Set Up for SOWWL NAPOLEON GAMES For Kriegspiel style

But our discussion is because I think we have too high a %age of troops who can sk and we are looking at ways to reduce that.

Legere shuldn't be able to skirmish in 100% like now - same logic as for British lights. On the other hand Grenzers that specialised in skirmish should be able to do so.

But our discussion is because I think we have too high a %age of troops who can sk and we are looking at ways to reduce that. wrote:

Oh, sure, with board games you could have all sorts of ad hoc rules because everyone had to be in the same room to play them. Computers open up worlds of possibilities but the limits of the game engine block things you'd like to do. I'm frequently amazed by what modders can do. They literally saved games like TW Empire from the scrap heap.

I have downloaded and installed patch 1.01, KS Sprites Mod 1.03, KS Napoleon Mod II 1.24, and KS SOW Supplemental  Maps Mod 1.16.

I have also made all the recommended option changes including those in the SowWL Folder.

Something is still wrong with my game though.

If I push the mods panel the game crashes so I can’t actually select any of the mods I just downloaded.

If I try for any scenario the game just freezes every time.

I am only able to get into a sandbox game, but even there it does no seem to work.

I have windows 10.

I initially had trouble with Gettysburg, but not like this. In that game I kept crashing at some point in the battle but up to that point all was working. I finally solved it (I think) by getting a better router.

In Waterloo  I’ve tried tinkering via the windows compatibility mode.

I’ve tried starting both as an administrator and not.

So as things stand now My SOWWL game does not work.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Regards Jess

If I push the mods panel the game crashes so I can’t actually select any of the mods I just downloaded.

I had a similar problem a few days ago and 'fixed' it by re-booting. I actually don't know what happened but Windows 7 sorted itself out. Sounds like you may have already done that, though.

Jess is your game with STEAM?

I had these same issues about a year ago.

Also have you downloaded the Direct X9 files to your PC since you are using WIN 10?  I think it may have come
with one of the past patches.

Have you uninstalled and reinstalled the game after cleaning out your registry in case a file within the game has become corrupted?

Put SOW GB/WL in WIN7 Compatibility mode too. Then try the game.

After you answer the above questions we can go from there.

We will get it figured out and if you do not know how to do some of things it is better not to try them without someone to guide you through it.

Read the below links.
http://www.norbsoftdev.net/forum/nuts-and-bolts-waterloo/71194-solved-new-version-crash-see-mitra76-post
http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3994964

Hi All and thanks

I think I will dump the game and start over.

Jess

OK job done, game is working and all appears to be well.

Now I just have to learn how to play (smile)

Jess

Excellent news. Do our usual game times suit you? Or would you be able to join us on a non-work day (Sunday) at 20:00 BST?

Almost any Sunday from now until the end of time is good for me.

2000 BST is 1200 my time. (California)

So I'll show up and be prepared to die. (smile)

Meanwhile besides the mods that came with the game, and the three KS mods.

What should my Mods section look like?

Is it standard procedure to add anything else?

Jess

So I'll show up and be prepared to die.

Just remember, the square is your friend when cavalry is about.     If you don't, have a crying towel handy.  

We also play on Mon. Wed. and sometimes Fri.  We have a game today at 11:00 PST if you can join us.  The place to look is the Impromptu Games thread.

The only mods you need to have activated are the three KS mods.  Do not activate the Grog Toolbar, (it will not work with the KS mod), or any others that come with the stock game.  You can also use the More Smoke mod if you like, but it is not required.  It causes the smoke from rifle and cannon fire to hang in the air much longer than the stock game.

Sunday is the soonest I can make it this week, I will keep my eye out for impromptu game notes starting next week though. I liked the smoke addition to ACW battles so I'll add it to these as well, only not yet. It will be good to see my destruction approaching for awhile while I'm learning.

Thanks Jess

There's a 'realistic smoke' mod out there and also a 'smoke lite' one as well. I find the realistic one is a little too realistic - you can't see a damned thing! In the case of these smoke mods IIRC the GB ones work with WL.

i have downloaded and installed the three mods, and they appear to be working, e.g. the game has not crashed yet and things look different.

