Set Up for SOWWL NAPOLEON GAMES For Kriegspiel style

“Marching band music” problem，Is the game itself because of the limitations of the engine, or because the production is very troublesome?

Its the structure of the game's files. We can have only 1 music file played per "action" by each unit class.

Find the unitglobal.csv file. It is at <...Norbsoft\Scourge of War - Waterloo\Mods\KS Napoleon Mod II 125\Logistics\>

Open it with Excel and look along the rows of, say, the British infantry - row 366 is GB_HI (Highland Infantry) and from column N onwards you see a sound file to play with each action. Walking, melee, firing, charging, running, etc are all obvious. Some of these are combat sounds (shouting, musket shots, etc) but with some of them we can have a music file play instead of a sound effect, so for walk we can have a tune playing, and a 'quick-time' tune playing for the run.

For the Highlanders we have and for the British line infantry (row 400) it is for row 400 the run sound file is . Now open the file in the logistics folder and look at rows 25-31 and 38-42 where we have assigned wav files to be played by the different sound file commands.

The actual music wav files are at <...Norbsoft\Scourge of War - Waterloo\Mods\KS Napoleon Mod II 125\Sounds>

Why would AI cross the two matrices? Why friendly army will be in the friendly behind the fire, is this game no friendly damage?

Correct, the game has no friendly fire.

Is there any superimposed punishment for this game? Will it cause the troops not to fire? When stacked, troops force themselves to move to a position where they do not overlap？

If troops overlap, one of the units will fallback.

So I did finally finish my "Auerstadt" game. I do see some differences in the game mechanics from before.

First off, I set it up with a script to release the Prussians down a single road ( Auseroad was quite helpful with that) as well as a Tactics: 5 command directing it to attack the objective hex.

Two Prussian cavalry regiments came down the road and as soon as they came into extreme artillery range they stopped. They stood there for a while taking a couple of hits but soon enough a Prussian battery passed through them and the French guns switched to counter-battery. What ensued was a lengthy artillery duel. I'm about 3 hours in and the French have pretty well suppressed the Prussian batteries. While the duel was raging no Prussian units made any attempt to move forward. In addition to not seeing the cavalry continue to advance down the road as they would have done in the past - and gotten obliterated for their trouble - I did notice that the guns moved closer than before, closing to under 700 yards before unlimbering. In the past, they would have unlimbered at extreme long range. While they were coming forward they did take some loss so that is a bit of a trade off but eventually 3 Prussian batteries were firing. They did seem to be concentrating on one French battery while the French were pounding all of them. I'm not making any commentary about what is better or worse merely noting the differences that I see from before.

Finally what seems to be a Prussian infantry brigade advanced behind a hussar rgt. The guns routed the hussars but the infantry kept coming until they started getting hit with canister. That's where I paused and saved the game and they were still thinking about what they were going to do next.

It does seem that the cavalry is less suicidal than before.

Now it is also possible/probable that the scripting is interfering with the game mechanics but I won't be able to see that until I try the MP version.

Your observations are what we generally see in our MP games. The AI is constantly being revised, almost on a daily basis. It's current behavior is improved over the version you are currently using. We've also begun using more historically realistic brigade formations, (1 regiment wide, (3 battalions)), to improve the AI and human handling of the battle lines.

If the essence of the scientific method is for other scientists to be able to replicate your findings then I would say you can count this as confirmation.

I think it is very important that friendly damage and morale receive the influence of nearby friendly forces. Why doesn't there exist such a setting? This game is simply the wargame made 3D look like?

I agree that the absence of friendly fire, or more importantly, the failure to mask the fire of units whose line of sight is blocked by friendly troops is a major issue of this and several other recent games such as the Ultimate General Series.  Oddly enough Totalwar managed to deal with this quite accurately, so I'm not sure why more recent games are finding it such a problem to deal with accurately.

The morale influence of nearby friendly and hostile forces (e.g. situational awareness) is a bit more complicated to handle accurately.  The simple fact being that situation awareness on a 18th/19th century battlefield was pretty limited in real life.  Not just because of the powder smoke which most historians recognise as being an issue for command and control, but more importantly because of the dense formations used in this period.

