Where is my infantry?

[cambronne]

I am playing 1.1 as France.
I moved Grande Army 1 and 2 into switzerland and later meet about 50K austrians in battle there.
I am told that I have 202,000 men v. the 50k austrians.
I select detailed battle and find that the only infantry I have is one unit of the Imperial Guard.
All of my corps commanders are present, just no regular infantry.

Any thoughts on this?

[Grand_Armee]

I had something similar happen when I was beseiging Moscow and was joined by 200K turks. I had 65K men of all three arms. When the battle came up I had only 2 artillery divisions on the field...the rest were Turks and Russkies. I can only guess at the problem. It'd really cheese you off if you were defending your capitol against another human opponent and you lost the war due to programming limitations.

[cambronne]

ORIGINAL: Grand_Armee

I had something similar happen when I was beseiging Moscow and was joined by 200K turks. I had 65K men of all three arms. When the battle came up I had only 2 artillery divisions on the field...the rest were Turks and Russkies. I can only guess at the problem. It'd really cheese you off if you were defending your capitol against another human opponent and you lost the war due to programming limitations.

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You aren't kidding. Additionally, even though I outnumbered the austrians 4-1, they had hordes of infantry.

[Hard Sarge]

well. part of it as I think you are saying, is there is a size limit to the number of troops allowed in the battle zone, and depending on where it is at, you may get all of your troops one battle and move someplace else and only see half of them

now throw in another army or two, and it can get ruff !

part I don't understand is how you can have a large battle, and then call in reinforcements, if you can't get all of your first army troops in ?

but for the most part it works right

hmmm
2 Arty and a Allied army ?, now you know where the term, Run and Gun comes from

[ericbabe]

ORIGINAL: Grand_Armee

I had something similar happen when I was beseiging Moscow and was joined by 200K turks. I had 65K men of all three arms. When the battle came up I had only 2 artillery divisions on the field...the rest were Turks and Russkies. I can only guess at the problem. It'd really cheese you off if you were defending your capitol against another human opponent and you lost the war due to programming limitations.

It's not programming limitations -- if you read the earliest posts in this forum players demanded that battles be limited in size. (They also demanded huge levels of waste!)

We had had battles with 400,000 men on each side and players howled in pain because they thought that was too many men to be involved in one battle.

The way battle limits work with reinforcements is that a certain percentage can be called as reinforcements beyond the normal battle limit. So say the battle limit for a battle is 18, it may be the case that 4 more units can be called as reinforcements. Furthermore some units that might normally start in the battle are instead placed on the reinforcement list automatically at the start of the battle.

You may have seen the list of selected battles at the end of Chandler; big battles such as Dresden will have many troops at the battle but nearly just as many "in the vicinity." The reinforcement limit it meant to simulate those troops "in the vicinity."

[cambronne]

ORIGINAL: ericbabe


It's not programming limitations -- if you read the earliest posts in this forum players demanded that battles be limited in size. (They also demanded huge levels of waste!)

We had had battles with 400,000 men on each side and players howled in pain because they thought that was too many men to be involved in one battle.

The way battle limits work with reinforcements is that a certain percentage can be called as reinforcements beyond the normal battle limit. So say the battle limit for a battle is 18, it may be the case that 4 more units can be called as reinforcements. Furthermore some units that might normally start in the battle are instead placed on the reinforcement list automatically at the start of the battle.

You may have seen the list of selected battles at the end of Chandler; big battles such as Dresden will have many troops at the battle but nearly just as many "in the vicinity." The reinforcement limit it meant to simulate those troops "in the vicinity."

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I know it is impossible to make everyone happy, but it is a little frustrating to be deprived of a 4-1 advantage in troops especially when that was my plan all along.
Also, not having any infantry does put me in a bit of a bind when fighting against hordes of enemy infantry.
Is there anyway around the problem?

By the way, I am still getting the repeated crashes I mentioned in a thread in bug reporting.

[solops]

ORIGINAL: ericbabe

It's not programming limitations -- if you read the earliest posts in this forum players demanded that battles be limited in size. (They also demanded huge levels of waste!)

We had had battles with 400,000 men on each side and players howled in pain because they thought that was too many men to be involved in one battle.

Wrong!

Sounds like some people have gotten too caught up in the designs (often flawed, IMO) from other games. One of the few gameplay issues I have with this game is the small battles....silly, even at 10K per unit. They had some BIG battles and the potential for bigger. You have initiative, chance, terrain and infrastructure all built into the algorithm that regulates troop arrivals. If it works out that lots arrive, let it be so! It is frustrating to work to bring force to bear and then have all of the above legitimate factors PLUS an artificial, programming defined limit adulterate a battle. 800K in a single battle? OK, not likely, just from a logistical level. But, the current limit does not work for the reasons in the other posts.

