"Realistic Attrition"

[lodilefty]

I'll volunteer to redo the weather matrix, but only with consensus input on what to change.

By this, don't mean 'number by number', but rather 'cut mud frequency in half [or whatever] for xxx weather area(s) and yyy terrain(s), and apportion the amount reduced to zzz weather pattern(s).

[Pocus]

Ok, perhaps a proposal (following Jagger's idea) would be have the Historical Attrition option:
a) remove the attrition by march
b) add a new attrition based on a new variable in the model file

In reply to Gray_Lensman question by mail, yes the 5 new variables asked would be used day by day, when the unit moves, so the weather & terrain in the current region can be tested accurately.

[Jagger]

Ok, perhaps a proposal (following Jagger's idea) would be have the Historical Attrition option:
a) remove the attrition by march
b) add a new attrition based on a new variable in the model file

In reply to Gray_Lensman question by mail, yes the 5 new variables asked would be used day by day, when the unit moves, so the weather & terrain in the current region can be tested accurately.

I believe we should keep the current cohesion based attrition model but also add an attrition variable linked to model files. Each would represent a different type of attrition.

IMO, there are two primary types of attrition.

First is the attrition of troops under non-campaign circumstances. The high initial attrition after a new regiment is created and the substantially lowered attrition as a regiment reaches seasoned status will occur whether a unit is on campaign or in camp.

This "everyday" attrition is well modeled by creating a new variable tied directly to individual models which is independent of cohesion.

However there is second type of attrition which occurs during active campaigning over and beyond everyday attrition. Hard marching, skirmishing, drinking bad water and eating poorly will produce an additional surge of non-battle attrition, even for hardened troops, when they are pushed to the limits.

Within the game, the second type of "campaigning" attrition is already tied to cohesion. Cohesion is lost due to the marching, skirmishes and battles of active campaigning. Loss of cohesion well represents the breakdown of discipline and health as extraordinary demands are placed on a unit by hard marching and the trauma of battle. It is very logical to use cohesion to represent the additional surge attrition which occurs as troops reach their limits by the demands of a hard active campaign.

The current attrition model, tied to cohesion, would be an excellent method to model this surge attrition, beyond everyday attrition, due to the demands of active campaigning. However the level of attrition would need substantial tweaking to produce appropriate attrition due to campaigning.

IMO, keeping the current cohesion attrition, but heavily tweaked, and adding the model variable, independent of cohesion, would allow for very strong modeling of the two primary factors impacting attrition. And since we already have the cohesion based attrition, we can certainly use it for what it represents best.

[Gray_Lensman]

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[Pocus]

I'm willing to do these tweaks because they will improve the whole attrition model on all games, so no problems.

For information, there was lost hits impacted during march, because BOA1 had no cohesion, so you had to make the regiments lose something when they marched (if I remember well, but it's starting to be fuzzy!).

About this 'CohesionNotMoving' thing, or whatever it is called, if it is introduced, I gather the hits incurred by marching should disapear.

Historical Attrition would then not be a new kind of attrition, with this new variable, but more attrition, for whose who thinks we are too gentle... And it is true that if the game modelled at the historical level attrition, this would bother many players, as more men were disabled by disease and sickness compared to the wounded and killed on the battlefield.

[Evren]

I'm willing to do these tweaks because they will improve the whole attrition model on all games, so no problems.

For information, there was lost hits impacted during march, because BOA1 had no cohesion, so you had to make the regiments lose something when they marched (if I remember well, but it's starting to be fuzzy!).

About this 'CohesionNotMoving' thing, or whatever it is called, if it is introduced, I gather the hits incurred by marching should disapear.

Historical Attrition would then not be a new kind of attrition, with this new variable, but more attrition, for whose who thinks we are too gentle... And it is true that if the game modelled at the historical level attrition, this would bother many players, as more men were disabled by disease and sickness compared to the wounded and killed on the battlefield.

Yes, i am one of those guys who thinks you are too gentle .

There's also one other thing that i want to remind you Master. I agree to those who have noted that the cohesion losses are higher than it should be, and i also wanna add an opinion. That is the high morale value of a moving force. All the great generals (such as Hannibal, Napoleon, Rommel.. open for debate) kept their army moving because they knew that it was the best way of keeping the soldiers in shape also. And once they started winning, they went on and on. I think they had a point (considering all the victories ). That's why i think cohesion losses are high.

Considering the attrition losses, the standing armies do not have an upper hand here also. There are more deserters than a moving army for sure, and diseases cal also hit your army even if you keep them in walls.

So i would be pleased if you could consider those statements before taking any actions.

Regards,

ps: I also agree that the AACW map is covered with mud .