Current Mod Configuration (See screenshot)

Spoiler:

As you can see I've turned off all my existing mods, just to avoid any potential conflicts and to make sure the instal was clean and working.

I'd be interested to know how many of them should be compatible, and whether any are rendered redundant by KS.

In game image

Spoiler:

The guy in the centre on the dark horse is apparently me (Sir Rowland Hill) as I loaded the 1st British Scenario, and I seem to be surrounded by German militia units according to the unit tags.  I haven't actually tried doing anything yet, as I can't seem to find my orders (Nice start what!), so I'll have to go back to the loading menu and read them again.

Perhaps, if I loaded Grogs Expanded Toolbar I might be able to find them, I'm sure I popped them in my saddle bag near the gin but they seem to have disappeared, and that ADC is useless.

Of the mods you have listed, only the fire and smoke is likely not to conflict. The grog toolbar will definitely conflict and probably crash the game.

The guy in the centre on the dark horse is apparently me (Sir Rowland Hill) as I loaded the 1st British Scenario, and I seem to be surrounded by German militia units according to the unit tags. I haven't actually tried doing anything yet, as I can't seem to find my orders (Nice start what!), so I'll have to go back to the loading menu and read them again.

If this is a KS scenario, then you can find a briefing and starting map in the KS Napoleon Mod/scenarios/BritishScenario1 folder. The briefing is labeled BritishOOB.txt and the situation map is labeled BritishPosition.jpg. All the other scenarios have similar files.

Glad you got it working. Yes, your mods selection screen looks good.

Those unit icons are our early "best guess" at a Hanoverian flag. We imported some "better guesses" from NSD after they replaced their awful "Henry V Royal Standard" style Hanover flag - which I was the one to complain about. As you know we (modern historians) lack information on 1815 Hanoverian flags - there's a couple of extant examples in collections but its possible to make some reasonably educated guesses. We are always open to improving the mod and inaccurate flags are one of my personal gripes.

I'm a fanatic for correct uniforms as well but it seems there is a limit to how many different sprites the game can reasonably use, especially in MP games. We are always wanting to improve uniform accuracy and add more variants but we need to be careful that we don't add sprites that only have a very small minority usage. For example our Brunswick hussars use the same black hussars uniform the Prussians use, and we don't have a Brunswick uhlans sprite at all, etc

Uncle Billy wrote:Of the mods you have listed, only the fire and smoke is likely not to conflict. The grog toolbar will definitely conflict and probably crash the game.

I've actually tried turning all the other mods back on, including Grogs Expanded Toolbar, and nothing actually crashed though some of the activity on screen was a bit weird.

For example: firing muskets seemed to be represented by a comic book like explosion graphic (the sort of thing you get when Batman punches the Penguin, almost expected to see 'POW' flash up on the screen.)

Likewise, there was no smoke whatsoever, so I suspect the Smoke and Flare mod had been overruled as that was working before.  I have altered the load order of the mods to give the non-KS versions priority, and will test again tonight.  However, despite the odd GFX effects I was able to play through the entire 'WL Tutorial' without any crashes or major issues.

Mr Digby wrote:I'm a fanatic for correct uniforms as well but it seems there is a limit to how many different sprites the game can reasonably use, especially in MP games.

Like you I'm a fanatic about historical accuracy and quickly spotted that the King's Dragoon Guards in the tutorial are wearing the wrong colour jackets.  i assume thats been corrected as every British dragoon regiment wore scarlet jackets, so there must be sprites in the game files with the right colour scheme.  I've also replaced the British Foot Guard sprite with an AddOn that puts them in their campaign uniform rather than their parade dress for the battle.

The Hanoverian colours are an interesting issue and like you I hated the Royal Standard in the original game.  The replacements at least looks more plausible.

I'd be interested in hearing of any other AddOns that members would recommend to enhance the game.  One thing that annoys me slightly is that the soldiers in the units are too widely spaced.  It was the same in the TW series and I managed to find a mod that persuaded them to stand closer together.  Historically, the frontage allowed per man in close order was 22", or 24" for the French, and the men would be taught to dress with their elbows touching.  The physical contact confirming that alignment was maintained.  In the game you can see daylight clearly between the figures, even in close order, which doesn't look right at all.

