samoja 说:
As someone who played a lot of Total war series where formation is king i have to say formation in Warband means very little, main reason being that battles are just too small for it to matter much, even in perisno with close to 400 troops (my poor poor CPU) battles are more like small skirmishes then actual full on battles. Even a small medieval battle could have thousands of soldiers on each side
No. During the Classical Era and in Antiquity, battles would frequently get to 10,000+ men. In the late Roman Republic, there were many battles fought by Caesar and Pompey that had 30,000 soldiers
on either side, and during Trajan's reign, the Roman army was at it's peak, over 300,000 soldiers and auxilia. This is in stark contrast to medieval battles - The single largest battle during the medieval period was the Battle of Grunwald, and that was only at 40-60,000 soldiers altogether. Keep in mind that this was
over half of Eastern Europe that had come to do battle there.
The organization of medieval armies had some standardization, but not a whole lot. Remember that medieval Europe was very decentralized - They had not the communicative abilities of Rome, nor their governance, roads, or standardization of armies. Indeed, the only edge they had on Rome was their technology, but even that wasn't too much of an edge. In wartime, the leader of the "army" of a kingdom was not getting a national standing military, but instead was calling upon the lords of fiefs to bring men to him, the number of men in accordance to the size of the fief itself. An average lord's retinue, in England known as a "lance", would have consisted of around 200 soldiers (plus the camp followers, who did not typically fight but would bring the lance to about double the size), and these men had to equip themselves out-of-pocket, save for the fifty or so that constituted the standing army of the fief.
On battles, formations were based on each individual lance. In this sense, the lord of the lance was basically the captain, and had autonomy over his men - They would typically do what the marshal wanted, but if a new development occurred in the battlefield, the lord did not have to wait for the marshal's orders to tend to it if he had the initiative. They might even assign captains of infantry, archer, and cavalry divisions within their own lance, so that the lord didn't have to issue orders to all of them all of the time. This made medieval armies far more flexible and unpredictable than Roman armies, especially because medieval armies were nowhere
near as drilled as their Roman predecessors.
Warband gets medieval warfare more correct than you might think, in terms of numbers - The real issue that we see (in battles, anyway) is that in battles with multiple lords, they should be taking command of their own men. Outside of major battles, which were largely avoided in favor of skirmishes and supply raids, we really need to see turf control. I don't mean positioning archers on hills - I mean that on the world map, neither we nor other lords should be able to pass right next to a hostile castle, or in many cases, straight
through them, with out some sort of challenge. That's what castles, and indeed fortifications, were for - To command the land around them, and render it difficult for enemies to get past them.
All this said, I would love to see PBOD in Perisno .90, or 1.0 when it comes. Medieval battles were not so uncoordinated and unpredictable so as to be a straight charge, nor a pointless dance around each other that leads to a charge anyway.
