New units management for expension

New units management for expension

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Marechal_Davout

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Over the years TW has been relatively fun to play but the management of the military units has always been extremely unrealistic. I would like to suggest a revamp of this part of the game. It goes like this:

In real life our forefathers leading their armies were not managing "stacks" - They were managing a number of large units, which in turn, controlled smaller ones.

As such I would like to see the ability to logically group units (regiments/batteries) into brigades, brigades into division, division into corps... you get the pictures.

The player would have the ability to manage an officer corps that he would then use to command those units - allowing for promotion, dismissals, ...)

Once a unit is defined, it can be assign to a larger one or transfer from one to the other.

Orders given to a unit would trickle down to all its sub- units whether they are in the same 'stack" or not.

Similarly, during a battle Napoleon was not actually micro-managing every single units in his army - specific instructions should be given to an officer commanding a set of units (take building, engage enemy, retreat,...) and the orders should then be carried out by the officer based on its capabilities.

One of the reasons that we only have 20 units per stack is because it would be hard to effectively directly control more than that - with this system we could have many time this number and get closer to an actual order of battle.

In both campaign and battle, the unit window could be toggled between showing the unit hierarchy or the listing of all the base units in the "stack"

the player should be able to name/rename both officers and unit groups (brigades, divisions, ...) from the screen

The player should also be able to access a screen displaying the current overall order of battle of the nation. Adding/Deleting/Reassigning units should be possible from this screen

In the same token, and for realism-sake, I would like to see a unit generation limit by region based on the region population
 
Brilliant thinking. I second this, and have also wished, many times, for the ability to organize my army into hierarchical structures.
 
i believe was implemented in rome total war, but no one trust the group AI. the idea you can issue order enmass only work if you are issue order to someone with a brain.
 
^ what he said. There are too many things you would have to specify to a computer player that you wouldnt to a human. Eg, you have a town. You tell the computer to capture the town. Computer follows orders but then the town isn't attacked. They just go round it. Human might leave the town to engage whilst a computer wouldn't. Humans could use their initiative, a computer would follow instructions and that is it.
 
The AI is far too stupid to trust with anything. You will have cannons firing spread shot behind your general within two minutes.
 
That's the problem with how RTW system. We don't need the AI to completely take over the units, just to logically interpret our simpler orders. It would kind of be like groups only the groups would be more permenent structures that could execute intelligent inter-unit drills (as opposed to intra-unit drills we have now). You take 5 line infantry units and say "you're a battalion now." You tell the battalion commander (as the general) to form platoon width column, medium company spacing, march over there and deploy into battalion line. They would take care to not shoot each other, walk through each other, etc.
 
They would get stuck in fences and so on, bunch up, then get slaughtered by calvary.
 
You guys do realize that the AI is actually suppose to wage an entire battle on its own - following a relatively simple set of order should be within its reach
 
Marechal_Davout said:
You guys do realize that the AI is actually suppose to wage an entire battle on its own - following a relatively simple set of order should be within its reach
Click to expand...

yeah, but human players generally beat the ai in equal battles and often when well outnumbered, because the ai is not intuitive.

ina real army you have hundreds and thousands of intuitive humans down the chain of command...

for example, if a human brigade commander is ordered to deploy in an area crossed with stone fences at an odd angle, he might alter the angle he deploys in to reflect what he sees that his general has not... an ai brigade will deploy to a set pattern and thats that.

we see it time and time again when an ai army hides behind the wrong side of a wall, or faces the other direction, or deploys against a formerly occupied but now empty house... or doesnt turn to face a flanking attack etc etc...

i think the closest way of arranging your forces into realistic manageable units is to group them according to how you would like.. make your own brigades on the field and control them as such.. i guess it would be a nice touch if battlefield groupings could be named, and arranged on the campaign map.. then deployed on the battle map in your pre defined 'brigade' groupings.
 
I'm not sure about divisions but weren't corps a Napoleonic development ? A bit late for ETW era. I don't think the British army even had a corps system in the Nap. wars.
 
Corps was indeed a development made by Napoleon. It was a breakthrough in administrattive organization but had nothing to do with battle order. All of the organization in TW is battle order, the administrative organization tree is completely missing (done for you I guess). None of the admin org would make a lick of difference in TW anyway since it's handled with computational perfection.

antea, I get what you're saying and I've seen games that are able to delegate effectively to the AI. They can conform to terrain and intelligently react on a small scale under the auspices of your larger orders. I think TW would be a lot different if the general only shaped the battle in broad strokes instead of micromanaging every little thing. The AI would seem like less of a pushover if not faced with super gamey human opposition.
 
