How to design an historical unbalanced battle

[Athos1660]

Imagine an historical battle with a bigger army on one side : 11 000 vs 9000 men.
Irl, 'unsurprisingly', the larger army won.

How would you make this battle in FoG/P&S ?
1) Would you keep it as irl, to make it as historical as possible : same army sizes, same troop quality, etc.
2) or would you tweak it to make it a fair fight (or at least a fairer fight than irl) to make it more playable and balanced, reducing the number of units in the bigger army, downgrading the quality of its units, etc. ? If so, what traits of the units or army would you choose to change/tweak ?
3) Make it SP, give the bigger army to the AI side and basta !
4) Choose another historical battle.
5) or ???

Btw both armies have the same kinds of units, so I guess terrain can't help to balance the fight.

[Karvon]

I guess one question you need to answer first is whether this is intended as a tactical study or are you wanting something play-balanced?

If you're interested in a historical study, then I'd go with making the OB and initial deployment as accurate as possible. You might opt to allow for free deployment to give players the option of changing things up a little.

If you are wanting something play-balanced, then you might alter quality levels, or make it a defensive scenario, where the smaller side wins if it survives till dusk.

Regards,

Karvon

[Athos1660]

Interesting!

[rbodleyscott]

If you are making an MP scenario, if you put

SetMPForceRatio();

in the StartTurnPost(side) function in the scenario script, the victory conditions will automatically be adjusted for disparity of forces.

(See the SCENARIOTEMPLATE.BSF sample scenario script in the main game folder. If you use that, make a copy, change the name to match the name of your .BAM file, and remove the comment marks before SetMPForceRatio(); on line 42)

[Athos1660]

Thank you, Rchard. I started this scenario as a SP one, but may add a MP version with this feature.