nwg

Hello interested Corps Battles players!

As we know, CB v3.2.1 was the last official release of CB and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Nothing contained in this thread, that I hope will develop into a nice and interesting discussion, should lead anyone to believe that a new version of CB is imminent because its not.

However, I love a good chat, and as many long time Napoleonic (and other) wargamers will know nothing beats a good long chat about rules or unit performance, so here we go!

As the creator of CB I must say that I remain pretty pleased with how CB v321 turned out - its the culmination of quite a number of iterations of the mod and I'd like to think it represents most of what was good about CB from the very beginning. There are a couple of 'no go' zones that I never wanted to tackle in CB however, some of them out of principle alone, but now that CB releases are done, I feel a bit more free to ponder on things.

For example (open to comment)

1) Howitzers and Rockets

In the latest CB I have tried to find the elusive middle ground that made howitzers and rockets useful and usable but without brushing aside the battlefield supremacy of the standard cannon batteries.

Its been a tricky thing, so to try and achieve this I've increased the range of the howitzers/rockets but still left their accuracy a power of magnitude or so worse than the cannon. However, in watching a lot of replays I am open to the possibility that I may have made a mistake by increasing the rocket batteries to 6 carriages (standard howitzer batteries have 4 guns). Doing this allows an astute player to somewhat get around the problem of a highly inaccurate weapon by using a lot of them - in many ways this is what the real commanders of the day did with muskets. Individually muskets have appalling accuracy but en-masse they could be extremely effective.

Rockets are only available to Britain and British armies in CB traditionally have problems with florins as their base troops are quite expensive, so it makes quite some sense to trade cannon for large numbers of rockets...however, this is not historical and its the designers job (mine) to provide incentive to produce roughly historical armies. More on incentives in a moment.

My thoughts are that if I had made the rocket troops 4 carriages large instead of 6 it would reduce the incentive to buy lots of them because the important interplay between using up several precious unit slots (from the 20 available) and having enough fielded infantry would come into force.

2) Line Infantry and Cost

Again, after the benefit of many many replays of CB as well as participating in dozens of games myself, I have come to ponder if some of the factions troop lineups as promoted by their statistics and thus their cost are really historical. My thinking is probably not. I'll give some examples:

Britain: I'm pretty happy to accept that in general British troops were pretty handy with a musket. Theres argument to be had about the detail of this as well as the why's and wherefore's but ultimately I'd probably concede the point myself. However, over time its become clearer and clearer just how important the musket firing statistics are in the game and appropriately the weight assigned to this attribute has got heavier and heavier making those troops who excel with a musket very expensive indeed.

In CB (and NTW2) the British are the pinnacle of a musket armed infantryman....but their basic line troops as a result are extremely expensive, well outside the 'normal' range of line troops from other nations. This has caused a peculiar problem for the British player. As the 'line' infantry is supposed to form the bulk of your army, what can you do when your line is simply too expensive? Well, the only answer to the dilemma has been to create British armies with large quantities of light and militia troops (Generally 50% or even more). Its not historical.

I always said that I would not change, except where forced, the vital statistics of a factions units. Small variations -did- happen over the different versions of CB, but wherever it was possible I always tried to revert back to the original stats in the next version. In the case of British line, I think that given an open policy on changes I'd be tempted to reduce their fire factors somewhat to help bring down their cost.

Almost all line infantry in the game has a fire factor of 15 with mediocre accuracy, British line has a fire factor of 17 (the highest!) with extremely high accuracy. I think that reducing line fire factor to 16 or even 15, whilst retaining their accuracy would have been worthwhile (and shaved something like 100f off their cost). It would still leave them as the best performing Line infantry in the game, but would have taken the edge off their extremely high value.


Russia: In many ways a similar argument as for the British. The existing stats encourage an army build thats not very historical. Typically we see vast numbers of both Grenadiers and Militia. What we should be seeing is huge numbers of Musketeers. But the Russians face a peculiar challenge with the standard stats they have been given. On the one hand their morale/steadfastness and melee abilities are amongst the most reliable in the game and this pushes up their cost, but their musket firing abilities are in general quite poor (until you buy Guard quality troops at their commensurate high price). Given these extremes the tendency by Russian commanders has not been to bet on mediocre performance but to go high/low, with the extremely low performance of the militia evened out by the good performance of the Grenadier class. Not bad choices by any means, but not historical.

