CEP: Armies

[Thalassicus]

In game terms, melee units are battling to take control of the enemy unit's tilespace, where ranged units are firing in to the enemy tilespace.

The same can be said of the bombers, they must enter the city to do their damage, thus leaving them more vulnerable.

Thank you for explaining your viewpoint. I think I understand now.

I sort units as "front" or "back." Anything with a range of 1 is a frontline unit, while anything with a range of 2 or more goes in back, to shoot over the front units. I put gatling guns and muskets in front, while bombers and artillery go in back. This has more effect on my decisions than whether units occupy the defender's tile.

It sounds like occupying the tile (or not) is more important to yall than the front-back difference. It's a different view from my own, but I can accept it. I'll keep this in mind for designing units in the future.

We have:
7 Arquebusier, 9 Musketman, 10 Rifleman, 12 Infantry, 15 Mech Inf

Wouldn't it be more beneficial to spread the upgrades out like this?
7 Musketman, 9 Rifleman, 11 GWI, 13 Infantry, 15 Mech Infantry

The mod names are more historically accurate. The names don't affect gameplay, so we chose to improve realism.

It's important to look at the structure of the tech tree. Industrialization needs twice as much cumulative science to research as smokeless powder (rifles and muskets in the mod, respectively). They may be only one tech column away from each other, but are very far apart in research costs.

 

[ShmooDude]

The mod names are more historically accurate. The names don't affect gameplay, so we chose to improve realism.

It's important to look at the structure of the tech tree. Industrialization needs twice as much cumulative science to research as smokeless powder (rifles and muskets in the mod, respectively). They may be only one tech column away from each other, but are very far apart in research costs.

Ah, ok, both of those make sense. As I said, just my musings so feel free to take or leave any of em.

 

[Babri]

Remember that a year ago people preferred footmen to mounted units nearly 3 to 1. We risk going back to that imbalance if we reduce the power of mounted units too much. I'm okay with some small changes to horses, but we need to be really careful. Horses have an inherent disadvantage because they're countered by common spears and pikes.

I think the ratio is perfectly logical, there is no need of giving incentive to the player to spam horsemen. Mounted units are specialized units, perhaps even as specialized as siege units. The main bulk of the army should still be infantry units, cavalry units should be there to punch holes in enemy lines, attack their ranged troops & artillery & disrupt their economy. The improved pillaging system also kind of favours cavalry.

And the spear/pike point is kind of weak. While true that pikes can defend against cavalry for a relatively cheap price, horses aren't supposed to take those guys head on. Why not bringing your infantry to deal with pikes & in the meanwhile pillage some tiles to keep your horsemen busy. Or even in the worst case scenario that you want to take pikes head on, horses have much higher strength so any bonuses they get (through promotion/GG presence/honour policy/heroic epic) is much more amplified which can somewhat compensate for this. They also have the ability to attack & then move out or pillage to heal, something standard melee units can't do.

I'm struggling to understand this. Why do you feel this type of attacker must take simultaneous damage? How do you think of bombers, which also take simultaneous damage?

I think of it this way:

One row of napoleonic soldiers fires their weapons, then slowly reloads over several minutes. Sometime later the enemy row fires. We can think these events happen in one turn (simultaneous damage) or spread out over two turns (alternating). It doesn't matter from a realism perspective, and has less effect on gameplay than the range of the units.

Napoleonic soldiers or any other of that type put their lives at risk by being on the front line. In other words they would trade blows with the enemy soldiers. This happened on range but still they were the frontline & received most casualties. On the other hand a gatling gun or any other piece of small artillery would be positioned securely while it kept firing. If enemy cavalry tries to intervine then the standard riflemen would block their or something to 'protect' the gatling guns. In other words napoleonic soldiers were frontline troops while gatling guns were support units.

This becomes even more evident in case of a assaulting a city as said by ShmooDude :-

Look at it less as soldier vs soldier and more from the perspective of soldier vs city.

How would that same row of Napoleonic soldiers have to assault a city? They'd have to enter it, correct? As shooting musket balls at walls/buildings is fairly ineffective. This leaves them vulnerable to any occupying force, far more so than a catapult or archers bombarding them from range. The same can be said of the bombers, they must enter the city to do their damage, thus leaving them more vulnerable. Since as you said, from a realism perspective, it doesn't really matter. This more than anything I think should determine whether a unit is simultaneous damage vs alternating damage.

