Mini mod: Eastern Irregularization Beta

[Ahiga]

The aim of this mini mod is to better depict the irregular fashion which most Easterners who had not been trained or inspired by European Military Tactics would have fought armed with musketry. This being as irregular units resembling Light Infantry in behavior: every man aims, reloads, and targets independently. However most of these irregular infantry will not have the accuracy, range or reloading of light infantry – they will have numbers closer to line infantrymen’s. And in any straight 1 on 1 duel an irregular should always flee before Line infantry – only in terrain that benefits them (Urban, Mountainous, lots of fences/walls) should it favor the irregular. The difference should become more stark as Line Infantry adopt firing techniques, which will let them bring to bear the same sort of numerical musketry that their enemies do.

It is based on Quixote’s Imperial Splendor v1.068. It will not effect the balancing of any European or American units.

First release is aiming at introducing the function of irregulars and a few small unit tweaks. I need to see how the AI responds to irregularization and will require a lot of input with balancing. I can only do so much testing, and the best tests aren't done in artificial 1 on 1 environments but realistic usage. Whether units are too weak or too strong in comparison to European Line/Skirmishers, I'll adjust accordingly.

Installation

Install Imperial Splendor v1.068 and then my mod, running my mod one level higher than IS (If that doesn’t work, load it one level lower).

Changes

• Irregularization: Quite simply making units behave less like line infantry and more like a rabble of individuals. Each man fires and reloads independent of the other, with a more spread out formation and for some the ability to assume Light Infantry Behaviour. There are various penalties applied to make sure that irregulars do not outshoot Line Infantry. Some units will behave like “heavy” infantry who essentially have to fight like Line infantry minus drills, and others will behave like light infantry where they skirmish and are better served at a distance.
  
  • Reload Modifiers are –very- low for irregulars, which may seem boring but was necessary for my preliminary balancing. The best bet is to position them so they aren't duking it out with Line infantry whereby they'll ideally get ripped apart.
    
  • There is a concern that you can 'cheat' by having the formation be very narrow yet all men fire - just follow house rules and don't do this.
  
  

• Re-Arming: Various Units are given new or additional weaponry to assert new roles on the battlefield.

• New Recruits: Various units which weren’t recruitable or were recruitable for only certain factions are now available to others.

• Mass-Fire: replacing “Fire Volley” for Line Infantry is Mass Fire, which allows the first, second and possibly, third rank to fire at once. According to Vanilla files, it was meant to make fire-volley obsolete and was for some reason skipped out over technology wise. I increased the reload modifier for both it and rank_fire, so as to allow Line Infantry a greater lethality against irregular units.

• European Doctrine: Available to Maratha as well now (required for Bargirs). Is located one tier higher in the tech tree, and takes longer to research. Coupled with the Janissary Changes (Not capable or meant to do line fighting, only melee or skirmishing/sniping) and a cap on the as far as I know to be ahistorical Isarelys, the Ottomans will be required to rely on irregulars, skirmishers, cavalry and melee until they can reform.

• New Officers: Didn’t want the usual stuffy officers for some of the more irregular units, so I created officers befitting their circumstances.
  

• Janissaries: As I understand it, they weren't fans of European style military reforms, so they've been redesigned to mostly fill a role of high class melee/light infantry for the Ottomans. Both with Beylik and Cemaat (I wanted to use the Sekbans, but they conflict with Remo's reskins at the moment), the Grenadiers represent a melee-focused brand while the non-grenadier is more the light infantry.

CREDITS

Credits:

• Quixote07 for allowing me to base this mod on his great work.
• Hellfell for letting me use his “Charge with Sword, not with Musket” animations from The Glory of the Russian Empire Mod.
• Randarkmaan for research on the Ottomans.
• Nizam and the Ottoman Historical topic: for their research on the Ottomans.
• LtChambers (For pointing me in the right direction and creating the Pack File Manager)
• Being Earnest (for showing me how to make a unit behave like light infantry)

[Lazy Knight]

I do not understand your Mass fire Changes.
European Line Infantry use Mass fire, yet you say they have not been changed. Isarelys do not use mass fire however.
With Line Infantry using Mass fire from the start, what is the point in researching Rank Firing Drill?

Could you explain which units you changed to Mass Fire and why?

