How to control 10 squadrons of cavalry

I've enjoyed playing cavalry in a couple of games.
Yesterday I controlled a cavalry brigade with 10 squadrons.

How do you control a cavalry brigade with 10 squadrons in SOW?

Short answer: IMHO it's impossible

- Generally if your troopers ride off-road they are exhausted and unusable for the rest of the game
- Each new movement order bears the risk that some of the squadrons will move off-road for a small amount of time. Sometimes they suddenly find a shorter route to the next road (through woods of course).
- When the suadrons reach their destination they deploy into formation. This formation can stretch a lot of terrain, ending up with squadrons in woods, creeks, behind fences and so on...
- In such a large brigade, squadrons tend to auto-doublequick more often. For example to reach their final destination, or because their movement is blocked by some other squadron.
- The smallest brigade formation is march collumn (IIRC). Yet with an average commander, only 3 or maybe 4 of the 10 squadron receive the commander bonus while resting.
- When trying to deploy or attack, I would never use all squadrons (half of them usually have too few fatigue left anyway). So I end up controlling each squadron individually.
- Cavalry can only charge with good fatigue or better, right? More than half of my force was out of action just after moving some miles, of which 98% by using roads! And I never hit doublequick. And the map didn't even had fences.

Some ideas how this could be improved:
- Organize over-size brigades into smaller ones with up to 6 squadrons each.
- Merge squadrons into larger but fewer ones (this could be too powerful).
- Increase Caliesthenics from 7 to 8 (could also result in a bit more powerful cavalry if they could engage more often than before)

BTW: Niall, what was your impression on the Spanish side with such a large brigade?

Regards
Stefan

Pretty much the same. After 15 minutes my units where exhausted and I was never able to get them to recover. I spent the whole battle trying to avoid your Cavalry. Had I known you were in the same condition I might have ridden up to your units and thrown tapas at them.

Some thoughts:

1) Stay on the roads always, until you contact the enemy. Only deploy off-road when you need to for tactical reasons, or if the terrain is very flat and open, free from obstacles (there's a large chunk of the new Brandy Station map in the south and south-west side that is excellent cavalry country). Marching on roads is what real armies did, why should we be different? Yesterday Mark sent his infantry division direct across country. I watched the replay and they went straight across four creeks, right over Bliss Farm with its fences and through numerous woods. Of course your troops will be exhausted after doing this. I saw that Stefan's cavalry did use the roads mostly, though some units cut across a few fences and things in Gettysburg town. I am not sure what the cause of their exhaustion was there. The Spanish cavalry in the north rode across country all the time, back and forth, through woods and over streams, and so obviously were knackered.

2) I have found that some battles allow your horses to recover their stamina. You need to leave them stationary for a while but I seem to be able to do this once the battle is joined quite often. I had a game with Kevin a couple of nights ago in which my cavalry brigade was left parked up for 30 minutes after the battle began, so by the time it was needed it was rested again after a long approach march. If you find yourself going into action with exhausted cavalry you are doing something wrong. Last night the French cavalry attached to Vedel's division had longish periods of standing around even in the middle of a hard fought battle. Cavalry is the one arm that can actually achieve its principal aim by standing still and doing nothing! It just has to be there, nearby to threaten infantry.

3) Ride well ahead with your officer at the gallop to find the enemy. Don't use squadrons across country to find him, use your general. I have never had an issue with this tactic in HITS games because what is revealed by your officer isn't visible to any other players in your team anyway, unless they are almost in the same area, or the terrain is extremely flat and open, so the act of riding ahead isn't unrealistic like it is in MP games with a more elevated view. We need to do this as well to represent fast moving patrols of cavalry which the game doesn't have but which would always be there. As long as players don't ride around behind enemy lines I don't see a problem. Just keep about 200 yds from all enemy you contact and stay on your troops side of him. If you have a cavalry command, leave them advancing at the walk on roads and find the enemy with your general. Please consider the freedom of movement of generals as a standing rule in all campaign games.

