Marching.....Spacing

[Marching Thru Georgia]

What is the effect of sandbox=5? A value of 1-4 is the type of battle, (attack - hunt them down), the game will create. I never tried 5.

[Garnier]

I don't remember, I was just trying different values back when I started GCM 3.5 years ago and this one did what I wanted, as I described. I'll have to experiment again to figure it out.

Sorry for hijacking the thread, if someone wants to split out my stuff that's fine.

[Davinci]

Yes, but that has been set to a specific formation to help the AI avoid bunching up its men when deploying for battle. So that avenue isn't open to us. This technique does work at the brigade level fairly well. However, at the division level, it takes ~20 minutes for the units to rearrange themselves and occupy a line over a mile long. So it not practical unless the oob formations are changed as you suggested.

Yes, I really do need to spend a fair amount of time experimenting with different Divisional-Formations, I'm not getting too many real good battles in Open-Play.

You don't know of a way of stopping the AI from holding a part it's forces in reserve do you?

Also - I went another way with having the units deploy in the Column-Formation at the start of the game by editing the defines.ini file to include this....below

;[SandBox]
MainFormation=DRIL_Lvl4_Inf_Reserves

davinci

[Davinci]

I made this suggestion in the Waterloo section;
Disconnect the supply wagon from the division commander and attach it instead to a 'Commissary Officer'; said officer could be programmed to keep 'close' to the troops, but behind it's own lines.

This will work with the troops that are under your command as long as you don't mind manually leading them to the Supply-Wagons.

But, this will not work with the units that are under the AI-Command .

Basically, the AI will not re-supply unless the wagon is under the command of the Divisional-Commander.

Most of the complaints are not about the wagons that the player controls, but the wagons that the AI controls.

davinci

[Garnier]

Yes. Once you set the location of each division you can decide what formation to place them in depending on the space you have available. If you want the brigades in column, you can use the stock formation DRIL_Lvl4_Inf_Column. That will place one brigade behind the other with the arty at the back of the column. DRIL_Lvl4_Inf_Reserves will place the brigades next to each other in column formation with arty in the rear again.

Do you have a scenario you could post where you did this? (Setting a different division formation per division and having it actually used in game.) Edit: Oh I see, you're using sandbox to create the scenario, you just set the formation you want in the sandbox master OOB. Is that how it works?

I haven't got it to work for me. If I remove the sandbox lines from my scenario.ini, all the troops get placed in one spot (where I set each units' coordinates to be) instead of in a division formation. If I leave the sandbox lines in, any formation I set on the division commanders is overridden by the MainFormation=DRIL_Lvl4_Inf_Line line that Davinci mentions. This is in defines.ini and isn't mod-able in multiplayer.

One workaround is to rename some other formation to DRIL_Lvl4_Inf_Line but I don't know if that would affect the AI in singleplayer GCM battles.

[Leffe7]

When I created the Scenario Generator I also tried to use division formations. The default in sandbox is Line Formation but this doesn't make sense for the setup of large armies. IIRC, disabling "sandbox=1/2/3/4" or setting it to sandbox=5 does result in having no formation and each unit is placed directly to what it's coordinates are set.
To create the marching column formation I wanted for the Scenario Generator, I had to set the coordinates for each and every unit in the scenario file :whistle:
Maybe there is an easier way, but I haven't found it.

[Marching Thru Georgia]

Davinci wrote:

Yes, I really do need to spend a fair amount of time experimenting with different Divisional-Formations, I'm not getting too many real good battles in Open-Play.

You don't know of a way of stopping the AI from holding a part it's forces in reserve do you?

Also - I went another way with having the units deploy in the Column-Formation at the start of the game by editing the defines.ini file to include this....below

;[SandBox]
MainFormation=DRIL_Lvl4_Inf_Reserves

What problems are you seeing in your open play games? The AI decides whether to maintain a reserve force and if/when to commit it. That is not something that can be modded. Although maybe it is influenced by the Style value of the commander. I've never looked at that.

Use of the defines.ini setting for initializing the troop's starting formation is a straightforward solution, but as Garnier points out, that is not usable for MP.

Garnier wrote:

Edit: Oh I see, you're using sandbox to create the scenario, you just set the formation you want in the sandbox master OOB. Is that how it works?

I haven't got it to work for me. If I remove the sandbox lines from my scenario.ini, all the troops get placed in one spot (where I set each units' coordinates to be) instead of in a division formation. If I leave the sandbox lines in, any formation I set on the division commanders is overridden by the MainFormation=DRIL_Lvl4_Inf_Line line that Davinci mentions. This is in defines.ini and isn't mod-able in multiplayer.

One workaround is to rename some other formation to DRIL_Lvl4_Inf_Line but I don't know if that would affect the AI in singleplayer GCM battles.

Yes, the sandbox can do much of the work. But as I said, I am not familiar with how you generate your scenario files. Does the host's computer use the sandbox to create the scenario file or is that done on your server with the completed file uploaded to the host? If you have your own program that generates the file as Leffe's SG does, then you can place the individual brigades and regiments as you see fit. But I think you will need to get rid of the "sandbox=5" command too. Otherwise the program will override your formation with the default one.

Leffe7 wrote:

disabling "sandbox=1/2/3/4" or setting it to sandbox=5 does result in having no formation and each unit is placed directly to what it's coordinates are set.

True, but that makes every scenario Hunt Them Down, (random movement). For SP or coop, there are many times we'd like to defend/attack an objective. However much of the time the AI will only send a small part of his force there. I get around that by adding sandbox=1 or 2, as appropriate, to the scenario.ini file after I create the scenario with your program.

[Saddletank]

You don't know of a way of stopping the AI from holding a part it's forces in reserve do you?

We (well MTG) found that lowering the style rating of the generals stopped them sending some divisions off into useless corners of the map. Strangely enough the worse they are rated the less they split their forces up. Personally I'd expect the opposite to be correct so maybe its an unintended feature, or possibly I'm misunderstanding what NSD mean by the "style" of the generals.

[Garnier]

@MTG
GCM generates a complete scenario (scenario.csv, scenario.ini, maplocations.csv etc) that goes in its own folder, i.e. "work\scenarios\Battle 23298". The host then selects it in the multiplayer staging room using "Create Scenario Game" and then clicking "Battle 23298" in the list.

If my scenario.ini has the line "sandbox=#" then each division is given the DRIL_Lvl4_Inf_Line formation regardless of what formation I give it in scenario.csv and regardless of the locations I assign to individual units. If scenario.ini does not have that entry, then each unit is placed at exactly the coordinates I specify in scenario.csv. This is more flexible, but I haven't written the code to generate coordinates for every unit so I can't use it yet. I might end up doing that eventually.

Meanwhile, AFAIK, there's no way to get each division in a MP scenario to deploy in a formation you want, because the only way to force the game to place the units by division is to used "sandbox=#" which always uses "DRIL_Lvl4_Inf_Line". Does that sound right?

[Marching Thru Georgia]

Yes that's right. If all the units have the same x,y coordinates they will end up in the same place if the sandbox= is omitted. It should be easy to create a few generic offset values since GCM games have divisions have only a couple infantry brigades and 1 or 2 batteries. Putting them all in column formation as Leffe's program would likely solve your problem.