[berto]

Historical Attrition would then not be a new kind of attrition, with this new variable, but more attrition, for whose who thinks we are too gentle... And it is true that if the game modelled at the historical level attrition, this would bother many players, as more men were disabled by disease and sickness compared to the wounded and killed on the battlefield.

Oh, go ahead, be harsh!

Anything that adds to historical realism is fine by me.

[Pocus]

Added to our task list then!

[Jagger]

About this 'CohesionNotMoving' thing, or whatever it is called, if it is introduced, I gather the hits incurred by marching should disapear.

Historical Attrition would then not be a new kind of attrition, with this new variable, but more attrition, for whose who thinks we are too gentle... And it is true that if the game modelled at the historical level attrition, this would bother many players, as more men were disabled by disease and sickness compared to the wounded and killed on the battlefield.

I would call it "AttritionNotMoving" since it isn't linked to cohesion.

Since the "AttritionNotMoving" is not linked to cohesion, the variable would not produce hits due to marching.

Although I hope we keep a cohesion linked attrition variable as well, in addition to "AttritionNotMoving". A variable which will produce surge attrition based on marching and battle cohesion loss which represents the extra attrition of active campaigning. Basically, additional attrition beyond the attrition produced by "AttritionNotMoving".

[Pocus]

But would this AttritionNotMoving variable produces hits or only cohesion loss?

And paradoxically, if you move, you don't suffer it, but suffers from the other attrition, which would have no more hits damages but only cohesion one.

It is better than the 2-3 veterans modders out there propose a clear and short summary of what they think is best, when moving, when not, what does it do in term of cohesion and hits etc.

[runyan99]

Well, I thought we pretty much had a consencus between Lensman, Clovis and I that:

1) Attrition should be constant, but independent from movement. Say attrition = X per turn.

2) Attrition hits should be higher in harsh weather (but modified down for being in a structure, or entrenched). This was the real reason winter campaigns were dangerous.

3) Movement should cause a loss of cohesion, but not hits. Stragglers return to their units. Also, cohesion loss from movement should be tweaked down modestly.

I don't really agree with Jagger that movement produces a burst in attrition. Rather, I imagine it produces a burst in stragglers. Also, while men on the sick rolls can return to their regiments when in camp, on campaign they will be left behind. That is I'm not sure that means however that more men got sick or deserted while on campaign than in camp.

[Jabberwock]

Since we are going for ultra-realism ... Weather based winter attrition should be lower if not moving in wooded terrain. Winter camps were almost always set up in wooded areas. Must've been something they taught at West Point, or just common sense.

[berto]

Will movement rates also be tweaked upward? Or is the gist of all of this that one is better able now (because devastating cohesion and attrition losses are no more) to use forced marches more often (in order to achieve, for example, the fast rates of march in the Kentucky 1862 campaign)?

[Gray_Lensman]

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[Jabberwock]

Since this is a Strategic Operational Scale game, I think we can safely table the tactical level attrition requests. All it's doing is confusing the issue. Movement attrition was tested and confirmed to be way too high. It needs to be fixed. That's the purpose of the original exported variables request. There should be a small amount of movement attrition because the men are moving and exposed more to the weather instead of in camps. The variables will allow us to reduce this to a realistic amount depending on the weather. This in turn allows the movement rates to be kept more in proportion with each other.

This should be a relatively easy change to implement, then Pocus can move on to other more important work, while we test some new movement rates and the variables effects, before they are "officialized".

Request withdrawn for now. I disagree with your implication that it is tactical rather than operational, but I agree that it would be clouding the current issue.

[Gray_Lensman]

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[runyan99]

Has anyone tested the latest official game patch (v1.09e) to determine if the movement attrition itself is still excessive (using the "standard option" choice)?

Should be the same. The change log for 1.09e does not mention attrition at all.

[bigus]

Has anyone tested the latest official game patch (v1.09e) to determine if the movement attrition itself is still excessive (using the "standard option" choice)?

Yes I have. Seems units suffer less/or no attrition hits on the march but they do suffer cohesion lose normally. I've been more intrested in the movement rates (Jaggers March Ter files). I'll pay a bit more attention to attrition in future scenarios but I did notice it and it does not seem excessive.

bigus

[Tazilon]

Ok, I have just finished slogging through this entire thread from its inception. I must immediately make one observation: the attrition caused by such slogging is way too high and should be modified downward!


Everything I can find on the subject shows that Armies of that time felt a standard day's march in good weather and on good roads to be 14-15 miles for infantry and 20 for cavalry - 25 once they got going. Of course, what is taught in class rarely is what occurs in the field. As demonstrated and documented over and over again, such movement rates were rarely achieved and, even more rarely, sustained in the field. The ability to perfectly organise and move large amounts of men while maintaining the perfect organization during the movement was beyond the scope of most commanders; even the best leaders could not do it day in and day out.

