Battle Lines - more dynamic warfare

[Ymir9]

LINK

An experimental, simple mod I cobbled together to try to make combat more engaging and dynamic.

It applies the Winged Hussar's unique ability "Heavy Charge" (the ability to force defeated units to withdraw if they take more damage than itself) and applies it to all melee capable units, both land and sea. The Hussar is instead given the Blitz ability for balance.
As these changes have made it much more difficult to hold land with vanilla settings, the maximum fortify bonus has been increased to 100%. The result seems to be a much more engaging and realistic battle dynamic, and it also has the nice side effect of re-balancing Japan's unique ability to be much more useful.

Feedback very welcome! Let me know if you think this is a good idea. I'm especially interested in seeing if this new dynamic makes the AI play better or worse, since the AI's free promotions usually mean they hit harder and might be more likely to push back the player's forces, foiling battle plans if he/she is unprepared.

 

[MACKA0ili]

Sounds like a cool mod. I've been waiting for an excuse to play as Japan. Will try it out once I get back from work.

Edit: great so far! Taking out barbarians encampments is really easy now though. I know this is just a simple mod but maybe think about making it so that units in encampments, forts, and citadels resist heavy charge. Otherwise, I can't wait to test this out on a large scale war.

 

[killmeplease]

maybe just give barb encampment a combat bonus

 

[Ymir9]

maybe just give barb encampment a combat bonus

Thanks. That's a very good point. I've mostly been using it with a mod that makes barbarians a lot tougher and removes combat penalties vs Civs, but for vanilla settings a 50% defense bonus for barbarian camps sounds appropriate, although I suspect it still won't be enough considering how much of a pushover barbs are, especially on lower difficulty settings.

I'll upload a new version.

 

[Olleus]

That's very interesting. I've thinking about giving this ability, not to ALL melee units, but just to the heavy cavalry ones (knights, cavalry, tanks etc... but not lancers or helicopters), to differentiate them more from infantry units.

How well does the AI deal with the changes? I've found (playing as poland) that I get a lot more units going too far forward and getting easily surrounded the next turn. Is this the case in your mod? How does it affect the balance between ranged and melee units?

This is a very interesting change, I more very curious as to what people's experiences with it are.

 

[Ymir9]

Sorry for my late reply.

So far in my experience, the mod doesn't seem to make the AI fight any better or worse, except in cases where the AI has significantly superior fighting strength. I find the mod rewards higher tech tiers and flanking more. It's more difficult to keep a carpet of doom at bay when every unit has heavy charge. The mod also makes flanking a lot more important and this is one area where the player will usually do better than the AI, except if massively outnumbered. The AI, even before the change, has never been very good at knowing in what order to attack with its troops.

As for the ranged/melee dynamic, I didn't notice any big changes on offense or defense. I think ranged units are still very important as one shot can force a unit to retreat from even a disadvantaged follow-up melee attack. On defense they can stop an attacking force in its tracks very quickly.

I still have to test it out more. Strangely enough in most of my games the AI is much too pacifistic to present good opportunities to test combat.