How to make longer lasting battles?

[Santiago de Pola]

I'm looking for a way to make longer lasting battles, but without interfering with the balance of the units!

It seemed that increasing the defense skill of every unit is a good way to go, but sadly it makes units less vulnerable to charges..

Any ideas?

[Taiji]

Reduce the melee hit rate in battle_config.

Values less than 1 will count as 1.

Will also negatively affect charges.

Causes an imbalance between missile and melee.

So basically I believe there is no way at all to do exactly what you are asking.

[Eothese]

How about adding the same amount of hit points to all units? (stat_health)

[taw]

There's no way to do exactly what you want in any trivial way because many effects take different time - like cavalry charges are fast, melee combat is slow, morale shocks are fast, missile units have only some ammo and some window of opportunity to shoot etc. You would need to rebalance everything (well, they're not too balanced in vanilla).

How do you expect to do that without breaking charge? You could increase defense and charge and ammo, so charging is about as strong, melee is slower, and missile troops can kill as much enemies except more slowly. That would still change the balance a lot.

[Santiago de Pola]

Reduce the melee hit rate in battle_config.

Actually I did that, but indeed it nerfed the charges!

In the current mod I'm using the default meelee hit rate is 2.00, so I reduced it to 0.50 to have longer lasting battles! To counter the charge nerf, I increased the charge values of all units by x4..tested, and it seems to work!

Causes an imbalance between missile and melee.

Really? Hmm..haven't noticed that. :hmmm: In what way?

How about adding the same amount of hit points to all units? (stat_health)

I'm afraid that would also imbalance the charges(the charged unit would receive less losses)..


BTW, thanx for the replies people!

[Taiji]

Really? Hmm..haven't noticed that. :hmmm: In what way?

Yeah, really. Slowing down melee is effectively speeding up missile, missile units will have higher kill rates/scores than melee units unless the missile units run out of ammo long before the battle ends. Check 'before and after' kill scores in a custom battle where you don't run out of ammo to see for yourself that your missile units kill more in relation to their melee counterparts. You can try to adjust your <missile-target-accuracy> in battle_config.xml to rebalance them. You might want to give them more ammo if you want to avoid them becoming less useful earlier in the battle than previously.

Raising morale like Mithrandir suggests is generally a good idea but you probably want a spread across different unit types and after a certain point, the higher you raise it the less noticeable the spread will be.

Raising defence has the added bonus of increasing the effectiveness of flanking, you probably already know. It also reduces the relative improvement given by experience and weapon upgrades, armor upgrades will be better vs missile than melee.

Spear and light spear weapon attributes come with penalties vs infantry, you may want to raise the defence of these units a little more than others in order to make them last longer in melee vs infantry. This has to be balanced with their defence bonus vs cavalry though or they will become immune to the charge.

Mass values affect cavalry charges, lower mass values for troops 0.2-0.5 with mounts around 2.0 or so will cause much heavier casualties than 0.8-1.2 for troops and 4-6 for mounts. No idea why but it works.

Attack delay can be used to reduce melee kill rates, just increase it. I know 3 digits will work since I've had units over 100 work as expected but I don't know the limit.

I didn't have much time to respond before, I hope I am more useful this time round

[Santiago de Pola]

Yeah, really. Slowing down melee is effectively speeding up missile, missile units will have higher kill rates/scores than melee units unless the missile units run out of ammo long before the battle ends.

Missile units will have a higher kill rate, only because the battle last longer..but that is expected, so it doesn't bother me!

I'm more concerned about the charge nerf..my countering measures worked, but it's still not 100%!

And cavalry seem's a bit overpowering(hard to kill)..but that might be because I am used to cavalry being very vulnerable..

Attack delay can be used to reduce melee kill rates

Well that's what I want..just a longer(IMO more realistic) melee! This actually seems like a great way to achieve longer battles..gonna try it, I wonder if it will also affect the charges..

I hope I am more useful this time round

You sure are..thanx mate!

[Mithrandir]

Reduce all attack values to 3/4 of their original value (doesn't have to be that, just make sure it's consistent). You could optionally raise morale across the board as well.