I think that again, given an open stats policy, there would have been merit in thinking about reducing the strong melee abilities of the Russian Musketeers (Line) to drop off some of their cost and present a line unit that is a lot more like the Spanish Patria Provisional..and at a similar cost. In this way the Russian militia armies would probably disappear in favour of musketeer/grenadier mixes with a splattering of high performers like Pavlov and Life Guard.

I think mostly the other factions are not bad. The problem I perceive is mainly with line troops and the need to always encourage players to -want- to choose large numbers of them. The choice comes down to the players perception of value for money. Mostly the different factions line cost about 400-500 florins and for the most part performs at a level commensurate with your expectations at that cost.

I'll open this up to comments now before I end up writing War and Peace

Moo.

Great stuff M very well explained, its pretty difficult to find anything to disagree with here.
As i have said before its my interest in history that drives my interest in NTW and CB.
So for me the current strength in power as well as deployment of rockets in CB is not pleasing from this point of view.
""Special note required here for Gunner""
Mate we are not out to get you first we take away your super rifles and now we are starting on your rockets
Your solution offered sounds reasonable to me, but more importantly as you have suggested above your following points regarding costing and performance of Brit line could clearly have a much bigger impact on creating the type of historical army's we desire.



Again i couldn't agree more, i have always felt the Brit stats to be a bit over the top, yes i believe its just about fair to give them a slightly better performance in musket duels than other nations, and these things in CB are very important in giving us variation in factions and therefore battles fought, which was obviously the intention from the beginning of NTW.
So one word of caution regarding bringing all factions abilities closer together.
All in all your suggestions on lowering Brit stats deserve some serious consideration, the reduced costs would certainly give Brit players a real boost (gunner mostly ) and lead hopefully to more historical deployment.




Hmmm the Russians i never play them
To be honest i don't favour mêlée driven games so steer well clear, despite hints in the past that I'm going to give them a go
But once again there is clearly an issue with historical deployment.
Once again Moopere points make perfect sense and his understanding on what makes CB tick puts him by far in the best position to offer the best possible solutions.
I would therefore just add that my view when looking at whats on offer from Russian army's is that militia are way to cheap.
Is this having more of an effect on the mass deployment of grenadiers than the price and performance of line ???
Could Russian militia performance and therefore cost be brought closer to other nations, this would surely make mass grenadier army's much less likely. (off course M is now going to tell how that would upset the whole balance)

Wow this doesn't look much like a bit of tinkering to me.
OK Moo this is for discussion purposes only yey pull the other one its got bells on you know where this is likely to leed
So my final thoughts are Moopere do you feel more work on CB is worth pursuing ??
I for one can see myself playing CB for some time yet, but who knows how ETW is going to grab us.

I'm confident the only CB players from now on will be the ones that are currently playing it, I'd not be sure if any further work for about half a dozen of us is worthwhile, BUT if it is, here are the things I think need attention.

ROCKETS : They are fine, really they are, no problem with them - cheap and nasty, to friends and enemy alike !.

HOWITZERS : They are too expensive, if they were cheaper you would not see so many rockets.

BRIT INF : Reduce their stats AND there cost might be an improvement but could make them even harder to use as the Cav is not so good and the Rifles have become a waste of money.

RUSSIANS : I have never used them and never will, if they have better shooting stats that's ok with me, it might make them playable.

ARTILLERY : 6, 8 and 9 pdr cannons could do with a cost reduction - for range. This is the main reason the Brits pick rockets, the cannon are to expensive to buy only to see them destroyed by 12pdrs before you can get to use them.

i dont want to be too optimistic but i am glad with everything in cb except the british rockets. They may be cheap np with that but if You decide to upgrade it cause we all decide to continue with CB and not really like ETW...please make rocket troops 4 carriages and force britain take maximum 2 of them (i am not sure how that ll happen or is it right to restrict smth like that ) Personally, 6 carriages * 3 rockets force me (either i am the attacker or defender) to march forward everytime whatever the risks are. I also try to watch every CB battle, every faction seems okay to me... Except rockets lol (gunner&simp ll kill me heh )

Not much chance of this Ank. I'd say ETW is going to be an ok piece of work and will likely improve vastly as modders get to work. In any event, no future release of CB is planned despite how this thread looks.




