Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: Marshall Ellis

fjbn:

Need to realize that the AI doesn't have the luxury of the historical knowledge that we humans have. What you mention about the Tzar leading the army sounds incredible to you and I BUT the AI simply thinks that their senior leader (not BEST) is leading an invasion.

Marshall

Why do you have to enforce another burden to the AI by not making the BEST leader to lead the army instead of the senior one? It doesn't sound like it would be difficult to implement since it just a diffrent value AI has to compare. (stratecig/tactical instead of seniority) As you said yourself the AI will never be as clever as the human players might be so I don't understand why it needs the extra burden of not using best it has when the players are surely doing so?

I agree with you. Can you imagine Brunswick leading Prussia, Mack Austria and the Tzar Russia?. It´s just a nightmare!. Napo will crush them all, no matter if they join their armies.

But it's not that historically unaccurate. Lot of armies of that time were given to blood princes and high nobility. If I'm not mistaken, Bruswick was in charge at Jena/Auerstadt, Mack was in charge of the army that was supposed to stall the french army at Ulm and Alexander was on the battlefield at Austerlitz.

Martin Paradis

I think, the IA is only to get used to the game, since i assume all of us have played the board game, could you imagine a Rusian IA attacking Turkey to weak it and just let Austria figth freely against France in a next war, or let Great Britain get the north of Africa, this kind of tricks is only for human brains, NEVER an IA could make a good diplomatic effort...

I thinh you are not right in Mack case, simply read OOB in Austerlitz scenario in EiA. You will see that the guard and the main army was in Italy commanded by Charles (in fact, an archiduke, like his brother John). Austria thought that Napo main attack would be directed to Italy, as usual, but Napo changed the plans and made the fastest movilization ever seen. This is the reason why Mack was captured in Ulm.

More important. If you have to be historicaly acurate, Russia manpower must be much bigger than France, and GB resources bigger, because in 1800 GB collected more money in taxes than France, and the difference was getting bigger with the years.

Ozie:

This was an odd situation where multiple leaders were in the same area and when this happens, the senior leader takes over (most of the time). I give the AI the option of what, where and who so I cannot completely answer the WHY yet ...

Thank you

Rules states that the most senior general present at the battle takes command. I suppose this makes the AI send their senior generals to the front...

"If you have to be historicaly acurate, Russia manpower must be much bigger than France,"

How so? Russia only had 9 million more people than France. That is not that huge of a difference. France always had an army that was at least twice as large as Russia's during the Napoleonic Era.

France had about 25 million people in 1800, so if Russia had 9 million more, it´s 34, and maybe more. The ratio 25/34 is worse for France than 30/36, and more important. You can say that France can take manpower fron other countries, but in fact you cannot take a man from Germany, for example, and convert it in a efficient french soldier, because the difference in lenguages make coordination very difficult. This is one of the reasons why Austrian army was not as good as it could be. Officers were basically austrians (german speaking) or hungarian, and Austrian Empire had many people from other countries who spoke other languages. It´s difficult to make a good army in those conditions.

And yet the Poles and Bavarians generally performed very well under French commanders. Or the Germans (KGL) under the British.

About KGL, they had a tradition to fight on the brit side. not only in the revolutionary wars, but in seven years war, so it was not new for them. Poles corps were big and had many good poles officers (Poland desapeared only few years ago), and the same for the bavarian corps, because they were both old kingdoms with military tradition, but you cannot say the same for other countries.

Anyway, you cannot compare a nation with one language, like france, Russia or Prusia with others with diferent countries, like Austria or, in 1812, France.

ORIGINAL: fjbn
Anyway, you cannot compare a nation with one language, like france, Russia or Prusia with others with diferent countries, like Austria or, in 1812, France.

I beleive that you just made anl anachronism here. France in those years is everything but a contry with only one language. French is only spoken by people of Paris and the elite while people of each province is speaking some kind of local dialect like Breton, Picard, Alsacien, provencal... and many more.
What will made people fight for france is the revolutionary "ideology" rather than the language. Like one century and a half latter, the peasans and workers will fight with the red army.

What about Blücher?. Is there any Blücher rule in the game like EiH or he will appear in 1806 like EiA?. This is very important because he is the only decent Prussian leader for a long time. It´s very hard to carry Prussia with Hohenlohe as your best leader.