Auto-evasion

[nikgaukroger]

Actually it had to do with Germany being a constant nuisance coming down into Northern Italy and raiding over and over again throughout history. Rome could never really put together enough war effort to clean them out and by the time to they start making some headway during Marcus Aurelius's reign, they start coming apart at the seams.

Er, I think that "constant nuisance coming down into Northern Italy and raiding over and over again" severely over states things. For example between 101 BC and 169 AD (to use your Marcus Aurelius reference) there is over 250 years with no German raid/invasion of Italy - and 101 is probably the first occasion anyway. I'd note that within that 250 years we have Trajan's campaigns to invade and conquer Dacia (and Mesopotamia) which involved very large armies. Rome could get the necessary military force if it so desired in this period, I would (again) suggest that it didn't for Germany because, unlike say Dacia, it wasn't worth the effort in terms of reward.

After 169 I think we then have to wait another 100 years before the Alamanni get to Italy for another Germannic invasion. Not very frequent really.

[Archaeologist1970]

You interpret it your way, I'll interpret it mine but I would expect the amount of raids from to diminish as the strength of rome increased with most of the raids coming earlier. This is true, however, I think you are underestimating the constant threat that the people across the Rhine meant to the Romans. Sounds like we are drifting off topic here, mod.

[nikgaukroger]

Indeed we are, although the whole subject of Rome's ideological portrayal of the barbarians is an interesting one. I recently reread Thomas Burns' "Rome and the Barbarians, 100BC to 400AD" which is a pretty in depth discussion - albeit rather dry and not an easy read.

On to other things though

[Gnaeus]

There is an excellent course by a professor at Tulane on Rome and the Barbarians, https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses ... rians.html. I've listened to it once and when FOG II gets to the barbarian invasions I'll be listening to it again.

[TheGrayMouser]

Uncontrolled and unpredictable war bands and shock cavalry in FoG I were great. If costed appropriately, they make for an extremely interesting approach to the game; you absolutely must have an up front plan, deploy for it and then let the madness happen. In a top-down game we generally do not have god-like control and, for certain specific units, we absolutely should not.

However, as mentioned above, the costing/balance needs to be right.

I liked it too but some of the arguments made against were not unreasonable. especially the dribble of a few units going crazy versus an entire line or command( which would make more sense)


I think the problem was to classify "anarchy prone" units based on weapon type

Spear armed warbands charging w/o orders? ok, hoplites, no.... Swiss pikemen? yes!... Hellenistic phalanxes er no... Same with knights whom had varying degrees of being held to extreme discipline as noted often by the Byzantines and Arabs verus lets ride over our own troops

If units could be flagged with an "impetuous" trait... AND, if army lists themselves could be flagged as triggering the trait so to speak, there would be a whole lot more options to deal with the phenomena ...

[Jishmael]

If you wargame on the tabletop, this is one of the first places I go to see how well they are written. So always comes down to roman legions vs warbands. Some make the legions unbreakable, some make the warbands out of control. Few get it right. It looks like FOG II is close but not there. The warbands should be feared by the romans (There is a reason they never conquered Germany). The romans however need to rely on superior training and tactics to win. In my prefect world of FOG II, I would do three things: add a fatigue rule (-5 to 10 POA per turn of continuous combat both sides, reset to zero by a round of rest), jack up the warbands a little more (make them scary), and make them auto charge randomly. Then you have a accurate portrayal of romans vs warbands.

Some excellent ideas for a mod here, I would think. Might be worth putting them in the modders forum and see if anyone fancies trying to model them. I have done that with an idea about push backs. No takers yet, but I have had 50+ views so there might be a modder or two already thinking about it.

just chiming in to say that fatigue for that matchup isnt really need in my opinion.
Warbands do already win nearly every attrition fight (if they dont break) because of their superior numbers.
So why add an extra mechanic that accomplishes the same goal?

[nyczar]

Personally I think leaving that unknown, as "fog-of-war" is a better game mechanism.

The unknown should exist in the random element of the result, rather than a lack of knowledge of how evade mechanics work.

I am heavily in agreement with this statement. A dedicated player if they so choose could probably come up with a reasonable model if they were willing to grind out umpteenth hours of trials. There is no reason for this to be a black box to the player. It would be the same as hiding PoA/combat power calculations from the player and just telling them to go by "gut feeling".

