McNaughton wrote:Is there a possibility to have certain generals more at risk for 'death' and others not so (based on their choice to lead from the front, or from the back). Also, there was a 'luck' factor (even though luck is one of those intangible things) some generals were repeatedly wounded in near-miss situations (truely, some had records of extreme luck!).
Also, I think that wounding (if working on a similar factor as deaths) should be increased significantly. Wounding even includes being sick (Beauregard became sick after Corinth, and was replaced by Bragg, one of the many examples). Wounding factor should be even higher than sick, but, as others have said, just because the general is wounded, does not mean his division fell apart (indeed, another commander always was re-assigned).
Would it be possible to have an auto-reassignment for a division, that takes brigadier generals from the stack and automatically puts them in command of a division when the leader is killed or wounded? Since the AI loves to put extra commanders in a stack, this would appear to be a viable option (if indeed it can be done!).
Hmmm.... It strikes me that there's a problem with our initial premise -- the way the game runs now, we have a number of divisions determined by the number of leaders available... (I'd venture that the mechanic, or our thinking about it, may be an artifact of VG's Civil War, btw)
In reality, the number of leaders was the dependent variable, with the number of significant commands being the driving force: i.e. at the lower ranks at least, leaders were promoted to fill available slots.... (and, for that matter, slots often became available in tragic circumstances.)
Now part of the confusion is that this dynamic did not operate at the most visible level -- Lincoln could giveth, but it was much harder to taketh away. So the idea of creating armiies to buy off 3-stars makes some sense... But 1 and 2 stars did not have that kind of political pull... (for the most part).
As a result, maybe the game should have been designed so that each division (or force) created was assigned a random leader, and that leader could only be detached from that division by promotion to corps, by change in leadership of the army to which he was attached, or by paying a penalty in NM/VPs.
I realize that this is blue-sky thinking... (and particularly I know that Athena has Pocus hostage with a spear to his throat, and such ideas might further threaten her sanity) but it seems worth clarifying a basic problem that we face, which is that the game mechanic is running the real-life mechanic in reverse.
I suspect the idea might also be quite relevant in thinking about the next AGE game -- not least, the French 'system' of government and war 1790-1815 ensured that there were many vacancies ...