[RuleBritannia]

How am I supposed to know if the mod works or not? I started it up in-game and didn't know how to tell if it worked or not.

[Aeterna]

How am I supposed to know if the mod works or not? I started it up in-game and didn't know how to tell if it worked or not.

Untrained/Irregular type of units will have for instance 2 or 4 accuracy. This is lower because they're spread out and all fire at the same time. if the accuracy wouldn't be lower they'd be seriously overpowered.

[Ahiga]

I do not understand your Mass fire Changes.
European Line Infantry use Mass fire, yet you say they have not been changed. Isarelys do not use mass fire however.
With Line Infantry using Mass fire from the start, what is the point in researching Rank Firing Drill?

Could you explain which units you changed to Mass Fire and why?

With IS or vanilla, European Line Infantry use volley fire - Only the very first rank fires, and does so sporatically. Mass Fire makes the first, second and possibly third (It's hard to tell whether it's a placebo, like Platoon firing's third rank, or real) ranks all fire roughly simultaneously (with some delay), though it also makes the unit spread out a little bit (like Platoon firing does).

All militia and line infantry (Meaning Grenadiers, Line Infantry, Elite Line Infantry, as well as Minutemen, Militia, and so on) practice Mass fire.

Isarelys not using it is probably a mistake on my part. The reason I introduced it was that I found people commenting how wrong it was for Line Infantry to not have a successful firing drill at the starting date and that they wished there was a drill which allowed for all ranks to open fire at once. Unless the unit is skirmishing, I really don't approve of Volley fire (the default for Line Infantry), because the notion of a unit having only the front men fire and everyone else waiting until the man up front died to let off a shot feels so artificial.

If there's not an advantage to rank firing then I overlooked that transition and will make it so Rank firing gives a greater reloading speed (much like Fire and Advance does in IS) than Mass Fire.


RuleBritannia: If the mod's working, you should see:

• Kurdish Hillmen recruitable by Ottomans in custom battles.
• Bashi Bazouks with Muskets
• Barbary Pirates recruitable by Ottomans in custom battles
• Lowered accuracy ratings for irregulars (Hindu Musketeers and such)

[Lazy Knight]

Main thing bothering me was that my Isarelys did not use it but the europeans did, good thing that's not intended.

As for Rank Fire vs Mass Fire, previously the main advantage of Rank Fire over Volley Fire was that you got two extra lines of men to fire. With Mass Fire in place i think Rank Fire needs a boost to be even nearly back to where it was. I agree on that change though, the second man in line waiting untill somebody else dies always felt wrong.

[Kip]

Ahiga, how did you unlock mass-fire? Once fire-by-rank is researched, do Line Infantry stop using mass-fire and change to fire by rank?

Lastly, do you have any interest on creating a stand-alone minimod that just enables mass-fire with no other changes? I ask because for the time being, I'm trying to play vanilla for as long as it can keep my interest (because I have a feeling once I try major mods like IS I'll never be able to go back), but I would like to try mass-fire in game.

[Ahiga]

Ahiga, how did you unlock mass-fire? Once fire-by-rank is researched, do Line Infantry stop using mass-fire and change to fire by rank?

Lastly, do you have any interest on creating a stand-alone minimod that just enables mass-fire with no other changes? I ask because for the time being, I'm trying to play vanilla for as long as it can keep my interest (because I have a feeling once I try major mods like IS I'll never be able to go back), but I would like to try mass-fire in game.

Kippyk, look at the unit_abilities_table and you'll see a table of all the unit abilities and what they make obsolete. How it goes unedited is:

fire volley < mass fire < rank fire < platoon_fire_group < improved_platoon_fire_group.

So the mass fire entry has "fire volley" under it's Obsoletes index, while Rank fire has "mass fire", and so on.

All you need to do is go into unit class to unit abilities table and switch out fire volley with mass fire. I've done it for you in this mod for militia and line infantry (Any unit with that class on unit_tables will mass fire until they get rank fire).

Balancing should be okay, since I haven't tweaked Line Infantry's stats in Eastern Irregularization and they perform better than volley fire but not overly so.