I'll admit right up that I've never been keen on arbitrary limitations on players troop choices. I believe its the game designers job to encourage a certain style of play by way the game mechanics itself. My job then is to find a way whereby British players will recognise the useful value of a rocket battery but equally will see value in other troop types as well and want to buy a realistic combination of both.




Aha, now this is very interesting for me. You know, this response to long range artillery is exactly as planned. This is the 'desired result' in my books. I wanted to find a way to encourage players to want to come together and get to the fighting rather than spend an hour manoeuvring around at maximum range. One of the reasons, though not the only one, is that we all seem to suffer a game crash after 45 minutes or so.




Heh Despite what sometimes seems to be the vast superiority of the British faction in fact I believe them to be quite a difficult faction to play. Their overall price, which is based mainly on their firing ability, makes them a hard army to build. Added to this is their fairly mid level morale and steadiness, they are -not- the strongest faction in game in this regard.

I have a lot of sympathy for the British player who at the moment is only able to field about 50% or so of his force with line or heavy line troops. If there -were- a future patch of CB coming then reducing the punch of some of the British long range units would have to be balanced against other changes which keep the Brits as a viable faction to play.

Best regards, M.

Yes I understand. The Russian faction within NTW2 has developed a little bit of an unfair reputation for being a melee only nation. Historically this is not really true though. Certainly in the early part of the wars Suvarov's doctrine of the "bayonet is your friend, the musket is a lazy fellow" is often quoted and there is a lot of early evidence for wars with the Ottomans being bloody and vicious in an up close and personal sort of way. However, the Russian Infantry actually benefited from range practise at at the very least where proficient with the use of their weapons - several other nations of the period were not altogether keen on spending money and time on actual practise in the arts of war and spent instead considerable time on the parade ground.

The biggest failing of the poor Russian infantry of the period was abysmal equipment and terrible leadership.

The reason I'm telling everyone this boring story is that its important that the Russian army really -is- competitive with musketry, but to be historical they should definitely be at the lower end of the competitive scale.




Ah, yes, now you very probably have a point there. The Russian and Ottoman Militia are extremely cheap because they have some very specific and nasty weaknesses - they are unreliable in the extreme and need a commander to handle them with extreme caution.

I'm not sure if Russian commanders would use them in quite the same numbers as now though if the Musketeers were viewed as being reliable and decent value for money. Spanish line has similar attributes to Russian Musketeers (not quite as solid morale/steadiness wise) and cost 400f, Spanish Patria are quite a weak formation but still better than true Militia at 300f. Russian Musketeers should probably have their stats tweaked to be around 350-375f which would be a powerful incentive to trade some of the militia for them.

Given more time and more graphic skill from me I'd have made a separate Musketeer unit to represent the garrison musketeer regiments which were pulled into service during the wars and formed a very large part of the later period army. These poor guys were as green as hell and definitely not up to par with the standard field units but were also just as definitely -not- militia. Having such a unit available would round out the Russian line up in a more realistic way. The bulk of most armies would be a combination of green musketeer and veteran musketeer units with a splattering of militia and a few guard units.




Yes, they certainly could, and it would work, but I'd be left with a sour taste in my mouth because the rather beautiful models of the Opolochenie units are definitely Militia and not professional army - it would really stick in my eye to have these guys on a performance par with line troops.




Ahh, I deserve that.

But honestly, not at all sure I'm going to pursue this past this discussion.




Only if the community as a whole strongly rejects ETW, which I am certainly not expecting to happen. Its the 4th here today, I'm off to my local games shop to get me a copy




I'm not sure. I've been watching a lot of replays lately as I've not been fortunate enough to have available time when everyone else in the world is awake and I do truly love the big battle experience that NTW2 and CB provides me. Its so near perfect in my view - if only we could have found thoughtful ways to correct engine problems.

But with luck by this weekend I'll have worked out ETW and be satisfied with its potential. CB may live on, but I'd think its more likely to be CBe2 and based off an ETW mod.

Regards, M.