Matrix Games Forums

I have 4 questions about this aspect of the game.

- I have readen the modding guide. According to this document, the leaders have an aggressiveness value or a personnality (cautious to a fault, ....).
This value is not displayed in the game itself. Could it not be usefull to know this value during a battle ?

- The manual doesn't explain how a lightly wounded leader is affected. Are his stats lowered ? Does he have less movement points ? Is his command radius reduced ?

- The AI will conduct defensive and offensive fires. How the AI will choose the range at which a unit will open fire ?

- Could it not be usefull for the player to know what units have been flagged as being always in command in a scenario ?

It could be useful to know aggressiveness. Aggressiveness is only used in one place in the game right now -- when the regiment is set to "May Charge." The regimental commander's aggressiveness rating is a factor in determining whether the regiment charges or not.

Light wounds don't have an effect on the commander's rating right now, but this is something we want to add.

The main difference between defensive/offensive AI and firing distances is that when the AI is defensive it gives much greater weight to its own projected casualties than when it is offensive. The exact distances, of course, depend on weapons and troop placement and defensive terrain and weather, etc.

I believe we only use always-in-command to designate just a few top-level units, e.g., corps or divisions that are acting as de facto army groups, so in our cases it hasn't really been necessary. But yes, I can see that if there is broader use of this feature, then players ought to have a way to see this. Are you planning to make such a mod? If you are, let me know and we can talk about a way to show this.

Thanks for your explanation.

No, I don't plan to do any mod. It was just a suggestion : as I don't know well this war, it helps me to understand the mechanisms of the game and of the pitched battles depicted here.

The game is really pleasant and interesting.

Regarding groups or units that are "always-in-command," even if the player cannot see which groups or units have been designated as such it can usually be figured out. This feature in the OOB files was included because the command&control system BAB has penalizes units that are not in-command, but in certain cases units were far from their commander but knew very much what they were supposed to be doing, so it would be wrong to penalize them. Think about Wilson's Creek, where Sigel's brigade begins at the far end of the battlefield from the main Union force: Sigel may not have been "in-command," but he had his orders and followed them. Or, at Manassas, it is impossible for every brigade stationed at a ford to be "in-command" because the map is simply too big and there is no one place Beauregard can be stationed and communicate with them all at once -- but, of course, units covering a ford don't really need to be "in-command" to know what their job is. So after playing for a bit it should be pretty obvious which units start off as "always-in-command."