SnuggleBunnies wrote: ↑Mon Jun 01, 2020 3:31 am
So keeping in mind my perspective is as someone who was testing out of curiosity...
thanks for taking the time to make a very thorough comment! I'll just address a few things because some of them need some more in depth discussion.
1) discussed in another post and at great length in the flank angle mod thread, so I won't add much here, except to ask if you found it changed the outcome of our mod games together? Really I haven't found it to change the ultimate outcome of a battle as much as expected
2) this one is definitely a tentative change, might not be necessary, might be better at 90%, or even something like 95%, just to remove seemingly very unfair and random double drops from totally fresh units. I don't really find unpredictability of double drops to be enjoyable, it just seems pure RNG to me, but that's subjective. Warbands double dropping all the time is what makes them pretty useless in competitive armies, but I wouldn't want them to be made OP with these changes either, so it needs balancing of course. This change is not related to rallying up though. Lancers you will still find commonly double drop other cav because of the cav changes.
4) lots of stuff here, sorry for the essay lol.
Cav pursuits are less slippery and more likely to charge a non-routed target of opportunity while pursuing in the mod. To be clear, this specific change has nothing to do directly with ZoCs (other changes do though). In vanilla, the AI code used for switching targets while pursuing relies on a generic AI_ChanceOfCharging() method that is used across the board for AI charges, and is not tailor made for the specific scenario of a unit, whether player or the AI, deciding to switch from a pursuit to charge a target of opportunity, but it is used for that anyway. This results in some weird behavior I thought, and in some kind of gamey tactics. For example, charging and pursuing light inf with cavalry, not to attack the light inf necessarily, but instead to get through an area ZoC locked by spearmen behind the lights that you would not normally be able to just order the cav through. That tactic seems like a workaround to just slip cav right through the enemy line in a way that doesn't really make a lot of sense. I replaced that code with an altogether new Pursuit_ChanceOfCharging() only used for this one purpose. It could definitely be further tweaked though. Two things I'm considering are increasing the effect of combat advantage and flank threat more than they already are when considering whether to break off pursuit and charge. I don't think that the vanilla tactic though of charging one evasive unit to auto pursue through the ZoC of another really makes sense historically or gameplay wise, and is more an ahistorical artifact of other rules, which veteran players can take advantage of.
Although another take, which is I think Pete's take, is that pursuing impetuous cavalry will make stupid mistakes, and if you as commander choose to have them attack and pursue an agile light infantry unit with spears right behind it, and your cavalry end up on those spearpoints, then that was your mistake.
The other ZoC changes that remove secondary ZoC for non light infantry units that have been charged this turn by cavalry would disincentivize spreading infantry units out in the way you are describing. In part this also motivates bringing a larger cav wing on the flank, rather trying to sneakily slip past one cav unit with a weird pursuit through ZoC game mid line. It's all kind of part of a whole moving in that direction. It is perhaps also just a case of knowing the new rules, ie like you said you would not have charged that light unit there if thinking about the new pursuit rules.
One other concern I think you brought up is if light slingers or archers are used they could shoot you at greater range, and you wouldn't want to charge them head on with your cav if they have spear behind them because then your cav end up on the spears, but again that seem to me like a good and historical result. Match their lights with your lights, don't charge non light cav into lights with spears right behind. Also, the new flanking rules mean that spread out units are
relatively at greater danger of suffering auto drop flanks than units in a line, and tighter and more important command radii also disincentivize spreading out so much, so I don't think on the whole this mod is incentivizing spreading way out like you are describing, in fact it is keeping most things much tighter I find.
You didn't really mention the adjacent units preventing cav pursuit bit much? It didn't really come up in the game too much because Romans didn't have much cav, but I am considering having it only if those adjacent units are also cav, not sure.
9) I think we are talking a lot more than 250 yards here, although I am not sure how wide exactly a tile is supposed to be. You could kind of turn this around though and say something like: In the vanilla game, a unit will run what looks like a few miles away, after being broken and beaten and taking serious losses, be totally out of the sight of their comrades, have no chance of returning to the battle, and for all intents and purposes be routed. But, then they are, psychologically, considered to be back to being part of the army again after rallying to fragmented out of everyone's sight (ie percent routed goes back down when they rally to fragmented), which seems to make less sense than a beaten and broken unit continuing to run away even though they see the battle 250 yards off.
10) I'm up for including lots more complexity in the anarchy algorithm, we'll figure that one out with time. We should discuss which of the listed things in the OP that are commented out that should be made active again.
Yes, it is possible that everyone will like some things and dislike others to an extent that no one ends up wanting the mod because one of the changes is too much for them, which we want to avoid. Hopefully, with testing, we can make an alternative gameplay mod that does not have any feature that is so undesirable or unjustifiable that it alienates people who might otherwise try it.
thanks again for commenting and feedback!
I think there is something we could look at that when cavalry charge head first into units like triarii that they bounce off more, but that is a slightly different issue. I watched the match in question on your new channel and I think we do have to point out a couple of things - your cavalry unit was fairly isolated and its accompanying chariot unit was not really operating in tandem with it. Your cavalry unit also charged an enemy skirmisher unit that had two triarii units in relatively close support. So it was a dangerous situation for your cavalry unit anyway. I appreciate that you were just getting your head around the mod, but I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with the eventual demise of that cavalry unit at the hands of two triarii units. It was a tough fight for 2-3 turns and you may have been able to rescue your cavalry unit if it had not been so isolated.