Next version will be out soon. Along with balancing, I'm going to introduce some new units including Afghan Light Cavalry and a series of Georgian units, as well as change around models so units look more unique. If anyone has a unit they'd like to recommend that can be accomplished with an existing model or texture re-armed or mounted/dismounted, I'd be happy to hear it.

[Aeterna]

I must say I like this mini-mod. More diversity is a good thing, atleast in this case.

[django333]

Has anyone done any tests to see if rank fire is still more effective than mass fire? I love the idea of the mod as long as it doesn't inadvertantly nerf rank fire.

[Kip]

Thanks Ahiga, that was just what I was thinking of, and ModManager capable too! I took a look in game and mass-fire seems very effective, at least more deadly than the original volley-fire. I wish I could do a side-by-side comparison of a Line Infantry regiment with mass-fire vs. a Line Infantry with rank-fire, but I think I can only encounter that in game. Thanks again!

[Ahiga]

Thanks Ahiga, that was just what I was thinking of, and ModManager capable too! I took a look in game and mass-fire seems very effective, at least more deadly than the original volley-fire. I wish I could do a side-by-side comparison of a Line Infantry regiment with mass-fire vs. a Line Infantry with rank-fire, but I think I can only encounter that in game. Thanks again!

You could, but it would be a bit of work. Basically, you'd need to keep the class_to_unit_attribute as fire volley, and give a unit_to_unit_attribute to one line infantrymen "mass fire", while not giving it to another.

I'll probably end up doing that to test it further if my current balancing efforts don't help rank fire out.

[Kip]

I tried editing a couple files once, and it resulted in a complete re-installation lol. I think I'll just keep my eyes open on your minimod to watch the ongoing developments... if you find that you need to edit unit stats in order to balance mass-fire vs. rank-fire, that'll be my signal to disable the mod via ModManager.

[Ahiga]

I decided to do some tests to allay any concerns of Mass fire being unbalancing, done with Holland and Spainish Line Infantry (same stats). This all occuring at maximum firing distance unless specified otherwise. In the first test the Spanish stopped with the second and third rank outside of my target range (Although they were still able to hit me, and I them).

The following scores are the total number of men lost, a slash denoting a loss due to a different volley:

Spain/AI on Rank = -9 / -17 / -25 / -33 /

Holland/Human on Mass = -11 / -20 / -25 / -29 / -34

I noticed, albeit because I got my shots off a second or two earlier, that I was able to reload more quickly.

Spain/Human on Rank = -12 / -23 / -30 / -40

Holland/AI on Mass = -12 / -20 / -35 / -43

It's pretty clear that there's little difference, the problem being I can't balance a unit exclusively for mass fire, since they'll end up adopting rank fire. What I can and am doing is adjusting the reload bonus (much like Quixote did for Fire-And-Advance), which may make Line Infantry more vulnerable to irregulars until they adopt Rank Fire but is also realistically depicting a lack of hardcore firing drills until later.

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With a much greater decrease on mass fire's reload rates, the results were:

Spain/AI on Rank = -9 / -17 / -25 / -36 /

Holland/Human on Mass = -12 / -23 / -35 / -46

In other words, I know what to adjust with 1.05 to make mass fire a weaker choice.

[Dogmeat]

Gota say what ive seen so far of the mod looks pretty sweet Ahiga

Just lost Ruperts land to some treacherous Huron (suppossed) allies, in a very nice CUsters last stand battle.

I much like the flavour you are introducing for irregular forces, i cant comment on baalnces for mass fire, as the above battle was 5x1 odds so dont really count hehe, like any mod a bit of tweaking will sort it out.

Keeps up the good work, its appreciated.

[django333]

Whats the DOCX file for? Do I put it in data? Sorry if this is a dumb question. Never seen that type of file before.

[Ahiga]

That's just the readme. Not sure why it saved in that formula.

Please note this isn't up to date with the latest version of IS (1.7, last one it was suitable for is 1.69).

[django333]

Thats what I thought but I couldn't open it so I wasn't sure.

This mod is freaking awesome! With the smoke mod the whole unit firing at once looks so cool. I haven't really done any tests to decide how balanced it is. I'll report back. +rep

You should post this on the released mods board so more people see it.

[Aeterna]

Well, it's purely for this mod, wouldn't really work out with the cost etc with vanilla/darth/APE or anything.
Still enjoying this one.