Suggestions

[ferragus]

Looking forward for this!

One of your main challenges with fortified positions will be to get the balance right. Hougumont and La haye Saint were able to repeal the repeated atacks from a whole corps with roughly a battalion during much of the day, La Haye Saint only surrendered because of lack of ammunition! How will you adress this? In what conditions will we be able to expell the garisons?

Some other questions: Will you remake the pathfinding issues (units crumpling toghether) and will the change formation animations get a more realistic revamp? Also, will we have any optional graphical assets to help us plan our operations (I mean like arows and lines on the places the troops will be positioned, just like in the Sid Meyers Gettysburg games)

hanks in advance.

[alex]

ferragus- Methinks that much of the system is already set. Only minor adjustments now. The arrows when you dragged formations was very helpful indeed - indicating their path on the terrain dynamically as you drag and drop.

Saddletan - Good as long as the buildings are strong. Those islands sucked up a lot of troops.

It's worth noting that there is a save Hougoumont website. The buildings are in rack and ruin and it is no longer in use as a farm. The account of the closing of those farm gates sticks in my mind as much as the "Bejabers, boys, I have the cuckoo! quote of the taking of the first eagle.

http://www.projecthougoumont.com/

http://www.napoleon-series.org/military ... flags.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hougoumont

"the success of the battle turned upon the closing of the gates at Hougoumont"

[Saddletank]

I can't recall if this has been suggested before, but can the game options allow for "AI courier message receipts" to be turned off?

These are the responses you get from your AI subordinates whenever you tell them to move to a new location. In the current game you are sometimes stuck in a click-frenzy of dismissing these annoying pop-up messages while trying to fight a battle. In SP its not so much a problem but in MP without the pause function it can become sometimes quite frustrating!

Thanks!

[NY Cavalry]

Hey Guys, I'm just wondering how counter battery fire is going to be handled????

Reason being, that for MP, to keep players from doing the very gamey trick of rolling the guns up within canister range the rifles were modded to 200 yards. This works and is acceptable for civil war battles. This "fix" will not work with Napoleonics. The muskets are limited to around 50 yards. What is to keep the guns from being rolled up?????


Counter battery fire is the historical fix for this. Guns driving off other guns that dare to come in to close. So, if modeling artillery separately is needed, well that is what needs to be done. Otherwise, this will make mp unplayable except for the few groups who can get gentleman's rules against this.

So what have you guys come up with?

[7thGalaxy]

Hi

A couple of suggestions

Firstly - maneuvers. It'd be nice to see a little more structure to the sprites moving between different formations. I know it's not exactly crucial, but it's always irritated me in N:TW to see the men just milling around into different formations. Hours were spent drilling the men so that in battle they knew exactly where to go to form a square, or a line, or a column.

Skirmishers - in the Napoleon mod, there are dedicated skirmisher units, which is fine & realistic. But it was also common to have light companies skirmish independently, then rejoin the regiment for volley fire. Will there be a formation in which the light company moves forward, skirmishes, and eventually falls back to line if pushed enough? You could almost have the AI handle it all to reduce the need to manage it.

Squares - in the current napoleon mod, these are a bit of a fudge. Especially the way they're strong in hand to hand against everything - it's just a general buff. Will it differentiate between cavalry and infantry? Will they still be vulnerable whilst assembling into the square? Will the square remain in formation once melee is joined?

Really looking forward to this!

[Saddletank]

Hey Guys, I'm just wondering how counter battery fire is going to be handled????

Reason being, that for MP, to keep players from doing the very gamey trick of rolling the guns up within canister range the rifles were modded to 200 yards. This works and is acceptable for civil war battles. This "fix" will not work with Napoleonics. The muskets are limited to around 50 yards. What is to keep the guns from being rolled up?????

Counter battery fire is the historical fix for this. Guns driving off other guns that dare to come in to close. So, if modeling artillery separately is needed, well that is what needs to be done. Otherwise, this will make mp unplayable except for the few groups who can get gentleman's rules against this.

So what have you guys come up with?

I don't know if anything needs 'fixing'. Maximum smoothbore musket range would be about 120-130 yards and effective range about half that. The Canister rounds fired in this period were deadly and could reach out to 400 or 500 yards. The most effective canister ranges were again about half that.