4) When commanding a large cavalry brigade in action I always TC about half of it, or more, and leave those squadrons at the back, as was done historically, and fight with only a very few squadrons, often only 2 or 3. When those are used up I park those at the back to rest and grab a couple more and use them. And so on. Lacking self-aware squadron commanders who do as you tell them I find there's no other way of commanding a brigade of cavalry, regardless of its size. I've commanded brigades of 8 squadrons several times using this method. I don't see any issue with adding 2 more squadrons, but I'll certainly try a few test games.

5) When choosing a location to deploy your unit, choose one appropriate to its size, or choose a formation appropriate to the location. I'll leave a cavalry unit in road column quite often, stetching back down my line of advance. I even take the time and effort to ride back down the line and place each squadron so its not standing in a river or something. Make the effort. It pays dividends.

6) The bug where units sometimes don't accept a 'use roads' command is very frustrating. I hope we can find a fix for this. I never used to suffer from it a few patches ago but recently I do. Maybe its a result of something in our toolbar?

7) Lets not go off half-cocked with a statistical example of 1, that's bad practice. Last night the 2 big cavalry commands were both forced to do a long march at the start of the battle. This won't be a common occurrence in most of the campaign battles which will tend towards being set-piece affairs with the armies already in contact. The next two games are both face-to-face get-stuck-in battles, so please bear in mind that last nights long march is not going to be the norm, at least in this campaign. We should think about our scenario and casual game design as well. Why is there this tendency to start the two sides well out of contact? Most Napoleonic and ACW battles were not encounter affairs and those that were tended to be messy. Armies would usually make contact on day 1 and then deploy and rest overnight to engage in battle the following day. If we create scenarios that are more historically inspired we'll have less marching around to do.

I want to use calistheinics as a variable to describe troop quality, just like every other variable so I don't want to set it artificially high. The most elite cavalry in the campaign will get 8 and 9 ratings there, the very average cavalry we had in yesterdays battle will get average ratings in that column. Spanish cavalry was pretty poor. You need to understand that and use it accordingly. Be very cautious with it, rest it often, consider it as a one-shot weapon and save its use for when you think that one shot is vital and must be fired.

Stefan I know you had a division with 2 brigades of 10 so yes, that's a lot to handle, but if you TC commanders they usually won't come to any harm. Also however many of the points you raise are not related to brigade size but are general weaknesses of SoW. Many infantry brigades with about 6 battalions don't all get commander bonus, yet no-one thinks about raising that as an issue. A big brigade doesn't necessarily make SoW's weaknesses worse. If I reduce brigade size it means adding extra officers which gives a lot of benefits to that side, allowing them morale boosts, rallying boosts, more tactical flexibility. Its unhistorical as well.

Perhaps we should get together for our own Napoleonic version of Brandy Station and each command a big cavalry unit with a battery? We might learn some useful things.

I personally do not think there is a problem, and the issue that will be raised by making the commands smaller makes it actually worse than what we have now. Martin wrote a very good post covering this a week or two back. His conclusion was we just need to play more with big cavalry commands and get better at doing so. People I think have been lulled into a false sense of how big historical cavalry commands were by people issuing OOBs that have cavalry brigades that are far too small. In fact these brigades are regiments. Austrian hussar and uhlan regiments had 10 squadrons and while at times one of these would be a brigade on its own, there were cases where a pair of these made a brigade so that is a command of 20 squadrons. French regiments were 5 squadrons and these were commonly paired to form brigades of 10 squadrons. I don't like bending history to fit a game, I'd rather design a game that allows historical formations to function correctly. Hopefully any future NSD products will do this, learning a lot from the inputs the wargaming community has provided.

TL;DR: We need to play more games with huge commands, and get good at handling them, not reduce the size of commands.

I have very limited experience in commanding the vultures, but i find it manageable if I only use 2 or 3 at a time when I approach the enemy. More than that and I don't have the skills to pull them back or redirect them to the place I really want them. I usually TC the brigade commander before I begin cavalry operations, otherwise he will see that some of his units are entering the battle and will want to drag the rest of his command in to help out.

I always use roads when moving the cavalry long distances and find they reach the 'winded' level after traveling 2-3 miles. That is probably a bit much for such a short distance. It takes ~10 minutes before they fully recover, so it's not too great an inconvenience. Traveling 4-5 miles puts them in the 'tired' or 'weary' state which takes 15-20 minutes to recover from.

