Imperia Antíquitátis - Cancelled for a New Project

[Duncan III]

You're actually making me feel excited about the game again Splenyi !! I think that you've got a huge job on your hands but I love your attitude and the direction you want to go in. I remember when your mod was first announced about 6 months ago, at first I was pretty sceptical (I was already feeling quite negative about the direction of development from CA) but your serious, intelligent and always positive posting quickly won me over. I'm very pleased that you are still as determined and active as ever, I really like your ideas .

[Biggus Splenus]

Patton's mod was announced ages ago, I was a part of it, but I decided to make my own mod instead (I like doing my mods my way, and I knew my ideals and design would differ from his). So that's probably the mod you're refering to (also abreviated IA )I'm glad you like my aproach PS. I updated the OP, and it's got some information on some help that is needed with the mod's development.

[super_newbie_pro]

Imperia Antiquitatis - A Realistic Representation of Ancient Warfare

Why do not you combine the team << Rome 2 TOTAL REALISM >> rather than compete with a mod that has the same goal as yours ? Together you could move faster

[Biggus Splenus]

Well if R2TR has a similar goal to to RTR, then I'm perfectly happy making my own mod with my own ideals and representations.

I offered to join R2TR a while ago, before it was announced to the public, but I was rejected.

[Southern Hunter]

I just give very big morale penalties for fatigue (cohesion?) and increase the penalties for bad stuff (outflanked, etc). There is also the army collapse point, which is normally set ludicrously low (30% from memory). I have increased this to 50% (that is, if you have less than 50% of your army left, they all want to go home).

[Biggus Splenus]

Well I have noticed that during a melee, lone soldiers will usually turn around a little, get hit in the side, and give the whole unit the "attacked in flank" penalty... Kaunitz has noticed this too. You're right about the "disciplined" trait by the way, it does remove the "general dead" mali, but it also allows them to rally faster after routing.

[Southern Hunter]

What is the 'extended casualties' penalty? I get recent and total. Is extended just like recent but operates for longer?

[Biggus Splenus]

Recent is at 4 second intervals, extended is at 60 second intervals, total has no time intervals

Dev blog on the way!

[Biggus Splenus]

Dev Blog #4 - Fatigue and Cohesion

New blog time! More exciting then that last ones hopefully. Sorry for the delay on this, I've been working on trying to get casualties right for a long time, but I realised I needed to get this mechanics done before going any further.

Before I begin to talk about this topic, I'd like to give a huge amount of credit to Kaunitz, (you'll likely see him active in this thread) who actually created the cohesion mechanics a few years ago in his ETW/NTW modification. I wouldn't have ever created this mechanics myself, so all credit goes to him for this. Any other mod that uses the cohesion system (eg. Empire: Total Realism, and likely Rome 2: Total Realism) did incorporate this mechanic from Kaunitz's mod too (JaM is the author for those mods, and the battle mechanics modder for R2TR), and if you don't see Kaunitz credited in any mod that incorpirates cohesion then proper credit has not been given (JaM did credit Kaunitz, because he's a good lad ). Ok then, let's get to it!

First problem I'd like to point out in this topic is the vanilla approach to fatigue; planely, it sucked. I felt that it just didn't matter enough in the game, you could easily run your troops from deployment to the enemy, have a melee, and win the battle, before your units actually became tired. On top of this, when your units did get fatigued, the mali effects were miniscule. Overall, it didn't present tactical or strategic importance during combat, which annoyed me as a realism enthusiast. Realisticly, a formation was near useless when exhausted, and even the most veteran, elite units could be torn down by fresh militia in this state. Running in full gear was exhausting, and so was a melee, this is why I believe vanilla's representation sucked. So yes, fatigue should play a huge in your tactical and strategic battlefield plans.

