Withdrawal + Reinforcement

[Athos1660]

I'd like to have a battle in two 'episodes' :

1) Hoplites and LF are caught up and attacked by the Persian cavalry vangard

2) As soon as the slower Persian Infantry enter the battlefield in front of the Hoplites (using the Scripted Method of reinforcements), the enemy cavalry vangard withdraw (by the sides), definitely leaving the map (the rationale being, they need to rest their mounts and refill their arsenal, waiting for the outcome of the Infantry battle to either protect their friendly routing army or pursue enemy routers ; this is a final phase not played, only shown on the result panel at the end of the game)

Making reinforcements seem simple. My question is about the withdrawal part : How to make units leave the battlefied at the time of the reinforcement ?

It can also be seen as a kind of a mini Campaign, made of 2 successive 'battles' (first a skirmish against Cav, then an Infantry battle) where the Greek losses of the first battle are used in the second one.

Can it be achieved ?

[Athos1660]

I might have found an easy (ie script-free) solution. I made a module for this battle with 2 battles :

1) first, the skirmish against the Persian Cav, Chariots and LH with a limited number of turns (4 or 6)

2) second, the infantry battle against the Persian Infantry alone. All the Greek units are Unfixed and ‘Force Points Callback’ allow to buy up to almost all the units. To keep it simple, the player uses the total % of losses from the panel of the first battle and applies it to all his unit types for the second one during the deployment to calculate and select how many units he’ll be able to command during the second battle.

A couple of texts will explain the arrival and withdrawal of the Persian cavalry, the arrival of the Persian Infantry, how to calculate the number of units for the 2nd battle, the link between both ‘battles’, etc.

Here Fixed/Unfixed is not used for difficulty levels, but to simulate losses. I don’t know whether both can be mixed.

Hope I’m clear enough.
Need to test it, especially the fun of an initial skirmish between Hoplites and Persian Cav/Chariots.

[rbodleyscott]

FOG2 Medieval has a script called SpecialScenarioTools.BSF in which there is a function

Code: Select all

// Make team leave battlefield. Note that it will still count for the original strength for rout % purposes. 
// This is because deleting the units would mess up references to other units in close combat arrays. 
FUNCTION RemoveTeam(side, team)
{
	int i;
	int total;
	int id;	
  
	total = GetUnitCount(side);
	
	for (i = 0; i < total; i++)
	{
		id = GetUnitID(side, i);
		if (id != -1)
			{
				if (GetUnitTeam(id) == team)
					{
						// v1.7.2 addition
						if (IsInCloseCombat(id) == 1)
							{
								RemoveAllCloseCombats(id);
							}
						// End v1.7.2 addition
						
            RemoveUnit(id, 1);
					}
			}
	}	
	
	SetCurrentSelectedUnit(-1);			
}

It is not unlikely that this could work in FOG2 Ancients if you put it in the scenario script.

But there is the issue of the rout % calculation.

[Athos1660]

Thank you very much, Richard !

I succeeded in turning the Persian Infantry into Reinforcements with Artaphernes as their C-in-C.

But I haven't figured out yet how to use the FUNCTION RemoveTeam.

[Athos1660]

I get it.

1) I added RemoveTeam at the end of the fragment about the Reinforcement in my scenario script :

FUNCTION StartTurn(side)
{
int id
(...)
if (GetTurn() == 3) // For testing.
{
id = PlaceUnit(36, 42, 4, 1, 6, "EASTERN_HILLMEN")
AddVizCam(GetUnitX(id), GetUnitY(id), 0)
AddVizFunctionCall("GetHeadImage", 1, "BP0Image:", 13)
ShowUIScreenToSide("BattlePop0", "Anim1", "IDS_AUTO_REINF_0", GetWorkString(13), 0)
(...)
RemoveTeam(1,4);
RemoveTeam(1,5);

2) I added the FUNCTION RemoveTeam(side, team) above at the end of the scenario script.

The mecanism/result is really nice.

[rbodleyscott]

Very pleased to hear it.

