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Army of Liberty: a Fantasy Revolutionary Warfare Quest

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NSchwerte said:
Nooo, the horse artillery got out :(

Something to keep in mind is that artillery cannot realistically lose experience with the current system except by being wiped out.

If an artillery unit goes down to 1 kin, then it will lose 5 xp regenerating, but usually artillery will get 5 xp during a battle.

So Von Trotha will still have his highly experienced artillery corps, just lacking in guns and we actually lost more cavalry than him.

Most of his casualties are pretty worthless low XP infantry.

It's still a victory, but just cause he lost these artillery pieces. If they got out I would consider this a strategic defeat where we lost more valuable kin than him.

We definitely made some big mistakes to get into such a situation with a way superior initial position. If von Trotha didn't suicide during that charge he could have probably retreated and won the battle when it comes to relative value
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I do think that you're right that there should be something done with Artillery XP loss, @Photomajig , since right now it seems there's basically no way to get rid of experience artillery units except to destroy them or make them surrender, because otherwise they'll just literally never lose XP levels as long as one of them survives.

However, I think you're obviously wrong about the cavalry: most of our cavalry losses are elves, and we hold the field. So he's not going to get many if any of his lost cavalry back, whereas we're going to get most of our cavalry back, and a higher rate of our Hob cavalry too because we hold the field.

I also think that you're underestimating the impact of leaving the field, and also the fact that even though they were "worthless low XP infantry" they were still people, and that it takes meaningful effort to replace them, tbh.

That said, it really does seem as if artillery units are, battle to battle, invincible unless you kill literally all of them. We had his entire artillery battery basically surrounded with four different cavalry units and a bunch of infantry about to move forward and literally ALL of them got away.
 
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Actually, @Photomajig , I feel like this bears repeating: we had a large chunk of his artillery in basically the worst position artillery can actually be in, right in the middle of the battle with dozens of faster enemies able to get off attacks in theory, and all he lost were, like, five guys and the cannons.
 
Red Rationalist said:
So, are there any changes to the influence system? With us no longer able to capture units, I would guess the influence gained from battles would change somewhat. Honestly, this has potential where how a battle looks also becomes a important factor, meaning we get fun additional considerations like charging because we need a decisive victory for our career.
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I'll be trying to include a lot more Objectives in future battles, which should address that. But also you're just going to have to get involved in politics more to get that sweet, sweet Influence!

The Laurent said:
I do think that you're right that there should be something done with Artillery XP loss, @Photomajig , since right now it seems there's basically no way to get rid of experience artillery units except to destroy them or make them surrender, because otherwise they'll just literally never lose XP levels as long as one of them survives.
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The Laurent said:
Actually, @Photomajig , I feel like this bears repeating: we had a large chunk of his artillery in basically the worst position artillery can actually be in, right in the middle of the battle with dozens of faster enemies able to get off attacks in theory, and all he lost were, like, five guys and the cannons.
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Mmh, I see your point. Though von Trotha did have three infantry Units in close proximity, which could feasibly have helped them get away. I think I'll have arty Units lose XP per 5 guys instead of 10, or maybe per 2 guys. Hmm.

Chimeraguard said:
Yeah, just noticed that right as you posted. But we should still have gotten the 60th and 75th Artillery. They're 3 turns of Movement away from the map edge even without the cavalry movement increases.
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The 60th had enough movement to escape just fine, but you are right about the 75th. They should have been caught. The intention was indeed that 3 turns of movement = surrender, though idk if that's too harsh. I'll just retcon that in the next update, shall I, so you get a bunch of arty prisoners too!
 
Photomajig said:
The 60th had enough movement to escape just fine, but you are right about the 75th. They should have been caught. The intention was indeed that 3 turns of movement = surrender, though idk if that's too harsh. I'll just retcon that in the next update, shall I, so you get a bunch of arty prisoners too!
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Aren't the 60th just 1 short? For 2 turns of Movement, they can go NE, E, NE, and then 3x NW and be almost off the map, but just short of making that final step to actually be off the map, so they'd need 1 more turn to actually leave the map.

