Casualties Sustained When Disengaging Troops From Combat

[Silven]

I've looked all through the db and I can't find anything that might affect this. You can make a super soldier unit with armor, defense, and shield values all at 500, and the second you tell that unit to disengage from whatever its fighting, they all start dropping like flies. This seems especially true with Cavalry.

Even more interestingly, when you chase down shattered and routing units, they seem to act like demi-gods incapable of death. The reason I bring this up, is because I originally thought it might have something to do with units turning their back, and thus switching their defense values to act on modifiers that deal with being flanked and attacked from behind. But this isn't the case.

I've tried altering the following values found in _kv_rules
factor_attackdir_flankleft
factor_attackdir_flankright
factor_attackdir_front
factor_attackdir_rear
melee_defence_direction_penalty_coefficient_rear
melee_defence_direction_penalty_coefficient_flank

I even tried messing with collision_damage_default and its relatives thinking it might have something to do with moving units "touching" each other when moving without an attack order, but these values just effect charge damages.


I'm totally at a loss here. I can't find anyway to reduce these kill rates while a unit is disengaging.

Has anyone else found methods to affect this???

[crzyrndm]

It appears to be a response to a bug that turned up late in the life of Shogun 2, known as the pull-through bug. People were running cavalry through their opponents units (not attacking), and taking very few casualties and dealing a massive amount of damage.

The theory going around is that to solve this issue, disengaging units are having their defence basically turned off, resulting in rediculous numbers of casualties when withdrawing units from combat. I can find no reference to this either, but the results are pretty obvious.

The values you've listed are just normal combat modifiers that go into the hit calc depending on the attack direction

[Silven]

So then there is simply no direct solution? Or even a manufactured solution?

[crzyrndm]

It's a new problem, so I don't think anyone has worked out a way around it yet.

[chris10]

It appears to be a response to a bug that turned up late in the life of Shogun 2, known as the pull-through bug. People were running cavalry through their opponents units (not attacking), and taking very few casualties and dealing a massive amount of damage.

The pull-through thingi is around since Rome Total War
but yeah...disengaging doesnt work properly.

[Kaunitz]

Indeed it's quite strange. In "unrouted, moving" modus, troops are fall like flies when engaged in the rear. Once they're routed, however, they're literally immune. It's incredibly stupid that you can't use your cavalry for its main task which is to run down routers. I don't think that this is actually moddable, since, as you say, it is not related to the variables that you've mentioned (tip: never ever increase factor_attack_direction_flanks/rear too much - it will make the AI go crazy; had to learn that the hard way). The disengagement doesn't bother me personally because in my private mod rout because of morale and fatigue, not because of casualties (there are hardly any casualties anyway). However, I then miss the means to actually inflict some casualties on the pursuit.

It would be awesome if units on the retreat would only get a defence-malus (and would be unable to "strike back"), but would otherwise be engaged by the pursuers normally. With good melee-attack-penalties for fatigue, you can end up with some nice pursuit-casualties and pursuit-behaviour. If you wanted to pursue, you'd need to "run", which would increase your exhaustion, leading to lower pursuit casualties over time (since melee stat decreases). Moreover, pursuit should make you more prone to a counter attack. Right now this is not really the case in the game. You can make it work via more severe fatigue-morale-penalties. Ideally, however, a run would make your soldier spread out and give up formation. Ideally, this mob would then be very vulnerable in melee, which is not the case right now (see further below).

Also, I'd love if there was a seperate unit speed for routing (right now it's running speed; units that are unable to run also use their walk speed for routing).

I'm also quite mad that units in total chaos, in a loose mob seem to be just as effective as units in perfect order. This is the death to a tactical battle game primarily based on melee. The most important factor for that game is cohesion (no, not weapons, armour and all that fancy stuff), and it's missing. I've been tweaking the "melee_outnumbered_defence_penalty" that is supposed to be a "penalty multiplier applied to melee defence of entity who is attacked by multiple attackers", hoping that it would punish engaging in a mob-manner, but to no avail. Well and what is an entity anyway? A single soldier or a unit? And what's the radious in which an entity takes note of other entities? And does it matter if two soldiers (if they're the entities) belong to the very same unit?

I think all battle-mechanics modders should write a letter to CA and politely ask if we could get more information on how the variables actually interact with each other in the game - for melee, morale, projectiles, battle entities.

[Rhetorikolas]

This bugs me a lot as well, the disengage/rout kill ratio. Maybe someone could figure out how to swap these two?