Resilience of armies
One question has come up tangentially in the scoring topic, but I want to raise it more generally, so here's a new topic for that purpose.
Armies were extremely resilient in the 1700s. You could fight them, but they could pretty much run away and reform 30 miles closer to home. It was all but impossible to get a really decisive battle.
In the early 1800s, decisive battles were more common, but that may have been because Napoleon was a genius more than because warfare had really changed very much.
In the 1790s, truly decisive battles were fairly rare, though armies were at least somewhat less resilient than they had been in the earlier part of the 1700s.
In NWOL-2, most battles are fairly decisive, in that it is rare for an army to take a serious battlefield pounding, and come back and beat their opponents in the next battle.
I wonder if we should do things to make armies more resilient, to reduce the extent to which battles are decisive, or perhaps, make it harder to get a really decisive result. Some possibilities:
1) Reduce the odds of shattering and increase the odds of routing, so that units fleeing lost battles are more likely to retain their coherence.
2) Reduce the fatigue penalties for retreating and routing so that armies which lose battles are not at so much of a disadvantage on the following turns.
3) Allow shattered units to come back faster and with greater strength, and perhaps under somewhat easier conditions. (I don't know what fraction of shattered units never reform, but I suspect it's too high.)
4) Shorten the time required to build new units, so that armies can replace losses more rapidly. (This only works when fighting at home, though nations which maintained garrisons could send the garrisons forward and have the new units rebuild the garrisons. That's what nations really did.)
Any thoughts?
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- koolguy66
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I think the routing instead
I think the routing instead of shattering would be the best way to retain the cohesion of units.
Don C.
Reply to Resilience
I find a unit that wants to survive can evade successfully. The decisive results were the result of Last Ditch posture.
1) If set to Skirmish or Evade a unit can easily avoid destruction. I think the high loss rate was due to the posture of the units - last ditch defensive posture.
2) It is difficult to track down routed units. I believe a unit can move Strategically up to a fatigue of 18. It is their fighting capability that ends earlier, perhaps too early.
3) No - I think this is about right - perhaps come back with slightly greater strength.
4) The MI should take 2 turns to build. LC, MC, HC, LA, AQ, should perhaps take less time. I would not adjust ships.
John Vanvark
Resilience - shatter specs
The % of units that recover from shatter staus is indeed very low. I suspect less than 35%.
Think the current rate of Rout and Shatter is about right. The issue in Napoleonics is about the quality of the officer/NCO corps to maintain battlefield durability. Due to limitations on voice & visual commands due to noise & the smoke from black powder -- the current mix for rout & shatter feels about right. However, if you admit that NWOL war turns representation a period of time greater than a day -- units should be re-forming quicker. Soldiers return to their units because they want to eat & the security from Lancers & other things that can get them in the night. The current duration of shatter staus means that the command structure is very ineffective -- even for units with higher Experience levels. Not sure that is the right thing
recovering from shatter
Let me ask this question, then. One reason we initially made it hard for a unit to recover from shattering is because we were worried that units might shatter, run into the enemy's rear area, then rematerialize there, inappropriately. However, my sense from NWOL-2 is that, at least in the majority of cases, shattering units were placed to their own rear reasonably accurately. Does that sound about right?
If enemy units do shatter in your rear, you can always use rear-area units to track them down and stop them from reforming, so it's not a crisis if a few units end up in odd places. The important thing is that it not happen too often.
In particular, I'm thinking that units that don't return from shattering, don't return because they lack supply or command. We could remove that requirement from the unshattering rules. Or, we could say you recover in 1-2 turns if you have S/C and 3-4 turns if you don't. Something like that.
I am a wizard. I make things using magic. SJS
Recover from Shatter
Steve posted:
Or, we could say you recover in 1-2 turns if you have S/C and 3-4 turns if you don't. Something like that.
Of all the suggestions posted, this seems the most viable option....
another option: Steve has it in the rules but never coded or active - that shattering or routing units may force other units to retreat, rout...
We can have it that in any tac phase that an Army has received % losses of a certain portion of the the Supply phase strength in a Strat. square has a possibility of involuntary retreat... % something like Shatter, retreat, route... If triggered all units in square will retreat or attempt to retreat as per shattered rule... units will try to retreat in the same general direction or to same square except those who have to go in another direction due to present retreat rules.
