Slitherine

I'm really getting into this game now but I am finding it quite difficult to understand just exactly what the various units are capable of doing in various circumstances on the battlefield. For example, in a solo game I played as the Imperial Spanish (for the first time) and I tried to stop the enormous Swiss and German keils that were lumbering towards me with their colunna - but they were all obliterated after briefly holding them for a couple of turns. I also had a massed arquebusier unit on rough ground that was attacked head on by a keil and that did manage to hold its ground for ages before finally succumbing to a flank attack. Presumably the way to defeat the keils is to weaken them with missile fire before engaging them in melee?

What I really feel I need is a feature that might be called "The Training Ground" whereby a player could set up a small-scale scenario and try out the various troop types against each other to see what they can do. I used to do this with FOG PC - I would design a very small scenario (sometimes with only 10 or so units) and test certain things out e.g. shooting my archers at armoured knights, or protected spears, to see what the average casualty rate might be.

At the moment it would be possible for a player to do this if they have mastered the scenario editor, but it might be quite good to have it as a general feature in these sort of historical wargames.

Any thoughts?

It's a good idea, though I think you would pretty much end up with "editor lite" to get all the necessary functionality, which would probably have pretty much the same flow as the current editor but with some buttons hidden.

Cheers

Pip

The editor is all you need right?

In learning what works or not, just turn on the detailed tool tips to see what affects what. In no time you will get familiar with the POA's.

jomni wrote:The editor is all you need right?

In learning what works or not, just turn on the detailed tool tips to see what affects what. In no time you will get familiar with the POA's.

Except that I think a lot of people found the editor quite difficult to use, that's what they were saying on the forum anyway. I have only started playing so maybe the editor is easier to use now?

In any case, I am really thinking along the lines of something that might be useful to new players to help them learn the game at the outset a bit more easily (and I do realise that people learn in different ways from each other). I don't think many new players would want to grapple with an editor just after buying a game. So "Training Ground" would appear in the main menu and would, as pip has suggested, offer a very basic editor, with terrain, the armies could just be "red" and "blue", and it would have all the troop types available (they would need to be editable). So within the space of 5-10 minutes a player could set up a simple scenario and start to practice.

Yes, I use the detailed tool tips when I am playing. It helps but it doesn't tell me things like -" if I attack a Swiss keil with a Spanish colunna unit and some rodeleros how long will they last and how many casualties will they inflict before they are routed." Or how many turns will massed arquebusiers in cover be able to hold off gendarmes in melee and what will be the relative number of casualties. Some players aren't bothered too much by this sort of detail, but some of us like to understand these things as it can affect how we set up our armies and how we try and play the game.

First of all i read the game manual, then i read this http://steamcommunity.com/app/377520/di ... 714356288/

then i did make a couple of useful steam guides.

in the end if you want to test something, you can create a multiplayer skirmish with password and accept your own challenge ie play your skirmish hot seat

MaxDamage wrote: in the end if you want to test something, you can create a multiplayer skirmish with password and accept your own challenge ie play your skirmish hot seat

Ok, I never thought of that. Thanks.

Sorry, but I have just spent an hour with the editor and it is not straight forward. Certainly not for someone new to the game and who has never created anything like this before. I created a very small scenario (no extra terrain) with 2 units v 2 units and saved it. It took me a while to find it again so I could play it. Then I decided I wanted to amend it and I changed one sides' units and did an overwrite. However, when I try to play the new version it just offers me the version I thought I had overwritten. So can I delete the original? How would I do that?

stockwellpete wrote: So can I delete the original? How would I do that?

Presumably you cannot do it in-game? I have deleted it manually now from the "My Games" folder in "My Documents".

stockwellpete wrote:

stockwellpete wrote: So can I delete the original? How would I do that?

Presumably you cannot do it in-game? I have deleted it manually now from the "My Games" folder in "My Documents".

