Scenario Generator for Scourge of War

WJPalmer wrote:Saturday's Italian Campaign event.

Have I missed something?

Blackstreet wrote:

WJPalmer wrote:Saturday's Italian Campaign event.

Have I missed something?

Apparently so!
http://forum.kriegsspiel.org.uk/t709-special-napoleonic-italian-campaign-hits-event-saturday-4-may#6355

WJPalmer wrote:

Blackstreet wrote:

WJPalmer wrote:Saturday's Italian Campaign event.

Have I missed something?

Apparently so!
http://forum.kriegsspiel.org.uk/t709-special-napoleonic-italian-campaign-hits-event-saturday-4-may#6355

Darn - I'm out again this weekend

With the constant help of Martin and Kevin I introduced some major new features to the Scenario Generator. Therefor a direct step up to Version 2.0 is appropriate
See posts #1 - 4 for details.

Outstanding!  Each of the new features is valuable, but the ability to introduce specific, custom OOB's will be nothing short of a godsend to both campaign and stand-alone scenario designers. Congrats!

Ron

Thank you Stefan this is great.

While using the previous version of the ScenGen for one of the Peninsular campaign battles I discovered it limits brigades to a maximum of 9 regiments. Can this limit be increased please?

Is there a limit to how many entries an OOB can have in ScenGen?

Also might you and Hays get together and possibly discuss ways to bring his Campaign Tool and your ScenGen into compatibility with each other? Niall's tool adds a coded column of numbers into column B of the OOB and adds 4 columns to the far right hand end which control the system of troops losses and recoveries for campaign battles. As these differences make the OOB formats incompatible between the two tools I have been manually making the changes to satisfy both pieces of software but if they could both recognise these columns life would get extremely good for camapign umpires.

The OOB that is output from the Campaign Tool is a standard OOB. The additional columns of data are only added to the Master OOB. (Don’t Load the Master OOB into the Scenario Generator)

I haven’t had a chance to fully checkout Stefan’s Scenario Generator yet but from reading the notes I can’t see why you would need to edit anything other than to add “1” to column “AK” in order to preserve any unit names you may have specified in the Master OOB that you wanted to appear in the scenario.

On the face of it I can’t see any issue but I need to do a full test to confirm there are no conflicts when the casualty results generated from a scenario are loaded into the Campaign Tool.

Great job Stefan.

Mr. Digby wrote:While using the previous version of the ScenGen for one of the Peninsular campaign battles I discovered it limits brigades to a maximum of 9 regiments. Can this limit be increased please?

The limit of 9 regiments per brigade is pretty hard-coded and would mean a lot of work to change. I haven't seen an OOB with that many regiments yet and I doubt it would be easy to handle for both an AI or human commander.

Mr. Digby wrote:
Is there a limit to how many entries an OOB can have in ScenGen?

Yes, currently the limit is 1900 rows. I could raise that limit easily if needed.

Re: Hays tool
By importing an OOB into the Generator, not all information is preserved:
NAME1: Preserved (but a roman letter is added if there are duplicates of the same name)
NAME2: Only preserved if flagged with a "1" in column AK.
ID: not preserved

Regards
Stefan

10 cavalry squadrons seems to me very common in French cavalry brigades as this is 2 regts each of 5 sqns. There's several brigades of this format in the Peninsular armies.

Russian Napoleonic position batteries sometimes had 14 guns IIRC, so thats a 14-unit brigade.

I think the ID column is the essence of Hay's tool. Its a great shame that the Scenario Generator can't be used with OOBs created in Hay's tool. If the two of you could talk about it and see if full compatibility could be reached that would be really fantastic.

I know we've discussed this earlier Digby, but it does seem that combining them into two-squadron units (as is done in a number of the base oobs we've used already with the Nap Mod) would both get us easily under the 9-regt-per-bde hard limit and make the whole formation a lot easier to handle. How often tactically would all 10 squadrons have been doing 10 different things anyway? 

Reading the book you kindly lent me with growing horror and amusement,

Justin

Khryses wrote:Reading the book you kindly lent me with growing horror and amusement,

E-mail me to discuss.

Khryses wrote:I know we've discussed this earlier Digby, but it does seem that combining them into two-squadron units (as is done in a number of the base oobs we've used already with the Nap Mod) would both get us easily under the 9-regt-per-bde hard limit and make the whole formation a lot easier to handle. How often tactically would all 10 squadrons have been doing 10 different things anyway? Justin

Stefan recently raised this issue with Kevin and I, in the context of the Scenario Generator.  There is a tension here between history and playability.  Modding can only take us so far, and ultimately we felt that the best solution would be for the game code to be re-written to allow for more effective control of the cavalry in combat.

Diggers is quite right about the size of cavalry brigades - the largest in the Waterloo campaign had 13 squadrons, and many had 7 or 8.  But as you suggest, such large brigades are not easy to control in the game.  Brigade size is closely related to the question of squadron size.  There are a number of difficulties with combining larger squadrons however:

(a) Historically, squadron size was constrained because that was the largest force of cavalry that could act as one tactical unit, and because much larger squadrons could not physically have brought all of their troops to bear against an infantry battalion.  Establishment strengths were typically 150-200, with most being towards the lower-end.  So having most squadrons at 200 or even a lot more is anachronistic.  Not Napoleonic warfare, and not representative of any horse & musket army.  