The AI doesn't have to be stupid. CA must make good AI a priority, and it will be fine.
 
Jihada said:
I'm not sure about divisions but weren't corps a Napoleonic development ? A bit late for ETW era. I don't think the British army even had a corps system in the Nap. wars.
Click to expand...

That is correct - the army corps was introduced by Napoleon - The request is to provide a hierarchical structure to the units - how many levels of command should be determined by the player
 
Frederf said:
Corps was indeed a development made by Napoleon. It was a breakthrough in administrattive organization but had nothing to do with battle order. All of the organization in TW is battle order, the administrative organization tree is completely missing (done for you I guess). None of the admin org would make a lick of difference in TW anyway since it's handled with computational perfection.

antea, I get what you're saying and I've seen games that are able to delegate effectively to the AI. They can conform to terrain and intelligently react on a small scale under the auspices of your larger orders. I think TW would be a lot different if the general only shaped the battle in broad strokes instead of micromanaging every little thing. The AI would seem like less of a pushover if not faced with super gamey human opposition.
Click to expand...
 
Frederf said:
Corps was indeed a development made by Napoleon. It was a breakthrough in administrattive organization but had nothing to do with battle order. All of the organization in TW is battle order, the administrative organization tree is completely missing (done for you I guess). None of the admin org would make a lick of difference in TW anyway since it's handled with computational perfection.

antea, I get what you're saying and I've seen games that are able to delegate effectively to the AI. They can conform to terrain and intelligently react on a small scale under the auspices of your larger orders. I think TW would be a lot different if the general only shaped the battle in broad strokes instead of micromanaging every little thing. The AI would seem like less of a pushover if not faced with super gamey human opposition.
Click to expand...

The Army Corps being essentially an administrative unit is absolutely incorrect - The Grande Armee was a composite of several army corps - each commanded by a Marshal or a General. Those "small armies" could fight independently or as a group. On the battlefield the corps commander was responsible for its units and carried the orders from the army commanders. In short,, the Army Corps was a tactical unit.
If you look at any Order of Battle of the Empire, the Army Corps are always present.
 
I think it sounds like a lot of work on CA's end, and alot of micro managing on the players end, for no real gain.

I might misunderstand your suggestion, but I don;t think it;'s anything you can;t simulate in the game already.
 
Marechal_Davout said:
The Army Corps being essentially an administrative unit is absolutely incorrect - The Grande Armee was a composite of several army corps - each commanded by a Marshal or a General. Those "small armies" could fight independently or as a group. On the battlefield the corps commander was responsible for its units and carried the orders from the army commanders. In short,, the Army Corps was a tactical unit.
If you look at any Order of Battle of the Empire, the Army Corps are always present.
Click to expand...

I must be grossly misinformed then. I thought each corps was pure "cavalry," "infantry," etc that handled the unified behavior of previously separate regiments and that the order was mixed down to the brigade level in operations. Reading about it, it's clear that corps are simply "division groups" for strategic movement, an extension of the classic organizational tree. Regardless, the corps system was not featured in military conflict 1600-1799 to any significant extent and TW rarely deals with troops numbering ~4,000, nevermind these 150,000 man monstrocities Napoleonic warfare dealt with.

The limiting factor is not how many units the player is able to reasonably control but rather how many men and how large a piece of terrain can be rendered using PC resources. To handle crowds of significantly greater than the current amount, CA is going to have to scale back their graphics (fat chance) or leverage some technique of not displaying all units and terrain at the same time in highest detail (streaming?).

The concept of a more-tiered (currently it's man>unit>stack) OoB in which command follows the heirachical tree is a solid one. The successful use of such an idea would reduce micromanagement, not increase it. Perhaps it could even scale with the conflict, commanding a battalion you control companies while a division commander controls brigades.
 
Frederf said:
Reading about it, it's clear that corps are simply "division groups" for strategic movement, an extension of the classic organizational tree. Regardless, the corps system was not featured in military conflict 1600-1799 to any significant extent and TW rarely deals with troops numbering ~4,000, nevermind these 150,000 man monstrocities Napoleonic warfare dealt with.
Click to expand...

You are correct about the period 1600-1799 - However this thread is about the expansion - that, most people believe, will be based on post 1800 (napoleonic era). At that time large armies were historically accurate and the point of my thread is that the current unit management system used by ETW would not adequately support such a scale. Having the Grande Armee being represented by a few non-descript stacks of "regiments" would not maximize the potential of what this game can do in term of historical accuracy and immersion.
 
