Slitherine

I think commanders are wounded way too often in combat.
Take a look at the screenshot. By turn-8 eight commanders are wounded, 3 in the last round. OK, so I may be a reckless player
But I've noticed commanders apparently get wounded even if they are one the winning side.
Maybe restrict this (random) function to units that are forced to retreat?

"Commander chance to get wounded based on damage taken, not strength after any combat action. The higher the losses are compared to the pre-combat strength, the higher the chance the commander will get wounded."

I guess keeping your units at full efficiency and strength most of the time is the key to commander-survival.

"sick leave" LOL

Horst wrote:"Commander chance to get wounded based on damage taken, not strength after any combat action. The higher the losses are compared to the pre-combat strength, the higher the chance the commander will get wounded."

I guess keeping your units at full efficiency and strength most of the time is the key to commander-survival.

I see.
Keeping units with commanders at near full efficiency/strength means assigning the guys to a desk-job, then.
You attack, lose some strength/efficiency. Then the enemy counter-attack and the algorithm kicks in. To often in my opinion.
I've lost air commanders even though their units have inflicted the most damage in the encounter.

Nope, losing commanders if the unit suffers heavy losses and is forced to retreat would work better.
Especially since the commanders are out for 9 or more turns.
That may be the better part of a scenario.

Denying the AI/enemy the possibility to counter-attack is the key-strategy to general unit survival. This is basically done by artillery (AA especially too for air combat!) and air strikes before you actually come in contact with your tanks and infantry units. It all depends on the scenario and AI aggression setting of course, but battered/low-efficient AI units tend to be no real threat anymore, as long as they don’t cut off your supply routes.
I’m also usually in a rush on the first visit of a scenario, but often notice that there are typically a few turns left in the end of a scenario where basically nothing else than hunting down some jumpy low-strength units was left to do. You somehow have to predict how many turns you actually need to accomplish certain tasks with a selected number of units. With enough preparation of artillery and air strikes, I could have often saved a lot of unit strength of my front-line troops – and keep the commanders away from sickbay of course.

I should test this sickbay-mechanic more closely sometime.

Edit: Anti-tank units are naturally also very useful to avoid counter-attacks of tanks. Well-armored assault guns like the StuGs make a huge difference in holding lines. You just have to make sure to kill the enemy artillery asap with your air force.

In general, if a commander has an "aura" that affects tiles around them, then they do tend to end up on semi-desk duty for me. Often they're on Heavy Inf that are used as a centre of my line (the AI doesn't want to attack them as the odds are rarely in their favour) and given the last hit on a unit that's being evicted from a city so that they can hold that same city in the future turns.

Or, they're in the backfield making my key artillery more effective. Or, if they've got good defense bonus, they're in my best tank and (again) therefore rarely attacked!

But, it has to be said, I am a rather careful commander, so it's rare that I'm not attacking at an advantage!

My ground commanders are always in the strongest tanks. Infantry is simply too squishy and can easily be seriously damaged by a surprising series of attacks. While self-propelled artillery and anti-tank units become good on defense later, they often simply lack the inf-attack value of tanks to completely annihilate any opposition like tanks. I prefer to maximize general prowess with commanders on the tanks. The more threat they show at the front-line for the calculating AI, the lower the chance it can do anything useful to counter them.

The example at the first post is of a multiplayer game of Erik and me, i have the exact same thing with most of my commanders out of action. It is especially hard to keep the commanders from being wounded in this scenario as we both have almost equal troops.

I did some test-duels with commanders:

1. A total unit loss is an automatic injury of 10 turns

2. AI commanders can be wounded too and won't return to any AI units

3. The commander’s time-out length is always as long as the damage received

4. It seems impossible to get an injury of 2 turns, but maybe I didn’t test it long enough

5. The more damage a commander’s unit received the more likely he becomes injured. A combat result of 1:9 had about a 75% injury-chance, while 1:5 a 20% chance

6. Experience doesn’t really help to prevent injuries against more powerful units, but surely avoids general damage as long as the base defense is not too low to make a difference. A 1:5 result produced about the same 20% injuries with a fully-experienced lower defensive unit like with an inexperienced higher defensive unit

7. A commander is automatically imprisoned by the enemy for 19 turns when he gets wounded in combat while his unit is cut-off from supplies. The unit's efficiency and strength can still be higher than 0 for this event to happen.

Horst wrote: 2. AI commanders can be wounded too and won't return to any AI units

Ahh, that makes sense for a few of the missions where I've been targetting AI commanders but they seemed to "disappear". The objectives still worked (so I assume the game is tracking the unit instead).