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Napi -> RE: Imperial Guards are No-shows?! (11/18/2005 10:08:14 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Russian Guard
Gentlemen, not quite sure what you are talking about. Each little green cube in an army represents 10,000 soldiers. I have seen French and even Turkish Armies running around with solid perfect squares of little green cubes, something like 500,000 men.
Two Armies like that collide, without limits, and you have a million men battling it out in one battle. Ludicrous, given the period.
Here's the battle limits:
Base 22 divisions (already at 11x10,000 = 110,000 men per side), plus or minus:
+1 per 2 levels of road development
+0 to 3 Random bonus
-3 in winter
-2 bad weather in province
+1 defender bonus
+1 per difficulty level -1 for AI controlled teams
-5 any team crossed a river
Plus the worst of terrain crossed while entering province or central terrain if any:
-10 mountains
-5 forest
-8 marsh
The base 110,000 covers Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Quatre Bras, Aeurstadt, and most other Napoleonic battles, including any Spanish campaign battle and Waterloo.
With a higher difficulty level, a little random bonus luck, and in the right (more roads) province the minimum can rise to 160,000 or more, per side, easily covering Borodino, Wagram, and the rare larger battles. While that doesn't cover Leipzig, remember that Leipzig was actually several smaller engagements over several days, rolled into one.
Now if you are arguing that the game battles shouldn't be limited to "historical" sizes, that's another issue, but these rules, while stringent, do keep battles within reasonable historical limits.
I think if anything in this game does not need to be historical it is the size of the forces involved in a battle. It's not because there was never a million men sized battle in the era that, should the troops have been available, the generals would not have used them. There was no set "rule" on how many participants could join in the fun. And you can bet good money that if Napoleon would have had more troops at his disposal at Leizig they would have been committed. I'm not advocating that we should drive tanks around in 1805 mind you but unless you play a simulation of a specific battle then I, as a player, like to decide myself how many troops I commit.
I'm also wondering why if you have 30 divs in the area with a limit of, say, 15 which are available at the start, why the other 15 do not participate as reinforcements. I've seen a few enter later on (fatigued!) but never the manjority of them. To compound my bewilderment, reinforcing corps can enter the battlefield... It also drives me into dispair that arty, as reinforcement, is always taggled. Why? I mean they can obviously get to the battlefield without being taggled, so why? The position the reinfocements enter is also strange. I've seen them enter between streams so entaggled in terrain it takes ages to get them anywhere remotely useful. Wouldn't it make more sense to let them enter somewhere on a road? Say to the North if they come from that direction on the strategic map?
I'm puzzled!
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