The GG/MG are the ones that seem the most out of place as far as that determination unless they are more effective from outside a city's limits than I would think. I suppose though it could be looked at more as suppression than anything else at that point. That to me also increases the desire to replace the MG with the AT Gun, as it would be far more formidable vs cities leaving only the GG feeling out of place in that role.

 

[Tomice]

I sort units as "front" or "back." (.....) This has more effect on my decisions than whether units occupy the defender's tile.

It sounds like occupying the tile (or not) is more important to yall than the front-back difference. It's a different view from my own, but I can accept it. I'll keep this in mind for designing units in the future.

I think a very important part of the difference between alternating and simultaneous damage is this fact:

- A simultaneous damage unit will ALWAYS take damage when fighting.
- An alternating damage unit may not receive the counterattack for various reasons.

The main reason is the range 1 unit being placed inside a city. But the counterattack may also not happen if we kill the enemy before he can retaliate. Or if the enemy has a more important target than our range 1 unit.

Thal, in your description, it sounds like ranged units woulld always duel it out, like the traditional bow duels between Samurai (even in big battles, they used to search for a single personal enemy and started a bow duel with him). But in my experience, ranged damage is more versatile/unpredictable than that.




Another fact to consider is how ranged units can defend on their own terms much better. I can position my gatling guns in forests, on hills or in forts and never leave this favorable position again. Melee units often have to cross terrain with defense maluses to reach ranged units, which can be exploited, even by a range 1 unit.

As example, I can position myself on a hill behind a river. In this case, the range 1 defender can always defend on perfect terms AND attack without worry. A melee defender would have to cross the river, taking a heavy penalty and eventually ending up in a suicidal position on the enemy side of the river. That's why vanguards are so much worse as defenders than gatling guns. They are doomed to passiveness.




Talking about offensive actions, there is one very common situation where there's a massive difference between simultaneous and alternating attacks: Multiple attackers vs. a lone city.
The city will always take damage from all attackers. But it can only retaliate to ONE ranged attacker. Melee attackers on the other hand will all suffer.

So in this situation, a range-1 unit is much closer to a range-2 unit than to a melee unit. In this case I consider crossbows, gatling guns and artillery as one group and melee units as another.






I usually had archers as city defense, so I might be a bit biased. Your strategy of defending cities with horse units sounds very appealing as well. In fact, I immediately thought: "Damn, why didn't I have this idea myself?" You're clearly better in thinking outside the box.

 

[Thalassicus]

As example, I can position myself on a hill behind a river. In this case, the range 1 defender can always defend on perfect terms AND attack without worry. A melee defender would have to cross the river, taking a heavy penalty and eventually ending up in a suicidal position on the enemy side of the river. That's why vanguards are so much worse as defenders than gatling guns. They are doomed to passiveness.

This is a good example, thank you.

 

[Delekhan]

It's worth noting that having a gatling gun/MG attack at range breaks their fortification, so that balances it a bit.

By range attacking they become more vulnerable to counter attack, especially if they're flanked, so I don't think they're overpowered as defensive units at all.

 

[ShmooDude]

The only problem I see is that they kind of have no counter by being a "defensive" unit. I can think if two possible counters to them.

First would be give Cannons, Artillery and Rocket a buff vs Automatics. This makes sense historically as you use those kinds of weapons vs an enemy in an entrenched position.

Second would be Bombers.

Though not having played with them having those stats, I don't know if its necessary for them to have a specific counter. Just eyeballing it though it feels like they probably do.

 

[Ahriman]

There is no hard counter, but they don't/shouldn't deal out enough damage to get complete kills by themself against similar era units (their ranged attack strength should be less than their core strength), so you counter them by focusing enough power and fire on specific units to gradually kill them one by one, rotating out your damaged units that have been injured by the gatling guns.

Thus: it's possible to defeat them, but it takes a while, so they fulfill their purpose in slowing offenses down.

 

[mystikx21]

There's no hard counter for a sword unit or really an infantry unit either. It's just that you can hit them with ranged units. You can still hit MG style units with range. Just means aircraft or artillery.

