Modding P&S to halve missile ranges & move distances

[Philippeatbay]

When you fire up one of John Tiller's tactical games you're quickly confronted with an options screen where you have to decide which ones are in play and which ones aren't.

In practice what happens is that you settle on a group of options that conform to your own personal concept of what's realistic or playable, and try to avoid ever revisiting that screen ever again.

It would be really nice to have a toggle switch to activate half range and half movement distances, even if it slightly unbalanced some of the scenarios.

I haven't played the game enough to decide how I really feel about this issue, but I have never liked being able to transfer cavalry from one flank to the other in the blink of an eye, and I doubt that those muskets could hit very much beyond a hundred yards.

[rbodleyscott]

These Mods are now back up on the FTP. They should work without problems with the current update (v1.0.4 PC / V1.2 iPad).

Let me know if there are any "scripts changed" reports, but we have tested them extensively, and there should not be.

[JocaRamiro]

Great news!

[Philippeatbay]

What would be nice would be to have one of the historical scenarios converted to the half range/ half distance mod for comparison purposes.

The other thing I've been wondering about is exactly what scale is being used in the game? How long is a turn and how far is it from one square horizontally/vertically, and how far diagonally?

[rbodleyscott]

The other thing I've been wondering about is exactly what scale is being used in the game?

1 square = 1/4 maximum musket range.

How long is a turn

Approximately 1/20th of the length of a battle.

how far is it from one square horizontally/vertically?

1/4 maximum musket range

diagonally?

For movement it is 1.5 times the other directions, but for shooting the ranges are rounded up.

-----------------------------------------------------

The point is that this is a top-down simulation, optimised for game play. The overall effect is what matters. Everything is telescoped to give a reasonable length game with plenty of action, and yes ranges are generous relative to the width of the units (which is the only relevant measure as no ground scale is specified).

Bottom up considerations like working out how many ranks could fire their muskets in a minute and how many minutes there are in a turn, really don't add anything useful to a game like this. To model things accurately using bottom up methods, you would then have to work out how many men would be incapacitated by that fire at each range, and then how much effect that many casualties would have on the unit, and so on and so forth. Any minor errors in the low level assumptions tend to be compounded and can lead to silly end results.

With the top down design approach (as used in pike and shot) you work out what the overall historical effect should be, then match the mechanisms to that. The realistic result is what matters, not the details of the nuts and bolts.

[Philippeatbay]

Great answer.

Designing a game so that the output reflects the historical experience is the correct way of going about it, so no quibbles on that point.

What's running through the back of my mind is the question of whether the game work with gruesomely accurate maps, and what would be the appropriate scale in lapsed time and space.

If you eliminate the command and control layer (i.e. the use of officers for something less trivial than chrome and the odd combat bonus or malus) you need to keep the maps pretty focused on the business part of the battlefield so that the armies can't go wandering off into the countryside in an attempt to get on each other's flanks. You can't, after all, simulate the mechanics of how the larger chunks of the army respond or not respond to orders, and the engine probably can't show the reasons you would want to start maneuvering in the first place.

And that's what you've done, and that's also why I'm not so sure adding commanders to the game would be a good idea, even though people like to see them wandering around the battlefield.

So even with gruesomely accurate maps you would still have to keep the scope of things fairly restricted.

Back in the day the original Combat Mission was released with maps that reflected what the terrain in the historical scenarios did to the flow of the game, rather than slavishly copying reality. After about two years of trial and error one group of modders got really good at producing maps that were slavish copies of reality, and another smaller group produced brilliant scenarios that were even more realistic than the first group, but did it by, in part, adjusting actual terrain maps so that they would influence the flow of action to make the point they were trying to get across. Those who produced the semi-historical scenarios were better, often more fun to play, and more reflective of the zeitgeist than the accurate map and oob scenarios. There's an interesting paradox buried in that, and from what I've seen you've opted to follow the semi-historical design approach rather than the slavishly historical. And I'm pretty sure that was the correct decision.

What I'm curious to try, assuming that it's worth attempting, is to remake one of the historical scenarios for comparison purposes according to the admittedly inferior slavish copy method, but to do that I would need to know how many meters or feet are represented by one tile so I can get a handle on how much of my source map I should try to use. Using your approach, the question that one asks oneself is what you have to do to the flow of the game to get the right result if the map is a constant rather than a variable. And I still remember board game designers (myself included) changing the time scale of things until the output worked. What's nice about board game design is you can revamp the game engine on the fly if things aren't working out the way you want them to, and you can't do that with a computer game because writing the program for the game engine is probably the most expensive part of the process.

I think the reason Tiller's games are always a little odd is because they're bottom up designs, and you adjust the game to reflect reality by adding a bit of chrome to a relatively inflexible engine. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

[rbodleyscott]

What I have suggested before - it is in another thread somewhere - is that you match the terrain features in the map to the frontage of the units that occupied them historically and will occupy them in the game. There is no point in accurately drawing a map of a battle in which terrain protected the flanks of the army (e.g. The Wimpfen scenario), if the troops don't fill the gap sufficiently to have their flanks protected.

So, once again, a relativistic approach works better than an mechanically accurate approach. It won't do you any good to have a mechanically accurate map if the standard game units that must occupy it don't also exactly match the historical frontage of the historical units. And as units varied considerably in size and frontage, the only ways to achieve this is to adjust the map to fit the units, or adjust the number of units to fit the map.

I think most people would be happier with seeing (approximately) the historical number of units (bearing in mind that the engine limits you to a maximum of 64 per side, including limbers), rather than a map that somebody claims is 100% accurate - which most people would have no way of checking - but they can check the OOBs.

In short, scale the map to the unit width, not to any arbitrary scale.