Make the limit user configurable.

As for waste...."More waste"...you've got to be kidding...criminy, what a "waste". Hope you did not spend too much time on that. It sounds like a mindset from some other games I won't mention. This is not always a valid concept and makes game management unnecessarily fuzzy. I know that it is supposed to represent economic C3 and inefficiencies, but it often doesn't. It certainly ignores economies of scale and assumes a lot of things about corruption and economic "friction". No question that inefficiencies happen, but unless it is necessary for game balancing, get rid of it or cut it. I hate to see it just because it makes people feel good about the accuracy of the model (snicker). Nothing but a fudge factor and equalizer to mitigate the "critical mass and roll over 'em" phenomena in many games. The political part of the game handles that pretty well.

<Edited by author for excessive "wrong" exuberance.>

[Peever]

ORIGINAL: cambronne
I know it is impossible to make everyone happy, but it is a little frustrating to be deprived of a 4-1 advantage in troops especially when that was my plan all along.

I feel your pain. I almost lost a key battle against Austria (playing as France) because of this. Austria marched an army of 60,000 men into battle against my army of 200,000 but once I got to the battle screen I was schocked to see I only had 80,000 for action. To make things worse it was snowing and I didn't have any winter warfare doctrines yet. I think I survived with all of about 6,000 men when I finally broke them.

I want the detailed battles to be just that; detailed. Give me all my units please and none of this artificial crippling.

[cambronne]

ORIGINAL: Peever

I feel your pain. I almost lost a key battle against Austria (playing as France) because of this. Austria marched an army of 60,000 men into battle against my army of 200,000 but once I got to the battle screen I was schocked to see I only had 80,000 for action. To make things worse it was snowing and I didn't have any winter warfare doctrines yet. I think I survived with all of about 6,000 men when I finally broke them.

I want the detailed battles to be just that; detailed. Give me all my units please and none of this artificial crippling.

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I would love to have the detailed battles be just that too. As mentioned above, it would be nice to have the option of the real detailed v. the limited detailed battles.
I am really disappointed about this aspect of the game.

[ericbabe]

I know it is impossible to make everyone happy, but it is a little frustrating to be deprived of a 4-1 advantage in troops especially when that was my plan all along.
Also, not having any infantry does put me in a bit of a bind when fighting against hordes of enemy infantry.
Is there anyway around the problem?

(The players who suggested we impose battle limits also made the observation that such a thing would prevent the strategy of having a single huge stack of units.)

The standard battle limit is about 200,000 men. Plan a single army of about this size and include a balance of troops. If you're in a place where the limit is tighter -- Switzerland, when it is snowing, for instance -- plan a smaller group, maybe around 50,000 in size.

By the way, I am still getting the repeated crashes I mentioned in a thread in bug reporting.

Was the save game file you sent me 2.zip? I couldn't get that to crash on my XP machine, neither in a release build nor under the debugger. If yours is 2.zip I have you down as a pentium4 with enough speed and RAM but I don't have an entry for your OS; are you running XP? If so, which SP?


Thanks,
Eric

[ericbabe]

I rather actually like the fact that sometimes battle limits allows an underdog force of 60,000 a reasonable chance of winning a battle against a larger force of 200,000+. I'm sorry if other people don't share this aesthetic preference.

Early after our release we had one player who responded that the battle limits for places like Switzerland were much too *high* and that they should be much lower. The high battle limits ruined the game for him...

Perhaps we could do something like make this an optional rule in the third patch.

[Hard Sarge]

Don't know Eric

over all, the feel is pretty good, at times, you may get a screwy outcome

I mean, pure numbers are still nothing but pure numbers (of course, your idea may help this area, or was that Religh, but whoever, that may help)


(different era, but Alex vs the Persians, Alex won the battle, and he was largely outnumbered, over 2/3s of the other army never got into the battle, Daris (?) fled the battle and the rest of the army lost heart and fled with him)

I had a few of those 400,000 vs my 200,000 battles, and the Turks Ran faster then I could form my lines

I myself, like to keep my armies around 80,000 or so, and have a Grand Army for the kill (125,000) but have them support each other, when you do run into trouble, you got help around you

to each there own and all, but I think the limits do there job right as it now stands

[solops]

Interestingly, I had one Turkish army fight three battles in two provinces in North Africa in one turn, winning all three. Beat the French once and combined French-Spanish twice. Each time it was a bit smaller, shrinking from 74,000 to 50,000. Find a hill, sit on it with infantry in line, shoot the bad guys until they disorganise and then send in the cavalry. Be nice if they got a tin medal.

