Why The Hell Can't I Withdraw!?

So I sent a small raiding party of militia to a French town. Next turn, a unit of french line infantry come to kick me out. At first, I retreat, but they follow me and I'm forced into battle. No probs.

Then the battle starts, I wait for them on the top of a hill and they close. Fire is exchanged but I pull back when I begin taking too many losses for my tastes. I wait for the equivalent of 10 minutes (I had it on fast forward) and the enemy don't move to chase me down or anything. Eventually, I know it's time to call it quits, so I march my men all the way back to the withdraw line, meanwhile again the enemy makes no attempt to engage me whatsoever, and when I get there I get a nice little surprise.

The "Withdraw" command, is faded out. I am unable to withdraw from the field, despite the fact I have just physically marched my men to the withdraw line without problem and the enemy is making no attempt to come and get me. Why? What is the excuse? Why am I forced to now go see my entire unit destroyed for the sake of taking down maybe, if I'm lucky, 20 more Frenchmen? When I can physically and in logic withdraw from the battle and effectively retreat?

You should be able to retreat when the attack force is making no attempt to, well, attack, and you are able to physically withdraw and retreat from the force. So basically I'm being told I have to go watch my men get annihilated while the French "attackers" sit on their bums because of an unrealistic game mechanic.

I withdrew from the fighting, ran through the woods, hid, and got away, sounds like a pretty good ing symptom list for "retreat". It's not like I'm backed against a wall or anything.

Originally Posted by Communist Nazi Republican

At first, I retreat, but they follow me and I'm forced into battle. No probs.

[...]Eventually, I know it's time to call it quits, so I march my men all the way back to the withdraw line, meanwhile again the enemy makes no attempt to engage me whatsoever, and when I get there I get a nice little surprise.

The "Withdraw" command, is faded out. I am unable to withdraw from the field, despite the fact I have just physically marched my men to the withdraw line without problem and the enemy is making no attempt to come and get me. Why?

Because if it weren't like that, you would be forced into battle on the map, position all your troops at the very back of the deployment zone and press "withdraw" as soon as the battle starts.

Originally Posted by daniu

Because if it weren't like that, you would be forced into battle on the map, position all your troops at the very back of the deployment zone and press "withdraw" as soon as the battle starts.

Easily fixed, close in the deployment zone so it's not possible. I never understood why something like that would be allowed in the first place. And again, that's not what I did, why should I be unable to do something because other people might abuse the system, when I have just realistically pulled off a tactical retreat?

And this just means an even stupider thing where the attacked doesn't actually have to attack, as in the case of the battle I'm in right now. I just lost my minor advantage of being on defense because now they get the first shot next round. And I am not waiting a whole freaking hour for them to get punished for it and have a victory given to me, if that's even going to happen and I don't have some weird glitch or bug where they win and I'm annihilated anyway.

What I'm saying is if you are allowed to (ever) withdraw from a fight to which you're forced from the campaign map, it renders the forced into battle concept moot.
It doesn't matter whether that's only from within the deployment zone or whether you maneuvered before.

Or what do you propose if one of your light cav is caught by a full stack of line?
You run around, withdraw, back to campaign map... you're forced into battle again, run around, withdraw... forever?
It's not only "some people" who would abuse the system; it wouldn't even be an abuse. Of what?

Even the AI should do it like this if it's allowed because it's optimal use of units. I'd be really annoyed and stop playing.

So then let's agree that the entire system is flawed one way or the other? God it's moments like these that completely kill the buzz you get from a RP'd storyline.

"We moved back to the hill without being pursued, so we made an effort to retreat. We almost got away when, suddenly, we couldn't. So we had to sit in the rain for an hour while we waited for the enemy to automatically lose." -_-

If they don't defeat you before the battle time limit runs out, then it's counted as your victory.


Assuming, of course, you have time limits.

Originally Posted by 43rdFoot

If they don't defeat you before the battle time limit runs out, then it's counted as your victory.


Assuming, of course, you have time limits.

Naturally, but it's still ticks me off I have to wait an hour before the idiot AI gives up when within that hour my troops could've been halfway back to London by then...

Same here. I've never understood why CA put this arbitary restriction in the game. Its even worse at sea where it's won't let you avoid battle with small ships after the first attempt.

So you end up forced to waste time going to the battle scene and then clicking withdraw to get your ship out of the fix. And then you have to save first just in case the dumb AI decides to try and evade by running your ship into the nearest land-mass and sinking it.

Originally Posted by Didz

Same here. I've never understood why CA put this arbitary restriction in the game. Its even worse at sea where it's won't let you avoid battle with small ships after the first attempt.

No, really, you don't understand it? Have you read my explanation?
If withdrawals from forced battles were allowed, forced battles wouldn't make any sense so out of the game they go.
If battles can't be forced, it's nearly impossible to prevent a single cavalry unit raiding your towns.

This is actually quite a good example where a game mechanic makes perfect sense although it isn't strictly "realistic".

