Scourge of War Boards

Mind you, I'm far from giving up on the game since it's still obvious it's a great game at the core - BUT - I'm having serious issues with how the heck the game decides the outcome of a battle?!

I've been playing the McPherson Ridge scenario a lot of times now, and finally got reinforcements up which I used to win what I percieved as a limited but surely solid victory - 1000 casualties for me against 1500 for the combined commands of Buford and Wadsworth - the enemy driven from MCPherson Ridge in disarray.

However, the game decides I'm defeated. Uhm, well...guess my "defeated" rebs will have to step back down and leave the ridge to the bluecoats once they rally...heh.

Nah, I'm not buying it. You surely have to agree with me that something's amiss here?

If you inflict 500 more casualties than you take, have your command mostly intact - in fact, I couldnt count a single routed regiment on my part - and hold the objective - surely you should be awarded with at least a minor victory?

Are you looking into this, team?

Points accumulate with time. The scenarios try to recreate the strategic situation of the whole battle not just the McPherson's "Skirmish" so that you are really required to push the enemy away from the objective as fast as possible in order to stop it to accumulate points.

Think of it like: if you beat them too slowly, once they are gone, you are left against their reinforcements while if you beat them fast, your own rinforcements will come, the enemy will not counterattack and hence the position is yours.

This is my understanding of how the Victory Points work.

And i would add to what Gshock said by adding that it is higly historically accurate! By holding off the Rebs from McPhersons ridge for so long the Union won the battle (for McPherson's ridge even though they were driven off.

Rebel M wrote:

... If you inflict 500 more casualties than you take, have your command mostly intact - in fact, I couldnt count a single routed regiment on my part - and hold the objective - surely you should be awarded with at least a minor victory?

It is a game, and it uses "points" for gaming purposes and the carry over feature. Surely that is one of the drawbacks of having "linked static" carry over scenarios that do not account for ALL possibles outcomes and adjust the next scenarios perfectly dynamically. But after all most people probably only want to play a game.

Wait till someone mods a complete "3 day scenario" with in-depth scripting for the AI, and you will be able to fight dynamically with forces continuing next morning where they camped the night before etc. Then it could get more complicating...

Janh wrote:

Rebel M wrote:

... If you inflict 500 more casualties than you take, have your command mostly intact - in fact, I couldnt count a single routed regiment on my part - and hold the objective - surely you should be awarded with at least a minor victory?

It is a game, and it uses "points" for gaming purposes and the carry over feature. Surely that is one of the drawbacks of having "linked static" carry over scenarios that do not account for ALL possibles outcomes and adjust the next scenarios perfectly dynamically. But after all most people probably only want to play a game.

Wait till someone mods a complete "3 day scenario" with in-depth scripting for the AI, and you will be able to fight dynamically with forces continuing next morning where they camped the night before etc. Then it could get more complicating...

Which is EXACTLY what I am waiting for!

J

A 3-Day scenario would be awesome!

BOSTON wrote:

A 3-Day scenario would be awesome!

This could be possible, but it would have to be 4 different scenario's. But it would be 4 big carryover scenario's representing each day... hmmm...

DrMike1997 wrote:

And i would add to what Gshock said by adding that it is higly historically accurate! By holding off the Rebs from McPhersons ridge for so long the Union won the battle (for McPherson's ridge even though they were driven off.

Hey DrMike1997, check your PM's sir.

hmmm...

That's a good sign :laugh:

Little Powell wrote:

BOSTON wrote:

A 3-Day scenario would be awesome!

This could be possible, but it would have to be 4 different scenario's. But it would be 4 big carryover scenario's representing each day... hmmm...

Why would that be? I assume someone will take on the honorous task of unifying the 4 maps into one, and even extending them a little further south and east. Then there will be some work with scaling, but I recall Norb saying that this will finally be much easier with the new engine.

Also, recovery rates for moral and fatigue would have to be decreased (say rout recovery for experienced should take 8 hours), and loss rates need to be reduced to what I consider more realistic levels, too (say 50% rifle, arty and melee effectiveness) so fire-fights can take longer. Thresholds for fallback, retreat and rout need to be raised so that only the elite units can stay in a spot longer and take extreme casualties, whereas for the rest there will be some flow forth and back, with natural interludes etc. So far in a nutshell how I went about the 3day SCN for TC2M, plus some more tweaking of other files including leaders stances in orders.csv.

The big question is whether the new scripting commands that will hopefully be there will allow say to skip the 12PM-5AM phases (while automatic recovery takes place), and whether the new scripting engine commands allow more complex type of "if then else" scripting. Or not to mention that we hopefully will one day be able to do some dynamic scripting where you can use dummy-type containers, men, gun counts etc, say:

if (count confed within 500 y of XYZ >5000) then
{
_formationatXYZ=highestunit(XYZ);
if (_formationatXYZ=="DIV_Anderson") then {Dispatch "Anderson has taken XYZ! He won't do anything!";} else {_formationatXYZ setformation "Div_line"; _formationatXYZ setfacing 275; (leader _formationatXYZ) setstance "HOLD"; Dispatch FORMAT ["It is %1's %2! He will turn westward and hold its position!",leader _formationatXYZ, unitsize _formationatXYZ];};
}
That kind of scripting potential would really make this game engine worth gold! And it would enable a dynamic scripting of a whole 3 Day Scenario, which AI would be very capable of micromanaging then. One can hope...