Edit: Wait, nevermind, they can just use the road. Yeah, they're off.
 
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Photomajig said:
I'll be trying to include a lot more Objectives in future battles, which should address that. But also you're just going to have to get involved in politics more to get that sweet, sweet Influence!




Mmh, I see your point. Though von Trotha did have three infantry Units in close proximity, which could feasibly have helped them get away. I think I'll have arty Units lose XP per 5 guys instead of 10, or maybe per 2 guys. Hmm.



The 60th had enough movement to escape just fine, but you are right about the 75th. They should have been caught. The intention was indeed that 3 turns of movement = surrender, though idk if that's too harsh. I'll just retcon that in the next update, shall I, so you get a bunch of arty prisoners too!
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Hmm, maybe every five or lower? Like, if they lose any people at all, they take XP damage, because artillery is a well-oiled machine or so on. Or you could go all sorts of ways, really, fiddling with the exact limit/level.

Oh, nice, 75th is a great pickup, considering they're the Professional unit.
 
So, using our unit as an example, we went from 50/50 to 18/50. At 2 per 1 XP, this would be a reduction of 16 XP, which might be slightly harsh (in that I think it'd take us all the way down to Trained or something absurd)

At 3 per 1 XP (with losses below 3 rounding up) that'd be -11 XP, which would be enough to put the 10th Human Artillery halfway through Regular, another battle from being Experienced. Which seems like a pretty significant setback... and it should be such a setback, because it's pretty significant losses while still preserving the commander and at least a decent chunk.

(To clarify by what I mean by below, a loss of four would 'round up' to -2 XP.)
 
Photomajig said:
I'll be trying to include a lot more Objectives in future battles, which should address that. But also you're just going to have to get involved in politics more to get that sweet, sweet Influence!
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Alright, that does sound promising. I think I favour gaining influence via mechanics or universal conditions, but having more objectives is also a decent solutions. Honestly, stuff like multiple contradictory bonus objectives could be interesting, it adds another dimension to battle planning (Like getting the objectives "Rout 6 enemy units" and "take less than 300 causulties"). And I am looking forward to playing politics more, we've been quite insulated from that so far.
 
Some more positive notes. As long as we can scare up some Regular replacements, which shouldn't be impossible at this stage, we should have our minimum competence level be "Regular" and the 72nd should get to Experienced. 10th Art will be busted back down to Professional, but on the other hand, 84th and 31st are one good battle from Professional, and if we can keep our Horse Artillery safe for another two battles or so, we should be able to have our first Veteran unit.

The 148th is going to do another swing up and down, because XP wise they have enough to go up to Professional, but that's before casualties that will send them down to Regular unless we can find some Professional troops, which will be expensive if potentially worth it considering how vital the 148th has been for us.

E: Also, 10th human would not be down to Professional, not Regular, I legit mixed up the difference between Professional and Experienced.
 
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Photomajig said:
-Elven:
--335 Trained Infantry
--53 Trained Cavalry, 100 Professional Cavalry
--10 Trained Artillery
-Human:
--395 Trained Infantry, 219 Green Infantry
--20 Trained Cavalry
--145 Green Artillery
-Hobgoblin:
--29 Trained Infantry, 200 Professional Infantry
--200 Regular Cavalry
-Halflings:
--153 Professional Infantry
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For reference, I believe this is our current Reserve of troops at the end of the 3rd March.

This was back when recruiting cavalry cost twice the Influence of recruiting Infantry. With the changes, hopefully that translates into having some extra horses.
 
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Chimeraguard said:
For reference, I believe this is our current Reserve of troops at the end of the 3rd March.
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So we should be able to make good on the losses in our Hobgoblin Infantry, the 200th and 251st.

If at all possible it'd be nice to get Regular replacements for Liberte and use the trained human reserves only for a bit of it, but we don't have those so we'd have to spend Influence to get 'em.

We can also make good on our Halfling losses, and even have an increase in XP to go from Professional troops being put in the mix, potentially putting the 19th and 28th close to leveling up.

Our Elven infantry losses are small enough that it's no big loss to throw a few trained people that way.

We'll have to see how many Elves we'll have to replace for the Cavalry, but it should be fine.