I agree that cavalry commanders must be TCed. Just imagine a non-TCed brigade and the enemy is coming near. The AI would form a line, crossing about half a mile with its 10 squadrons, depleeting 8 of 10 units by doing so.

And yes, I use roads as often as possible. The trick might be to HALT the cavalry while still on road and not to wait for them to reach their destination and deploy.
But still I don't understand why cavalry should loose fatigue while travelling on road at all. Infantry stays fresh IIRC...

But still I don't understand why cavalry should loose fatigue while travelling on road at all. Infantry stays fresh IIRC...

I think it is better than stock play. As I recall, the reason for this is due to the fact that humans don't tire as quickly as horses. Unfortunately base fatigue is assessed uniformly over all types of terrain. We can't reduce it for road travel and keep it for cross country travel.

Uncle Billy wrote:We can't reduce it for road travel and keep it for cross country travel.

Oh gawd.. the more you dig into this game the more you realise how simple and limited it is!

We need terrain types to all be definable and adjustable separately - for movement speed reduction/bonus, for cover modifyers, for morale modifyers, for melee bonuses or penalties, for spotting... for each arm of service and for each formation its in! Aggg! I hope someone from NSD reads this.

I'd be okay with a slight reduction of fatigue for cavalry marching anywhere and everywhere. I did a test today and took the entire Fresia cavalry division, 25 squadrons and a battery and marched them across the Gettysburg map by road. They varied from exhausted to tired by the time they'd gone from the far SW corner up to Codori Farm.

What I did notice was that units on the march in road column would bunch together so that when a brigade reached its destination the tail units would be past the arrow markers allotted to them in the road column. The squadrons then spent ages wheeling around and galloping about trying to both avoid each other and get to their allotted stations in the column. A couple of squadrons went from tired to exhausted just doing this. It would be worse with a map that had fences as well. Something has to be wrong there. Is that a problem with our formations in the drills.csv Kevin?

Thanks Martin. I just wanted to make a similar test (move some cavalry around - on roads.
This describes very well my experience during Sundays game.
@Kevin: So you raised the cavalry fatigue penalty over the stock values? IMHO it is really too much. Cavalry should spend their fatigue during their 1 or 2 assault, not by trotting along roads.

Leffe7 wrote:So you raised the cavalry fatigue penalty over the stock values

No, I think I lowered the fatigue rate a bit. As I recall the fatigue rate is worse in the stock game. The values are in statetables.csv.

Digby wrote:What I did notice was that units on the march in road column would bunch together so that when a brigade reached its destination the tail units would be past the arrow markers allotted to them in the road column. The squadrons then spent ages wheeling around and galloping about trying to both avoid each other and get to their allotted stations in the column. A couple of squadrons went from tired to exhausted just doing this. It would be worse with a map that had fences as well. Something has to be wrong there. Is that a problem with our formations in the drills.csv Kevin?

No, it is not a formation problem, but another game bug. It has always existed except for one patched version. The units march to the brigade commander, or where the brigade commander will be when he arrives and then move to their assigned locations. The other half of that problem is if you change the brigade's destination while they are still marching to their first, the units will march to the location the commander was at when they get the order via a straight line and then march to their new destination. This last 'feature' is what often wears down the troops. They often march along fence lines to reach the commanders location.

The problem here is that NSD is fully focused on their scenarios. Since the scenarios don't use roads, they never see these effects. And since they are written with minimal use of the AI for any large unit initial movements, they never see what happens when whole formations are ordered to a given location. IMHO it is the myopic focus on scenarios which really retards improvement of the game.

So are we limited to just a single blanket variable that raises or lowers troops fatigue for all events?

Are there different fatigue levels incurred when charging, and when fighting hand to hand to those incurred when climbing over fences?

I'm not sure what variables we have to play with here but I'm in favour of making terrain less tiring for troops to some degree while still keeping road marches by far the most efficient way to move about. Charging and melleeing and standing there shooting fatigue rates should remain as they are now.

The base fatigue rate for moving, which can be set for each branch of the army separately is augmented by fatigue levels that are set for various terrain features such as woods, fences, etc. Those terrain fatigue levels apply uniformly to all 3 branches of the army. Fatigue generated by melees, loading and shooting are set separately for each branch. Additionally, the fatigue is further modified by the unit's current fatigue and calisthenics ratings. Fatigue is accrued in 5 second intervals, I believe. So the faster a unit can cross a piece of bad terrain, the less fatigue it will accumulate.

