Why do Austrian Line Infantry suck so hard?

[Sogui]

Ok so I'm playing Austria and I figured that 25% more men per regiment would be awesome. After all they have the most expensive infantry in the game so they must kick ass!

I realize they trade off like 5 accuracy and 10 reloading skill, 1 melee attack, 1 charge bonus, 4 defense, and 2 morale... but that's nitpicking compared to the 40 extra men you get! Sure having 25% more firepower for that first volley, or 25% more men for that charge will outweight the small differences that the stats make.

So I tested after having some frustrating moments in my campaign I tested it out in custom battles.

Here's what I found:

1- In a strict gun-to-gun fight Austria's line will barely win 50% if it gets the first volley. If it doesn't get the first volley it will definitely lose. So all in all you will lose more than 50% of your gun to gun fights.

2- Melee... what the hell? They are a joke. Despite only 1-2 point differences in melee attack, charge, and morale and a 4 point difference in defense.... they get absolutely slaughtered in melee. Multiple times I would charge a British line from an angle, meaning neither side had fired a shot. Our entire lines would clash but I had the "charge bonus". However I would only kill maybe 5-8 units in the charge and then instantly my men would start dropping like flies. 200---160---120---80---break.... all in like 1 minute.

The last game I tried on hard difficulty was like 60 men killed, 160 men lost... and that's when I got the charge! Most of my other tests had similar results.


How disappointing = /

[Varaaki]

I find it interesting that you find this disappointing.

The melee situation is particularly amusing. You think that a 4 point difference in defense is insignificant? If the numbers were 1000 and 1004, perhaps. But you're talking about 15 vs 11... that's more than a 25% difference. That's huge. Given the 10 v 9 offense difference (10%), you're talking about troops that are vastly inferior on a 1-on-1 basis in hand-to-hand combat.

And the morale issue... given that Austrian troops already start with low-ish morale, given that they're going to take huge losses in melee, it's no surprise at all that they turn and run.

What this all demonstrates is something any student of military history already knows: the skill and experience of the men under your command is at least as important as the raw number of men.

[Sogui]

Yea but the stat differences are numerical representations of other factors that may or may not play out as explicitly. Having 15 vs 11 defense does not play out as having a force that is 37% stronger, nor does the +1 attack explain why my forces dies in droves after the initial charge.

Stats just don't work that way in the TW series. You'd have to do some real digging into the code before you can come up with a way to calculate how stats truly affect the odds in a given fight. Unless they changed the way their philosophy on unit stats, which evidence says it hasn't... mere numbers never tell the whole story. Otherwise my 2-hander units from M2TW (patched) would be 100% stronger than dismounted feudal knights.