Thankfully though, I've implemented a cohesion system to replace the vanilla fatigue system (as said at the start of this dev blog, all credits to Kaunitz). The importance of fatigue was great, like I said before, but cohesion was much, much more so, and often it was the decisive factor in an engagement. Cohesion is the reason why Sparta could continuously defeat their Hellenic adversaries in phalanx combat during the classical age, for example. Realisticly, poor cohesion lead to a multitude of problems for the formation; insecurities, inefficiency to manouver, combat ineffectiveness, among other things, and perhaps most importantly, poor morale. Most "civilised" (hehe) societies relied on a heavy, disciplined formation that could maintain cohesion for their combat effectiveness, such as the Hellenic phalanx, the Makedonian phalanx, and the Roman maniple. Other society's military, such as the Celts, relied on the psychological "shock" of a charge more than discipline and cohesion; sometimes veteran warriors accustomed to this tactic could withstand it through sheer discipline and near-perfect cohesive organistation (such as Ceasar's legions), but then there's the other side of the spectrum when a warrior (or entire formation) that had never met this tactic before, would simply break against their alien-like tactics (like at the Battle of Allia); practically, it was much like the use of elephants. More on cohesion, but in different tactical situations; the Parthians could hail masses of arrows upon well formed, cohesive, disciplined Roman legions to soften them up, forming gaps, confusion and shock in the formation, which their cataphracts would quickly exploit. Iphicrates the revolutionary Athenian strategos, employed an army exclusively of peltastai against a Spartan phalanx. They defeated the latter by simply harrasing them constantly with javelins, disolving their cohesion until weaknesses in the formation could be exploited. Am I rambling? I'll get down to the actual mod now, and implementation.

Well like I said, cohesion has completely replaced fatigue in this mod, simply because it's much more important, and it's only possible to have one or the other. From a realism perspective, the choice I made is much more satisfying and I'm sure many of you will agree. There's still much more fine tuning left to do on this system, but I'll give you guys some tasty information on what's done already. As you could imagine, running is not good at all for your unit's cohesion, realisticly it would make ranks nearly indistinguishable from one another, so you want to keep this to dire situations. I haven't yet decided whether to give walking a mali or boni to cohesion, either could work realisticly; mali for slowly coming out of order, boni for the officers getting time to adress the ranks - I'll need to do some further tests on this. Charging actually gives a boni to cohesion, and you guys might be double-checking to see if you read that right Yes, you did. Realisticly, a formation would run into combat, and during the last stages of this charge, they would slow right down to gain cohesion, and make contact with the enemy as more of an actualy formation than lone-warriors. Troops didn't actually sprint into a charge at each other, even though Hollywood says so, because people would rather not be crushed against their own, and the enemy's, weight. It's common sense not to kill yourself in battle, when trying to kill the enemy. So that's why units gain cohesion during charge, and also because it's more forgiving on the AI (which enjoys running everywhere for no apparent reason). Of course though, a melee is the most diminishing on your units cohesion; low cohesion will give severe penalties on unit defense, and major morale mali.

Other nice additions to the cohesion system are the effects of projectiles. Kaunitz also discovered the possible link between projectiles and cohesion (along with other great effects), so full credit goes to him for this concept too. Pila will give a fairly slight cohesion penatly to enemy units, but their use is amied more at reducing the enemy unit's shield stats. Javelins are the most appropriate missiles for harrasing an enemy's cohesion, but also offer other mali. Slingers and archers work much the same way in the effects department, but with a couple major differences; both give fairly minor cohesion mali compared to pila or javelin, and their other effects will be discussed in a later dev blog.

The only problem I've ran into is that I can't assign individual fatigue values for each unit (ie. like a fatigue pool), all units must have one of 2 generic assignments; there's the normal one, and the "fatigue_resistant" attribute which I've assigned to units that don't rely on cohesion as much as others (eg. skirmishers). This sucks, but there's nothing I can really do. Experienced troops have better cohesion that non-experienced troops though, this was possible in the engine, which represents that experienced/veteran troops are much more effective at keep cohesion than raw recruits.

I think that's all that I need to discuss on fatigue and cohesion I hope you guys enjoyed this dev blog, and I want everyone to thank Kaunitz for making this possible.

I know I've said this before, but next dev blog will definitely be on casualties and morale hopefully I wont have any other painful hurdles in my way.

Leave your thoughts and comments please

[Kaunitz]

Oh my, Splenyi, you over-credit me too much.

