Is this WAD? Artillery retreating before frontline gets demoralized (1.33 beta)

[watchout86]

I noticed that my backline artillery is consistently retreating in the pretty early in the battle while my frontline infantry/cavalry continues to stay and fight. Surely this can't be intentional, right? In previous patches, the backline artillery line would continue to fight until they get pushed into the frontrow and starting losing morale. As of the beta patch, they just retreat despite never leaving the backline and leave the frontline units to fend for themselves.

Here's a screenshot showing an example of what I'm talking about: the first Artillery unit retreated at the same time the first infantry unit, but there's still 10k infantry (and 1k cavalry) in reserves ready to get into the front line.

With this situation (backline artillery retreating prematurely), artillery seems far less valuable than ever before: if they retreat just as quickly as infantry does, then you need just as much artillery as you have frontline in order to maintain full effectiveness (rather than at least 1.5x as much frontline since artillery would retreat last).

 

[currylambchop]

Intentional but they're tweaking it and probably gonna make the backline take half or a quarter as much morale damage.

 

[dD_ShockTrooper]

It's absolutely working as designed and as intended. It was mentioned directly in one of the dev diaries. Front line troops no longer deploy in the rear either. I believe the goal is to reduce the importance of cannons in battles and make excess cannons valuable at the same time. This would make the AI stronger as they have no concept of proper unit compositions and just hurl whatever they have at hand into the battle.

 

[watchout86]

It's absolutely working as designed and as intended. It was mentioned directly in one of the dev diaries. Front line troops no longer deploy in the rear either. I believe the goal is to reduce the importance of cannons in battles and make excess cannons valuable at the same time. This would make the AI stronger as they have no concept of proper unit compositions and just hurl whatever they have at hand into the battle.

Ah. I saw the part about front line troops not deploying in the backline anymore, but must have missed the part where artillery takes morale damage while in the back.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I haven't played beta, but this sounds over-cooked. It doesn't make sense that arty would outright route before the first front set of front line troops routes. Troops taking at least some casualties should have a faster morale loss than troops taking no casualties, even if all are losing morale as the battle continues.

 

[MatthewP]

I haven't played beta, but this sounds over-cooked. It doesn't make sense that arty would outright route before the first front set of front line troops routes. Troops taking at least some casualties should have a faster morale loss than troops taking no casualties, even if all are losing morale as the battle continues.

Yeah. But I think the obvious fix of reducing morale loss is maybe even more problematic. Then most battles end with the front line routing then artillery moving to the front and getting completely wrecked before they retreat. I dont think that’s good for the game either.

Tbh I think they should just revert this change, which they already said they made on the mistaken assumption that artillery with zero morale stopped doing damage.

edit: it’s probably possible to balance it so artillery get a little wrecked, but not completely, and maybe it would be a good change. I just think the window for hitting that outcome which is maybe slightly better than the status quo is very small and comes with a lot of potential for issues and unintended consequences. Doesn’t seem worth it.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Yeah. But I think the obvious fix of reducing morale loss is maybe even more problematic. Then most battles end with the front line routing then artillery moving to the front and getting completely wrecked before they retreat. I dont think that’s good for the game either.

You could just give back row arty a fixed morale hit that's less oppressive, or (more logically) have them take a fraction of the front line morale damage.

If they run out of frontage, it's reasonable for them to get badly damaged. But yeah, maybe it's better to leave it alone too. Depends how much trouble starts to crop up with reworking all this.

 

[MatthewP]

You could just give back row arty a fixed morale hit that's less oppressive, or (more logically) have them take a fraction of the front line morale damage.

This was what I was thinking as well. But:

If they run out of frontage, it's reasonable for them to get badly damaged. But yeah, maybe it's better to leave it alone too. Depends how much trouble starts to crop up with reworking all this.

I agree it’s reasonable intuitively. But unless I’m missing some hidden complexity of the combat system (which is quite possible), with that change we would then be in a spot where a typical battle would get to a point where the loser should always manually retreat rather than see their artillery savaged.

I don’t think adding that kind of high stakes, near mandatory micro is good, and I suspect it would be a problem for the AI too (or the AI would be taught to do it, giving an arguably unfair advantage against distractible players).

TBH, I sort of suspect this was hashed out sometime 5-15 years ago, a lot of the same issues were spotted (and probably others) and that’s how we ended up with the unintuitive but functional solution of artillery not caring about morale.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

with that change we would then be in a spot where a typical battle would get to a point where the loser should always manually retreat rather than see their artillery savaged.

Arguably, this has been the case since 1.0. Especially before they changed manually retreating to add a bunch of morale to the army that did not retreat.

Even in current patch, you can cycle retreat out a battle you're winning despite giving them morale, and hit enemy arty anyway on follow-up attack if they don't manually retreat. Or, if the initial fighting took their numbers low enough, outright stackwipe them instead.

The AI does not do this, other than by accident. But if you're going to lose a fight, you can make a case that it has (nearly) always been better to manually retreat in EU 4.

 

[watchout86]

You could just give back row arty a fixed morale hit that's less oppressive, or (more logically) have them take a fraction of the front line morale damage.

If they run out of frontage, it's reasonable for them to get badly damaged. But yeah, maybe it's better to leave it alone too. Depends how much trouble starts to crop up with reworking all this.

I feel like the best solution is essentially what we already had: if there is a unit in front of the artillery, they shouldn't be demoralized because the enemy can't even reach them (except perhaps the enemy artillery, but in that case you would think the formation would have stopped moving as soon as the artillery was in range to hit the front line rather than take extra losses by moving further to be in range of the enemy artillery). If the shield of frontline units protecting them retreats and no one is there to fill it, they should lose morale quickly and retreat (artillery might not have lost morale any faster than infantry at most tech levels, but IMO they should have and this was already taken care of by the player being smart enough to retreat ASAP in that scenario).

 

[MatthewP]

Arguably, this has been the case since 1.0. Especially before they changed manually retreating to add a bunch of morale to the army that did not retreat.

Even in current patch, you can cycle retreat out a battle you're winning despite giving them morale, and hit enemy arty anyway on follow-up attack if they don't manually retreat. Or, if the initial fighting took their numbers low enough, outright stackwipe them instead.

The AI does not do this, other than by accident. But if you're going to lose a fight, you can make a case that it has (nearly) always been better to manually retreat in EU 4.

I don’t disagree with anything you say here. Honestly, there’s an even more compelling example of this already being in the game than you gave - naval combat. That’s a case where the difference between manual retreat and retreat from low morale is often most of your fleet.

I don’t like this. It makes the part of the game that is carefully babysitting far-flung stacks more important, and it makes inattention the most dangerous failure rather than lack of skill or planning. I don’t want land combat to be that way. Large wars are already annoying enough. I also don’t really want the game to suddenly get much easier because every time I win a battle I do double the damage to the AI (or more because of how much cannons cost).