Strange behaviour of Britons

**Bumbar** · October 07, 2006, 05:16 PM

I just finished one h/h game with julii and while I liked it more than vanilla rtw, I got slightly annoyed at rather strange briton tactics when attacking. First strange thing I noticed was that sometimes their general was placed far far far behind his other troops, completely alone on start of the battle and in some battles general retreated the second battle started, but rest of the troops stayed on battlefield.
Second issue was that sometimes britons just don't attack, even if it's them who initiates combat on campaign map. Battle starts and they don't do anything else but stand with all units in one big clump, or they only send chariot archers to attack and after those are routed rest of their troops do nothing.
Third issue is directly related to their formation when attacking or defending. They seem to prefer clumping in one big group and then throwing that at me, which makes it very easy to flank them and encircle that group, which consists of 80-90% of their soldiers, completely. Needles to say, I can defeat them very easily this way, all I have to do is make a single line to hold them when they charge and make strong flanks that can move fast and encircle them. Usually that group even covers enough space that I can afford to order archers fire in it with only minimal risk of them hitting my troops. Completely sorrounded with fire arrows hitting them, they rout rather fast.

Apart from issues with britons, I love this mod. Battles vs other roman factions were great and while I still won all of them, they did make me bleed, which rarely happened in vanilla. I started vh/vh today to see if those barbarians will manage to stop me this time

.

**Tankbuster** · October 08, 2006, 09:14 AM

Welcome to the Dartmod Forum Bumbar!

Interesting questions :hmmm:

I think that the clustering of the Britons is in a way meant to be so, because Darth Vader has (I think) made the Britons a faction that uses the "Barbarian Onslaught Formation" which indeed commits everything to one big big big charge.

The routing generals is rather normal I think, when the general sees he can't win and he's like the only one left on the field, they rout... It's called AI cowardness I suppose

**Grand Duke Vytautas** · October 08, 2006, 03:08 PM

Hey

I noticed similar behaviour with Pontus faction as well (I'm playing as Egypt). That 'big messed up circle' happened to me too, seems like chariots are somehow messing up the formation I donno really. Maybe Darth will answer this?

**DARTH VADER** · October 08, 2006, 05:41 PM

This you post is of great concern of me.
Is this mass a heavily contested center or a 'messy' intersection between units?
I know that chariot units cause problems in my formation force width methods I will describe later in my evolving tutorial.

If possible if this happens in a battle pls post to me a screenshot.

**Bumbar** · October 09, 2006, 01:52 AM

I'm sorry, but I didn't make any screenshots of it, I'll make some if I see it happening again though. It looks as if computer ordered all units to go to one spot, instead of deploying in their normal formation. You basically get a large cluster of units without any apparent order with all groups intersecting with eachother, way different than barbarian onslaught where units are placed tightly together in several rows. It could be connected to chariots I guess, playing Julii only faction with chairots I fought were Britons and I only noticed such occurance in battles with them.

**DARTH VADER** · October 09, 2006, 06:09 AM

I know how to correct it...will upload a new 16.1 Darth Formation Pack soon.

----edit----

It is a very rare issue caused to large settings. In Huge should not exist.

**DARTH VADER** · October 11, 2006, 04:51 PM

I remind that my new Darth formations 16.2 uploaded have diminished this rare incident and improved the overall perfomance of the formations in all occasions.