Gamemode For Line Battles?

[Benjamin F. Ogle]

I wanted to post about the lack of game modes in WoR and one in particular I was wondering if it would be made. I know a lot of unit commanders as well as members are getting tired of losing a game because they lost a point or trying to defend or attack a point when the match was supposed to be a line battle. Sure Confederate units and Union units could coordinate to make a line battle but with all the new random people without units that don’t understand how the game works it gets more and more difficult to have line battles on a game mode based around capturing a point. Basically I’m wondering will there be a game mode based purely on casualties so line battles can happen and if the game mode could be designed to encourage random people not to run off on their own but to hop in a line even if it isn’t their unit or they haven’t joined a unit. I’m also wondering what other game modes might be planned for the future other than one for line battles.

[Gamble]

Did you read the latest field report? I would do so

[Benjamin F. Ogle]

The only other gamemode on the field report is historical gamemodes which have capture points?

9. Historical Battles mode: Besides the quicker Skirmish mode, the largest and main game mode intended for the game, known as Historical Battles, would open up the entirety of the 4x4 km battlefields for more of a complete playthrough, with a moving frontline consisting of several capture areas. This will also entail the use of the full chain of command where players take the part of Generals, using maps and couriers to direct troops across the huge battlefield.

[Oleander]

Skirmishes are the only mode available right now. Later on the entire Sharpsburg map will be available with multiple capture points.

[Poorlaggedman]

You think spreading out the players over a larger area is going to make people operate in more densely packed lines?

[Sox]

I wanted to post about the lack of game modes in WoR and one in particular I was wondering if it would be made. I know a lot of unit commanders as well as members are getting tired of losing a game because they lost a point or trying to defend or attack a point when the match was supposed to be a line battle. Sure Confederate units and Union units could coordinate to make a line battle but with all the new random people without units that don’t understand how the game works it gets more and more difficult to have line battles on a game mode based around capturing a point. Basically I’m wondering will there be a game mode based purely on casualties so line battles can happen and if the game mode could be designed to encourage random people not to run off on their own but to hop in a line even if it isn’t their unit or they haven’t joined a unit. I’m also wondering what other game modes might be planned for the future other than one for line battles.

None of this makes any sense to me, to begin with, 99.9% of the time we DO fight in line. Now I have a challenge for you, I want you to show me a battle from the American Civil War where two armies marched out onto a field & just shot each other, with NO tactical objective in mind. Casualties were a consequence for trying to achieve a goal, a tactical objective. Even in disasters like Freericksburg there were still tactical objectives.

You want us to march out into a field and just shoot each other, and the only objective you have is that we stand in pretty, well organised, files.

So that's your idea of a 'line battle' is it....I think I'll be giving that a miss.

[LaBelle]

None of this makes any sense to me, to begin with, 99.9% of the time we DO fight in line. Now I have a challenge for you, I want you to show me a battle from the American Civil War where two armies marched out onto a field & just shot each other, with NO tactical objective in mind. Casualties were a consequence for trying to achieve a goal, a tactical objective. Even in disasters like Freericksburg there were still tactical objectives.

You want us to march out into a field and just shoot each other, and the only objective you have is that we stand in pretty, well organised, files.

So that's your idea of a 'line battle' is it....I think I'll be giving that a miss.

Why not? It was the standard for linebattle games for nearly a decade before WoR came out. It made NW the highest played mod for Warband. One life, maneuver and fight with your head. It's been done, and it's successful, especially when coupled with a random map generator.

[Oleander]

If they ever did 1 life on WoR that would be a complete game changer.

[Sox]

Why not? It was the standard for linebattle games for nearly a decade before WoR came out. It made NW the highest played mod for Warband. One life, maneuver and fight with your head. It's been done, and it's successful, especially when coupled with a random map generator.

Why not? Well because it's pointless of course. The one and only thing that prevents more structured troop movement in WoR as it stands is the timer, remove that timer and you could do all the manouvering you wanted to and STILL have objectives. One life worked in the NW mod because you couldn't hit water if you fell out of a boat with those weapons.