I think this idea has been done before to various degrees in other games and it's simply not as fun as the current mix. Thats not to say that it shouldn't be tried again, but I think most people enjoy the current level of command and control. If anything the requests that are mostly voiced are to give us more control and not less. You're essentially asking for the AI to take over more responsibilities and make us a more passive observer in the game.

Taken to the extreme, would you have fun if they simply gave us one button to push and the AI took over after that button push. You could then watch things unfold before you and maybe push the button again when they didn't seem to be going the way you liked. As extreme as this sounds, you are in fact asking for the player to be in less control and not more.
 
Marechal, TW always seems to have a limited number of troops on a battlefield purely for PC resource reasons. Arguing for a new management system on the basis that Napoleonic conflict is going to be much larger than the current 1700-1799 scale ignores that TW will not be seeing a huge increase in army sizes any time soon, history be darned. Unless TW gets a radical change for an expansion (unlikely), justification for a re-organization will be as justified for ETW as it would be for ETW:Napoleon +/-20%.

I would adore such a system of hierarchical organization and large-scale strategic movement. I would want it in ETW just as much as any expansion.
 
Can't you just make seperate Stacks? They are Generals even on the game now, Brigades and Divisions were commanded by Generals so it's kind of pointless really since the stacks are commanded by Generals, you in fact when moving the main armies would fragment across a country side, and when enemy location is clear they would converge a lot of times at one point, something you can do on this game. The Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War was like that, so was several battles including the very first, it wasn't 100+ thousand men bashing eachother right out all at once, so the part where you have reinforcing armies enter in during the battle also fits a realistic tone.

I personally like the stacks since on most RTS games based during the 1700-1800s I really like the Division size battles, of around 3000 men, and this game fits well for that. Since a stack is basically that much counting on your settings.

Frederf said:
Marechal, TW always seems to have a limited number of troops on a battlefield purely for PC resource reasons. Arguing for a new management system on the basis that Napoleonic conflict is going to be much larger than the current 1700-1799 scale ignores that TW will not be seeing a huge increase in army sizes any time soon, history be darned. Unless TW gets a radical change for an expansion (unlikely), justification for a re-organization will be as justified for ETW as it would be for ETW:Napoleon +/-20%.

I would adore such a system of hierarchical organization and large-scale strategic movement. I would want it in ETW just as much as any expansion.
Click to expand...
Play Take Command Second Manassas then, huge, huge battles on it, and the game is set up in regiments/brigades/divisions/army With artillery, cavalry being parts of many divisions. If you put a full out battle between fractions of the Union/CSA army you have well over 30+ thousand men in the field at one time, and for a sprite animation game it even makes my PC run slow, and I can play Empire Total War at pretty good settings. lol
 
Last edited:
I was giving reasons why wanting the post #1 mechanism "for this great new expansion we're getting with Napoleonic scale warfare" wasn't that realistic of a reason for wanting the mechanism because the scale of TW warfare is unlikely to change significantly for such an expansion.

Personally I like most if not all of post #1's suggestions, just applied to a contemporary TW scale. As for the "20 unit cards in a stack" level of organization, it's silly that we're stuck with such fiew tiers of organization. There's no reason that you can't better organize the same 3000 men in a stack on multiple levels without stepping on any PC resource toes. We could designate "sub-card" unit fragments as well as "super-card" unit groups with a lot of features. On the strategic level stacks could be organized into supporting "stack groups."

Imagine the following:

2-3 stacks are linked to form a "division" with a general which is purchased when ever the link is established (purchased). When close to each other geographically, strategic cross-support is available if one stack engages the enemy. Mid-battle reinforcements can have their reinforcement location and units from neighboring stack(s) chosen. Retreating stacks within the support zone of linked stacks suffer less than if not supported. The division general's benefits apply to all stacks, even those he is not in so long as he is within support range of the stack in question.

Each individual stack is a "brigade" and is the largest unit that can occupy a battlefield. The brigadier general could either be attached to the most senior unit, purchased, or auto-generated for stacks of a certain size. Such an officer is required for that stack to participate in a "division linkup."

Brigade (stack) is a collection of units most of which are in permanent named battle groups typically 1-5 "cards" in size each. The groups work just like battle groups only they are defined at the campaign level, are named, and tend to stick together through drag and drop like practices. These groups collapse into "group cards" to ease the organization visual picture and display name and symbol for unique identification. These groups persist from campaign to battle to ease and hasten the organization of battle.

