Battle of Alagon, late June 1808

For this MP battle you will need a special Antietam Morning Map csv file. Get it here.

Unpack the contents of this file to the \Maps folder of your KSPeninsular Mod, overwriting when prompted. The archive contains a backup of the file you are overwriting "ANT_1.csv" to "ANT_1_backup.csv".

The new csv file removes all the effects of all fences on the Antietam morning map. It means cavalry gets less tired marching around the place.

The third in our trio of turn 2 battles is being fought just west of Zaragosa between the French corps of Marshal Bessieres (commanded by Darr [Wittmann]) and the clever and manipulative General Palafox' with his Army of Aragon commanded by Steve (Sspoom). This will use the Antietam morning map and Kevin's restricted movement mod again, making the Antietam Creek impassable except at the 3 stone bridges.

I have a tentative yes by both Steve and Darr to be able to play this game this Sunday, 14 July at 19:30 UK time.

I'll put more details up in the individual team threads, with OOBs and a map but a show of hands here would help. If its too short notice or people are busy we can try for next weekend, but lets give Sunday our first shot.

One comment about the restricted stream maps. The AI WILL march men across it if you give your brigades orders to simply 'get to the other side' I saw this happening on at least three occasions last week, once was when Trienio and Sarsfield were retreating which wasn't so big a problem, but one of Ceverra's regular battalions attacked across the stream in the woods just south of the north ford and at least two of Centerremona's battalions did as well south of the south ford.

When you are near a stream/river that's been deemed as uncrossable, please don't rely on the game to ensure this as it won't. The game is extremely buggy on this feature so you MUST always TC your units or at least the brigade commander and order them across and to USE ROADS. This seems to be the only way to make the AI reliably see the crossing points.

Fords can be crossed in column of march or column of divisions and I'm fine with orders being given to form line the instant the far bank is arrived at. Guys stood firing up to their thighs in water is acceptable and I know its hard to command units eactly where to stop, etc.

For the stone bridges units can ONLY cross in march column but can deploy the instant they get off the bridge model at the far side. I know this makes attacking over bridges tough but then it was historically. For commanding your units in these circumstances its really to be treated like commanding cavalry - your general needs to be right there by the bridge and TCing units to ensure they go across correctly and deploy correctly, please don't stand a way off and send AI orders, it just doesn't work well enough. Likewise defenders please don't stand a unit actually in the water on the far bank of a ford, give the attacker at least a chance to deploy, and please don't actually stand men on the end of the bridge model.

I would like players to report incidents of units abusing these instructions (even if a player may reply on the AI to carry out his orders - I'm not going to blame players in any way as being gamey), but if we get incidents of this they do grant that side an advantage they shouldn't have, so please take a screenshot, send it to me and let me know what unit it was and I'll inflict some extra casualties on it. I would like to try and get these impassable water barriers to become a real issue to players and if we let the AI decide where it'll put its units they don't.

Thank you very much, everyone.

I can play Sunday.

I can be there.

Be aware that the road pixels do not actually run across the stone bridges. They are set to one side. The most noticeable one is the middle bridge. The troops actually march beside it. This is due to a mismatch between the battlefield view and the bmp map.

Once a unit retreats, for whatever reason, and reforms, it will ignore impassable streams. They will cross them unhindered. I made crossing these streams very slow, so at least the unit that does ignore the impassable pixels will be tired once they get across. It is entirely possible that a player may not notice that these units are crossing the river as the AI brigade leader usually calls them back to the fight, once they reform.

Yup, good point, retreating troops and rallied troops returning just ignore the impassable barrier

If you see this, TC them and move tham back to where they can cross a bridge, if they try and wade over they'll probably get shot to bits before they get across anyway.

We can only hope for a better game with whatever v2 brings.

I'm a little concerned about playing on the Antietam map with its harsh movement penalties and Kevin's mod.

I well remember Neal's campaign game we played on it -- the horror! Everyone's troops exhausted in the first ten minutes and staying that way the entire battle.

I hope we can do something about this. Kevin?

Generally I think we are making a move towards reducing terrain fatigue penalties, as it seems to hurt the Nap Mod more with its cavalry.

Also bear in mind that both sides should be deployed well forwards in this battle, in sight of each other and artillery range at the start, so the moves to contact should be very short. I don't want any troops starting way back at the map edge and having to march for 30 minutes to begin with. Think of this like Waterloo with a stream running down the middle of the valley. Everyone's been there at least overnight and the battle begins from formal deployed positions. That should help us too.

I already cut in half the fatigue penalty due to marching through corn. Wooden fences are the most fatiguing feature on the map. They are currently 10 times more fatiguing than most other terrain features. NSD really doesn't want us crossing fences. It was probably done so the Union was worn out by the time they reached the greatly outnumbered Rebs and made it a fair fight in their scenarios.

Since we want to experiment with downgrading wooden fences for nappy fights, this would be a good test fight. I suggest we reduce the fatigue from 10 to 1 and remove the defensive value altogether, from 45% to 0. Movement speed is currently reduced by 0.7mph. What new value would people like to see?

