Battle resolution has a very long "tail"

[EwaldvonKleist]

When the battle between armies is simulated, there is a long tail where the weaker army is already almost completely decimated, but continues to fight on. The weaker side's losses get ever smaller, since they are somewhat proportional to its strength. The combat strength graph usually resembles two declining exponential functions.

But IRL combat does not work that way. When the strength disparity growths, the weaker side usually takes more losses, while the stronger side takes less. And IRL 100k men are not stopped for weeks by a 1k residual force of a once 150k strong army.

 

[andersonm]

Completely agree.

In another thread I saw a dev explain that as the numbers dwindle on the defending side the attacker currently sends in only a fraction of their troops (combat width decreases). This is supposed to be reworked in 1.3.

 

[Caitou Tan]

Agree.... It's so weird....

 

[Allan Nonymous]

I've noticed a really strange tail end bug with certain battles, I think you should post a bug report.

 

[EwaldvonKleist]

Agree.... It's so weird....

View attachment 958374

View attachment 958375

This is even a bug. Sometimes battles draw out endlessly as the weaker side refuses to die.

 

[Froonk]

There should be a threshold where an army loses its organizational integrity and rest of the men are demoralized. This threshold should be more for attacker than defender. Say 35% for attacker and 20% for defender by default.

Could even add tech and traits to manipulate this number. Maybe reducing it to 15% and 10% by late game to make battles more grindy with longer tails.

 

[za3tarani]

Completely agree.

In another thread I saw a dev explain that as the numbers dwindle on the defending side the attacker currently sends in only a fraction of their troops (combat width decreases). This is supposed to be reworked in 1.3.

do you have link where they said it, or know where it was said?

 

[Danieri]

I have the same experience, playing as a nation with superior tech and more battalions vs weaker country. Like, 50 vs 30 battalions and the last 3 troops lasted longer than the other 27 combined.

I think that the way it works now should be preserved as a tactic that has low chance of happening when losing (a last stand, if you will, where you don´t lose morale but the troops keep fighting until they die), but the combat overall should, as you have stated, be more polarized and faster as the combat goes on.

 

[Basileus2]

More examples of the janky "pillar" of war. More like the missing pillar of war.

 

[Askorti]

Wasn't this supposed to be (partially?) fixed in 1.2, where they made it so reinforcements stop constantly trickling in during a battle?

 

[yurcick]

It has got better, and not only because of reinforcements, the "300" situation is gone to, AFAIK (when after certain threshold the numerically inferior and technologically superior side stopped taking any casualties, but didn't stop inflicting "demoralization" casualties, so the last dozens of defenders gradually grinded down tens of thousands of attackers).

However, it's reasonable to implement what OP says, overall the situation just got better, but not to the optimum. An overwhelmed opponent should get instantly defeated due to loss of control of rears and loss of supply, unless he's defending a fortress or something like that.

 

[Evethor]

Wasn't this supposed to be (partially?) fixed in 1.2, where they made it so reinforcements stop constantly trickling in during a battle?

It`s a different problem.
This as far as I know is a problem with recovery and not reinforcements.
Some units gets killed so hard that the game does not register that they are recovered and as such they are undead / unkillable.

 

[Nuklearius]

A hard agree. Battles should become faster, not slower, the greater the numerical discrepancy with the forces.
IMO it's one of the biggest problems in the war system right now and contributes to the "weightless" feel of combat.

It should be fixed with a hotfix.

 

[andersonm]

do you have link where they said it, or know where it was said?

(I put this into a code block because for some reason the forum automatically changed it to a weird image of the post)

Here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/10yfe4h/initial_thoughts_on_12_beta/

In regards to an earlier version of the beta. Note that the first part was supposedly fixed in 1.2.4 but they are looking into the lengthy tail.

The strange battle morale logarithmic drop at the end of most battles is still present and continues to make battles continue on for longer than it feels is necessary

PDXMikael: Lead Designer

It's because battles get reinforcements every week, and the new reinforcements come in with fresh morale, which in combination with the decrease in intensity as the battle drags on (due to low terrain combat width) causes a few men to stick around for way too long. Both are addressed in the next beta release, battles no longer get reinforcements and thus cannot recover either men or morale, and combat width has been increased overall. I still think some battles drag on a little too long and we're looking into that, but it's much better than before.

 

[andersonm]

More info here:
https://www.reddit.com/user/PDXMikael/
PDXMikael
· 4 days ago

Lead Designer
We actually just found the cause of this bug! What is happening is a combination of two factors:

• Combat Width ensures that you can only get so big of a numeric advantage over the enemy at any one time. In this case, those 47 Austrians are likely only being effectively fought by maybe 60-80 people on the other side, not all 8000+ men at once. This reduces the effective casualties that can be inflicted on the Austrians. Technically, this is working as designed, although when the numbers become really small on one side it results in pretty ridiculous outcomes.
• in certain cases, very low casualty numbers can be split over several entities and become so small that they're ignored.

In combination this can cause rare situations where a few brave men can hold off a huge army forever, as only so many opponents can inflict casualties on them at a time and those numbers are spread out across combatants such that they end up taking zero casualties in the end.
Both issues are going to be addressed for the next release!