DrTomas said:
Maneuvering forward and backwards was supposedly quite common and does not require a lot of discipline. Just follow your formation banner/flag when moving forward and backward. Without it you would get tired too quickly.
Native AI is turns the battle into giant braveheart style melee, which is not how battles behave. If you loose sight of your banner or your banner would be taken by the enemy - you would likely to route. Probably because you would not know what to do or who to fight. I imagine, it would be the same if your formations breaks.
well I'm not a medieval warrior so its just what I thought. For starters I believe most infantries, in the case of lance system, are just new recruits to fulfill their duty and trained poorly.
Growing up in a military camp myself, I agree a bunch of poorly trained new recruits could gather a tight formation, and move as a group forward, but maybe first not walking as smoothly as what is in game. What normally would happen is somebody won't be able to keep the pace when they stand together that tightly and turning it into a mess.
Moving backwards, on the other hand, is almost impossible for non-professionals. 1st thing is they will most likely just simply route in battle. They are not knights. Turks could retreat without routing, but not in formation, and that's the closest thing coming to my mind.
Even if they don't for some reasons, what I believe in real life is they would make a turn as a whole group, rather than stepping back blindly(does it ever happen in military history ever?) while still keep the formation.
It is just impossible to have such an army that can orderly doing so at that time in Europe.
Remember not until Frederick the great, with years of rigorous training, could we have oblique order, which also looks like a petty thing, but only after 18th century with well-trained it indeed happened.
What is currently in game is more like Tercio with oblique order to me, especially when I ride around them seeing the unbelievable way they quickly rotate.
On this matter, native battlefield is more convincing to me.
It's not I hate the whole idea. Rather, I just don't like the part where infantry can stay in a tight formation while moving. They should move loosely like in native and then gether formation afterwards. In that way cavalry could crush them when they are striving to maintain a formation, more like what's in history to me. What in game now is I feel like I don't feel a strong need to keep heavy cavalries like miles(light ones still needed for archers). Infantry, at the time, was supposed to buy time for archers to kill the horses, not form into a square that renders cavalry useless. Yes heavy cavalry still works if use correctly, but with the wage I could make better use with something else. I certainly do not expect few knights can kill off an entire square, altho its very likely to be in history, but playing more and more I feel I just use them as heavy infantries --- since even if they do break the formation for few seconds it will quickly regrouped, what's exactly the point of having those 400 cost guys in my army?
In any case, Whether what I said is more realistic or not is not important. The thing is we want to have more options to fit individual better while still on the way for not being too historically inaccurate.
two other suggestions tho:
1. Formation should be disabled once the banner man died, or plus the condition when the formation has been broken. Currently they will run back to regroup with reinforcement no matter what happened. In real life once the formation is broken it's done.
2. Since we are on discussion now, I wonder is there a way to fix archer's weapon select, a more serious one.
It works better than before, but still I have the problem, when defending a castle, the archers on the towers stopped shooting and changed to melee when enemy was getting close even before they climbed the ladder. And most of them stopped ever since, and making no contribution more than angrily glaring. I feel the problem might because the vertical distance was not counted but not too sure. Would it be possible to change the auto-change weapon range to be a much smaller one, and give the option to "force use range weapon"?