[cambronne]

ORIGINAL: ericbabe

I know it is impossible to make everyone happy, but it is a little frustrating to be deprived of a 4-1 advantage in troops especially when that was my plan all along.
Also, not having any infantry does put me in a bit of a bind when fighting against hordes of enemy infantry.
Is there anyway around the problem?

(The players who suggested we impose battle limits also made the observation that such a thing would prevent the strategy of having a single huge stack of units.)

The standard battle limit is about 200,000 men. Plan a single army of about this size and include a balance of troops. If you're in a place where the limit is tighter -- Switzerland, when it is snowing, for instance -- plan a smaller group, maybe around 50,000 in size.

By the way, I am still getting the repeated crashes I mentioned in a thread in bug reporting.

Was the save game file you sent me 2.zip? I couldn't get that to crash on my XP machine, neither in a release build nor under the debugger. If yours is 2.zip I have you down as a pentium4 with enough speed and RAM but I don't have an entry for your OS; are you running XP? If so, which SP?


Thanks,
Eric

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Thanks.
I did send it as 2.zip. I am running on XP.

[tolstoy1812]

I am a little bothered by Austria (the AI, that is) always invading France through Switzerland, from a huge base in the Tyrol, the Alps!

I'm bothered because the road net in the Alps and in Switzerland was rather limited, as were the resources to support depots in the Tyrol. The only campaign actually fought in the Tyrol in 1809 involved forces no larger than a division or two against insurgents. In life, armies did pass through the Alps on their way to more fertile lands, in limited numbers. But they never set up an army of 7-8 corps there. Yet in COG mountainous terrain seems only to limit the size of battles, not the size of the army you can lagger there.

I"d like to see it more difficult to amass armies of hundreds of thousands of men in areas that probably could not supply more than a few thousand quartered there, and maybe a corps passing through and living off dry rations for the duration of the climb up the hill and down the other side. Even a chain of depots would require a better road and communication net from mountain top to mountain top, where all those men and horses are sleeping under the stars in mid winter.

I know, it's only a game, and there is a fine and ultimately unachievable balance between game and simulation. But the supply parameters of such wild locations did, in fact tend to channel the fighting into the Danube valley. The armies that fought in Switzerland during the Revolution/Consulate tended to be smaller affairs, as I recall. I don't think any nation ever quartered half a million there. And, back to my point, they arrived there via the Danube valley and/or the Northern Italian plains.

I hope I'm not over-generalizing, or wrong on too many details. As a game matter, I just get tired of fighting the Computerized Austrians in the Alps, and want to get them out onto the Danube plain or the Po valley where I can fight that big battle. But they won't come out and play.

CS

[ericbabe]

It would be nice to have a limit on army sizes in mountainous regions... I've given it a bit of thought and I'm still not sure the best way to implement it. There's a UI component and an AI component so it's not merely a matter of thinking up a clever rule; the rule has to mesh with the underlying system.

The easy way I have in mind is simply prohibit entry into mountain provinces whenever that player or his allies control a certain number of divisions there already. The AI would simply avoid moving into such regions altogether.

[ericbabe]

debugger. If yours is 2.zip I have you down as a pentium4 with enough speed and RAM but I don't have an entry for your OS; are you running XP? If so, which SP?

As I haven't been able to duplicate the crash yet, I hope you don't mind if we wait to see if patch 1.2 fixes your problem -- there were one or two small save file issues I fixed with that version, issues that were causing machine specific crashes that might have had something to do with your problems. If 1.2 still doesn't fix your problem then I'll try another save file from you on the other machines I have available to see if I can duplicate this bug.

Sound OK?

[cambronne]

ORIGINAL: ericbabe

debugger. If yours is 2.zip I have you down as a pentium4 with enough speed and RAM but I don't have an entry for your OS; are you running XP? If so, which SP?

As I haven't been able to duplicate the crash yet, I hope you don't mind if we wait to see if patch 1.2 fixes your problem -- there were one or two small save file issues I fixed with that version, issues that were causing machine specific crashes that might have had something to do with your problems. If 1.2 still doesn't fix your problem then I'll try another save file from you on the other machines I have available to see if I can duplicate this bug.

Sound OK?

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That is fine.
I have noticed that the crashes seem to take place when I stop and game and then reload. If I completely exit the game and then go back to a saved game it doesn't seem to happen.
I can live with that. [:)]

[tolstoy1812]

That sounds like a good idea. I had a feeling it would not be an easy fix. Another brainstorming idea is to prohibit construction of depots in extreme & high mountain regions.