RC8 - Why was there a battle?

[AndrewKurtz]

Pocus...here is a turn with RC8 to check as there was a battle in Fairfax that I do not think should have happened if I understand things correctly.

Neither the USA nor CSA armies are offensive posture. The CSA is retreating. A USA force was being railed in to join the USA army, also in defensive posture.

But for some reason, when the USA force enters Fairfax, even though MC is over 5%, it is switched to offensive posture and attacks the retreating CSA army by itself...wiping itself out.

If I understand, because MC was >5%, the unit should have entered and stayed in defensive posture and no battle should have taken place.

Could be a misunderstanding of how things work on my part, but seemed very odd.

[ATTACH]33016[/ATTACH]

[Pocus]

Hey Andrew,

MC is 98% on the side of the US in Fairfax, at start of turn. It means that unless the CSA is in passive, it will be switched to offensive posture forcefully. In the player's turn, the CSA forces are in defensive, not passive.

When I process the turn, there is a battle, as expected, the battle report indicates the CSA is in offensive and the Union remains in defensive. This is normal. As the cohesion is low on the CSA side, there is also a message that the battle ends rapidly.

'Retreat immunity': If you are beaten on a given turn, then you switch to retreat mode. In this mode, for the rest of the turn and while you stay in the same region where you were beaten, nobody can attack you. This is clearly not the situation here, as this is a new turn...

Hope it helped!

[AndrewKurtz]

Sort of except...look at the attached file. This is the next turn I got. It shows a battle and the USA is the one in offensive posture. How can this be explained?

[ATTACH]33019[/ATTACH]

[AndrewKurtz]

Any comments on whether the battle in the second attachment makes sense given the situation in the first (and Pocus' comments)?

[Pocus]

That's because this is you that I spent some time into that

Makes sense too. Union ordered 1st PA Brigade to move by train then foot from Franklin to Loudon. Loudon is fully under CSA controls, so it could not enter it until CSA fully evacuated Fairfax, as it would mean crossing enemy lines. You get a message about that in your logs, msg 29 '1st PA is blocked by enemy positions'. As the engine saw this trespass attempt through enemy lines, it switched the Brigade to offensive, and there she went, against the full CSA army still moving out of the region!

Admitedly, the complexity of simultaneous turns with the guess game about enemy actions did play a role here. This is a blunder in a march order, it happens in real war quite a lot!

[Captain_Orso]

This made me smile . The intricacy of playing the game is sometimes phenomenal, which makes it fun--to me anyway.

[AndrewKurtz]

I have to say thank you!

Very interesting scenario. I didn't manually select the route so I'll go back and spend a little more time with the turn to see if I can figure out how/why that route was selected.

Thank you for taking the time and glad to know all is WAD.