That is correct. It has not been included in the editor to stop people deleting scenarios by mistake.

stockwellpete wrote:

jomni wrote:The editor is all you need right?

In learning what works or not, just turn on the detailed tool tips to see what affects what. In no time you will get familiar with the POA's.

Except that I think a lot of people found the editor quite difficult to use, that's what they were saying on the forum anyway. I have only started playing so maybe the editor is easier to use now?

In any case, I am really thinking along the lines of something that might be useful to new players to help them learn the game at the outset a bit more easily (and I do realise that people learn in different ways from each other). I don't think many new players would want to grapple with an editor just after buying a game. So "Training Ground" would appear in the main menu and would, as pip has suggested, offer a very basic editor, with terrain, the armies could just be "red" and "blue", and it would have all the troop types available (they would need to be editable). So within the space of 5-10 minutes a player could set up a simple scenario and start to practice.

Yes, I use the detailed tool tips when I am playing. It helps but it doesn't tell me things like -" if I attack a Swiss keil with a Spanish colunna unit and some rodeleros how long will they last and how many casualties will they inflict before they are routed." Or how many turns will massed arquebusiers in cover be able to hold off gendarmes in melee and what will be the relative number of casualties. Some players aren't bothered too much by this sort of detail, but some of us like to understand these things as it can affect how we set up our armies and how we try and play the game.

This is not ideal but you can also edit the army "lists" to include exactly the troops you want to test. That way you can simply use the skirmish mode to load up essentially premade armies and not have to worry about using the editor

(you of course would want to make a "clone campaign x" folder, before editing any of the text files)

the army.text files is/are the ones you want to alter and it lives (for ECW skirmishes), here: \Slitherine\Pike and Shot Campaigns\Campaigns\7ECWCampaign


a quick example of what it looks like below:
As you can see, it would be real easy to just delete units for your testing or just make the min's and max's 0, 1, 2 or whatever #you want, add new units

Hope this is of some help, cheers!


// 1642
[ECW_EDGEHILL_ROYALIST]
SIDE ALLIES
SIDEID 12
NAME IDS_ARMY_ECW_EDGEHILL_ROYALIST
YEARS 42 42
SKIN ECW_Royalist

UNIT_0 Royalist_Edgehill_PikeA
// fixed quantity for 2000 point army
MIN_0 3
// total (fixed + selection) quantity for 2000 point army
MAX_0 8

UNIT_1 Royalist_Edgehill_PikeB
MIN_1 3
MAX_1 8

UNIT_2 Royalist_Edgehill_Musket
MIN_2 5
MAX_2 16

UNIT_3 Cavaliers
MIN_3 9
MAX_3 30

Thanks for that, TGM but it is a bit too complicated for me. If I start messing about with files I am bound to corrupt my game.

In any case, my idea for a "Training Ground" option is primarily to help newer players learn the game. I am playing multi-player now but every second game I get slaughtered and sometimes I am not really sure why. Is it because some armies are stronger than others? Or am I picking the wrong troop combinations? Or am I not reading the terrain correctly? For example, there doesn't seem to be any way for ECW Parliamentarian horse to stop the Royalist cavalry, whichever ECW armies you are using - so is the only way to counteract them is to pick more pike units instead of horse? If it is then this is problematic because you end up picking a very unhistorical army, which I am disinclined to do. So I need a training ground option to try various permutations out to see if I can develop some sort of plan to cope with Royalist cavalry.

stockwellpete wrote:So I need a training ground option to try various permutations out to see if I can develop some sort of plan to cope with Royalist cavalry.

You can use SP skirmish mode as a training ground option. Especially for ECW where the army lists are not too complex, so you will pretty much always get the combos you want to test.

Try fighting the Royalist cavalry in enclosed areas where they their impact bonus.

rbodleyscott wrote: You can use SP skirmish mode as a training ground option. Especially for ECW where the army lists are not too complex, so you will pretty much always get the combos you want to test.