Originally Posted by daniu

No, really, you don't understand it? Have you read my explanation?
If withdrawals from forced battles were allowed, forced battles wouldn't make any sense so out of the game they go.
If battles can't be forced, it's nearly impossible to prevent a single cavalry unit raiding your towns.

This is actually quite a good example where a game mechanic makes perfect sense although it isn't strictly "realistic".

You could always take the realistic approach by needing to have a blockade of forces around your borders to prevent raiding parties, since they can't avoid the interception range. Yet that would require CA to fix the retarded retreat pathfinding so the raiders wouldn't go past your troops all the way to your capital, and instead have to go back to their own damn country, which they won't.

And don't be silly, everyone knows only artillery form raiding parties.

Originally Posted by daniu

No, really, you don't understand it? Have you read my explanation?
If withdrawals from forced battles were allowed, forced battles wouldn't make any sense so out of the game they go.
If battles can't be forced, it's nearly impossible to prevent a single cavalry unit raiding your towns.

This is actually quite a good example where a game mechanic makes perfect sense although it isn't strictly "realistic".

Well as the CAI is too stupid to avoid battle anyway the example is irrelevant. But give that a raiding party of cavalry would be extremely difficult to catch in real life I see no reason why the game should make it easy.

All the that mechanism actually does is make the game designers look stupid and annoy the player.

Well as the CAI is too stupid to avoid battle anyway

It's not actually. I have had an army run from me on the campaign screen several times. Just today I also had an army withdraw from battle after the AI realized it had taken too much of a beating from my artillery.

The AI isn't perfect, but it's not all that bad.

Yes, I agree that from what I've seen so far (180 hours of gameplay to date) the CAI of NTW is less dumb than it was in ETW, but both games suffer from this same problem with evading battle.

Its a shame because there are much better ways to deal with the whole issue, than the one that was chosen. My personal preference would have been to see lines of communication and depots properly represented so that armies were forced to fight out of necessity rather than run.

But at the very least evasion should be dependant upon an accurate reflection of the relative movement speed of the opposing forces thus forcing the pursuer to tailor his pursuit force to allow it to catch the enemy, and of course, as a matter of practicality forcing the evading player to establish a rear-guard force capable of fending the pursuit off and then evading.

At sea especially the faster vessel should always be able to escape unless the player makes a big mistake. This after all was an age when sea chases lasted days or weeks and traversed whole oceans, and pirates, privateers and commence raiders should be much harder to catch than they are.

Originally Posted by Didz

Well as the CAI is too stupid to avoid battle anyway the example is irrelevant. But give that a raiding party of cavalry would be extremely difficult to catch in real life I see no reason why the game should make it easy.

So you're saying it's OK for the AI to be stupid, because otherwise it would use all means to its disposal and make the game unplayable with the concept you're proposing.

All the that mechanism actually does is make the game designers look stupid and annoy the player.[...]
At sea especially the faster vessel should always be able to escape unless the player makes a big mistake.

Yeah awesome! Make it impossible to break a port blockade by a 5th rate because it is always able to escape and come back next turn!
Or, to prevent that, have a large amount of ships hanging around all your ports, costing so much money you may as well give up on sea trade altogether.

That wouldn't annoy the player at all.

Originally Posted by daniu

So you're saying it's OK for the AI to be stupid, because otherwise it would use all means to its disposal and make the game unplayable with the concept you're proposing.

No I'm saying that the game should reflect what was possible, in order that the player (and the AI) have to adhere to the principles used at the time to resolve the tactical and strategic issues that arose.

Originally Posted by daniu

Yeah awesome! Make it impossible to break a port blockade by a 5th rate because it is always able to escape and come back next turn! Or, to prevent that, have a large amount of ships hanging around all your ports, costing so much money you may as well give up on sea trade altogether.

Yep! thats exactly what I'm saying, and yes it would annoy the player, but only if the player was dumb enough to have a fleet with no frigates capable of catching a 5th rate. In other words the game would punish poor strategies instead of making sound strategies impractical.

Having said that the current blockade system is flawed anyway, but thats a seperate issue entirely. Certainly, a frigate should be able to keep watch off an enemy harbour without being caught and destroyed by an enemy 3rd rate.

Originally Posted by Didz

Having said that the current blockade system is flawed anyway, but thats a seperate issue entirely.

Not at all.
I keep bringing up those examples to make clear that all these elements are connected to each other in a rather complex system. One cannot change one aspect of the game without changing another; this tends to cause a chain reaction which will sooner or later result in changes that will again be called unrealistic and arbitrary - because they are.

Rules in games are always arbitrary to some extent. When playing "Game of Life" and rolling an 8, do you complain about not being able to go only 6 spaces because "realistically", you can choose the effort you put into things?
There will always be a line to be draw; the job of the game designers is to draw the line where it least hurts. What I've been saying is that with the topic at hand, they made a very simple, understandable and - most important of all - consistent decision; it doesn't make them "look stupid" at all. Any change to it will very probably result in even more inconsistant behavior elsewhere.