In this time armies suddenly, unexpectedly fled the field without orders. This is the survival extinct as men did not have the same enthusiasm to follow orders as did officers if they felt they would lose the battle. This tendency to save oneself was all too real and is all too absent from our simulation. Such 'involuntary' actions can make armies more resilient and also reduce the number of 'marathon' battles we have had for certain areas.
Robert
A couple points
I have a couple thoughts on this subject.
I will caveat this that it likely in the hard to code, but maybe this will spark an idea for Steve that is workable.
The smallest unit in the games is the brigade. In this time period that level of unit was not a permanent structure, rather it was a task organization of individual battalions or regiments. So soldiers would generally not think of themselves as members of a brigade, but rather one of the smaller units that made up the brigade. Thus they can easily be moved around from brigade to brigade as the mission dictates. NWOL treats all soldiers as being fiercely loyal to their brigade and they will only fight for it. If a brigade is shattered it would most likely be broken up and the surviving troops used to reinforce other brigades, rather than trying to get the band back together. This would happen a lot faster than the few weeks it takes to reform the shattered unit. But again I'm not sure the best way to simulate this in the current system.
The other problem, which I also don't have a solution for (i'm really helpful today aren't I?) is that the nature of NWOL combat doesn't favor armies keeping troops in reserve. One of the reason armies survived is that there were often fresh troops kept in reserve that could cover the retreat of the defeated army. However, the real purpose of the reserves (since you don't generally assume you are going to lose) is to have a fresh force that can respond as needed during the course of the battle. Since NWOL generals don't have the luxury to be able to react to enemy moves the utility of reserves is greatly diminished. Therefore generals tend to commit all the forces they have available on TP1, since that is the only phase that they really have complete control over. Thus if an army gets defeated, literally the whole army is defeated. I don't know how to fix this either.
-Nick
-Nick
points
Nick's right about the reserves. One thing that would help, a little, is if defensive tactics worked better. Then it would more often make sense to, at least, defend for TP1 and TP2 and attack later in the turn.
I will say that few if any NWOL players have ever tried keeping a serious strategic (not tactical) reserve and so we don't know that much about how effective such a strategy would be. I have my opinions but they're only my guesses at this point.
In general, though, to maintain a war-wide time scale (even the relatively short wars we've been seeing, and I don't think anyone really ever wants to see an NWOL run until 1815) we have to resolve battles in one turn, and that means no opportunity for mid-battle corrections. So the general problem of toss-it-all-in-in-TP1 is, I think, unavoidable. This is one reason I've never made any serious attempts at getting tactically accurate battles. I just try to get the broad outcomes right, and make the tactical problem reasonably interesting in an abstract sense, and I think that's the most that can be done.
I am a wizard. I make things using magic. SJS
Points
Steve,
Your comment on strategic reserves was interesting. We've both used them. I used them playing France in NWOL I and we used them together in the Baltic army in NWOL II. The thing about reserves is that they don't have to be sitting way back, inactive and largely useless. A strategic reserve can be used to fill a picket line (as we did) or for vital garrison purposes.
As for the tactical issue, you and I and anyone else whose played CWOL or any other game that tried to cover the entire range from tactical through operations, strategic and diplomacy knows that there is a real time dichotomy. Something has to be sacrificed. For example, if the game has a time frame designed to produce tactical realism, say a turn equals an hour, you can forget about any strategic realism. After all if a square is 15 miles across, what is the strategic movement allowance of a unit that would do well to cover 3 miles in that hour?
So in NWOL a deliberate decision was made to sacrifice the realism of the tactical in order that the other aspects of the game work well. I've always thought it was a good decision and I still do and I don't think we should sweat it. There are tons of single-battle tactical simulations out there. Perhaps someday HOLF will have some.
Jim
Jim Voege
Agreed
I have long also felt that fatigue recovery from battle, both for the winner and loser, takes too long in general. It is not unlikely that after a major battle a unit that started fresh could be sitting with 7 or more fatigue. To recover from that would take 2-3 turns of sitting still doing nothing. Having been on week long field exercises with no transport, i am pretty sure it took us a day, maybe two of rest to recover, not weeks. Not sure how this could be addressed though