Reducing battle casualties

**pengwinrex** · March 07, 2013, 12:20 PM

In Shogun II battles (and every other total war game) casualty rates are ridiculously high, for both the winning and losing side compared to how it was historically. In the past I have tried editing unit moral, etc to fix this but it usually results in less entertaining/ difficult battles and when you win you can just send your cavalry to massacre your routing enemy.

I recently tried editing the army destruction ratios and ume_concerned_army_destruction in kv moral, and when I changed the ratios all to 0.9 and the moral penalty to extremely high (just to see if it would work) during a test battle I found that after around 1/10th the enemy army had been killed the rest of them started to waver and where routed almost instantly. This seems like a good way of preventing armies fighting until most of their men are dead, as it doesn't affect the battle in any way prior to the entire army getting a serious moral reduction, unlike editing individual units moral which in my opinion ruins a battle - (your army can be winning by a lot and yet units still rout, or alternatively an army obviously losing and yet the men fight near to the last man, individually fleeing at different times and getting cut down by enemy cavalry)

The army destruction ratios could help solve the problem but I dont really understand how it works, at 0.9 it seemed obvious: when an army is at 0.9, the concerned army destruction penalty activates, but when i tried it at 0.75, when i played a battle only my very last unit seemed to be affected by it. Does anyone know anything about these values and how they work, or is there a mod that reduces casualties through this or some other way?

Also, during a rout an army would obviously take high casualties, but as it is now you can pretty much kill every single fleeing enemy infantryman and completely destroy the enemy army just by chasing them with a few cavalry units. Is there a way to reduce the effectiveness of cavalry chasing down routing units?

**Ygge** · March 07, 2013, 01:21 PM

This is a really interesting topic. I am too trying to find a way to decrease casualties without changing gameplay too much. I have not had so much luck yet...

**pengwinrex** · March 08, 2013, 01:03 PM

I may have found a solution - I haven't perfected it yet but I much prefer it to vanilla. I reduced the negative moral effects in kv_moral so that unless clearly outmatched or attacked in the flank all units will fight until most are dead. I then changed army destruction ratio to 0.6 for both alliance and enemy (also in kv moral) so now when an army loses over 40% of its men the rest rout instantly (this could be changed using ume concerned army destruction, and you could make it so the effect is less drastic) At first the battles where better regarding casualties but they where too fast and when fighting with large armies some of the units ended battles unscathed, but this can be fixed by slightly increasing armor and drastically increasing the defense of all units (I've been playing with units with a defense in the 20s/ 30s) and total war battles have always been over far too quickly compared to historical ones so these changes combined make battles much more convincing in my opinion. Missile units are also a little better, which I like but it would be easy to reduce their effectiveness. I also increased the recruitment times and cost of units in the campaign as units are no longer as easily destroyed. I cant believe no one has included some form this in a mod before, its clearly a problem for many people.

**Yerevan** · March 24, 2013, 04:42 PM

Originally Posted by pengwinrex

I may have found a solution - I haven't perfected it yet but I much prefer it to vanilla. I reduced the negative moral effects in kv_moral so that unless clearly outmatched or attacked in the flank all units will fight until most are dead. I then changed army destruction ratio to 0.6 for both alliance and enemy (also in kv moral) so now when an army loses over 40% of its men the rest rout instantly (this could be changed using ume concerned army destruction, and you could make it so the effect is less drastic) At first the battles where better regarding casualties but they where too fast and when fighting with large armies some of the units ended battles unscathed, but this can be fixed by slightly increasing armor and drastically increasing the defense of all units (I've been playing with units with a defense in the 20s/ 30s) and total war battles have always been over far too quickly compared to historical ones so these changes combined make battles much more convincing in my opinion. Missile units are also a little better, which I like but it would be easy to reduce their effectiveness. I also increased the recruitment times and cost of units in the campaign as units are no longer as easily destroyed. I cant believe no one has included some form this in a mod before, its clearly a problem for many people.

I'm interested since i'd like to find a way avoiding general's & daymio's casualties. What I don't get, is why you have to first reduce the casualties moral effect since what you want is increasing it at the end (or there's something I don't get...).

In clear, what istheline that precisely impact on unit's morale proportionaly to the casualties sustained by the whole army ?

**pengwinrex** · March 27, 2013, 05:14 AM

The lines that affect moral in proportion to army destruction are all in kv moral: the first three all have army_destruction_strength_ratio in them. If you change all of these to 0.7 for example then when 30% of your army is destroyed the value unit_concerned_army_destruction begins to tale affect. All the units of your army or an enemies get the moral penalty that you have set for that line. If you make it high enough an army will rout almost instantly.
Unless your enemy makes the not uncommon decision to charge at you with their general immediately at the start of the battle, generally this means they will escape short of being trapped or with an army of just a couple units.