Originally Posted by daniu

I keep bringing up those examples to make clear that all these elements are connected to each other in a rather complex system. One cannot change one aspect of the game without changing another; this tends to cause a chain reaction which will sooner or later result in changes that will again be called unrealistic and arbitrary - because they are.

Absolutely, which is why its so dangerous when game designers trying to model a historical setting start introducing game machanics that have no historical plausibility.

The ‘No Withdrawal’ mechanic is a classic example of exactly the point you make, as its introduction (or rather retention, as it exists in earlier TW games too) led to a whole series of game design issues, which then led to even more arbitary design decisions which were only necessary because of it.

The classic example is the American Frigate, which existed and worked in real life simply because it could defeat anything that could catch it, but couldn’t be caught by anything that could beat it.

However, thanks to the ‘No Withdrawal’ rule the American Frigate became a useless ship, in the game, as any 3rd, 2nd or 1st rate could catch it and blow it pieces. So, rather than upset their US customers, CA decided to make American frigates powerful enough to defeat British ships of the line. Thus the American Frigate becomes a line of battle ship in the game instead of a commerce raider as it was in real life.

By far the best option for any game designer involved in the develop of a game system based upon a historical period is to stick to modeling what was actually plausible at that time. By definition the ‘cause and effect’ relationships between the historical factors has an real life integrity and so will work as a game system.

As soon as a game designer decides to arbitarily change one of those factors then the entire model begins to fall apart and you get into the situation that CA found itself in of having to introduce more and more historical inaccuracies just to compensate for the ones they had already introduced, and try to keep the game playable.

Ultimately, thats why we ended up with such a poor game in terms of its historical context and playability, and why the modders are so important in correcting their errors.

Set the battle time to 20 minutes.

Originally Posted by daniu

Again: it's introduction is perfectly reasonable to keep the model consistent. You fail to present a counterproposal.

On the contrary I’ve already presented a counterproposal, you merely chose to ignore it.

Originally Posted by daniu

What you seem to have in mind is that an army will always be able to withdraw, disregarding its movement points on the strategy map; you must be aware this is ridiculous.

On the contrary what I proposed was a system which recognized that troops and ships cannot be forced to fight by an enemy which cannot catch them. In other words a system which recognizes the relative movement rates of the forces involved rather than ignores them.

Originally Posted by daniu

The only other option is replacing the movement point model; I'm really looking forward to your proposal of how to do that in a turn-based game.

Already have, and its not like it hasn’t been done before.

Originally Posted by daniu

Here's another system that is consistent (still using movement points): Since an army has a certain amount of movement points in a given round, if an army comes to a halt without any left, it cannot withdraw at all if attacked. It also cannot move to maneuvre at all anymore (think of it as having established a camp or whatever) and is slaughtered helplessly. Which is pretty much what happens now.

Even if that were true of the game mechanic as it works now, then its not the way its implemented. All the current mechanism does is force you to fight a pointless battle. Once you have fought the battle, and lost, it then allows you to withdraw still further, so its obviously not applying the movement point restriction consistently anyway.

In fact, at sea when one of my commerce raiders gets forced into such a pointless action I simply start the battle, deploy the ship as close to the edge of the map as I can, start the battle and click ‘Withdraw’ and then turn the game speed to maximum and let the ship run off the edge of the map. Accept the defeat and watch my ship sail off across the map again, so its obviously gaining extra movement points during the battle.

The simple solution it to halt the pursuit once that pursuer is out of movement points and leave the pursued to escape, if the pursuer is too slow to catch it.

Originally Posted by daniu

The game is perfectly playable the way it is.

Well that’s a matter of opinion. Personally, I haven’t played vanilla ETW since the TROM mod was released, and I won’t play NTW anymore until I’ve found a Mod that makes it playable.

Originally Posted by daniu

Name a mod that changes the withdrawal behavior we are talking about... it's not only (I'm guessing) technically impossible to mod, but no modder who knows what he's doing would change it.

As I understand it that function cannot be modded. Like a lot of stuff that Modders would love to put right.

Originally Posted by Didz

what I proposed was a system which recognized that troops and ships cannot be forced to fight by an enemy which cannot catch them. In other words a system which recognizes the relative movement rates of the forces involved rather than ignores them.

No.
What you propose is that an army has unlimited movement points.
Let's say in Prussias round, they send a cav unit to pillage a French town. They run out of movement points doing that and come to a halt.
Now it's France's turn. They send four militia units from the nearest town to get rid of the Prussians.
Because they "cannot catch" the Prussian unit, the cav is able to withdraw and moves to a nearby location, effectively having gained as many movement points.
Or both army stay where they were when the battle started, so the movement on the battle map never happened.

If you don't see how this system is a total fail either way, do us all a favor and stay with historical research because game design just isn't for you.