Applying my own knowledge of meteorology (I'm a retired weather forecaster) to known Army rules of movement, I think Jabber's mod has come close to what was historically accurate for fair weather movement.

Unless you are moving troops in the southwest, you would not normally have 14 days of fair weather in a row. The Polar Front typically undulates is such manner cold fronts pass over temperate regions every 3-4 days. The number of inactive cold fronts (no precipitation) more common in summer would be offset by the increase by non-frontal weather also more common in summer.

Any single precipitation event has the capacity of making dirt roads difficult for large scale momement on the day during which the weather occurred. I can distinctly remember my van sliding off the side of a dirt road in rural Florida one summer after only about a 20 minute rainshower. (I won't say why I was on a rural dirt road in Florida but the more psychedelically inclined of you can figure it out.) Most of us are so used to traveling on paved highways, I think we lose appreciation of how much better they are in rain as opposed to unimproved roads.

Extrapolating figures from various documents on troop movements, I created a rudimentary "model" for troop movement on good roads in fair weather:

Per Army documents, I used 6 days of marching per week at a rate of 14 miles per day.

Per my knowledge of weather and verified in a sample I present after this model, I considered every 3rd day to be one with weather (precipitation).

Per documents I could find on movement along muddied roads, I used a momement rate of 7 miles a day for the weather days.

Thus, for a 2 week period:

(FairWeatherDays*12)+(RestDays*0)+(WeatherDays*7)/14

would yield an approximate movement rate under ideal conditions.

Plugging in the numbers, we get:

(8*14)+(2*0)+(4*7)/14 = 10

Throw in the fact perfect marches were not the norm and Jagger's use of 8.5 miles per day for infantry in fair weather seems quite accurate.

Here is how I checked my assumption weather occurred roughly 1 every 3 days:

Using official data from the National Weather Service, I checked the average number of days per month with measurable precipitation for 10 cities located around the main area of combat in AACW. I used the averages for the entire period of record for these cities, meaning these numbers are the monthly averages of 40-80+ years of data, depending on the location.

The cities I used are:

Harrisburg, PA (closest I could get to Gettysburg)
Washington, DC
Richmond, VA
Atlanta, GA
Pensacola , FL
New Orleans, LA
Nashville, TN
St Louis, MO
Dayton, OH
Lexington, KY

The average number of days with measurable precipitation for these cities in the following months is:

January: 10.8
April: 10.1
July: 11.8
October: 7.4

It should be noted that Pensacola and New Orleans, with their sea breeze front convective storms in the summer and less frequent polar fronts in non-winter months, skew results a bit. Removing them from the non-winter sample, the averages would be:

January: 10.8
April: 11.0
July: 10.5
October: 7.9

Based on this sample's results, I feel using 1 in 3 days as weather impacted movement is valid for the purposes of such a generalized model.

A couple of other notes on weather in general:

1) Fall almost always presents the best weather in the US, with October normally the fairest month of the year. Future Mods or changes to the game might consider reflecting this.

2) Southern coastal areas typically have precipitation maxes in summer, instead of spring. One region inland, however, averages follow the normal Spring, Winter, Summer, Fall order of precipitation frequency. Again, future changes should consider reflecting this.

Some thoughts on weather's impact on movement:

1) As noted in the comment on my van, short periods of rain in summer can have disasterous results in the South. Combine heavy rainshowers or thunderstorms with roads of the period and I would think marches in coastal regions in the summer would be forced to deal with mud a lot.
The land itself would be fine - but the roads would be mush for several hours during and after the showers. Note that precipitation occurred almost every other day in the sumer along the coast! This is not an aberration in the data. Having forecast in Ft Walton Beach, FL for 6 years, I assure you, the hard data matches the emperical. Imagine trying to keep a Corps together when the lead end hits the mud, everyone bunches up and then the advance units pull away from the rest as they emerge from the mud but the rest are still slogging through it. A day's march could be severely impacted by a single, isolated thunderstorm - a common occurence in southern, summer, coastal regions! Accordians are great to polka to but they aren't much fun to march in. Again, food for thought for modders and designers.

2) There appears to be a small debate whether mud is worse weather than snow/frozen ground. I assume those who feel mud is worse have never lived up North. Anyone who has spent any amount of time driving in winter conditions will tell you fresh snow is much easier to drive in than old, compacted snow. But it should seem obvious: you don't get many men down a road on fresh, easy-to-step-through snow before it becomes trampled into hard, slippery, ack-i'm-falling-again snow. Of course, that implies snow that is easy to step through in the first place. Imagine what happens if you are trying to move through 2 feet of snow! Even fresh, it is a chore.

And if you think mud is slippery, try moving that wagon train down the non-perfectly level road on ice! I doubt any Army commander would be so dumb as to try it.