The simple fact is that most soldiers spend most of the battle staring at the back of the man in front of them, the only indication they had that things were going well or badly was transmitted through the formation by the reactions of those few men who happened to be on its edge.  This for example was the main reason why most units fell apart and disintegrated from their edges rather than suddenly scattering in one solid mass.

Also a study of primary accounts suggests that units were affected more by what they thought was happening rather than what was really happening.  There are some famous examples such as the Austrian Army that managed to rout itself, and the French invasion of Britain that was defeated by a bunch of nosy welsh women who they mistook for soldiers.  One of my favourite passages from 'War and Peace' relates all the internal rumours, anger and nervousness that takes place in a Russian battalion waiting to advance at Austerlitz.  The men could see nothing, but the fact that they were standing around doing nothing, and the general impression that their officers were confused and the damned Germans were screwing things up and creating chaos was enough to demoralise the troops before they even stepped off.

Quite how one would programme something like that into a computer game, or even rule for it on the tabletop is difficult to imagine.

Friendly fire is not part of the game and cannot be added as part of a mod.

Artillery fire can be blocked by friendly troops.  Troops within 150 yd. and in front of the guns will them will cause the firing to stop.  Likewise, if friendly troops are within 150 yd. of an enemy target, the firing will stop.

Units that are near retreating or routed units can suffer a morale drop which, in turn, can lead to that unit retreating.  This "knock-on" effect can cause a number of units in an area to retreat.  It is more apparent later in a fight when troops already have lower morale due to accrued casualties.

Didz wrote:Quite how one would programme something like that into a computer game, or even rule for it on the tabletop is difficult to imagine.

I'd model units morale system around concepts like perceptions stimulii (visual, sounds, intelligence reports, effects like explosions, etc.), time/accumulation/spreading/sum of increasingly personal (at unit/officer granularity, not below of course) interpretation dynamics and so on.
The actual reaction to any situation would be heavly stochastic then, and irrationality could be thought as a sort of "scaler" of a statistical distribution centered around the expected behaviour...
I'd also consider a battlefield's smoke grid-based simulation mandatory....
I used to love the Sid Meier's GB/ANT/WNLB/ANGV engine morale's building blocks / pips UI representation too.
But that's just brainstorming. Any of that will never be included in SOW.

Just picked up the DLC pack in the sale. Much appreciation for the continued work you put into this. Now to remember how the syntax of orders works.

If you are talking about how to move a unit to a new location, the order is: 1. the new location, 2. the formation to assume at the new location, 3. use roads (if necessary).

You're a gentleman and a scholar, sir.

Thanks, but not really, just experienced.

I am back and fully installed. I will need tested but ready to battle once again gentlemen. Plenty of Cuirassiers and german wenches to enjoy!

Welcome back Mark. We'll be playing on Sunday at 14:00 EST, 19:00 GMT. Hope to see you then.

I'm helping my parents paint but I will be online next weekend. Any campaigns ongoing?

I'm trying to install this on a new computer and I cannot find the MPplyradius line in the .ini file I found in the SOWWL folder in "My Documents".

I can find the plyradius line, and I modified that to 10, but when I opened a user scenario, I was able to move my screen across my entire battleline - I wasn't restricted to the saddle of my commander, as it were.

I'm still trying to get my head around SOWWL and Kriegspiel style SOWWL in particular. What am I missing?

I have the game on Steam.

Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks!

I don't think you need to change them settings any more, unless I'm mistaken.
Start game. Go to options. Pick custom. Set command radius to 10. Save settings.
The other instructions on the Kriegsspiel set up page apply.

Has that changed recently?

I notice my installation guide still includes editing the sowwl.ini file to change the MPplyrradius and plyrradius. So if it has changed I should probably update my guide.

I don't think it has been changed in the manual but I wonder if it has been left in by mistake. Kevin?

Yes, that was left in by mistake. We used to use a player radius of 2. That had to be set via the ini file. But we found it was too hard to see the location pointer when we were that low so we changed it to 10. That can be set via the options page. Sorry for the confusion.