Basically, it's a renaming of fatigue to cohesion. The only real difference is that fatigue accumulates realtively fast, but also recovers relatively fast and has more severe consequnces on morale etc.. The basic idea was to make fatigue/cohesion more based on the "situation", not just a more permanent "status". The rather odd idea of letting charging troops actually recover cohesion (very quickly; linked to morale) was necessary in NTW to simulate the momentum of the charge, or rather to give troops a slight chance to "charge through" the wall of fire of the defender without breaking due to casualties all too easily.

It's still a pity that it's not too immersive, as the only indicator of cohesion is the colour of the fatigue-status (but hey, better than in NTW, where you would have to read the tooltip-text). Low cohesion cannot be represented on the battlefield by untidy formations, I'm afraid. The impact of javelins, however, will make formations get disrupted visually. But it's hard to make this kind of real disruption count for melee. (I'm trying to find a way - with some settings, you can achieve such a thing, but it's not optimal...a high melee-malus for being outnumbered doesn't really help, btw). In general, the most difficult task is to make unit-quality be located less in stats (except for morale), and more in animations (resist disruption by javelins) and manoeverability (/battle entities).

PS: As I'm basing my private little mod on the Samnite Wars, I was pretty excited to get to know about the Lucanian tomb at Paestum: http://funkystock.photoshelter.com/g...000yhYrmxc8IA4 (a google pictures search will give you some more and different photos as well). Most of this stems from roughly 330-320 BC, quite fitting to the first Samnite war. I'm currently designing my ingame-Samnites/Sabellians around these tomb-paintings.
Examples:
circular shield-pattern: http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/...6E23F71147EC0/
Lion: http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/...794D828C83333/
rather fantastic thing in the middle, with some words in the oscian alphabet and twigs: http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/...CF21D4A4FCD11/

[Ariovist]

Great update again, hopefully you get rid of the senseless display of the germanic tribes as "only effective at ambushes" faction idea.
In reality they were more "disciplined" concerning battle tactics as the Gauls for example.

[Biggus Splenus]

Oh my, Splenyi, you over-credit me too much.

Not at all Might sound simple, but creating concepts isn't easy.

In general, the most difficult task is to make unit-quality be located less in stats (except for morale), and more in animations (resist disruption by javelins) and manoeverability (/battle entities).

That's also what I've been doing. Melee skill and armour quality is still existant, but no where near as significant as it was in vanilla. Morale and battle entity stats are the biggest bonuses of higher quality troops

PS: As I'm basing my private little mod on the Samnite Wars, I was pretty excited to get to know about the Lucanian tomb at Paestum: http://funkystock.photoshelter.com/g...000yhYrmxc8IA4 . Most of this stems from roughly 330-320 BC, quite fitting to the first Samnite war. I'm currently designing my ingame-Samnites/Sabellians around these tomb-paintings.

Nice Why the Samnite Wars though, just a curious question.
EDIT: Wow, just saw your addition to that post. Love the shield designs. Buc's recent post in the social group on Republican Roman armies breifly covers the nature of the Samnite's shield, and it's good to see none of those horribal gladiator trapezoidal shields in your units!

[Biggus Splenus]

Great update again, hopefully you get rid of the senseless display of the germanic tribes as "only effective at ambushes" faction idea.
In reality they were more "disciplined" concerning battle tactics as the Gauls for example.

well that's very debatable. I've read accounts of Celts using both tortoise and shield wall formations, which requires some degree of discipline.

Could you educate me on Germanic tactics I enjoy learning this stuff, and it'll help with representation.

[Duncan III]

Thanks for the update and the great pics from Kaunitz (to me some of them are reminiscent of bronze age Aegean art from Crete and especially Thera (Santorini)) I know nothing of modding, so have little to contribute in a technical way but I will be following your progress Splenyi and will chip in if I feel I have anything worth saying.

[Biggus Splenus]

I'm glad you're enjoying it Duncan hopefully I can get another update in during the week.

[Pistol-Pete]

Good work Splenyi!
If forced to choose between fatigue and cohesion, in designing a ancient battles simulation i would go your way. Ideally fatigue would be included as well, but it is maybe not as prominent as the aspects it influeces; combat efficency, morale, cohesion. What about units not relying on cohesion like warbands? Are you going to let them have higher charhe speeds and do more impact on charge? Combined with units having different combatattributes for formed and unformed melee, would make for a realistic reprensation of diffrent combatstyles of regular troops and warbands. But how about troops in heavy armour? I guess they are slowed down, but not getting tired than unarmoured then?

