I do like this idea that, in a very general, kind of abstract way, each battle should tell a story. It's nice to think of groups of units as a whole, like the main battle line, the weaker flank that is held back in echelon, the reserve, the major cavalry flank etc...and how the battle was determined by some decisive multi-unit maneuver, or by a whole wing holding out heroically until the cavalry arrived etc...stockwellpete wrote: ↑Tue May 12, 2020 5:08 pm One thought I have is - and anyone playing the game can try this - I think you should be able to describe to a third party what a particular FOG battle was like. What its main features were. In a few sentences. If you cannot do this most of the time then I think there is an issue to do with the battles being messy and atomised with units ending up all over the place.
Sometimes FOG battles do that, but sometimes it just feels more like a series of isolated XvX skirmishes, where X is 1-4 units, all happening kind of separated from one another, and the winner is just whoever ran up the numbers the best. That might be an artifact of better players min-maxing all over the battle and taking advantage of weird gameplay anomalies that you find in any video game. For example, the weird grid dance a lot of better players know how to do to open up 'flanks' mid line, the stopping fallbacks or forcing turn arounds with light cav units to get odd flanks in, the ZoC trapping of expensive cav with cheap non light infantry, etc...In a sense, battles between more amateur players who don't know about this stuff are more interesting than those between veterans who know how to game everything, but I guess no video game can ever solve that problem.
You could never get rid of all such anomalies, but it's worth trying to mitigate them of course. I guess what I'm saying here is, what modifications can be made that change the player's incentives in such a way that they are motivated to maximize their army's battlefield potency by following historical, or at least pretty cohesive, tactics, rather than scattering all over in an attempt to min max based on weird gameplay anomalies.