Bertram
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Some comments on AJE and BOR mechanics

Fri Mar 01, 2013 11:15 am

I have been playing AJE for some time now, including a PBEM (the civil war) and finished some games of BOR against the AI. I have some general comments and some scenario specific comments. (Disclaimer: I am playing AJE on version 1.01, due to my PBEM game not being finished yet).

During my AJE; civil war game, my opponent (on the Pompeijan side) made several invasions of Spain and Italy. Sneaky, and good use of the Pompeian superiority on the sea and its interior lines. I was wondering though, if it was not a bit too easy to land 100k troops on an enemy shore. The only real examples I can think of are Darius (a few hundred years earlier) and the invasion of Britain (both Caesars aborted try, and the second successful one). And those took quite a bit of organizing. The main issue, as I see it, is that in the game we can collect our ships, and keep them as one big fleet, ready to transport even the largest army. In reality there wasn’t an harbor big enough to put that much galleys up, and keeping them anchored off shore would very quickly render them out of action. I am unclear on how you could enable the historical possible invasions, without making this ship hoping possible though.

A second thing I think could be improved is the taking of the cities. It works well enough for level 2 (and above) fortifications, and with some real troops. The costs for assaulting a level 1 fortification with militia defending on the other hand is way too low. As it is a major army can assault all level 1 towns in a single day (on arrival), and expect to 10-1 ratio of casualties – in its favor! This isn’t very realistic – assaulting towns was a risky business. First troops on a wall got a medal – and that was not because they were expected loose only one man for each ten enemies. (And I don’t think those town militia would be eager to muster, if there was a 90% chance they would be annihilated within the day). As it works better with more experienced troops inside the walls, I would suggest shortening the frontage (even more), giving a (larger) cohesion bonus to the units on the wall, or raise its minimum cohesion (it is, after all, easier to keep in formation if you are standing on a wall), giving them more protection (less hits to the unit), and more hits and cohesion damage to the attacking unit. As I read it, assaults were not so common, and if there was an assault, the kill ratio was more like 10-1 in the favor of the defender. A small number of not so highly trained troops, could hold of a large number of enemies (especially as the number of units that could actually attack was limited) until an entry was forced. Tougher defenders, with more casualties to the attacker, would force the player to choose between assaulting or taking the time to lay siege. Now it is a no brainer – my men always charge the wall.

Third remark is about the size of the armies. Though I don’t think the (maximum) size is wrong, it seems to me that it is too easy to keep large standing armies. In the civil war scenario we had Caesar and Pompeii staring at each other across the Bosporus, each with 120k+ men. As attacking would mean crossing the water and we both were “entrenched”, we stayed that way for more than a year. Meanwhile we both had 40k+ armies in Italy and Spain (and we are playing on hard attrition). I think that even the Romans would not have been able to keep that many men in the field for such a long time (it works good for the armies of the nations in Persia, they are severely limited in size by supply, money, and attrition).
I’ll put the scenario specific comments in another post – this is long enough as it is :) . Ah, and before someone thinks me negative: I really love the game(s), and will be playing them for a long time.

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PhilThib
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Fri Mar 01, 2013 11:32 am

Very good points and remarks. My suggestion would be for you to tweak some of the in-game data and see how it affects gameplay:

1 - naval transport: you can severly reduce the transport ability value of the various models and see what it gives
2 - city defenses: we can seriously boost the combat and morale values of urban militias to achieve your result
3 - this would need to rework the attrition parameters of the various models, and possibly cut down the supply wagons powers...this is a lot of refined tweaking, but achievable

Cheers...
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HanBarca
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Fri Mar 01, 2013 3:17 pm

Amphibious landing
If you have an enemy army in the region in offensive mode it's probably quite difficult. The loss of cohesion and the time spent debarking troops make the debarker an easy prey

City assault
I agree, I've changed the sieExtraModifier parameter to make it more difficult

Army supply and maintenance
I agree, try the changes I've made in my Road, Supply and Replacements MOD

turenne08
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Sat Mar 02, 2013 2:08 am

Your example of two armies facing each other across the Bosporus seems to make the supply rules work.

From what I've read most armies were only forced to move from positions if they were placed in bad positions to begin with ( no water source etc. ) or were starved out by the ohter army stopping them from foraging.

As far as the invasions there were tons during ancient history but the largest armies were in the range of 40k. Having to transport the horses food etc. took up too much tonnage to do more, as you point out.

Henri
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Sat Mar 02, 2013 2:29 pm

turenne08 wrote:Your example of two armies facing each other across the Bosporus seems to make the supply rules work.

From what I've read most armies were only forced to move from positions if they were placed in bad positions to begin with ( no water source etc. ) or were starved out by the ohter army stopping them from foraging.

As far as the invasions there were tons during ancient history but the largest armies were in the range of 40k. Having to transport the horses food etc. took up too much tonnage to do more, as you point out.


Actually there were some battles with over 100,000 casualties on the losing side during the first barbarian war (around 110 BC), so there must have been more participants than that...

Henri

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Philippe
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Sat Mar 02, 2013 2:46 pm

Large numbers of any kind (on any subject) in antiquity were iffy at best. The numbers were often wrong to begin with -- read a little Hans Delbrück to get a sense of what I mean. This was compounded by the problem that the Greeks and Romans used really weird systems for recording numbers and medieval manuscript copyists tended not to understand the notation (and it didn't help that they were spectacularly ignorant of math). When you add in the need for propaganda and take into account the fact that the Romans had a really bizarre relationship with mathematics (centum was felt to be a larger number than mille) and numbers like 100,000 show up with disturbing regularity, any time you see a large number in Roman history you should probably interpret it as meaning a whole lot. One wonders who exactly fed all those ravenous hordes of barbarians when they weren't invading civilized countries...

