Chapter 6
Battles: Understanding Combat (advanced)
Damage calculations:
Let's go under the covers, and see how a small part of a battle plays out.
First, we'll look at a case where an infantry unit is attacked by another infantry unit:
Prussia: Impulse Infantry (10/8 fire 8/7 shock 12/10 morale) - first number is offense, second is defense.
Austria: Impulse Infantry
Let's assume middle of the road: both sides roll 5. The modified die roll for the fire phase is:
(10 + 5) - (8 + 0) = 7 As you can see, because both sides are more offensive, both sides take a little more damage than the die roll would normally allow. The final damage would be then modified by the tech modifier (1.5) and discipline (124% for Prussia, 106% for Austria in the Rev France scenario, IIRC), and thus Prussia will do about 17% more damage than Austria solely due to discipline...
However, if we look at cavalry vs. infantry, we see a different story:
Prussia: Impulse Infantry (10/8 8/7 12/10)
Austria: Uhlan cavalry (5/5 7/6 8/8)
Fire phase
Infantry attack: (10 + 5) - (5 + 0) = 10
Cavalry attack: (5 + 5) - (8 + 0) = 2
Infantry has 5x the modified roll - worse, the tech modifiers in 1789 give infantry a fire modifier of 1.5, and cavalry only .5! The cavalry will end up doing around 1/15th the damage during fire...
Shock:
Infantry attack: (8 + 5) - (6 + 0) = 7
Cavalry attack: (7 + 5) - (7 + 0) = 5
Cavalry again has the lower modified roll, but the shock modifier in 1789 for cavalry is 4.5 to infantry's 1.5, giving them a decided advantage. Had cavalry gotten a roll of 9, they'd be doing a ridiculous amount of damage...
So let's look at infantry + artillery vs just infantry:
Prussia: Impulse Infantry (10/8 8/7 12/10) + Flying Battery (8/5 7/5 9/6)
Austria: Impulse Infantry
Shock:
Prussia: (8 + 5) - (7 + 0) = 6
Austria: (8 + 5) - (7 + 5/2 + 0) = 3.5
Austria loses over a third of their damage in shock...
Fire:
Prussia: (10 + 5) - (8 + 0) = 7 (from infantry) + (8 + 5) - (8 + 0) = 5 (artillery)
Austria: (10 + 5) - (8 + 5/2 + 0) = 4.5
Not only does Austria again lose about 1/3rd of their damage, but they take over twice as much damage since Artillery will do half their fire damage (with a modifier of 5.5, half is still a 2.75x modifier!)
--- Your biggest advantage over the AI is that the AI does not build optimum armies, nor will they pick the optimum advisors for what they are doing. ---
For a spreadsheet that will calculate damage for various unit combinations,
look here. It does not cover the tactics modifier - I simply haven't had time to spend a few hours crunching numbers to reverse engineer it.
Terrain:
Terrain modifiers are huge, especially against cavalry. Whenever you can sucker an army into attacking you in hills, forests, or mountains, do so. Hills and forests give a -2 modifier, rivers and straits give a stackable -2 modifier (with other types), and mountains give a -4 modifier.
--- The AI will try and hunt down smaller armies and destroy them. You can occasionally sucker them by sending a small army to the province you want to fight in, and waiting for the AI to send their army in. Keep a smaller army in the next province (out of sight), and time it to arrive the day after the enemy arrives. ---
Fighting when you have lower tech:
As you can see, the tech modifiers are a large part of battle. If you are not Western European tech, you will slowly find that you cannot achieve parity with European powers (moreso if you are Muslim, Indian, or Chinese tech - if you are African or New World tech, you'll never have parity without westernizing!). Your only hope is human waves...since you'll have inferior units doing inferior damage.
Even within tech groups, tech level differences can be huge!
1.) Western Europeans do not get any new cavalry units until Land Tech 22. Starting around land tech 13, the Western European infantry units have enough raw pips to outmatch the two starting cavalry units.
2.) Being one set of units behind an opponent will put you at a consistent disadvantage every day in battle. If you can wait until you get the new unit before fighting a major power, do so.
3.) Use attrition against the enemy. If you whittle away 10-20% of their men before the battle starts, they'll be doing 10-20% less damage to your men and morale. If the AI thinks you are weak, you may get lucky and watch them lose a significant portion of their army assaulting their way through your lands, at which point you can wipe out their regiments.
Now, the most important part of a battle:
Outcomes:
There are two outcomes in a battle for the losing army:
* If the army runs out of morale after the first 10 days, they will retreat.
* If the army runs out of men before morale (possible as tech levels increase) or runs out of morale before the first 10 days are up, they will surrender.
As long as the army survives,
all regiments in the army survive. If one guy staggers away from the battle in a 200 regiment army (this is an exaggeration, of course) and gets home, all 200 regiments will reinforce, and the enemy eventually can throw the whole thing back at you. Your goal, thus, is to wipe out enemy armies, forcing the opponent to pay to rebuild the regiments from scratch (slowly, since they'll now have war exhaustion).
To do this, you want to pursue the enemy army, so long as it doesn't run you smack into another huge enemy army (lest you just wipe yourself out).
There are three broad tactics here:
1.) Chase the enemy with a faster army (use a high maneuver general, or break off your artillery and have it follow separately, if the enemy has artillery). This lets you get to the retreat province first, and you will be the defender!
2.) Chase the enemy army with a larger, slower army. You won't be the defender, but the enemy army will take attrition when they arrive, and you won't. Usually, 2 is what happens.
3.) Start the battle somewhere that the enemy cannot retreat (no access, on an island, etc), which wipes the losing army. If the only way out is a strait, putting one ship across the strait blocks it, and forces the army back into battle (where it wipes out if there is 0 morale).
Conversely, you don't want your own armies wiped out:
1.) Try to never let your armies run out of morale and autoretreat. Your armies will pick some random direction, invariably somewhere that will get it killed.
2.) With the latest beta patch, you an choose a long retreat path. Your army will not reinforce until it reaches the end of the path, but it also cannot be attacked until it does.
3.) Optimally, cover your retreat path with another army.
Since the AI likes to concentrate their armies into one or two "doomstacks", wiping out a large enemy army can cripple their war effort, leaving their homeland ripe for the taking.