I understand where you're coming from and sympathise. I know we had similar conversations over at TWC. The game unfortunately is not scale accurate.

Each sprite in the game represents a variable number of men, depending on the settings. For infantry the largest number of sprites the game allows in a unit (battalion) is 200, so if the player selects a 4:1 sprite ratio this allows up to 800 man battalions to be represented which is enough for 95% of cases. In some of our bigger MP games with 50,000+ men represented a side or if really large battalions are present we'll go for a 6:1 ratio.

This sprite ratio causes ground scale problems. You'll notice that the men are not about 6' high but in fact are 12' tall, with all the vertical components of the scenery adjusted to fit, such as trees and buildings, to keep them in scale with the animated figures. This causes further problems in that roads and streams then become too wide and buildings take up 4x the footprint they should which is why Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte look so huge in proportion to the ground they should have covered. A battalion standing at one end of Hougoumonts garden is out of musket range of a target stood at the far end of the farmyard complex which we both know is incorrect. Firefights now appear to take place at ranges of around 50 - 75 yards when viewed from the size of the figures. A 4:1 ratio sprite really represents 4 men in two ranks and two files meaning that in scale our British battalions should really be deployed 1 sprite deep and our French 2 deep but this causes all manner of other problems, both in appearance of the simulation and gameplay (the latter is catastrophic for formation changes and unit reaction distances because of the distance the flanks of a formation are from the unit's centre point flag marker). So our formations are too deep and therefore not wide enough. Compressing the sprites together further might make the visuals better but it breaks other scale issues (frontages).

In terms of gameplay we need to ensure that things are both balanced and as historically accurate as we can get the mod to be whilst retaining the fun factor in playing the game. Units have to move across the ground at rates we are comfortable with in terms of how they historically might perform on average and we are stuck with some limitations the game forces upon us in some areas of code we cannot get at to change. One of these is the fixed musket range of 150 yards. We can make it longer but we cannot make it shorter without causing unwanted effects as units are set to react in certain ways if enemy come within their maximum weapon range; if we set musket range to a more realistic 120 yards or so, the AI now cannot respond to certain events quickly enough and some unwanted things happen to break the game. The "unit weapon range reaction time" is hard-coded and while we can change the numbers we cannot change the reaction distance to anything but maximum weapon range. The 150 yard limit also means that a very wide frontage line formation will have its end sprites more than 150 yards from its flag and the game breaks down when this occurs and all kinds of silly things happen like opposing units walking through each other.

This answer turned out longer than I wanted but the end of all this means that things like weapon ranges, move rates and unit frontages and depths are all inter-related. I know you'll be well aware of this conundrum that has teased the minds of wargamers and warfare simulators for decades but the bottom line is if we place sprites closer together the realism factor for unit frontage and formation change times get bent and one small change in the set of variables can have unwanted effects elsewhere.

We are always open to change however; like scientists if our current theory of how best to explain something (in our case Napoleonic warfare via the SoW engine) can be improved, we'll do it.

This reminds me - Kevin and everyone else, go to row 1224 in the British and "Full" 1815 OOBs and replaced the GB_HDR_BLUE cavalry sprite with the GB_HDR sprite listed a couple of rows below. That fixes the Dragoon Guards uniform error David has spotted.

Just for the record I tested my game this evening with all my mods activated and the load order giving priority to the original mods I was using for immersion and atmosphere.

Spoiler:

My game still didn't crash and i was able to start and play both a WL Tutorial, and a KSBritish01 scenario.

However, things were clearly not right.  

In the WL Tutorial game everything seemed to work perfectly and I was getting the realistic battlefield smoke etc.  But when Rogers Battery turned up I found i was able to deploy it, but nothing I could do would persuade then to fire on the enemy.  Tried 'Take Command' and selecting targets but they refused to fire, and so the tutorial stalled at that point as the next step. the arrival of the Kings Dragoon Guards, is triggered by the artillery opening fire.