(b) There even seems to have been a reluctance to combine 2 very small squadrons.  There are numerous examples of squadrons continuing to operate with strengths as low as 70 or 80.  I suspect (or rather speculate, to be honest) that this may partly have been because of status-related officer issues – a reluctance to ‘demote’ squadron commanders.  All that said, I admit that weak squadrons were occasionally combined, and that is reflected in some of the Austrian game OOBs.   But I think that was very unusual.

(c) If we have unhistorically large squadrons, with historical stats, then each one will be unduly powerful.  If we compensate by reducing cavalry stats to give infantry its historical ability to defend itself, then an army’s overall cavalry arm will be weaker than it should be, due to the smaller number of units.

(d) Having fewer (but larger) squadrons will also reduce the overall resilience of an army’s cavalry, simply because there are fewer units, so charge fatigue will have more of an impact.  If we compensate for that, by reducing charge fatigue penalties, then we risk making uber-cavalry which can just make continuous charges. As well as making infantry too vulnerable, that will also remove much of the tactical flavour and decision-making from pure cavalry fights.  Engagements where victorious squadrons are then charged and defeated by fresh enemy ones, would be unlikely to occur in a historical manner.

(e) Cavalry brigades of just 4 or 5 units are not satisfying to command.  One engagement and you can easily find all your units gone.  Yes it has happened to me!  Cavalry combat in the game tends to be over very quickly - as it should be.  But that is little consolation if you spend the next hour and a half with no troops.

My own view is that the least bad option is to stick to brigades of historical size, and work at getting better at controlling them.  Practice should help.  And there are some things you can do to assist, like using the ‘detach’ button creatively.  But that is not ideal, and I’m not sure I have even convinced Stefan and Kevin .

Martin (J)

Just a minor update to v2.1 to include the Brandy Station map.

And a small fix to increase compatibility with Hays carryover tool.
Note that when using Hays' tool your scenario will need to have an army commander. And you will need to delete all couriers and wagon trains in an imported custom OOB.

Hi guys

I updated the Scenario Generator to v3.0. See second post for details. The main new feature is the Carry-Over mode, which was also used in some of the battles in Neal's campaign.
As far as I can tell the new version is working ok. If not, please tell me. I will wait for some feedbacks before posting this version in the NSD forum.

As soon as the Courier and Mini-Maps Mod and the KS Napoleon Mod are updated to the next version, I will also post an update to v3.1 to include the new OOBs which will make use of new sprites, flags and portraits.

KR
Stefan

Hi Stefan

Looks great. I had a read through the manual. All I can comment on is the incorrect spelling of "casualties" and "permanently". There's also an issue with "colour" and "centre" but perhaps that's intentional?

There's also an issue with "colour" and "centre" but perhaps that's intentional?

Looks like typical British misspellings to me.    I do try to point out to Stefan the common misspellings you island folks commit, usually from your bigoted behavior towards the letter 'z'. But they are legion and a few slip by unnoticed.

Thanks Digby, I corrected casualties and permanently.
While putting Kevin in the center I will give the colours to Martin...    this will add some international flavour to the document.

Hi Stefan.

Can you please allow a maximum brigade size of 12 units? The scenario generator caps Russian 12-gun batteries at 9 guns which is not correct of course.

Thanks.

In addition, on the subject of cavalry regiment size and organization, the 1810 re-organization of the Russian Army produced light cavalry regiments (uhlans and hussars) of eight field squadrons. One of the real world solutions to the organizational issues was to organize them into 'battalions' of four squadrons each. I suspect the senior major led one and the lt-col the other in the Russian Army and perhaps other Continental armies of the period. Austria had large cavalry regiments as well, did it not?

A quick status of the Scenario Generator.
- I plan to give an update to v3.1 in about 3 weeks.
- It will include the updated Nappy OOBs as well as Martins improved ACW OOBs (with more flags and sprites).
- I haven't heard of any problems with the carryover feature, so I assume it is working ok.
- Raising the number of regiments/guns is pretty hard-coded. But I will take a look to see what has to be changed. If so, I will raise it to 15, just to be sure. Or does anyone need even more than that?
- I'm interested in including one of the Blenheim Mod OOBs. I think I will just use his largest OOB. Or does someone wish to produce a comprehensive OOB for the SG?

Thanks Stefan. I've taken a look through the Marlborough OOBs and would recommend you use two of them: Blenheim and Fictional. These are by far the largest and cover most of the variants of troops and organisations.

The Fontenoy OOB by Pom might be useful to have in the SG as well.

Hi Martin

Is Fontenoy working in MP and the flag problems are gone?
Then I could include it, yes.

Flag problems are fixed. I haven't tried it in MP. My PC can only handle div vs div battles due to the hi-res sprites used.

did you try the low-res version already?

I ran a game just now army vs army on the GBurg map and it ran very well. Even Pom's lower-res sprites look excellent; would like to play some MP games with this mod.