Yes, to a point and I do that already. But, for example, if I want to look specifically at a particular aspect of cavalry tactics, I cannot do that without fighting a complete battle.

Try fighting the Royalist cavalry in enclosed areas where they lose their impact bonus.

Yes, I have tried that - and also I have tried fighting on rough ground too. Enclosed areas (if they are present) can really help, rough ground seems to give a Royalist win albeit more slowly than open ground. But on an open battlefield where the Royalist side has 5-6 veteran horse then that seems to be game over before you have even started.

stockwellpete wrote:

Try fighting the Royalist cavalry in enclosed areas where they lose their impact bonus.

Yes, I have tried that - and also I have tried fighting on rough ground too. Enclosed areas (if they are present) can really help, rough ground seems to give a Royalist win albeit more slowly than open ground. But on an open battlefield where the Royalist side has 5-6 veteran horse then that seems to be game over before you have even started.

Hide your cavalry behind your infantry. Use raw pike and shot to hold off the Royalist cavalry wings. Use your cavalry to charge disrupted Royalist infantry.

rbodleyscott wrote:Hide your cavalry behind your infantry. Use raw pike and shot to hold off the Royalist cavalry wings. Use your cavalry to charge disrupted Royalist infantry.

OK, that makes sense in game terms, but is it how the Parliamentarian army actually fought? I don't actually know myself as I am just beginning to read up on the period. That sort of historical accuracy is important for me although I appreciate not all players are so bothered about it.

At Edgehill (Kineton) 1642 where the battle seems to have been a draw, I understand the reason the Royalists didn't win outright was largely because Rupert and his cavalry pursued the Parliamentarian horse off the battlefield and came back too late to decisively force a victory. So from that it seems that the Parliamentary horse did try and face the Royalist horse and did not hide among the infantry. I am not sure about the other major battles yet as I haven't got that far (reading Trevor Royle's history of the ECW). So maybe the Parliamentarian horse melee rating is a bit too low? I notice that a quite common result on impact is for Parliamentarian horse to "fragment" from "steady". Maybe that is too much given that the subsequent "rout" result could cause further cohesion drops to adjacent Parliamentarian units? Surely the Parliamentarian horse were not as completely hopeless as this? Even the New Model Army suffers this sort of debacle quite regularly (although it might just be that I am crap).

Another provisional observations at this stage - in terms of army selection it is possible now for a player to use their army points to buy 5-6 veteran horse units to massively enhance their cavalry arm and this strikes me as questionable inasmuch as I am understanding "veteran" as a relative term and it seems strange to be facing an army with, say, 6 veteran horse and 5 ordinary horse. Surely there should be a proportional ratio between the number of veterans and ordinary? So, perhaps, for every veteran horse unit you have to have two ordinary horse units?

stockwellpete wrote:

rbodleyscott wrote:Hide your cavalry behind your infantry. Use raw pike and shot to hold off the Royalist cavalry wings. Use your cavalry to charge disrupted Royalist infantry.

OK, that makes sense in game terms, but is it how the Parliamentarian army actually fought?

No, but they pretty much always lost the cavalry fight until they re-organised their cavalry tactics. This is reflected by their rating - and no, we have not overdone it.

So if you want to win with an early Parliamentarian army, you have to use unhistorical tactics. And if you want to use historical tactics you have to resign yourself to your cavalry losing, as they did historically.

Surely there should be a proportional ratio between the number of veterans and ordinary? So, perhaps, for every veteran horse unit you have to have two ordinary horse units?

That would rather depend on the region - if the Eastern Association horse were present, there would be a higher proportion of veteran (or high quality) horse.

Of course, in a civil war lasting for several years there would be a lot of veteran units after the first year.

In any case, the army list system does not permit restrictions on one troop type to be linked to another. If you want to restrict yourself to what you deem historical, please do so. The AI will tend to pick a historically proportioned army anyway, as it makes no attempt to "optimise" its forces.

OK, thanks for that, Richard.