The KSBritish01 scenario was even more weird in that although it loaded perfectly I found I was in charge of the French, and nothing i could do seemed to load it with me in command of the British.

So, I guess I'll have to experiment a bit more and see which of my non-KS mods don't screw up the game.  In fact, I think I need two mod sets, one for playing the standard single player game using Grogs Toolbar and one for playing KS Scenario's.

BTW: Spotted another possible issue (bearing in mind that weird things were happening) and that was that in the KS scenario's the French were only deployed in a two deep line.  Grogs Toolbar corrects this for the main game, and only the Allied (strictly speaking only the British trained units, form in a two deep line), although at Waterloo most started the day four deep and ended it in a single rank.

The scenarios allow you to play either side, although they are designed to be played from the side that is named. To change sides, just one of the British officers and you will assume command as that person.

Spotted another possible issue (bearing in mind that weird things were happening) and that was that in the KS scenario's the French were only deployed in a two deep line

If you just use the KS mod, you should see the French in three lines and the British in two.

Slower Animations and Foot Guards are completely irrelevant to the KS Mod since these mods affect only the vanilla game sprites, not the sprites used in the KS Mod.

The KS Mod has a replacement pointer as well; have a go with it and see which you prefer.

I really recommend you avoid the Grog Toolbar as it provides in game information that the KS Mod specifically excludes and you'd get a distinct advantage in an MP game using it.

How do i stop the WSAD keys allowing me to wander around the battlefield, when I'm playing HITS?

If you go into options and set "camera distance from you" at 10, that should be enough. Make sure the realism level is set to custom as well. The pre-set difficulty levels override some of the options. Try also couriers set to brigade level

All - I have found and corrected a few errors in the OOBs I have been adjusting recently. All three of the 1815 OOBs have had a couple of units position numbers fixed and I have removed the Spanish flag icons from their artillery in the 1808 OOB which Miko pointed out yesterday.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9nvo1jpliqyxgc7/OOB_SB_KS_NAP_Belgium1815_British.csv?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nfj62q5o5a8ndsu/OOB_SB_KS_NAP_Belgium1815_Full.csv?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9c01bhudaa99rpc/OOB_SB_KS_NAP_Belgium1815_Prussian.csv?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jwrzu1dtm5uazoz/OOB_SB_KS_NAP_Spain_1808.csv?dl=0

...and Phil... saw your message to Miko in his video of yesterdays game and there were cuirassiers in Spain in 1808. A few cobbled together regiments de marche and squadrons de marche were about, grabbed from various depots and garrisons in southern France and by 1809 these had been formed into the famous 13th cuirassiers; the only such regiment to serve in Spain where I think it spent its full operational life but was only employed in Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia (north-east and east coast). Suchet still had them in 1813.

I think the unit only appears 2 or 3 times in the full 7 corps of the OOB so you were very unlucky to get to face them!

I've been trying to set-up a new game as Host.  (I figured if I can set-up a game, then I will probably be able to join one. So, it seemed like a good test that everything was set-up correctly.)

However, in trying to create a room I got an Error.

munitions.csv error:

I thought 'fair enough' obviously the KS Mod doesn't want a conflicting mod loaded.  So, I did a search of the SOWWL folder in Steamapps for 'munitions' and sure enough there were two versions.  One in the KS Mod and one in the Explosion Effects Mod I've been using to enhance the look of the game.  So, I disabled the Explosion Effects Mod and tried again.

Got another effort this time.

unitglobal.csv Error:

I did the same search again and this time I found three versions of this file.   One in the KS Mod; one in the Expanded Toolbar Mod (which wasn't activated and so shouldn't have been the problem); and the third is in the QB DLC.  Which is a major problem as I purchased all of the DLC in the steam sale.

I'm assuming that unless I can get rid of this error I won't be able to join a game using the KS Mod.

Any thoughts on what I should do?

If it's a file in the DLC, just rename it. Rename it aunitglobal.csv and that will fix the problem. That can be done with any conflict. Should you want to play a DLC scenario in SP, just remove the 'a' and you're set to go.