So right now there is not much skill involved in large battles, basic tactic goes like this. 1. Blob all of your units. 2. Send forth your cavalry to absorb enemies musket fire. 3. Hope that you out DPS your oponent. So as you can see there is really only one tactic and that is to blob your army since there isn't any advantage to breaking your army up (especially with artillery disabled), there are no line battles and not much strategical use of units. To complicate things further, france and switzerland are really the only 2 viable armies for online metaplay, choosing any other nation will leave you severely out classed by your oponents if they themselves are france or switzerland, Jaegars and Chasseur have far too good minimum and maximum engage range and can often win flawless battles. Can we get rid of blobbing and make it so that only one unit can occupy an individual space? I was thinking maybe design the map so that it has a navmesh of tiny 1x1 squares that each unit may occupy one of those squares, blobbing ruins the spirit and fun of the game please resolve this every game is the same.
Sadly blobbing doesn’t seem to be an issue they care to fix, hence why a few updates ago they merely lessened the damage units standing in the same square meter can receive. Either they know not how to fix it without disrupting pathfinding, or they keep it to preserve the ‘original’ gameplay of rinse repeat s**** rather than creating physics that lead to unique engagements at every turn.
Yes, the blobbing problem really annoys me as a modder. Can we figure out something about it if we analyze it? As a player you can stack formations but you cannot "blob" units in a single formation nor can you blob individual units. What I mean in saying this, is that you as a human operator cannot order or manipulate units too close to each other to form a blob except by formation stacking. However, the engine can compress and does compress a single formation into a blob or individual units into a blob. The engine usually does this when they are attacking targets. The formation or the single units compress towards the targets. What this says to me is that if we could define the area a formation covers as a discrete polygon and deny all other friendly units entry to this polygon (unless using the fill formation command) then we could stop formation stacking. We could not stop the "auto-blobbing" of a formation or units seeking targets. How we would do this I have no idea. I am not a good enough modder. Of course, the better solution would be to use proper "elbow room" for all units. Individual units have minuscule elbow room right now. They can stack incredibly close under certain circumstances as in formation stacking or formations seeks targets. Yet when a formation simply arrays itself on open ground the units do have proper elbow room. What routines are used to set this elbow room and why is this elbow room overcome by targeting? Watch a formation compress as it targets the enemy. Why cannot this "parade ground" elbow room be maintained in fights? Somehow we need to find and use the routines that maintain this "parade ground" elbow room and maintain it in fights. In that case the reach of cold steel weapons (pikes and swords) will become an issue. I am just floating ideas here hoping that someone might find a usable idea among this speculation.
I complained about the 'compressing of units when attacking' in my 'Spacial Awareness' thread early on, but nothing was done about it.
Yep, you called it mate back in 2015 and yet the new engine still does it. I guess we will never get a fix for it now. It was also noted in your thread that it made cannon and howitzers too powerful. Now they have been nerfed but of course that removes the one deterrent a player had to induce an opponent NOT to formation stack.
From my point of view, MP portion was a big blow-out from the announcement day. Later went worse in battle of stat wh*res. Past dead already?
Might work against noobs but definetly won't work against pro's. If you blob all of your units and use cavalry as cannon fodder it leaves your base completely undefended against raids. Also your army could be bypassed by the enemy army, thus, forcing you to pull back into your base or giving up advantageous hills. From my experience having the battle taking place in ones own base is not the best idea as it blocks resources, kills half of your peasants and prevents you from preparing organzied reenforcements. The most important factors from my perspective are: - hire the apropriate units to counter your enemy: shooters or pikes or both in the barracks? Roundshits from the dip? 17cent dragons or reiters from the stable? Multiple options and tactics possible - their strenghts must complement eacht other: use the optimal advantage of combined arms - situate army on hills and use stand ground whenever possible - tactical withdraw: continously back and forth - attack timing: send different troops at the right time so that they all enter range of fire on time - push reenforcements towards currently fighting army or pull army back towards reenforcements and reorganize As you mentioned france: I have seen multiple players camping on hills with their long range chasseurs but still loosing games as they couldn't adopt to the more dynamic tactics of their opponent that split its army into multiple small army groups surrounding the base and finally forcing the france army blob to be split up as well and getting finally killed by well managed hordes of reiters. Edit: By the way I don't get the problem: --> if you just found the perfect tactic: congratulations: always take france, blob your units and roll over the enemy: you will win every game: thats great! --> or do you complain because you loose to this stupid tactic? Well, time to improve and find alternative tactics to counter your opponent
These tactics I would think would work well in early to mid game, But for a late game battle you would loose most of the time. It is unfortunate, and really takes away from the game for me. But concentration of fire is key to large battle victory. I have won games where my opponent has skirted my attack, and destroyed my entire base. (TC non capture-able of course) took all my mines, blacksmith, and artillery depots. Everything! But I still was able to maneuver him off of his hills, break his walls and destroy his base with a concentrated attack of my army that was already in the field. I do not like it that this is the way the game plays. But it the current model.