Artillery 'charges' were a standard tactic, at least by the French and at Waterloo the first thing the French did in the early evening when they captured La Haye Sainte farmhouse was to bring up artillery next to it and begin canistering the Allied squares. Allied losses were significant here for a while.

Artillery was the real killer in Napoleonic warfare and often accounted for most of the casualties inflicted in battles. Unlike the ACW prolonged infantry firefights were rare. Artillery was used to soften up an enemy line and then infantry was usually sent in with the bayonet to break the line, with cavalry being released to either pin/occupy the enemy cavalry or smash the enemy as he retreated.

I do think that some form of 'hold fire' rule would be great to have - so a defending enemy can unleash a deadly volley at a chosen short range. One especially effective British tactic was to hold fire until an advancing enemy formation came within 20-40 yards or so and then fire a volley and countercharge. Things like the auto-charge ranges and so on would all need to be reviewed for such tactics to work in the game.

I do think point blank musketry (at under 40 yards) should be modelled as being very effective, especially for fresh troops. Tired or nervous troops would not be able to deliver such devastating fire.

Please don't think of Napoleonics as being ACW without rifled muskets - it was an entirely different form of tactical combat.

Counter battery fire was not that effective using roundshot and shell since a deployed battery was a target with a lot of spaces in it (guns were usually around 15 yards apart), so before you think anything needs changing, play the new game and discover the new tactics.

[NY Cavalry]

Well, my post was probably to heavily worded. I have started to learn about Napoleonic tactics and am far from confident of the knowledge of those tactics.

From your post, front line artillery resupply wagons have to dealt with or left out of the oobs for obvious reasons.

There has to be some range that counter battery effectively started. How close would the artillery unlimber. In the civil war it was 600 yards. 400 yards was considered very close work for artillery as Confederate guns attested too day 2 at Gettysburg. The loses in horses and men were very high.

[Saddletank]

Counter battery fire was conducted at long range using solid roundshot (cannons) and shell (howitzers). The British also had a new kind of airburst round called Shrapnel that was fired by both howitzers and long guns. The ranges for counterbattery could be anything from 600 yards (the little 3 and 4 pdrs) to 1,200 yards (12 pdrs).

Artillery wheeled up to close range to wreck a defensive line would use canister and would be used at 200-450 yards or thereabouts. The only counter to this was defensive artillery fire, to quickly counter-attack the guns or to withdraw to a more sheltered location. On the evening of Waterloo at the crisis of the battle when French guns were firing canister from near La Haye Sainte Wellington chose partly to withdraw and partly to simply order his battalions to stand and take the losses. He had nothing left by then to counterattack with and his cavalry brigades were all spent or busy elsewhere.

I'm hoping the new game will have introduced enough changes that we all have to re-learn the ropes and find out the best tactics to use, and we've been told the new game will be more moddable so if anything isn't working in some MP environments then making changes should be easier this time around.

I don't know what Norb's plans are with ammo resupply wagons in the new game. I think their inclusion in the original game was a mistake and their function was weak and their behaviour anomalous. In Napoleonic armies ammunition was carried in the battery itself in caissons so each battery had its own resupply. Napoleonic artillery carried with it far more ammunition than ACW artillery did (500+ rounds per gun instead of about 125) so the vehicle and transport train attached to each battery was HUGE. There's several eye-witness accounts of ammunition wagons exploding at Waterloo.

Infantry carried 40 to 50 cartridges per man and with scavenging off the fallen little to no ammo resupply was needed for infantry units. I know of only one case where a unit ran out of ammo and that was the Kings German Legion defending La Haye Sainte but their predicament was unusual.

[Saddletank]

Norb and crew - can you make it possible so the new game will be able to use the existing SoW:GB maps? That will make our MP games so much more diverse. Thanks.

[Jack ONeill]

All,

I second that which Tank posted AND perhaps make it possible to use the new maps on the old SOWGB game. Since all of my fighting these days seems to be in the 18th Century, the addition of actual European maps would be outstanding.

Thoughts?

Jack "the Old Dessauer", (sort of), O'Neill