PJJ
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Sat Mar 02, 2013 3:26 pm

Philippe wrote:Large numbers of any kind (on any subject) in antiquity were iffy at best. The numbers were often wrong to begin with -- read a little Hans Delbrück to get a sense of what I mean. This was compounded by the problem that the Greeks and Romans used really weird systems for recording numbers and medieval manuscript copyists tended not to understand the notation (and it didn't help that they were spectacularly ignorant of math). When you add in the need for propaganda and take into account the fact that the Romans had a really bizarre relationship with mathematics (centum was felt to be a larger number than mille) and numbers like 100,000 show up with disturbing regularity, any time you see a large number in Roman history you should probably interpret it as meaning a whole lot. One wonders who exactly fed all those ravenous hordes of barbarians when they weren't invading civilized countries...


Good post.

"Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics." The logistical side of things in ancient warfare has often been badly neglected. It's easy to imagine some ancient king or emperor putting together a huge army of tens of thousands of men (they had the populations to do that), but to keep them well supplied day after day was something else. So any ancient description that mentions armies with hundreds of thousands of men and animals should be taken with a grain of salt.

Perhaps the single biggest army ever assembled in ancient times was the Persian one which invaded Greece in the 5th century BCE. But it most certainly didn't have two or three million men like described by the Greeks. It has been estimated that something like 250,000 would have been the absolute maximum that could have been managed by the logistics of the day, and even then those numbers can't have stayed in the same area for extended periods of time. Romans obviously had more men combined in all of their legions later, but they were never concentrated in such a small area for a single campaign.

turenne08
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Sun Mar 03, 2013 12:59 am

In the thread the OP was talking about naval invasions being 100K+ in some of the games he played. That number is totally unrealistic.

As far as land battles, especially with invading tribes, the Romans seem to have added in the non-combatants as well.

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Ace
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Sun Mar 03, 2013 6:55 pm

The logistic side of this game seems way too easy. There is no need for supply lines, and you can forage enormous amounts of food. I wonder if it was that easy in ancient times. In medieval times, 50k army was extremely rare because no one could forage that amount of food. In 19th century, 50-100k army supplying was still enormous task, and it required continuous supply line, while here in ancient times, one can wonder around with the army in hostile territory without ever thinking about feeding them.

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marek1978
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Fri Mar 08, 2013 4:07 pm

Ace wrote:The logistic side of this game seems way too easy. There is no need for supply lines, and you can forage enormous amounts of food. I wonder if it was that easy in ancient times. In medieval times, 50k army was extremely rare because no one could forage that amount of food. In 19th century, 50-100k army supplying was still enormous task, and it required continuous supply line, while here in ancient times, one can wonder around with the army in hostile territory without ever thinking about feeding them.


Tottaly agree, it seems, it is much to easy to proceed with operations – supply factor is not stron enough.

About the fleet thing – and this actually refer as well to other ageod games I was wondering whether it is possible to create mechanism that would allow to detect such a fleet and army gathering.

Getting together invasion fleet for 50K was not an easy task, and in most cases one could at least be informormed that someone concentrated some forces some where. Maybe some kind of spending EP to get this could be used, and I don’t mean that it should happen always and be very accurate information but would give this special felling of “thunder coming “

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Pat "Stonewall" Cleburne
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Fri Mar 08, 2013 9:39 pm

Since this game uses the "simple" AGEOD supply model, it can't really simulate supply lines unfortunately. The best you can do is require supply wagon shuffling, which could get tedious fast.

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Ace
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Fri Mar 08, 2013 9:59 pm

I agree, supply wagon shuffling in not the answer. The supply model used in AACW is. Somehow, I feel I am playing an arcade simunaltion crossover in AJE.

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Erik Springelkamp
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Fri Mar 08, 2013 10:18 pm

Roman legions demanded that local population would sell the food that the Romans needed, as far as I know.
Winter locations were also stocked by collecting food from all around.
So I think the model is OK in principle, although one might discuss the amount that was produced in a region.

But the civilized regions in classical times were much more developed than Western Europe in most of the Middle Ages.

I have lost large parts of an army when it was stuck without supply though.

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Highlandcharge
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Sat Mar 09, 2013 2:05 pm

I have as well, in fact I am playing a pbem game of the Severus scenario, I am the Clodians, I have an army of about 80,000 men at Pisae, I have a level 1 depot there, but in spite of that I am 1 turn away from running out of supplies, if I dont split it up into smaller armies and disperse them they will start melting away, I dont think there is anything wrong with the supply system, I have other examples also I could state....

PJJ
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Sat Mar 09, 2013 3:35 pm

Yes, I think the system works well enough to punish big armies without adequate supply sources. In some cases, even small armies are in trouble. If you have the Cantabrian Wars DLC, try playing as the Romans. It's a nightmare to keep all your troops adequately supplied while besieging the enemy's mountain strongholds.

Perhaps some of the regions produce supply too easily for big armies, but it's also true that the ancient powers were able to maintain considerably bigger militaries than any European kingdom or principality of Medieval times. Towns and cities were bigger and in many ways, the whole economy was much more centralized and advanced. The city of Rome had over one million people living within its limits at the height of the empire. Keeping such a huge population well fed meant that they absolutely needed an advanced logistical system in their empire.

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