Evading Enemy Armies

[Ludendorf]

This... might not be a good idea, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway. It was often possible for even quite large armies to avoid each other even when in roughly the same geographical location. A skilled general with a fast or experienced army (or maybe a trait like 'raider' or 'Fabian Strategist') might be able to opt to try to avoid enemy armies that turn. If forced into battle while attempting this, the evading general would logically be at a disadvantage, but if successful, fast raiding parties or smaller armies might be able to avoid much larger armies or armies attacking them on plains/other unfavourable defensive terrain.

It would add to the war of manoeuvre and make it harder for players to just concentrate all of their forces into one big stack and march it at the enemy. Strategies like Vercingetorix's famous harassment of Caesar's supply lines or Hannibal's skilful evasion of the Roman trap during Fabius's first dictatorship would become much more viable; armies in bad situations stealing out under cover of darkness to live another day. Armies with lots of skirmishers and cavalry are an example; those guys aren't just going to stand and fight against overwhelming numbers, even if the enemy is in the same province as them.

On the other hand, this could be very frustrating for some players. It would also make adequate skirmisher cover even more important as you might need skirmishers to hunt down and weed out other armies of raiding skirmishers.

[rbodleyscott]

On the other hand, this could be very frustrating for some players.

That is the problem, a lot of players don't like that sort of thing. So, while it may be realistic, it might be a bad move to add it to the game.

[Nijis]

I think ancients wargaming hugely undermodels the importance of evasion, skirmishing, ambushing foragers, etc, and I would love to see it featured more heavily in the game. Not just Fabius and Vercingetorix but also Jugurtha, Maurice's Strategikon, du Guesclin, and pretty much every commander of an overmatched hill tribe - arguably this is a more predominant form of combat than field battle.

I don't think that commanders would need a special trait - major battles were usually fought by mutual consent, and that's why really lop-sided battles were rare.

That said, I think it would require a thorough rebalancing of the battle system, and may be better left for another time.

Here's how I would do it...

Units and commanders aren't rated for attack/defense so much as battle/skirmish. There were many armies and leaders in history who did brilliantly as guerrillas but were smashed when they massed for open battle.

Any army will, at the moment of battle, select a "shadow/evade/skirmish" posture or a "offer battle" posture. This can be randomly determined unless one or the other player has chosen an override tag. If an army cannot retreat, it will always give battle.

If one army has chosen skirmish, it will usually be a skirmish - unless the other player gets very lucky with a die roll and traps it. However, an army that chooses skirmish is much more likely to retreat, and cannot assault or besiege any fortifications that turn.

I say "a skirmish" but in practice this represents a long string of ambushes, clashes between patrols, hit-and-run raids on camps and marching columns, etc.

It would look just like a battle and yield the same kinds of results - damaged units and destroyed units, and a loser who must retreat. However, combat factors, frontage, support and flanking would all be redone so that smaller armies composed of lighter troops of higher experience would perform much better in skirmishing than they would in open battle. However, losing a skirmish would be much less devastating than losing a field battle.

Paired with a more punishing logistical system, I think this would make wars in the tribal areas of the map much more realistic, and give a different feel to playing a Spanish or Thracian or Gaulish or Caucasus confederation. It would make playing a little tribe fighting a big empire more interesting. But it would be a real overhaul that's perhaps better left for a sequel or something.

[Hendricus]

Retreat before combat, sounds good to me.

[Lysimachos]

I think ancients wargaming hugely undermodels the importance of evasion, skirmishing, ambushing foragers, etc, and I would love to see it featured more heavily in the game. Not just Fabius and Vercingetorix but also Jugurtha, Maurice's Strategikon, du Guesclin, and pretty much every commander of an overmatched hill tribe - arguably this is a more predominant form of combat than field battle.

I don't think that commanders would need a special trait - major battles were usually fought by mutual consent, and that's why really lop-sided battles were rare.

That said, I think it would require a thorough rebalancing of the battle system, and may be better left for another time.

Here's how I would do it...

Units and commanders aren't rated for attack/defense so much as battle/skirmish. There were many armies and leaders in history who did brilliantly as guerrillas but were smashed when they massed for open battle.

Any army will, at the moment of battle, select a "shadow/evade/skirmish" posture or a "offer battle" posture. This can be randomly determined unless one or the other player has chosen an override tag. If an army cannot retreat, it will always give battle.

If one army has chosen skirmish, it will usually be a skirmish - unless the other player gets very lucky with a die roll and traps it. However, an army that chooses skirmish is much more likely to retreat, and cannot assault or besiege any fortifications that turn.

I say "a skirmish" but in practice this represents a long string of ambushes, clashes between patrols, hit-and-run raids on camps and marching columns, etc.

It would look just like a battle and yield the same kinds of results - damaged units and destroyed units, and a loser who must retreat. However, combat factors, frontage, support and flanking would all be redone so that smaller armies composed of lighter troops of higher experience would perform much better in skirmishing than they would in open battle. However, losing a skirmish would be much less devastating than losing a field battle.

Paired with a more punishing logistical system, I think this would make wars in the tribal areas of the map much more realistic, and give a different feel to playing a Spanish or Thracian or Gaulish or Caucasus confederation. It would make playing a little tribe fighting a big empire more interesting. But it would be a real overhaul that's perhaps better left for a sequel or something.