I am really looking forward to your next blog. The project is looking very promising.

[Biggus Splenus]

If forced to choose between fatigue and cohesion, in designing a ancient battles simulation i would go your way. Ideally fatigue would be included as well, but it is maybe not as prominent as the aspects it influeces; combat efficency, morale, cohesion.

Fatigue usually fits in with cohesion anyway, so it is sort of still involved in this mod

What about units not relying on cohesion like warbands? Are you going to let them have higher charhe speeds and do more impact on charge? Combined with units having different combatattributes for formed and unformed melee, would make for a realistic reprensation of diffrent combatstyles of regular troops and warbands.

Undisciplined warbands will be able to move faster, simply because they're not worrying about keeping formation. Still thinking if they'll be able to maneuver more effectively though, because any unit with poor command structure would have trouble with this

But how about troops in heavy armour? I guess they are slowed down, but not getting tired than unarmoured then?

Well I don't think heavy troops should be slower, because in this mod, troop's movement is already limited by the fact that they have to move slower because they're in formation, and heavy armour won't contribute to them moving even slower, if that makes sense. Warband-style heavy troops will be slower than equal light troops though, just because warbands can move more freely, and equipment weight would play a factor.

EDIT: Kaunitz, perhaps use the Hellenic thureos, not the Celtic one for your Samnites? Italian scutum/thureos I've seen don't have the umbo in the centre, just the spina. But I could be wrong. The in-game model does seem a little small though...

I also found it strange that Samnite riders only use bridle, and don't have any other furnishing, not even anything to sit on! It must have hurt.

Do you have a planned roster for the men of Samnium

[Southern Hunter]

Your devblog makes a lot of sense and I remain encouraged that you are heading in the right direction.

How do you handle the fact that the fatigue / cohesion penalty for running is related to the animation, not the stance? It is completely baffling me right now (as I have very slow move speeds).

I just ran some trials, which I imagine are unhelpful:

- Eliminated running for all heavy infantry (i.e. set it to the same as walking). Probably not acceptable, as HI then have such terrible problems with LI.
- Made running 3x the walk speed for infantry. Unfortunately, this is still too slow to count as running by animation after a while, so they continue to run but do not get fatigued.

I think I have worked out a scheme to make projectiles realistic in terms of casualties (and like the other ideas that have been talked about here on their other effects).

[Osbot]

That's 100% correct in my book I believe that no formation in ancient warfare (and as far as I know, any period of warfare) was capable of using multiple ranks of force to push the enemy, it's just not possible, the guys in the front would quickly be crushed or they'll fall over, moreover, they won't have any space to fight back. The only purpose of a deep formation was to try and give your men higher morale, and a higher sense of security, and perhaps to also strike fear into the enemy on the recieving end.

I agree and disagree. I don't think it is black and white. Against a fence designed to hold back people yes, people are going to be crushed to death until the fence breaks. However two masses of people are not equal in mass and neither has the rigidity to hold up in that manner. One side will begin to break down much sooner than the other side will. Also, I don't think you should look at it as a mass crush of people all piled up pushing against each other. Think of it more as a battle of inches. Where one guy backed up by more people is able to clear space that the other side has to concede. Occasional pushing matches is absolutely certain to have happened though, especially Hoplite vs Hoplite or Roman vs Roman type engagements. Again, neither side was immovable, once the point of balance was exceeded one side was going to trample over the other.

I've experienced this first hand on a much smaller scale playing both rugby and american football. Rugby is the better example due to the analogous nature of rucks and scrums. If you are caught between two opposing rucks or scrums and you are in an akward position, yes you can get squished and it can be unpleasant, however if you are part of the ruck, the guys at the "spear" point are simply transferring energy and neither side has the force to cause the point men to begin getting crushed. Simply put, one side collapses before this happens.

Now with 50 guys behind you pushing, unless the other side also has nearly 50 men deep pushing back, you are going to bowl right over the top of them and any momentary resistance on your men in front will be momentary and hardly enough to crush them. The other guys will not have the ability to stop that push.