[Poorlaggedman]

It's also ahistorical and non-competitive if you have to have a gentleman's agreement within an event that's supposed to be a competition. I'm not buying this 'line battle' where you have skrimishers as pets playing with each other on one flank or the other as some sort of historical nod to real life either. You can't hold opposing teams accountable for not being easy targets. It just becomes reenacting at that point and that will make the game a weekly niche fix for players and kill a lot of potential. If that becomes the cream of the gameplay you can forget about servers filling up just because. If the entire point of the game is to get on for a line battle event then people will stop playing outside of them. Without ever having played any of those other 'line battle' games I'm willing to bet that's what they all became. This game has full servers at 8am EST. That's good, not bad.

[Sox]

It's also ahistorical and non-competitive if you have to have a gentleman's agreement within an event that's supposed to be a competition. I'm not buying this 'line battle' where you have skrimishers as pets playing with each other on one flank or the other as some sort of historical nod to real life either. You can't hold opposing teams accountable for not being easy targets. It just becomes reenacting at that point and that will make the game a weekly niche fix for players and kill a lot of potential. If that becomes the cream of the gameplay you can forget about servers filling up just because. If the entire point of the game is to get on for a line battle event then people will stop playing outside of them. Without ever having played any of those other 'line battle' games I'm willing to bet that's what they all became. This game has full servers at 8am EST. That's good, not bad.

Although most of the above is true, it's a little more complex than that. What the OP is suggesting & LaBelle endorses, is the past. Campfire Games are trying to move this genre' forwards with a system, while not being perfect, that goes a long way towards simulating armed conflict in the American Civil War. Objective based gameplay coupled with their casualty/morale system, is the way forward, in theory we can,as players, actually bring together authentic formations coupled with competative gameplay. I'm not a big fan of your constant refference to 're-enacting' as some kind of bad thing, I used to do it, but WoR gives us the one thing you CAN'T re-enact....bullets. That's the attraction for me, it HAS to be competative, & not bloodless like re-enacting is. I think there is a place here for skirmishers, for double ranks, single ranks and just about anything else that happened at Antietam, but not for backward steps in terms of gaming, on that much we do agree.

[Poorlaggedman]

IMO gameplay has to be laissez-faire at the core with the incentive on the individual player (for his own enjoyment and personal success) to behave somewhat properly.

Game design is no less complicated than the founding fathers molding the U.S. constitution. Human nature is a tough thing to master but you can't just pretend it isn't there or expect to subjugate it. I don't think it's impossible to get it working right to a point it makes competitive gameplay that doesn't require intentional reenacting.

I don't have anything against reenacting, but I saw all this pan out early on back in 2002-2003-ish I was big into 'realism units' in a WWII FPS called Day of Defeat. We thought we could just put on some ranks and privates would select private roles and sergeants would select sergeant roles. There were bursts of role-playing, pretending to provide covering fire (which served almost no purpose as there was no suppression), and mimicking of the operations of a real unit but that was it. When it came down to bare knuckle competition against other organizations everything fell apart and everyone hated each other. There was a lot of discussion on what the organizations meant and how they should operate but there was seldom any thought at all into how to make the game fit into that. That game is a disaster today, a total anti-social masterpiece of kill ratios and casual banter. Nothing like anyone envisioned.

I've always argued that to end up with realistic gameplay you have to start to puzzle together why real life happened like real life did and set the stage for it.

[LaBelle]

Poorlaggedman - An infantry assault on Harper's Ferry is also ahistorical, but it's in the game, so.

Sox - I'm going to disagree that it serves no purpose or is "boring." It serves as a much greater test bed for the current wip morale system than simply charging across bridges at this point.

[Sox]

I'm not a fan of 'milsim' at all (that might sound odd coming from a former re-enator lol) but you can get closer to it with eighteenth century combat than you can with more modern combat. The men who charged the fields at Antietam had objectives beyond 'kill the enemy', that's why armies during this conflict could fight each other to a standstill.....just like they did at Antietam. Unlike a lot of re-enctors I don't believe that 'these pretty straight lines' lasted much beyond the first encounter with the enemy, there are far too many written accounts with 'we lost all organisation' in them. I know that on occasion regiments did stand shoulder to shoulder, but that was the exception, not the rule.