I'd say a few things here on these units

1) Their ranged strength should be slightly less than strength. This would make them hard to kill, which we want, but not equally excellent at dealing out damage offensively. They should still be respectable at attacking because they are ranged and because they would be at a comfortable attack value without penalties like siege weapons.
2) I'm not sure they should get city attack promos if practicable. This would remove any desirable function for line infantry units if this is not their advantage over GG/MG
3) If their ranged strength isn't to be somewhat lower than strength, we should consider making the units somewhat less powerful and maybe add some kind of "counter" abilities to them to make them useful on defence (like a modest anti-tank bonus that spears get for horses).
4) The main reason I'd suggest a lower value is that they also get a bonus to ranged defence, like many other ranged units (non-archers?). I'm not sure this is necessary because they have high strength too. If we strip this out, they're probably fine even at higher strength than comparable line infantry.

 

[Volver]

I've raised the following issue on the Github page, and will do so again here. I apologize if this has been done elsewhere on this thread or the forum.

The upgrade track for soldier units, and I suppose the classification altogether of Gatling guns AS soldier units. Why? Warriors > Swordsmen > Longswordsmen continue to upgrade into the Industrial ranged (Gatling gun) line upon researching Steam Power. Aren't Riflemen a more appropriate upgrade for this track, leaving archers, etc. for the ranged track?

 

[Kivin]

I've raised the following issue on the Github page, and will do so again here. I apologize if this has been done elsewhere on this thread or the forum.

The upgrade track for soldier units, and I suppose the classification altogether of Gatling guns AS soldier units. Why? Warriors > Swordsmen > Longswordsmen continue to upgrade into the Industrial ranged (Gatling gun) line upon researching Steam Power. Aren't Riflemen a more appropriate upgrade for this track, leaving archers, etc. for the ranged track?

Please, skim through pages 9-11 of this thread and edit your post if you have anything to add to the discussion.

 

[mystikx21]

Volver, as Kivin pointed out, that issue was a subject of some discussion and even attempts at outside modification already. I suspect it's being resolved and untangled based on Thal's responses. There was a near universal agreement (at least among those expressing it, surely someone agreed with Thal but just kept quiet) that this was a poor design.

There is one reason to avoid a ranged upgrade track on gatling guns and that's the range promotion, already powerful for archers, it's really powerful for MG style units (doubles their range instead of +50% ,or +33% for longbows/artillery). But this doesn't mean that crossbows can't or won't upgrade to gatling guns either. It just means coming up with a promotion swap that preserves the XP in a useful way without being overpowering when they are upgraded. Or maybe modifying the range promotion for such units in some way.

 

[Tomice]

If it is possible to make the same promotion affect machine guns differently than archers, then I'd keep the +1 range upgrade, but make it reduce the ranged damage of machine guns.

For archers: 2+1 range
For artillery: 3+1 range
For machine guns: 1+1 range at -20% damage

Since machine guns upgraded this way could attack more often and choose their targets better, situations where the promotion would turn out negative should be rare.

 

[mystikx21]

I'm not sure if it will work that it would only attack at 1 range with full damage. So it would be negative in that regard, but you would be able to attack further away. If that's a trade-off.

 

[Tomice]

No, I too doubt we can make the damage range-dependent (e.g. making one and the same unit do 30 damage at range 1 and 24 damage at range 2).

But it should work to give a machine gun e.g. 30 damage and 1 range without promotion, but 24 damage and 2 range with the promotion.

Sure, the raw damage at range 1 would decrease, but there's a significant chance I could hit an approaching unit twice for example. Or I could return damage to a range 2 unit without moving. Overall, The promtion would turn out beneficial in most cases, but it would be less overpowered.

 

[Volver]

Thank you for pointing me to the appropriate discussion. I apologize for not skiming the thread first, as suggested -

 

[mystikx21]

Adding an additional voice of concern on the matter isn't a bad thing. Just a little late to the party.

 

[ExpiredReign]

One more thing to add into the mix, the Ottoman Janissary with 24 upgrades to the Arquebusier with the same .

But it lacks the unique abilities, in effect making it not an upgrade.

Perhaps we could skip this unit and go straight to the Musketman?

 

[mystikx21]

Isn't the Janissary supposed to be an arque anyway?

 

[ExpiredReign]

Damn I hate it when that happens. Posting before checking is a problem that should be punished severely.

My mistake, clicked the "Replaces" button instead of the "Upgrades" button.

Move along. Nothing to see here. Oops.