All,
Siege attrition has actually looked pretty good. I imagine as castles get bigger, it becomes far likelier that sieges will fail, particularly in MP where players intelligently build up infrastructure and maneuver, thus ending most wars inconclusively.
However, I am dismayed by how little attrition there is when on the march. It's much, much too easy to concentrate armies, which, of course, was fairly rare until the 18th century. Perhaps the actual solution is to make pillage much more lucrative and dangerous to the defender, so that you can afford to just let small regiments march around your lands and thus have to keep your forces divided most of the time. But it does seem that CK II's engine is right on the verge of delivering more realistic maneuver (i.e., units are arrayed across several counties rather than clumped together to fight pitched battles) and attrition is the most obvious answer. Perhaps a progressive modifier could be used-when a large number of troops gather in a single province, they at first suffer ordinary attrition, then more and more as they exhaust local supplies and get hit with pestilence until finally the army disintegrates.
It also appears that the Alps can only be passed at certain places? Is this correct? I haven't played there, but when trying to march an army (from Poland) as an experiment, it seemed that way. Is this also true of rivers? Forests? Other regions? If not, could it be modded so that it is?
It would be frankly fantastic if the Rhine could only be crossed in certain counties (simulating permanent bridges), and ditto the Danube, Carpathians, etc. It's imperfect without an MA system, but at the very least it would allow for more interesting maneuver if the holder of the choke point is an actual combatant.
Siege attrition has actually looked pretty good. I imagine as castles get bigger, it becomes far likelier that sieges will fail, particularly in MP where players intelligently build up infrastructure and maneuver, thus ending most wars inconclusively.
However, I am dismayed by how little attrition there is when on the march. It's much, much too easy to concentrate armies, which, of course, was fairly rare until the 18th century. Perhaps the actual solution is to make pillage much more lucrative and dangerous to the defender, so that you can afford to just let small regiments march around your lands and thus have to keep your forces divided most of the time. But it does seem that CK II's engine is right on the verge of delivering more realistic maneuver (i.e., units are arrayed across several counties rather than clumped together to fight pitched battles) and attrition is the most obvious answer. Perhaps a progressive modifier could be used-when a large number of troops gather in a single province, they at first suffer ordinary attrition, then more and more as they exhaust local supplies and get hit with pestilence until finally the army disintegrates.
It also appears that the Alps can only be passed at certain places? Is this correct? I haven't played there, but when trying to march an army (from Poland) as an experiment, it seemed that way. Is this also true of rivers? Forests? Other regions? If not, could it be modded so that it is?
It would be frankly fantastic if the Rhine could only be crossed in certain counties (simulating permanent bridges), and ditto the Danube, Carpathians, etc. It's imperfect without an MA system, but at the very least it would allow for more interesting maneuver if the holder of the choke point is an actual combatant.