I can understand a game based on casualty count could be a test of organisation, or marksmanship, I just don't see the point in it because all of those things are included in the normal game mode.

[Benjamin F. Ogle]

None of this makes any sense to me, to begin with, 99.9% of the time we DO fight in line. Now I have a challenge for you, I want you to show me a battle from the American Civil War where two armies marched out onto a field & just shot each other, with NO tactical objective in mind. Casualties were a consequence for trying to achieve a goal, a tactical objective. Even in disasters like Freericksburg there were still tactical objectives.

You want us to march out into a field and just shoot each other, and the only objective you have is that we stand in pretty, well organised, files.

So that's your idea of a 'line battle' is it....I think I'll be giving that a miss.

Every battle had a strategic significance to it but Im saying that points ruin it for units that want to have line battles especially with all the random people that don't have units. New people to the game or those that don't understand it (a lot of people) just go straight to the point and then ruin it for units who want to fight in lines. Also when did I say march right into a field? The map could have all types of environments and there would be constant tactical changes because people no longer had to fight around a point but could constantly be trying to outflank the other and all sorts of tactics that lines can now use because they don't have to rush towards a point or defend it. This game should have all types of gamemodes and this is just a general and basic one I'm thinking up of that makes it easier for units to have full on line battles. Before early access it was easier to coordinate with both sides and set up a line battle but now with randoms even if we tried to ignore the point randoms would most definitely go for it.

[Benjamin F. Ogle]

It's also ahistorical and non-competitive if you have to have a gentleman's agreement within an event that's supposed to be a competition. I'm not buying this 'line battle' where you have skrimishers as pets playing with each other on one flank or the other as some sort of historical nod to real life either. You can't hold opposing teams accountable for not being easy targets. It just becomes reenacting at that point and that will make the game a weekly niche fix for players and kill a lot of potential. If that becomes the cream of the gameplay you can forget about servers filling up just because. If the entire point of the game is to get on for a line battle event then people will stop playing outside of them. Without ever having played any of those other 'line battle' games I'm willing to bet that's what they all became. This game has full servers at 8am EST. That's good, not bad.

It can also be ahistorical to allow the Confederates to win a battle that was originally a Union victory haha but they allow that to happen for the good of the game. Who wants to fight a battle they know they are going to lose? Also why do you think that all other gamemodes have to be thrown out? The main gamemodes would have points because there are more and more people who don't fight in units now this is just a gamemode for units who just want to have a line battle and not be restricted by a point.

[Poorlaggedman]

The game allows for ahistorical as it should. What I'm saying is ahistorical is the idea that there were agreed rules of conduct between the two sides, which is what 'line battles' are. The two sides are agreeing to a method of competing which also doesn't include commonsense Civil War era tactics.

The battle line realistically is truly a result of putting so many people in a set terrain and trying to use them the most effectively as possible. You can pretty much go to battlefields and count the space a regiment would take up. Of course it would shrink as it took casualties. The frontage these units take up often swallow up wide swaths of battlefield. A lot of people packed in a short space. A regiment on it's own operating somewhere would never intentionally make initial contacts in line of battle. It may move into an existing fight like that, but you wouldn't just operate alone and wait for someone to fire into your mass of infantry.

Skirmishing is a fact often overlooked or seen as not the pinnacle of reenacting or Civil War combat so it's ignored. It was used all the time. Little Round Top, Vincent's Brigade takes up positions - they immediately send out skirmishers to their front. They aren't out long but they go out several hundred yards. An officer from one of the Vincent's regiments is even killed on the skirmish line. You can go down the list of most engagements and most attacks and defenses begin with skirmishers, not as an aside - it's how battles begin. And they can go on like that for a while. The reason it progresses is because one side decides to try and jam thousands of troops in double ranks down the enemy's throat.

The problem with games like this is people just want to avoid that fact somehow and skip straight to fighting in line. That is my personal preference, don't misunderstand, but that doesn't mean there aren't as many or more situations where you'd want to form a skirmish line right now in WoR. You can set up whatever rules you want with events but it would work a helluva lot better if players (and 'commanders') consensually made the choices on how to form up according to what the situation calls for. That's how you keep the game competitive and harmonious.