[Athos1660]

I wrote this fragment of script for my scenario script (here is only the upper part of the FUNCTION) :

Code: Select all

FUNCTION StartTurn(side)
{
    int turn;
	int i;
	int id

	if (GetTurn() == -1)
		{
			SetUniversalVar("Deploym", 0);
		}
		
	if(((GetTurn() >= 7) && (Rand(1,100) <= 20) && (GetTurn() <= 11) && (GetUniversalVar("Deploym") == 0)) || (turn == 13 && (GetUniversalVar("Deploym") == 0))) 
		{
		SetUniversalVar("Deploym", 1);
		id = PlaceUnit(43, 39, 5, 1, 0, "LIGHT_JAVELINS")

The goal is to make the reinforcement imperatively happens between turn 4 and 7.

I tried it. It seems to work. However I don't know a thing about coding.
My only question : does it look logical at first sight ?

[rbodleyscott]

I wrote this fragment of script for my scenario script (here is only the upper part of the FUNCTION) :

Code: Select all

FUNCTION StartTurn(side)
{
    int turn;
	int i;
	int id

	if (GetTurn() == -1)
		{
			SetUniversalVar("Deploym", 0);
		}
		
	if(((GetTurn() >= 7) && (Rand(1,100) <= 20) && (GetTurn() <= 11) && (GetUniversalVar("Deploym") == 0)) || (turn == 13 && (GetUniversalVar("Deploym") == 0))) 
		{
		SetUniversalVar("Deploym", 1);
		id = PlaceUnit(43, 39, 5, 1, 0, "LIGHT_JAVELINS")

The goal is to make the reinforcement imperatively happens between turn 4 and 7.

I tried it. It seems to work. However I don't know a thing about coding.
My only question : does it look logical at first sight ?

Looks good at a quick glance through. If it does not work as you want, ask again.

[Athos1660]

Thank you so much for taking the time to look at it and reply !
I keep on testing to see if unwanted results come up.

But there is the issue of the rout % calculation.

Once the Persian cavalry has left, the Greeks have to rout 100% of the Persian non-light infantry to get a 53% win .

To fix it, I guess I could either try to add a few units of Persian Irregular Foot to the Persian infantry or reduce the cav army, but actually :
- the infantry units are already quite numerous and the overall fight is already long with the cav 'pre-battle',
- I'd rather add a few cav units to the cav battle to made it harder...

However, the rout % calculation is no big deal to me. I like the battle as it is. Some other players could too.

I'll look at what I can do for that. Anyway, the number and types of units still need to be tweaked to adjust the difficulty.

(edit)
For now, at level 3, we have :
1) During the first part of the battle (cav attack) : 8400 Greeks vs 4110 Persians
2) During the second part (infantry clash) : the same 8400 Greeks vs 9840 Persian Infantrymen,

and at the end of the battle, we have 8400 Greeks vs 4110 + 9840 = 13950 Persians :


As the Persian cavalry are not meant to massively die and rout against Hoplites (and a few LF), most of the rout % is made by the Greeks during the second part of the battle, the Infantry clash, ie against the 9840 Persian Foot, 1200 of which being LF.

I guess an 'honest' rout% would be that calculated with the numbers :
8400 (number of Greeks from the start)
9840 (number of Persians of the second part of the Battle, ie. number of reinforcement troops).

Again no big deal.

[Athos1660]

I modified the bit of script (shown above) aboout the reinforcement/withdrawal of the AI army, forcing it to occur only on human player’s turn, as new bugs happened today such as the reinforcement message ou the reinforcement not showing up at all. It seems to work better :

Code: Select all

 if(((GetTurn() == 6) && (Rand(1,100) <= 20)) || ((GetTurn() == 8) && (Rand(1,100) <= 20) && (GetUniversalVar("Deploym") == 0)) || ((GetTurn() == 10) && (Rand(1,100) <= 20) && (GetUniversalVar("Deploym") == 0)) || (GetTurn() == 12 && (GetUniversalVar("Deploym") == 0)))

Given the ‘issue’ of rout %, this scenario most likely won’t make it to the in-game community scenarios.
So here is a link to download & play it :
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
Place EPHESUS_498BC in your Documents\My Games\FieldOfGlory2\Campaigns\

Enjoy!
Localisations : English, French

Any suggestion is welcomed.

Many thanks to Richard and Paul59.