Unit groups take their automatic naming from their primary contents, being "group" for artillery, "squadron" for cavalry, or "battalion" for infantry. Orders can be given to battalions directly and they will pass down information to the member units. AI interpretation and/or command override will determine what formation and general stance is used to carry out the order, often pathfinding units clear of obstacles and intermixing.with other friend units. A battalion could form a single square formation against cavalry of its own accord using all or some of the member units. A battalion told to attack a building might put 3 companies of infantry to the task of surpressing while automatically determining that a 4th company is best for assault and maneuvering it out of the supporting fire to run in.

The units themselves which are rarely commanded invdividually are companies of typical or even smaller than typical TW size. Due to the heirachy method 30-40 or more fundemental units can easily be managed (so long as the total troop count is kept under control) since 99% of the time they are part of these defined unit groups that effectively manage the individual units. Fine structure is seen visually as the company is not a uniform mass of men but has pacing separation between sections and platoons. Drills using virtual sub-unit groups can be enacted such as fire-and-advance-by-platoon or by-section if either the player, AI colonel. or AI captain (when alone) are compelled to use the tactic.

All division, brigade, and battalion names are uniquely and automatically generated but renameable. Companies or batteries are named non-uniquely in each larger unit. An automatic army organizer algorythm button can make a best guess at categorizing all units in a stack if the player doesn't want to be bothered.
 
Frederf said:
I was giving reasons why wanting the post #1 mechanism "for this great new expansion we're getting with Napoleonic scale warfare" wasn't that realistic of a reason for wanting the mechanism because the scale of TW warfare is unlikely to change significantly for such an expansion.

Personally I like most if not all of post #1's suggestions, just applied to a contemporary TW scale. As for the "20 unit cards in a stack" level of organization, it's silly that we're stuck with such fiew tiers of organization. There's no reason that you can't better organize the same 3000 men in a stack on multiple levels without stepping on any PC resource toes. We could designate "sub-card" unit fragments as well as "super-card" unit groups with a lot of features. On the strategic level stacks could be organized into supporting "stack groups."

Imagine the following:

2-3 stacks are linked to form a "division" with a general which is purchased when ever the link is established (purchased). When close to each other geographically, strategic cross-support is available if one stack engages the enemy. Mid-battle reinforcements can have their reinforcement location and units from neighboring stack(s) chosen. Retreating stacks within the support zone of linked stacks suffer less than if not supported. The division general's benefits apply to all stacks, even those he is not in so long as he is within support range of the stack in question.

Each individual stack is a "brigade" and is the largest unit that can occupy a battlefield. The brigadier general could either be attached to the most senior unit, purchased, or auto-generated for stacks of a certain size. Such an officer is required for that stack to participate in a "division linkup."

Brigade (stack) is a collection of units most of which are in permanent named battle groups typically 1-5 "cards" in size each. The groups work just like battle groups only they are defined at the campaign level, are named, and tend to stick together through drag and drop like practices. These groups collapse into "group cards" to ease the organization visual picture and display name and symbol for unique identification. These groups persist from campaign to battle to ease and hasten the organization of battle.

Unit groups take their automatic naming from their primary contents, being "group" for artillery, "squadron" for cavalry, or "battalion" for infantry. Orders can be given to battalions directly and they will pass down information to the member units. AI interpretation and/or command override will determine what formation and general stance is used to carry out the order, often pathfinding units clear of obstacles and intermixing.with other friend units. A battalion could form a single square formation against cavalry of its own accord using all or some of the member units. A battalion told to attack a building might put 3 companies of infantry to the task of surpressing while automatically determining that a 4th company is best for assault and maneuvering it out of the supporting fire to run in.

The units themselves which are rarely commanded invdividually are companies of typical or even smaller than typical TW size. Due to the heirachy method 30-40 or more fundemental units can easily be managed (so long as the total troop count is kept under control) since 99% of the time they are part of these defined unit groups that effectively manage the individual units. Fine structure is seen visually as the company is not a uniform mass of men but has pacing separation between sections and platoons. Drills using virtual sub-unit groups can be enacted such as fire-and-advance-by-platoon or by-section if either the player, AI colonel. or AI captain (when alone) are compelled to use the tactic.

All division, brigade, and battalion names are uniquely and automatically generated but renameable. Companies or batteries are named non-uniquely in each larger unit. An automatic army organizer algorythm button can make a best guess at categorizing all units in a stack if the player doesn't want to be bothered.
Click to expand...

I think that we are exactly on the same page
 
I just want someone to add in more role-playing elements that makes me actually care for my generals.
 
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