Like I said, the Thebians defeating the Spartans using an oblique battle order is in my opinion evidence enough that there was a pushing effect in warfare like this. The Thebians deployed with an inordinately deep flank and obliterated the Spartan flank opposite so decisively that the main line of the Spartans (if memory servers) ran before contact knowing their flank was decimated. This has to indicate that the collapse was rapid, and a result of overwhelming mass, and not a typical engagement where there was considerable spear pokiness going on.

I could be wrong, but it is the only way I can really conceptualize the break down of the Spartan flank in the manner it happened!

[Biggus Splenus]

How do you handle the fact that the fatigue / cohesion penalty for running is related to the animation, not the stance? It is completely baffling me right now (as I have very slow move speeds).

Oh wow you're right, I didn't even notice that while testing that's a terrible design choice by CA. Well if I do chose to have very low unit speeds, then the speed boni for running will be much smaller than it is now, but if I keep with fairly regular movement speed, then I'll just keep it as it is. I've still to do some tests on this.

I think I have worked out a scheme to make projectiles realistic in terms of casualties (and like the other ideas that have been talked about here on their other effects).

Feel free to share

I agree and disagree. I don't think it is black and white...

I know that it's definitely not black and white, it's very complex, and I know that people wouldn't be piling up on each other. The most common simile for hoplite battles seems to be an america football/rugby scrumage, which I think is fairly rediculous. The hoplon, according to recent studies (see Storm of Spears, Christopher Matthew), shows that it couldn't allow "shoving matches" between phalanxs for any more than a minute or two, the shield's design was horrible for this and would cause the user to be crushed by his own, the enemy in front, and his allies behind weight. When you put this into perspective of phalanx combat lasting a few hours, well, yeah. Moreover, men in a phalanx could hold each other to form a combined mass. If one side did collapse, then there'd be a lot more casualties than we hear about, I believe.

Now with 50 guys behind you pushing, unless the other side also has nearly 50 men deep pushing back, you are going to bowl right over the top of them and any momentary resistance on your men in front will be momentary and hardly enough to crush them. The other guys will not have the ability to stop that push.

I don't believe that form of cohesion existed in this period, because it wouldn't have been possible to use everyone's weight in the formation. First off, it would be absolutely terrifying, and no man would put himself into such a possition (totally different to sport, seems as fatality is an issue here). Secondly, you wouldn't be able to fight back apart from just pushing the enemy. If hoplite did engage at that distance, what would be the point of a spear, why not just carry a sword.

Like I said, the Thebians defeating the Spartans using an oblique battle order is in my opinion evidence enough that there was a pushing effect in warfare like this. The Thebians deployed with an inordinately deep flank and obliterated the Spartan flank opposite so decisively that the main line of the Spartans (if memory servers) ran before contact knowing their flank was decimated. This has to indicate that the collapse was rapid, and a result of overwhelming mass, and not a typical engagement where there was considerable spear pokiness going on.

The Theban left flank was 50 deep, all other parts of the phalanx were fairly shallow (can't remember exactly, but shallower than the Spartans). The entire Spartan Phalanx was 12 deep. The Spartan's met the deep Theban phalanx and a melee definitely happened (they didn't run before contact). The severly out-numbered Spartan line collapsed. Goldsworthy says that this could be for multiple reasons; the shallow frontage of the formation (in comparison to the depth) allowed the unit to move much faster (like a column) and retain its cohesion much more effectively. If the phalanx could use the weight of all rank (50 men) in a push, I doubt the Spartans would have lasted a few seconds. Spartan lines had constantly dealt with much deeper formations than their own.

I'd just like to say that I do think "shoving matches" did happen in this type of warfare, but extremely rarely. I don't think soldiers/warriors went into battle knowing that they would attack in this way, or be dedicated to it in anyway as their strategy. And I don't believe the Romans had these types of confrontation, that's not what their shield is made for (it's for being wacked and melee fights, that's why it's so large and covers the legs).

I could be wrong, but it is the only way I can really conceptualize the break down of the Spartan flank in the manner it happened!

Well the exciting thing is that we don't know who is right, everything on phalanx vs phalanx is just a conecpt/theory! So either of us could be right, or either of us could be wrong.