We have just enough to replace Bonnair's men without any risk of losing anything.

And... the human artillery? We're going to have to spring for Regular via begging, borrowing, and stealing, because those Green Artillery would absolutely devastate the 10th. We want to keep it at least at Professional.
 
Aside from that, we're definitely going to want to form some fresh formations, particularly of infantry so we actually have enough infantry formations to form a solid battleline. This battle we ended up having to use our cavalry for quite a bit of frontline work and it showed.
 
Chimeraguard said:
Aside from that, we're definitely going to want to form some fresh formations, particularly of infantry so we actually have enough infantry formations to form a solid battleline. This battle we ended up having to use our cavalry for quite a bit of frontline work and it showed.
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I'm not so sure about that, or rather each new unit formed decreases our Army Drill by one when we've been fighting this whole time to keep at 'halfway okay', so we have to be pretty sparing with this kind of thing.
 
Maybe we're in luck and the Convention will send us some units from the western provinces?

If the Norns have the time to swing over reinforcements then so might we? II. and IV. Armies are still unaccounted for. One of them is likely on the southern frontier, but the other should be free.

And if the Committee for the Army isn't scraping together new units out of Grand Coalition veterans and new volunteers then they should probably be dispersed with a bunch of not so grapeshot.
 
Yeah, we got a glimpse of Oberlin when he introduced us to our spy, and Montmorency's the one who got fragged by his own troops, but we haven't had a POV for either of them.

If we have the march actions it might be nice to Mentor Montmorency soon, both because Unsteady is a really nasty trait that it'd be nice to get rid of and because narratively it'd be fun to see Durand go "so why do your troops hate you so much?"
 
natruska said:
Yeah, we got a glimpse of Oberlin when he introduced us to our spy, and Montmorency's the one who got fragged by his own troops, but we haven't had a POV for either of them.

If we have the march actions it might be nice to Mentor Montmorency soon, both because Unsteady is a really nasty trait that it'd be nice to get rid of and because narratively it'd be fun to see Durand go "so why do your troops hate you so much?"
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Part of me is trying to find someone to have a brother to smuggle rumors in, because there's some interesting political implications going on? Historically, the Jacobins were very, very suspicious of a possible Caesar, and yet the Levelers like Durand... but then, she's presenting herself not as a possible Caesar or even a Consul, Consular style, but just as a general who has private opinions. So I wonder whether beneath the numbers that give the overall picture there are some weird abberations like a few Consulars who are more willing to hear out the idea of a General becoming Consul (including theoretically, but not preferentially, someone like Durand) while Levelers who like Durand plenty argue fervently against this as an ideological point... and of course the Liberationists going, "Why shouldn't a military or ex-military person have power?"

...there's probably also nuances within that, to be honest, between those who are like, "Soldiers are also citizens, so of course they have a point of view, but that's not the same as supporting military rule" and, "Military rule? That'd be nice."
 
If we do mentor someone, I would prefer mentoring a maverick over unsteady. Unsteady is a bad trait, but maverick could lose us a battle.


Concerning new units/refilling out existing ones. It is generally preferable to use veteran troops to reinforce our units and use less experienced troops for raising new ones, especially for infantry.

This is cause when reinforcing, 10 experienced troops will add 1 xp, but when creating a new unit you get the xp to get up to the level of your recruits, which is usually less than the 100 xp you would get from having them reinforce.


I'm not sure if we are going to get entire units as reinforcements. If the convention wanted to do that, why deploy guillory as another army instead of having them join us? Though of course we may end up having him join us anyway to be able to stand up to a strong nornish professional army.

Maybe it will be the first time we'll have the theoretical multiple front system where we only fight half the enemy while guillory distracts the other?


I also don't think we lost so much cavalry from the interception, the problem was mostly losing a lot of kin to a bad placement where infantry caught them in the west.
 