If you want to have inherent chance in the game on this mechanic, that is perfectly ok but the player needs to be able to make some sort of educated decision on this. Right now it is a rather arcane process of gut feeling, past experience and guessing at the relative weight of factors involved.

After seeing a unit of Slingers decide to take a charge from med armored Cav in the open, with no other threats lurking, I decided I had learned nothing about evasion and decided to post a question to the forum. I see, however, that their has already been a robust discussion. so i will amend my original question of "how does evasion really work" to "based on the factors cited, has anyone formed any doctrines to help guide their thinking on determining when a unit will evade or not?" Thanks to anyone who wished to share their wisdom with the community.

Thanks,

nyczar

[Kabill]

After seeing a unit of Slingers decide to take a charge from med armored Cav in the open, with no other threats lurking, I decided I had learned nothing about evasion and decided to post a question to the forum. I see, however, that their has already been a robust discussion. so i will amend my original question of "how does evasion really work" to "based on the factors cited, has anyone formed any doctrines to help guide their thinking on determining when a unit will evade or not?" Thanks to anyone who wished to share their wisdom with the community.

Thanks,

nyczar

What was the distance between the slingers and horse? If the horse started their turn right next to the slingers, I would expect them to hold, as on average they would be caught if they tried to evade (which would be worse than holding since it counts as a rear attack). If there was a tile between them, I'd usually expect them to evade (certainly if there were no other threats nearby and plenty of space to retreat) but I don't have any sense of whether there's a random element or not. If there was more than one tile, I'd expect them always to evade except under fairly unusual circumstances.

To turn that into an answer to your question: I would typically expect a unit to hold if attacked by a unit which has good odds of catching them (i.e. attacker's movement - distance > defender's movement) and expect them to evade if on average they won't. I can't say that this always produces the results I expect but I find it fairly reliable as a basic rule.

[nyczar]

Thanks Kabill,

There was one tile between the slingers and the Cav and plenty of room to run. Thanks for sharing your formula, helps.

nyczar

[Kabill]

I've just had a look in the code. It's too complex for me to interpret exactly but the basic points appear to be:

- Units will always attempt to evade if attacked from the flank or rear, unless it is a light unit attacking a non-light unit (which should only apply when light horse are attacking regular horse)
- The decision to evade takes into account not only the attacking unit but other potential attacking units as well, so if a weak unit is supported by a stronger unit and charges, the defender may evade because of the threat of the stronger unit.
- The decision to evade is based on the probability of winning the combat - units will stand and fight if they can beat threatening units.
- But there is a random factor involved. I can't tell how much without digging deeper - from what I can tell this matters in only fairly edge-cases so a unit which is strongly outmatched will always decide to withdraw (I'm very possibly reading this wrong, but I think the defending units need to have between a 0% and 10% advantage over their potential attackers minimum to make them want to stand and fight, with the exact value being a flat random roll between 0 and 10).
- The margin of advantage required to stand and fight is lower if both units are light foot or light horse, and also lower always if the defending unit is horse (i.e. light units charged by equivalent light units are more likely to stand; and horse are also more likely to stand against any attacker).
- But also, the probability of standing is also based on the probability that the unit will be caught when trying to evade. A unit that is evenly matched or better will only evade if it has a high probability of getting away (2 or more tiles worth of move difference); a unit which is at minor disadvantage (up to 20% combat difference, if I am reading it right) will evade if it has fair odds of getting away (1 or more tiles worth of move difference); otherwise it looks like it will always try and evade. Note that this only seems to consider relative move distance and not factors that might inhibit move (e.g. light foot moving through friendly units, or terrain), so a light unit adjacent to a friendly non-light unit will not think that evading is more favourable than one which is on its own, even if in the former case the non-light unit would shield the light troops and block pursuit.

In the situation you describe, then, it looks like the slingers would typically try and evade but there is a random roll which means sometimes they won't. The general conclusion is that I don't think it would be possible to predict with certainty whether a unit will evade in many circumstances, because of the randomness, so the best you can do is learn general patterns rather than an absolute set of deterministic rules (in contrast to, say, units withdrawing from combat which always happens under specific circumstances with no randomness other than the combat roll).

[nyczar]

Thanks for the follow up. Appreciate you going to olympus to fathom the will of Zeus, Apollo, Ares and others. In the end, it is good there is fortune in the game. Just frustrating when it goes against me .