, duh.

I'm still waiting for riflemen to get some sort of bonus against cavalry....

It always drove me up the wall in Civ4 when, for example, AI Cav would kill my machinegun. It's a machine gun....horse cavalry has NO chance....

 

[Alter Hase]

In terms of historical accuracy, giving archers better ranged combat than riflemen is even more ridiculous. It's clearly there to provide some sort of balance before catapults are invented but surely it could have been done in a better way. Once again it shows that the abstract combat system was created, one size fits all, and then all the units were shoehorned into that system.

Its just bad design, nothing more, archers are fine (minus the longbow) the catch is that all ranged units should have the bombard option this would also show the great historical shift in warfare

- archer 2 hexes

- musketman 1 hex (but far cheaper to build representing the short training time necessary to use firearms compared to bows

- riflemen and infantry 2 hexes

- cannons 2 hexes

- artillery 4 hexes

 

[jjkrause84]

Its just bad design, nothing more, archers are fine (minus the longbow) the catch is that all ranged units should have the bombard option this would also show the great historical shift in warfare

- archer 2 hexes

- musketman 1 hex (but far cheaper to build representing the short training time necessary to use firearms compared to bows

- riflemen and infantry 2 hexes

- cannons 2 hexes

- artillery 4 hexes

That would be interesting......