This would be really great! +1

[desertedfox]

Niijis's post. +1

[ctimmerman]

The discussion sort of loses sight of the time scale for FoGE. We are talking about a year, not necessarily a single battle. Although I can see some of the design appeal linking FoGE to FoG2 or watching the battle in FoGE this might not have been such a good idea ooverall because of this time scale problem. I can think of the year represented by a FoGE turn has possibly representing lots of things such as the attacking army divides up to cover the region, there might really be multiple battles (of maybe different elements of the attacker and defender armies) summarized by the single battle shown, etc. So short term evasion isn't really appropriate for the year at a time turns. But, overall defender (or attacker) retreat before combat (maybe with small losses) to a neighboring friendly region should be considered if the game engine calculates an extremely one sided result.
One more thing should be considered. I just had a battle with restricted frontage (mountains) with my army over twice as powerful as the defender. The battle took 3 rounds of stalemate and eliminated the defender on the 4th round (all in the same turn). Because of the restricted frontage, retreat before combat might not have been appropriate as the defender might have wanted to wear down the attacker. But not to the point of eliminating the defender (my attacking army lost some strength but not that much). Retreat to a friendly neighbor region after a couple of stalemate/draw battle results would have been more appropriate.
One note - I stress retreat to a friendly region (that I suppose could include allied). But I would not include that if the owner's country is otherwise eliminated. The "whack a mole" problem of the early CK2 versions should be avoided.

[rbodleyscott]

The problem with allowing armies to retreat when outmatched is that players then complain that the campaign is like “whack-a-mole” because it becomes almost impossible to pin the enemy down and finish them off.

There does not seem to be a solution that will please everybody.

One possibility is to allow seriously outmatched armies to retreat, but have a high chance of being caught.

It wasn’t that easy to disengage from the enemy without fighting, except by mutual tacit consent. On several occasions even Hannibal only achieved it by using stratagems to deceive the enemy enough to give him time to withdraw. E.g. the torches tied to cow horns stratagem.

[Nijis]

The discussion sort of loses sight of the time scale for FoGE. We are talking about a year, not necessarily a single battle.

I'd argue that a turn in FoG:E represents maybe a month's worth of campaigning. The game does not however model demobilizing for the winter, remobilizing, command and control delays, the rivers unexpectedly in flood, or other things that slow down the pace of campaigns. You call a month's worth of campaigning a year, and it works out in terms of historical pace.

It wasn’t that easy to disengage from the enemy without fighting, except my mutual tacit consent.

This isn't relevant to the playability issue, but but I question whether this is true on an operational scale - when armies are at least a day's march apart, a distance that's pretty easy to maintain. There are many many cases of one army "shadowing" another for very long periods of time - staying close, but just out of range. Many of the chevauchees in the Hundred Years War, had either a small English army trying to stay out of range of a bigger French force (and sometimes failing and winning the battle anyway), or a French force following the English, avoiding set-piece battles where the archers could do their thing but doing well in the skirmishes. The Romans also shadowed Hannibal's army without offering battle for years after Cannae. Byzantine doctrine was built on the idea that one army could shadow the other for extended periods of time.

You didn't need a genius general to pull this off - any general was fine, so long as they could shrug off political pressure from glory-hungry vassals or Senators angry that their estates were being burned. Hannibal's famous escapade with the cattle was only necessary because Fabius had blocked the passes out of Campania. In game terms, this would be as though Fabius had rolled a very high leadership modified die roll to trap Hannibal, but Hannibal rolled even higher. I would argue that the default outcome, whether you're pitting genius vs genius or mediocre vs mediocre, is that no battle happens unless both sides have a good reason to fight - a political reason, usually, but also sometimes logistics.

I don't think you could have a doctrine based on shadowing if there was a good chance that the strong army would catch the weak army and eat it for breakfast. And yet a fair number of pre-modern states - Fabius-era Romans, du Guesclin-era French, Byzantines throughout much of the 5th to 10th centuries - did have such a doctrine. It was a question of political discipline, not a commander's skill, I would argue.

[Ludendorf]

It's a tricky one, isn't it? Nijis's post is fantastic, but I have to acknowledge the developer's difficulties here. It is almost impossible to come up with a system and particularly a timescale which perfectly matches ancient era warfare on this scale. For example, you could probably model Caesar's campaigns in Gaul. It isn't entirely implausible with a large enough army to conquer the whole of central and northern Gaul in ten years; you're going to take a heck of a decadence whack doing it, but you could pull it off with enough of a military advantage. Caesar's Civil War, on the other hand, could never happen the way it did in real life. There's simply no way someone playing Caesar could crush the Senatorial faction within the four years it happened historically. It's not even possible to get from the various points Caesar got to during that campaign in time facing no opposition and with the land already under your faction's control. (Though is it just me, or is it possible to move faster in your own territory than it is through the enemy's?)

You could possibly develop a rapid redeploy system where a faction can quickly move from one side of the empire to the next if good ports/proper infrastructure is in place. You wouldn't be able to do it through provinces near an enemy army, and you could even model in an interception mechanic if an enemy army manages to get onto the route the redeploying army is marching down. The later Total Wars also have a Forced Marching mechanic where the army moves at its maximum speed and neglects proper scouting and recovery periods. This naturally comes at a price if the army is attacked while in this stance.

I think 'whack a mole' could be avoided if the chance of being caught and the penalty for doing so was high enough. Skirmisher-only armies already struggle against garrisons of any significant size, and you really should be building walls around your settlements at the first opportunity you get. Even a palisade will fend off a small band of raiders. As for larger armies, the evasion chance gives a smaller army engaging the Fabian strategy one last chance to avoid destruction. I can see how this could be frustrating from some players' perspectives, but on the other hand, an indirect strategy almost seems to be necessary for a faction like the Antigonids, who given the speed at which the Seleucids develop a massive army, almost have to resort to this strategy if they can't knock the Seleucid empire out of the war quickly.

(This in itself might be an issue; the Seleucid long term war capacity is borderline insane. I've seen 800 combat power and stable decadence at a point where the Romans are barely getting out of Italy.)