Things we learned the hard way.

[rbodleyscott]

48. Reconnaissance before a battle is extremely important. When bringing Heavy Chariots to the field make sure the stream running completely across your front line is not deep.

kilroy

After this week's patch deep streams will not be impassable to heavy chariots.

[lapdog666]

48. Reconnaissance before a battle is extremely important. When bringing Heavy Chariots to the field make sure the stream running completely across your front line is not deep.

kilroy

After this week's patch deep streams will not be impassable to heavy chariots.

other changes are good but i am not sure about this one

was there any real life historical justification or balance?

[rbodleyscott]

48. Reconnaissance before a battle is extremely important. When bringing Heavy Chariots to the field make sure the stream running completely across your front line is not deep.

kilroy

After this week's patch deep streams will not be impassable to heavy chariots.

other changes are good but i am not sure about this one

was there any real life historical justification or balance?

Balance

[nyczar]

49. Beware of the battle line that stands before you with its units on the diagonal. You are being set up. When you attack , if you push a unit back you will push the unit back diagonally and your unit's flank may be expose to a counter attack from a well placed unit in reserve.

[Ludendorf]

50. Armoured lancers and cataphracts both tend to break the truism that cavalry don't beat infantry from the front. Be very careful letting infantry get near armoured lancers; in most situations, the good money is on the lancers. At best, your infantry will pin the cavalry in place long enough for another unit to get the lancers... either that or you'll be pinned just long enough for something else to get your infantry.
50.1: Warbands are a particularly cost-ineffective answer to lancers, though their sheer bulk may keep the lancers at bay for a while. The lancers only have to keep hitting the warband long enough to cause a disruption; after that, it's probably game over for the warband unless the lancers run out of steam, or the warband gets lucky on a lancer cohesion check.

[klayeckles]

45. Elephants laugh at your puny horsemen, no matter which direction they come from. Hit an elephant in the rear, and it will strangle ten men and horses with its tail while your men drink bitter tears. An elephant sees all. It never forgets.

(EDIT: How did I get 400 hours into this game without learning that elephants aren't affected by flank attacks?)

apparently you didn't read the "things i learned the hard way...this was listed in item 30 and 31. elephants are like infantry in regards to targets of flanking. "funny...you posted right around there!

[cromlechi]

Rushing to take your turn without stopping to think about an overall strategy. For example what sequence should I resolve melee?

Thinking a static enemy doesn't know what they are doing so it's simply a matter of marching over and slaughtering them. All of a sudden they act quite rationally and cunningly. (patience)

Allowing archers to get caught up in melee too quickly before they've had chance to use their arrows thus reducing their value.

Thinking you've won and you can relax only to find the tables have now turned.

Giving up too soon, things can change and it's good to always show pride and stubbornness to the end. I lost one game and I only needed 1 % for about 5 or 6 turns.

Trying to destroy pike Phalanx with bows and realising it will take forever.

If your opponent has elephants don't forget to make them priority targets for missile fire, if they hit your ranks chances are chaos will ensue.

Not looking at the draw percentage chance just the win percentage chance if you have a mob army. If you can get several units engaged it's worth the risk even if initially there's only a small win percentage chance, the win percentage will increase as more units engage. Quantity can trump quality in this game but you have to take some losses and bruising before it counts.

I would be interested to hear what thought sequences players go through before a turn, especially the first one.

[nyczar]

I would be interested to hear what thought sequences players go through before a turn, especially the first one.

I think of this as Vision and think it is an area where my game can improve. I put a question out there hoping to get some of our FOG 2 wizards to share their approaches, none so far....

[Ludendorf]

Just my two cents, but I would summarise a basic turn (not army setup; you could have a whole essay on that) as following a SWOT analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.

Strengths: What parts of my line are stronger than the enemy's? Where on the battlefield am I currently winning at an advantage, and how can I ensure I will win there quickly so I can move on?
Weaknesses: What parts of my line might be in trouble? Who needs reinforcements, who is likely to rout, who is kind of out on a limb and might get flanked in the future?
Opportunities: Are there any units in my line that I can use to get an advantage over my opponent? Is there a favourable match up I can force? Is there a unit I can throw in to present a flanking opportunity either now or in the future?
Threats: Is my opponent able to do the same thing to me with any of his units? Are any of his units in a particularly threatening position? If I move one of my units to take advantage of an opportunity, will that in turn create an opportunity my opponent can exploit? Does this mean I shouldn't take an opportunity but instead move to block one of my opponent's threats?

[cromlechi]

Just my two cents, but I would summarise a basic turn (not army setup; you could have a whole essay on that) as following a SWOT analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.

Strengths: What parts of my line are stronger than the enemy's? Where on the battlefield am I currently winning at an advantage, and how can I ensure I will win there quickly so I can move on?
Weaknesses: What parts of my line might be in trouble? Who needs reinforcements, who is likely to rout, who is kind of out on a limb and might get flanked in the future?
Opportunities: Are there any units in my line that I can use to get an advantage over my opponent? Is there a favourable match up I can force? Is there a unit I can throw in to present a flanking opportunity either now or in the future?
Threats: Is my opponent able to do the same thing to me with any of his units? Are any of his units in a particularly threatening position? If I move one of my units to take advantage of an opportunity, will that in turn create an opportunity my opponent can exploit? Does this mean I shouldn't take an opportunity but instead move to block one of my opponent's threats?