Just like in the last game I was all about there was this constant scapegoat, the 'lone wolf,' which was responsible for everybody's loss. Some servers banned it but it's a real bitch enforcing it and a major bias in favor of the team the admin is on. You can't police the enemy team but people try to. It'd be a whole lot better if games made undesirable behavior like that harder to be successful for the player doing it. I think desertion timers aren't the way to go, certainly not for privates.

[Oleander]

Maneuvering in general is something that seems to completely fly over the heads of most commanders. Outside of events with well organized units, most of the battles turn into reenactment parodies. Too often I've seen a line stand out in the open just firing away while cover is conveniently located no more than 30 yards away. And these same people complain when they loose the match because of tickets. Most people don't look at the field and think, "I need to find a tactical advantage over the enemy." They think "If I stay here and shoot long enough I'll 'wear them down.'" I'm not joking I legit saw a line stand in the same place for 10 full minutes firing at an enemy behind a stone wall and accomplishing absolutely nothing aside from giving the other team a free victory.

The tools are there to win matches, most people don't take advantage of them.

[Benjamin F. Ogle]

The game allows for ahistorical as it should. What I'm saying is ahistorical is the idea that there were agreed rules of conduct between the two sides, which is what 'line battles' are. The two sides are agreeing to a method of competing which also doesn't include commonsense Civil War era tactics.

The battle line realistically is truly a result of putting so many people in a set terrain and trying to use them the most effectively as possible. You can pretty much go to battlefields and count the space a regiment would take up. Of course it would shrink as it took casualties. The frontage these units take up often swallow up wide swaths of battlefield. A lot of people packed in a short space. A regiment on it's own operating somewhere would never intentionally make initial contacts in line of battle. It may move into an existing fight like that, but you wouldn't just operate alone and wait for someone to fire into your mass of infantry.

Skirmishing is a fact often overlooked or seen as not the pinnacle of reenacting or Civil War combat so it's ignored. It was used all the time. Little Round Top, Vincent's Brigade takes up positions - they immediately send out skirmishers to their front. They aren't out long but they go out several hundred yards. An officer from one of the Vincent's regiments is even killed on the skirmish line. You can go down the list of most engagements and most attacks and defenses begin with skirmishers, not as an aside - it's how battles begin. And they can go on like that for a while. The reason it progresses is because one side decides to try and jam thousands of troops in double ranks down the enemy's throat.

The problem with games like this is people just want to avoid that fact somehow and skip straight to fighting in line. That is my personal preference, don't misunderstand, but that doesn't mean there aren't as many or more situations where you'd want to form a skirmish line right now in WoR. You can set up whatever rules you want with events but it would work a helluva lot better if players (and 'commanders') consensually made the choices on how to form up according to what the situation calls for. That's how you keep the game competitive and harmonious.

Just like in the last game I was all about there was this constant scapegoat, the 'lone wolf,' which was responsible for everybody's loss. Some servers banned it but it's a real bitch enforcing it and a major bias in favor of the team the admin is on. You can't police the enemy team but people try to. It'd be a whole lot better if games made undesirable behavior like that harder to be successful for the player doing it. I think desertion timers aren't the way to go, certainly not for privates.

Then wouldn’t it just be easier to have a gamemode for line battles instead of having to get both sides to coordinate which is now even harder because of all the new random people who go to the point rather than get in a line. Also if your concerned about skirmishing form a unit for it and coordinate with normal infantry units. I love skirmishing tactics integrated with normal lines but even skirmishing units form lines now.

[STOTS]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry_in_the_American_Civil_War

[Poorlaggedman]

I've pointed out in another thread that smoke played a huge role in allowing these formations to survive like they did in long firefights. Very often they were firing blindly due to it. It's why a first volley could be devastating especially when one side was too incompetent to send skirmishers forward first and skirmishers themselves can inflict heavy loss opening a fight on an advancing enemy.

You can duplicate that in game but only when people are packed in close proximity. 'Opening' the map up is basically going to eliminate that entirely if not done carefully.

[Benjamin F. Ogle]

Once again never said to open the map lol. Just said they should remove points and maybe then they could use smaller maps for the gamemode.