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I honestly think people worry about Maervick CO's too much. It's come up once in our actual battles (and one time in the second tutorial, which was just in Raka's head), at a time when we didn't really understand the trait, and Brutét worked out fine in the end. Mavericks want to be part of the action, so as long as we place them in it, it works out fine. Unsteady isn't actually that bad as I thought after mathing it out (on average 2 more stress, which adds up to being routed a check sooner), but it's still more of a weakness. Mentoring the 45th is also kind of a risk, as there is a chance to get an actively bad trait like distracted, demoralizing or incompetent.

Overall, I think we should focus on raising more troops rather than do the mentor option, we really need more combat mass. Honestly, something like 3 more infantry units could have changed our approach considerably, we could have send less squishy reinforcements to the Kirschenholz and had a better defence in the centre. We really need reserves to start a counterattack against a battle-hardened enemy. The force structure on the Rotholz also wasn't really great for a counterattack (we probably should have put the hobs rather than elves there, given their value in a charge), but that was also partially an issue with deployment.

Overall, I am also kind of reconsidering if we should keep our skirmishers all in one place or disperse them more. This battle does show some of the issues there, though the centre was also really open. Putting a halfling unit in the shadow of the Rotholz Turm might have worked out well (Move E, Shoot with ambush, Move back), especially against units already involved in melee. Overall, we also should have put the Halflings on the hill range in the south, rather than the forest outskirts. It would have put them in range to ambush units trying to move into the woods, while putting them in a position to move out and harass Trotha if he put his line out of Sarnscheid. Well, lesson learned about skirmishers also needing to see their targets. The next battle will hopefully be less of a partial mess with the experience gained.
 
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I do think spreading our our skirmishers some would be a better idea than keeping them all ultra-concentrated. Maybe have a picked focused force, but each flank having a skirmisher formation would be great in terms of providing us with options for long-ranged rifle fire in all areas of the battlefield. Imagine if we'd had a unit of rifles shooting at the 28th instead of muskets. We probably could have taken our the enemy battery.

Not every turn will see a golden opportunity like that, but a spread out skirmisher force will let us take advantage of them when they happen. Plus, we might be able to do sneaker stuff with Halflings if there's other, more obvious units nearby to keep the enemy distracted.
 
Yeah, part of this failure was also a lack of considerations that the enemy might try to assault on 2 fronts rather than 1. I mean, it was a plan that very clearly didn't work, but that doesn't mean enemy generals won't engage in it. Battle planning should involve more considerations for multi-pronged attacks, Norn's generals do seem to like those.
 
Red Rationalist said:
I honestly think people worry about Maervick CO's too much. It's come up once in our actual battles (and one time in the second tutorial, which was just in Raka's head), at a time when we didn't really understand the trait, and Brutét worked out fine in the end. Mavericks want to be part of the action, so as long as we place them in it, it works out fine. Unsteady isn't actually that bad as I thought after mathing it out (on average 2 more stress, which adds up to being routed a check sooner), but it's still more of a weakness. Mentoring the 45th is also kind of a risk, as there is a chance to get an actively bad trait like distracted, demoralizing or incompetent.

Overall, I think we should focus on raising more troops rather than do the mentor option, we really need more combat mass. Honestly, something like 3 more infantry units could have changed our approach considerably, we could have send less squishy reinforcements to the Kirschenholz and had a better defence in the centre. We really need reserves to start a counterattack against a battle-hardened enemy. The force structure on the Rotholz also wasn't really great for a counterattack (we probably should have put the hobs rather than elves there, given their value in a charge), but that was also partially an issue with deployment.

Overall, I am also kind of reconsidering if we should keep our skirmishers all in one place or disperse them more. This battle does show some of the issues there, though the centre was also really open. Putting a halfling unit in the shadow of the Rotholz Turm might have worked out well (Move E, Shoot with ambush, Move back), especially against units already involved in melee. Overall, we also should have put the Halflings on the hill range in the south, rather than the forest outskirts. It would have put them in range to ambush units trying to move into the woods, while putting them in a position to move out and harass Trotha if he put his line out of Sarnscheid. Well, lesson learned about skirmishers also needing to see their targets. The next battle will hopefully be less of a partial mess with the experience gained.
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Again, the difficulty is that adding three infantry units would basically mean that our Army Drill goes down to, "We're going to lose every single battle and get every negative event."
 
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