I like that idea. Will definitely try that, I do enough SWOT analysis in work so should have thought of it before!

[SimonLancaster]

The only thing about SWOT is that it seems a little reactive to me. Like you are making lots of decisions in the moment. I like to have a general plan with some adaptions as needed which is where the flexibility comes in..

[Ludendorf]

The only thing about SWOT is that it seems a little reactive to me. Like you are making lots of decisions in the moment. I like to have a general plan with some adaptions as needed which is where the flexibility comes in..

Oh, absolutely. You usually need a general plan for how your army is going to win the battle. SWOT tends to come in more when the battle is already underway and you need to decide how to go about best fulfilling/adapting that strategy. It's fine to have a plan, but if your enemy suddenly turns up in the woods with four brigades of cataphracts and a war elephant named Alfred, you may find you need to reconsider things.

[nyczar]

Just my two cents, but I would summarise a basic turn (not army setup; you could have a whole essay on that) as following a SWOT analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.

Strengths: What parts of my line are stronger than the enemy's? Where on the battlefield am I currently winning at an advantage, and how can I ensure I will win there quickly so I can move on?
Weaknesses: What parts of my line might be in trouble? Who needs reinforcements, who is likely to rout, who is kind of out on a limb and might get flanked in the future?
Opportunities: Are there any units in my line that I can use to get an advantage over my opponent? Is there a favourable match up I can force? Is there a unit I can throw in to present a flanking opportunity either now or in the future?
Threats: Is my opponent able to do the same thing to me with any of his units? Are any of his units in a particularly threatening position? If I move one of my units to take advantage of an opportunity, will that in turn create an opportunity my opponent can exploit? Does this mean I shouldn't take an opportunity but instead move to block one of my opponent's threats?

Thanks Lundedorf,

I am having one of those "duh of course moments." As has been expressed, I had never thought to apply a business framework to help with FOG II decision making. In my professional and even personal life I have drawn on my military history reading to give examples and metaphor that assist me in framing arguments and telling story. Of course I could use the Business part of my life in FOG as well. I certainly think the same framework may be applied at the start of a battle. Thats is indeed where i was coming from with my comment on vision and while there will be many ways to define the thinking of vision, The SWOT framework I think can work well. I might give applying the framework to what I am craving to understand better a go and put it out there for comment and enhancement; being concrete always seems to work best to get other to do the same. There are certainly decision pathways I Struggle with. One most notable is is when I know something about the oppornet, I waffle between deciding to play the game I want or trying to stop him from playing the game he wants. I think that considering observed tendencies is important, but I wonder where that ranks for others as a point of consideration. Definitely one of the concrete parts of pregame vision I am trying to better understand and define.

[Ludendorf]

I think it's best I finish by saying that I don't really do a formal 'SWOT' each turn. It's more my way of crystallising my general way of thinking as I process my turn. So, I'm not mentally doing 'SWOT', but I am weighing up the general state of my line, getting an idea of where I locally have an advantage overall vs where I locally have a disadvantage, which is the Strengths/Weaknesses part of the 'analysis'. I then start looking more locally at what unit could move where, what unit could engage, ZOC or start to threaten what, and the potential moves of enemy units. I need to decide what options out of my potential moves are my best chances for destroying enemy units and ultimately winning the battle, as well as what potential moves by my opponent are most dangerous and need to be stopped or delayed as swiftly and as surely as possible. That is the 'Opportunities/Threats' side of the analysis.

[nyczar]

What, no quadrant mapping of every discernible turn element? No turn move quant analysis and statistical algorithm based on some weighing scale? .

I never assumed you were speaking about a literal process done every turn. What I took was that you were framing your thinking, which I appreciate as succinct framing I find is generally the most difficult thing to do.

[Yaitz331]

Don't assume that, just because you have 6% losses and the other guy has 38% losses and none of your main infantry units have even been engaged yet, you've won. ESPECIALLY not when fighting the Romans.

[sIg3b]

40. Rough ground looks a lot like grass.

Any chance you could post some screen shots of where this is a problem as I've remade all the rough terrain a few times to add more rock and generally increase the visual differences without it looking entirely crap or impassable. I'm starting to wonder if I'm just not getting the nature of the confusion.

As stated before, maybe it is because the terrain textures merge together at the edges, so there is some rough ground texture on Open Terrain squares adjacent to rough ground. This is necessary because otherwise it would look awful.

Personally, I think the Rough Ground textures themselves are as clear as day, the nature of the terrain on a particular square only becomes less clear because of the merging issue. This issue would not be solved even if the rough ground texture was pulsating neon pink.

Could this be solved by always giving preference to Open Terrain? So there would be some Open Terrain in Rough, but no Rough in Open Terrain; in other words, you could be sure the tiniest spot of Rough means Rough.

Similar with Marsh etc.: No overflow of the more difficult terrain into the more easy, always the easier terrain prevailing at the edges.

[rbodleyscott]

Could this be solved by always giving preference to Open Terrain? So there would be some Open Terrain in Rough, but no Rough in Open Terrain; in other words, you could be sure the tiniest spot of Rough means Rough.

Similar with Marsh etc.: No overflow of the more difficult terrain into the more easy, always the easier terrain prevailing at the edges.

Noted.

[sIg3b]

I. Muddling through with a "Wait and See" approach may work against the AI, but will not work against Ludendorf.

[SpeedyCM]

1.b. - Not much works against Ludendorf.