The battle that changed Europe.

[terje439]

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[terje439]

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[terje439]

One of the most fun battles I've ever played. Too bad the AI brought too much CAV and too many poor quality troops with Preussian standard on all armies this would have been one bloody battle.

[Ugrok]

Very impressive ! Nearly one million men on a battlefield ! I would have expected a lot more casualties.

[terje439]

Yea, me too. However the Russian, Austrian and Turkish armies have too low morale to stand for long.
If I had gone with instant battle/quick combat two things would likely have happened;
-I would likely have lost the battle
-losses would probably be doubled.

Would be fun to see such a battle against Sweden, Britain and Preussia [:D]

Terje

[06 Maestro]

Very well done! That was quite informative too-I learned a couple of things.

I am currently amassing my biggest Turkish army ever-about 140,000. You've "upped the ante" a bit-I need to set my sights a little higher.

I wonder how much a difference it would have made if the coalition army was human controlled?

Thanks for presenting that battle-very interesting.

[terje439]

ORIGINAL: 06 Maestro

I wonder how much a difference it would have made if the coalition army was human controlled?

A good question, and to be honest it would have made alot of difference. A player would probably (atleast I would have) have spent more time to completely surround me before moving in for the kill. If you look at the screenshots you will in a few of them see that my rear is guarded by only a handful of units, those could easily have been swept aside by a determined player. If that had happened I would have needed to pull my lines in, and that is not always doable when my units are engaged in firefights.
Also the battle would have been far bloodier, but in the end I do feel comfident that the battle would have been winnable for me IF the enemy player had brought the same quality troops to battle. Quality won me that battle, my units were mostly in the 7-8 morale range, and the enemy 3-4.

Terje

[Joram]

Very nice AAR Terje. One reason the battle wasn't quite so bloody is because of the cascading affect of morale loss. With all the low quality units in the opponents mix it is no wonder they routed before you could cause more casualties. If you had wanted to you could have split your units in half to try to surround more and get them to surrender to you. Also, if you had guarded your rear with just one or two cav units on screen, you could have used your other infantry to rollup a flank and surround some units (not that you were ever in real danger it appears).

[terje439]

I agree with everything you said, I did not want to force enemy units to surrender due to the fact that I was not sure if this battle would cause every nation I was at war with to surrender. So by not taking more units out of the game, I had the option to set of another big (yet smaller than this one) battle with any nation I was still at war with (this was also what happened the next turn. Another rather big battle, and Turkey surrendered.).
Any danger? Not really. I believe this is partly due to the map layout. In FoF the opposing forces would come at eachother head-on, but in CoG:EE the map is tilted, forcing the attacker to come in at an angle, which again makes it far easier to make an educated guess where the main force of the enemy will appear, and also takes away the AIs advantage in huge numbers. Against a human player I would have had more problems, as the thing to do in this battle would have been to completely surround my forces, and then attack.

Terje

[Joram]

Yeah, I was kind of thinking about the multi-national aspect of it. I keep going back and forth if an allied nations morale loss should affect each other. Part of me says yes and part of me says no. So maybe there should be a compromise and have a reduced affect.

[terje439]

Yeah, I have the same feelings towards this as you do.
This battle resulted in a NW loss of 2173, which means that all nations involved on the losing side took such a beating. However the main casualties were taken by Turkey and Austria, Preussia on the other hand lost fewer troops than me, and it really is weird that they take an equal NW loss as their allies.

[Hard Sarge]

it is going to be much HARDer to get morale losses like that when the patch comes out

would of been a better battle if the AI was on the defence, 4 Nations on the attack, is going to be pretty confused

[terje439]

Yea, gonna be sweet [:)]
Just had a big battle (140k of my troops vs 90k Brits) in Devon. At the end of the day I lost 15k men vs the British losses of 49k. So a much smaller British army took the same amount of beating as 600k entente troops in this battle before fleeing.
The effect of morale is crucial to your armies!!

And I agree, had the AI been defending I would have gained far higher losses to the enemy, but not too high anyway due to so many CAVs and low quality INFs on the enemy side.
Actually IMO the AI should have been on the defence, as they had captured Champagne a few turns earlier, before I attacked their position, but...

Terje

[ptan54]

Good show Terje.

I'd like to see a Waterloo AAR one day!

[terje439]

ORIGINAL: ptan54

Good show Terje.

I'd like to see a Waterloo AAR one day!

Actually this was not far from "a Waterloo". Had I lost that battle, the AI would have me on my knees as all the troops I would have had left would have been a ragtag army still in the making with a mere 50.000 infantry attached to it.
It was France against a coalition of nations, and they all brought their big armies to play in hope of make France come crashing down once and for all. A loss would most likely have seen me surrender to;
-England
-Spain
-Russia
-Preussia
-Austria
-Turkey
[X(]

What I would have liked to see in a battle however is;
-more defined areas of the map. Aka a forrest on one spot, hills in another area, a lake etc.
-better quality troops for the AI, not more troops just better ones.
-better use of AI Cav units.

Terje

[ptan54]

True, if anything this is more difficult than 1815 due to sheer numbers. But are the Prussian, Austrian and British morale better in 1815? French morale advantage should be less pronounced in 1815 after the losses of 1812 and 1813. Would be interesting to see a similar battle with a narrower morale gap.

Are you going to mod your game so that Nappy appears or is Dummy the new Nappy?

[Hard Sarge]

A shame though, they shouldn't of fought, they should of took land instead, they could of won the war, without fighting the Major battle (but with those kinds of numbers, it is HARD not to try to force a Major Battle)

one hassle with that type of battle, neither side had all of there troops there

[terje439]

ORIGINAL: Hard Sarge

A shame though, they shouldn't of fought, they should of took land instead, they could of won the war, without fighting the Major battle (but with those kinds of numbers, it is HARD not to try to force a Major Battle)

one hassle with that type of battle, neither side had all of there troops there

No no, the AI never tried to do this battle, but as usual my armies were camped in Paris, and the enemy armies all marched to Champagne which they besieged and captured. I kept two armies in Paris and marched my remaining army around taking protectorates around the map. After a while I noticed that the AI continued to send army after army, corps after corps into Champagne and I decided I wanted to try that battle, marched my third army to Luxembourg, waited a turn and set all armies to attack towards Champagne. Only the two armies in Paris arrived, and I called in army #3 as reinforcements.

True, if anything this is more difficult than 1815 due to sheer numbers. But are the Prussian, Austrian and British morale better in 1815? French morale advantage should be less pronounced in 1815 after the losses of 1812 and 1813. Would be interesting to see a similar battle with a narrower morale gap.

Are you going to mod your game so that Nappy appears or is Dummy the new Nappy?

The Preussian and British morale is not really the major issue, they all can keep up (to some extent anyway, but more than enough to be able to win the day in a battle as this), the problem is Austria, Turkey and Russia who all fields far too many low quality troops (2-3 morale).

It does not help either, that this battle took place in 1799 which means that my armies have been fighting for 7 consecutive years gaining experience, while the enemy brings an army where alot of the troops have spent some time in a French POW camp ATLEAST once.

Nah I'm not gonna mod in anything [:)]
(too lazy! [:D])

Terje

[ptan54]

I thought COGEE had a hardcoded limit on the number of divisions that can take part in a battle. How did they get 600K men against you?