The recovery rate is hard coded.

Uncle Billy wrote:Fatigue is accrued in 5 second intervals, I believe.  So the faster a unit can cross a piece of bad terrain, the less fatigue it will accumulate.

My God. How completely illogical. So trying to run across a stream will tire a man out less than wading it slowly? How did these people think these things up?

So I'm suggesting we generally lower the fatigue penalty for cavalry across all terrain types. What does everyone think?

The GCM mod lowers fatigue rates of terrain very much. Garnier makes up for it by making movement speeds in woods and creeks/rivers/marsh and such very slow. It also turns off the fatigue penalty for fences and makes it very slow to cross them.

As far as game-play goes, I do not enjoy marching for an hour or more only to arrive where I need to be with exhausted troops which require twenty minutes or so of rest before they are ready to go into battle.

I hear that.

My own views on fiddly high-regiment/squadron-count brigades are known (and haven't changed), but I accept that it was done historically. Now all we need are historical-level brigade-and-regimental AI to make it feasible  

Sorry to hear you spent the whole action marching without getting a chance to get stuck in.

A bit.

Not a LOT sorry since their showing up is what changed our week-long flank march from devious and potentially devastating to incredibly hazardous to our health, but you know, I feel Vedel did very well by your command.

Very much looking forward to commanding some troops in the next action, while my poor Ejercito de Valencia licks its wounds...

Soldier wrote:The GCM mod lowers fatigue rates of terrain very much. Garnier makes up for it by making movement speeds in woods and creeks/rivers/marsh and such very slow. It also turns off the fatigue penalty for fences and makes it very slow to cross them.

That does have merit. But we have to make sure that it is still faster to use the roads rather than going cross country for longer distances else we become no better than NSD'ers.

Garnier increases the march speed on roads to make using the roads have strategic value. I think it's built into his maps, but I'm not sure.

In GCM games, everyone marches on the roads until deployment, because it is faster.

Yes, we could make roads faster. Good roads could be fastest, with badly rutted roads slower, or at least the same speed they are now.

This is going to mean a lot of work for Kevin though, if every map must be adjusted. Unlike the GCM group (who if I understand things correctly almost exclusively now use Garnier's maps?) we use NSD maps almost exclusively and there's a fair few of them.

Suggestions from me.

1) Increase road march speed a bit on the best roads, perhaps make the cruddier trails a bit better (the AI doesn't differentiate so a player can't ask his units to take the best roads, only "the roads"). I therefore would like to see all roads improved to some extent, but the major highways more.

2) I like the idea of woods slowing all troops more, especially in Napoleonic warfare, but just dense and light woods, not orchards.

3) Streams perhaps to be slower, not sure... if roads are faster there's enough incentive to use them in place already, possibly. Some slowing down though would make them more useful as a defensive barrier because an advancing attacker would spend longer moving through a defender's musket fire.

4) There's a idea I want to discuss which is we simply delete fences completely from the effects arena (cover bonus, movement penalty, fatigue penalty) because so few Napoleonic battlefields ever mention them. A few are okay but some of the stock maps are thick with them and they wouldn't be there in Europe to the same extent. The graphics have to remain on the maps but we mentally and actually blank them out. They don't exist.

When we go back to playing ACW battles we should need the stock maps remaining unchanged so I guess we need a set of maps adjusted for Napoleonic play.

Changing the speed, defensive and fatigue values of various terrain types is very easy to do. It would take less than a minute per map. Deciding on what the values should be will take much longer. I'll only make these changes to the nappy maps. For ACW battles we use Courier&Maps which I will not change.

Currently I am busy cleaning up the myriad errors in the drills file. I've only just finished the infantry formations. So it will be a few days before I can do any more with the maps. In the meantime, maybe we can come to some consensus as to what the new map values should be.

What are the default values? If we can see those we can work from there.

Open up one of the mapname.csv files located in the \Maps folder. The terrain types and various values are all at the top of the file. You may need to look inside Courier&Maps mod as I don't think I transferred any of those over to the nappy mod yet. All the maps should have the same values.