is the reinforcement idea still in the game ?

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Artificial down-scaling of battles and playing out 100 vs 400 battle to sorta reflect 600vs2400 battle is a terrible idea. While it may sound reasonable in theory, in actual gameplay terms it's even worse than the current system IMO and seems like a lazy, simplified solution to the problem. It results in crappy gaming experience where every battle will be the same and size of the armies will become just numbers on the campaign map. In BL, every unit represents a single individual. Turning that into representation of the whole unit just does not make any sense to me. And no, technical limitations are not the excuse for it. We can easily have working reinforcement system with just a bit of effort, with 1000 units cap on the battlemap. Sorry if it sounds harsh, but I find this idea really dangerous :smile:

Much better solution would be to give the player more options. Add simple in-battle UI screen to manage reinforcements/AI parties and allow them to arrive to the battlefield in force, not trickle one by one. @Hugo_Stiglitz ideas of allowing us to choose whether we want reinforcements or if we want to hold the ground with the current, beaten up troops would add a lot to the battle. If we could withdraw tired/beaten up units and then order them to return to the battlefield later on it could be even better. Battle epicness can be achieved not by sheer size of the armies, but also by prolonging the combat, adding different stages of the battle. Making it a two or three stage encounter, with the skirmishing phase before the main clash happens could also be the solution. How many times do you have 3000+ vs 3000+ battles? And if someone is finding the necessity to play consecutive battles to resolve the huge scale battle tiresome...well, maybe it's time to give BL a rest for a while :smile:?

Sadly, I don't have a feeling this system will be expanded and I expect TW to keep the current, broken mechanic.
 
Since the game can't handle battle sizes over 1000 perhaps party and army sizes should follow that. Lowering party sizes and limiting army size to 500 would somewhat solve this problem. Would also reduce snowballing as settlements would be harder to capture.
 
@Hugo_Stiglitz ideas of allowing us to choose whether we want reinforcements or if we want to hold the ground with the current, beaten up troops would add a lot to the battle. If we could withdraw tired/beaten up units and then order them to return to the battlefield later on it could be even better. Battle epicness can be achieved not by sheer size of the armies, but also by prolonging the combat, adding different stages of the battle. Making it a two or three stage encounter, with the skirmishing phase before the main clash happens could also be the solution. ?

Not my concept. It's actually from Rome Total War. That game is amazing for many reasons and controlling which reinforcements enter each battle is one reason that game is the legend that it is. Unfortunately and for no reason what so other, other than sheer and utter incompetence, the braid dead devs at Creative Assembly did away with letting players choose which reinforcements they wanted to enter each battle in later editions in the Total War series.

Selecting which reinforcements we want to enter the battle, holding some in "reserve" for a looming larger battle, or just because it's easier to take out 30 bandits or looters with 120 a troop party rather than managing an entire 500 man army, makes sense strategically, tactically, historically and for the game's sake.

With this type of mechanic in game, where we only use a small force within our army, to take out another small force, perhaps we could see the disorganized penalty(slow map movement) recover faster or be less of a penalty when we don't use the entire army for a small scale skirmish.
 
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what about simple reinforcement buttons with a running total which reinforces you back up to your max on field, you could have 3 buttons one for infantry archers or cavalry each press gets say five of each you want ten infantry and five archers easy 3 presses and they're on their way, you run out of archers your archer button will say 0 but you still have 25 infantry and 10 cavalry

Say you start with 200 you have the choice to reinforce at 190 and gain the extra ten men for your shield wall or wait till your down to 180 or even 150 and bring in a a bunch of cavalry in a block. The ai can make its own choices.
 
what about simple reinforcement buttons with a running total which reinforces you back up to your max on field, you could have 3 buttons one for infantry archers or cavalry each press gets say five of each you want ten infantry and five archers easy 3 presses and they're on their way, you run out of archers your archer button will say 0 but you still have 25 infantry and 10 cavalry

Say you start with 200 you have the choice to reinforce at 190 and gain the extra ten men for your shield wall or wait till your down to 180 or even 150 and bring in a a bunch of cavalry in a block. The ai can make its own choices.
Making the UI for this work is a bit more complicated than it sounds at first blush, but in principle the idea has merit.

A little UI widget that tells you how many of each group you have in reserves, and how many reserves you can currently bring in. Since a mouse clickable button on the battle UI isn't practical and it is poor form to add more loose keybinds, perhaps the "summon" button is handled as an order. ie. Select Infantry with 1, then a function key to bring in reserves of that type. Scaling how many to bring in with a single order is where things get a little trickier because circumstances could call for quite different numbers, but that problem has a few potential solutions that could be refined to an intuitive and satisfying outcome.
 
One thing I'm noticing with big battles is that, if odds are fairly even, the AI will hang back near it's own reinforcement zone. This is smart, but it makes for bad battles, because the flow of the battle will be sort of

1) Player Army advances, beats the socks out of the AI
2) AI reinforcements arrive, overwhelm the player army
3) Victorious AI troops advance, and run into
4) Player Army reinforcements, which overwhelm the AI army
5) Victorious Player Army advances, and run into
6) AI reinforcements arrive, overwhelm the player army

and so on and so forth...

While it is not "smart", like in maximizing their chances to win, I think it would make for better, less gamey battles if the AI generally advanced to the middle of the field, even when feeling defensive. Size good ground and stay put, sure, but not at the map edge.
 
And if someone is finding the necessity to play consecutive battles to resolve the huge scale battle tiresome...well, maybe it's time to give BL a rest for a while :smile:?

The issue I had with the multi-stage battles in Warband, was the lack of intermediate saving. From a "stop playing now and get some sleep" pov it wasn't ideal.
 
One thing I'm noticing with big battles is that, if odds are fairly even, the AI will hang back near it's own reinforcement zone. This is smart, but it makes for bad battles, because the flow of the battle will be sort of

1) Player Army advances, beats the socks out of the AI
2) AI reinforcements arrive, overwhelm the player army
3) Victorious AI troops advance, and run into
4) Player Army reinforcements, which overwhelm the AI army
5) Victorious Player Army advances, and run into
6) AI reinforcements arrive, overwhelm the player army

and so on and so forth...

While it is not "smart", like in maximizing their chances to win, I think it would make for better, less gamey battles if the AI generally advanced to the middle of the field, even when feeling defensive. Size good ground and stay put, sure, but not at the map edge.

Yes - this would be better. In any case, that's pretty much what happens in big battles - it devolves into a no-tactics scrum in which 1) #s and 2) to a lesser extent, troop quality are all that really matter. The player can make up for a small strength deficit because the player can trade effectively with the first AI deployment ... but then it goes to **** when the AI reinforcement spawn in on top of the enemies defensive position to replace their dead.

Any idea needs to address that problem as described here.
 
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