I went to my first tech school in the Air Force at Wichita Falls, TX. I was there in January 1978. We normally marched in formation to class and back. Mind you, we moved in flights of only 40-50 students. One day, it snowed heavily (for the area) overnight (7-8") with a spattering of frozen precip under the ice. The Air Force would not let us march to school that day - we were told to get there however we could - walking alone, taxi, personal car, whatever. Moreover, we would told we were not allowed to march in step along the way if we walked with others. Walking by one's self in winter conditions is infinitely easier than trying to march in formation, even if you are in a loose formation. Trying to move large amounts of men over snow/ice would be comical at best, suicidal at worst. Any movement undertaken would have to be exceedingly slow to succeed.

Personally, I think movement rates should be lower in snow than mud.

Thought on attrition/cohesion:

The rates mentioned by others seem excessive. I can't quote figures but my own short experience with attrition from movement mirrors their accounts. Cohesion drops too rapidly and rises too slowly relative to the drop. I think toning down movement related cohesion losses would be the route to take. It is one thing to end a movement in less than perfect battle condition. That is to be expected. It is quite another to end a non-forced movement with the fighting capaibility of a sparrow. That is ridiculous.

I disagree with manpower losses being returned to the manpower pool where you have to buy them again. ("Army recruiter to conscript, "Hey! Didn't I just recruit you two months ago?") Stragglers normally rejoined their units. This is already modeled by the cohesion loss with movement. To suffer cohesion loss AND an increased loss of troops seems like double jeopardy.

Desertion and illness was more dramatic in standing armies than moving ones.

I think the goal should be to tweak the cohesion/movement/weather interplay to more accurately reflect conditions and tweak the attrition system so that the historical setting causes standing armies lose more men than marching ones - but please don't make me buy training for the same guy twice!

One final thought...

As shown by various posts in this thread, commanders were sometimes capable of pulling off astounding marches but were also subject other times to the full effect of Murphy's Law. Instead of treating movement rate as a fixed number, is it possible to make it a variable? The leader's bonus or penalty for movement (if he had one) could skew the variable positively or negatively as applicable. I'm thinking each day would add a check for the movement variable with 3 options possible: slow, normal, fast. Commanders with a sped bonus would have percents skewed toward fast. Commanders with a movement penalty would have percents skewed towards slow. Combine this with your movement orders showing PROJECTED rate of movement as opposed to ACTUAL rate when you planned a move and the game could easily simulate the fact you didn't always get what you thought you would.

You might expect Grant to take 5 days to get to the battle but that unforeseen snafu with the loose sheep at Boogerville Crossroads slowed him down an entire day! Maybe too much to program in but with the depth of game play already there, I think it would add even more realism to a currently outstanding game.

[Gray_Lensman]

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[Tazilon]

I am using the currently posted most recent patch.

Two days ago I made a cavalry movement with two units through several friendly regions with clear weather and ended up with 0 cohesion. I can't acurately say what their cohesion was at the beginning of the march but it could not have been very low because they had been idle for several turns inside a town.

Their arrival with 0 cohesion is what prompted me to seek the boards and see if there were any comments on the subject. It is definitely something I will watch now and if something weird happens again, I will be able to post exact numbers and conditions.

[Gray_Lensman]

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[Primasprit]

[...]
The main discussion of this thread is the permanent movement attrition losses that were directly proportional to the cohesion losses and therefore excessive in earlier patches. These losses are not easily recoverable especially in enemy controlled territory.

The changes of the attrition calculation are under way. It will be possible to adjust the attrition independent from the cohesion loss.

Cheers
Norbert

[Jagger]

The changes of the attrition calculation are under way. It will be possible to adjust the attrition independent from the cohesion loss.

Cheers
Norbert

When are the attrition parameters going to be released for modders? Or are they already released? If so, where are they at?

[Primasprit]

Hi Jagger!

When are the attrition parameters going to be released for modders? Or are they already released? If so, where are they at?

They are not yet released, as the new attrition calculation is not yet included in the currently released version of ACW. There are still some tests needed.
There will be a new opt-file which contains the coefficients which care about attrition and cohesion loss. Additionally 3 new parameters will be added to the model files.

Cheers
Norbert

[Tazilon]

I have sent the same cavalry units over the same march 3 more times under the same conditions. Only in the reported case did they end at 0. Every other time they ended in the mid 60s. No idea why they dropped so low the one time - but it certainly caught my attention! lol

[berto]

There will be a new opt-file which contains the coefficients which care about attrition and cohesion loss. Additionally 3 new parameters will be added to the model files.

Thanks for the update. I anxiously await these enhancements and adjustments!

[Jabberwock]

I think Jabber's mod has come close to what was historically accurate for fair weather movement.

Not mine, Jagger's. It's not the first time. I do tend to get a lot of credit for his superb work.

[Gray_Lensman]

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