Do battle tactics or straight up numbers win battles?

[unmerged(669561)]

The gaming community I play with doesn't bother to create combined arms armies or set battle tactics preferring to win battles with numbers and spamming one type of unit. This leads to the comment that the combat system is broken. For me the fun of the game is organizing my armies. When playing single player I'll sit with the game paused for 10 15 minutes and arrange my stacks in a certain order, call me anal I guess. They say I'm probably wasting my time, but I would like to believe creating and organizing my forces makes a difference.

Now about the combat system. First I understand the concept of the frontage system, but when you check the terrain of some provinces it will have: 44% plains, 22% woods, 18% marsh, 16% towns. How the heck are you supposed to calculate the actual effective fighting frontage for that province; are you going to pause the game to do an algebra problem? Second, the battle tactics, say two opposing armies equal in size,composition and leadership have the same battle tactics mirroring each flank, they meet on even ground. How do you get the edge an your opponent this way? Is the whole battle now decided by who has the luckier dice rolls.

Do some battle tactics counter other battle tactics? Do some tactics work like combos, i.e. Feint and Counter Punch?

How does the computer know when to do the battle events?

In the manual the battle events: cavalry charge, harass, push forward all say up front that it increases defense, but on the back side they say it decreases defense? Also the battle event Up the guard isn't listed with any of the battle tactics; I'm assuming it goes with Up the Guard.

I know this is a grand strategy, but not having the slightest control of troops during combat irks me.

P.S. I forgot to say that I think its ridiculous to have to siege towns. Napoleonic warfare was not about sieges, albeit there where some important ones like Mantau and Danzig. Shouldn't it be like the player that starts inside a town province just get a defense buff?

 

[deadmeat1471]

I think 'up the guard' is OP at the moment, in real life it had the negative of that if the guard rout, not only are the cream of your army being slaughered, the rest of the army generally takes flight. This happened in ancient greek times(The immortals) and napoelonic times(Waterloo).
I think
A) there should be a cap on guards, a realistic amount say max 5% of manpower are guards.
B) If the 'up the guard' get defeated by superior firepower, the whole army should withdraw or rout.

I think building only one unit leaves you open to being countered. Too many guards = tiny manpower, too much infantry = little offensive ability, essentially WW1. Im gonna try this out though to see how it goes.

*also i think the minimum composition you need is Infantry and Cavalry, without either of these you are at a huge disadvantage, artillery are very very good on the defensive and guards on the offensive.

 

[StephenT]

A lot of the battle tactics give you a +100% bonus to your combat strength. In other words, an army of 20,000 with a good balance of inf/cav/art that uses the right tactics, is equal in strength to an army of 40,000 that's just all one troop type. And that's not even taking account of the fact that artillery gets to shoot first while infantry has no attack strength in the initial phase of combat, so an army with no artillery has to sit there and get shredded for several rounds of combat.

A province that's 44% plains, 22% woods, 18% marsh, 16% towns just means that when the battle starts, there's a 44% chance the terrain type will be treated as plains, and so forth. It doesn't actually pro-rata the different terrain types to come up with a combined value for each unique province.

Personally, I've found that tailoring the frontage to the terrain for each stack is too much micromanagement. It's just something you need to be aware of: that huge armies will suffer a penalty in rough terrain, and a relatively small group of defenders who would be overrun on flat ground can put up a solid fight in the mountains. Maybe if you were designing a specific "Alpine Corps" you could design its frontage for mountains.

If two armies have identical troops, identical morale, identical supply, identical leadership, use identical tactics and meet on perfectly flat ground, then yes of course the results of the battle will come down to who has the better dice rolls. But how often does that happen?

I'm pretty sure battle events are random, but the chance of each one happening is weighted by various factors (troop type, leader skill) and not pure chance.

Sieges may not be the glamorous and famous parts of the Napoleonic wars, but there certainly were lots of them. Especially in the Peninsular War: the Lines of Torres Vedras, Badajoz, Ciudad Rodrigo, Almeida, San Sebastian, Pamplona: all important sieges. The Wikipedia category page "Sieges involving France" lists at least 20 that I counted from the period 1805-15, and that was without going into the individual pages to check the dates when they wren't given (and of course, not all sieges are important enough to get their own Wiki page).

 

[Voffvoffhunden]

Numbers are obviously important, but things like terrain, army/flank composition and tactics are what makes or breaks an army. It is how Prussia can stand up against Russia, despite having a fraction of its manpower. One of my favourite moments so far was when my Spanish 30k-strong army in North Africa over the course of a month eradicated 90,000 Ottoman soldiers.

 

[Sir Garnet]

Numbers are obviously important, but things like terrain, army/flank composition and tactics are what makes or breaks an army. It is how Prussia can stand up against Russia, despite having a fraction of its manpower. One of my favourite moments so far was when my Spanish 30k-strong army in North Africa over the course of a month eradicated 90,000 Ottoman soldiers.

What organization and tactics did you employ?

 

[Rommel22]

Now I only played the demo, but tactics matter a lot. The right troop composition and tactics can easily defeat an army twice or three times its size.

 

[Alomoes]

as seen above you. But yeah, tactics mater a lot. In peace time, if you do thing right, you can probably bet your friends with half their army. Imagine the look on their faces when your 200k just obliterated their 400k army to ~100k with only 20k losses. Of course, I would not know what composition would be best.

 

[Rommel22]

With experimenting a few compositions and trying to emulate real world tactics (from the era), I would assign Guard units heavily to one flank. I'd set the flank with the Guard to none other than "Up the Guard". I'd have the opposite flank cavalry heavy, and have it set on "Counter Punch" and the center usually set on "Delay" or "Determined Assault". I have found this combination to be effective against an opposing army twice its size.

 

[unmerged(669561)]

I've been playing the 1792 mod. The last test I did was as Poland. I used the battle tactics of refuse, counter punch and delay, and my armies of 17k were repeatedly mauling all Russian armies of 25k and under