I should be able to represent the glorious army of france this sunday

Good to hear it, Andy!

Those figures sound good to me Kevin. Perhaps as I suggested elsewhere we should make it so that in effect the fences just don't exist at all. Visually the graphics have to stay on the maps of course but there is no effect at all; no cover bonus, no speed impairment and no fatigue effect. There's enough walls on the map anyway for infantry to hide behind and unless we treat the fences as non-existent what are we treating them as?

I think I would like to see all types of road the same as well, just make all the farm trails as good as the best road. I don't see any benefit in farm trails etc adding a fatigue penalty.

Is there any other terrain type that is a problem for fatigue on this map? I'd like to keep woods as an obstacle for Nappy troops. They can slow them but they need not tire them out.

On the bridges, can the centre road pixel across them be shifted or is the 1 pixel too coarse and it'll move the road marker to far the other way?

Stone walls are almost as fatiguing as wooden fences, but since we are keeping them in place they won't be changed. Fords are just as tiring, but there won't be any of those in this battle. Woods terrain reduces speed by 0.4mph. Heavy woods reduces it by 0.6mph. Getting rid of the fences should make fighting on the map more interesting.

I'll make the necessary changes and email you the revised file. It's small. You can then send it out to the scenario players. It should be placed in the KS Peninsula Mod\Maps folder.

Part of the Restricted Maps Mod, surely?

Or are these changes not in the file where the rivers are made impassable?

Perhaps we could do a test game on it on Friday?

They will be part of the restricted and non-restricted maps, so they need to be put in the Peninsula mod and the KS Napoleon mod. I'll take care of the latter since I'll be updating it with new csv files and maps with town areas.

I'll be available for testing Friday at the usual time.

I should be able to play, if another is needed.

Given the extreme strain imposed by the Antietam map on players' machines, may I suggest dialing back the sprite ratio in this battle as a compromise to improve game speed and performance -- and reduce the risk of player crashes? Recent experiments with this setting in large GCM games demonstrates that substantial performance and game-speed improvements can be achieved at the higher ratios of 4, 6, or even 8.

Is this the sprite ratio, Ron? As the Alagon battle is quite big I think a 6 or 8 sprite ratio is a wise change.

Good news on the fatigue side of things. I did a test game last night with Kebin's updated 'no fences' map commanding a 10 squadron cavalry brigade and I got them from the very far north of the map all the way down to the hill just north of Antietam and most were still 'okay' or 'winded', a couple of squadrons being 'weary'. A 5-minute rest behind the infantry which was fighting the Spanish coming out of the town and I had 4 squadrons back to 'fresh' and ready to go into action, so despite lots of annoying 'marching along fences' due to the road bug, removing the fence fatigue and speed penalty has been very helpful.

My main worry is that we may be making cavalry more powerful vs infantry now but a few battles should let us test this.

Yes, the sprite ratio adjustment in the host/options panel. This does carry some impact on game play as it allows regiments to be aligned more closely together, but it seems a relatively small price to pay if it helps the game run smoothly.

We had another 'bad frame in packet' crash last night on the Antietam map, and that was with only 3 players in a game. Two were using full screen, one was windowed (my bad). It looks like we all need to use full screen for a while and we'll see if we get any more crashes of that type. No more voice-chatting with other players, just send a courier when you are next to them and comms are still instant.

I'm going to postpone the Alagon game. We can't get enough players at such sort notice and also the game tonight is taking up some people's allowed weekend game slot! I've still not created the scenario either - still waiting on French orders/deployment.

I've asked Steve and Darr what times they can both make next weekend, so we will hopefully play the battle then.

Mr. Digby wrote:We had another 'bad frame in packet' crash last night on the Antietam map, and that was with only 3 players in a game. Two were using full screen, one was windowed (my bad). It looks like we all need to use full screen for a while and we'll see if we get any more crashes of that type. No more voice-chatting with other players, just send a courier when you are next to them and comms are still instant.

I'm going to postpone the Alagon game. We can't get enough players at such sort notice and also the game tonight is taking up some people's allowed weekend game slot! I've still not created the scenario either - still waiting on French orders/deployment.

I've asked Steve and Darr what times they can both make next weekend, so we will hopefully play the battle then.

What's the current deal with TeamSpeak when playing Full-Screen? Are you using whisper keys or is somebody going to be running two PCs to switch ppl in and out of channels for private chat?

It would be great to get everybody familiar with configuring whisper keys. They're not that hard, and if you're right with your hunch about bad frame packets, then this would seem the best way forward?

Digby may very well be right. The nappy mod is far harder on computer resources due to all the different uniforms being displayed. On top of that, the KS Peninsula mod uses some unpacked sprites which drives the computer even harder. Since window mode forces the graphics card work harder than full screen, (it has to render both the game and desktop), it would be best if we set up whisper keys and run at full screen.

The unpacked sprites are not in use. I could not get them to work alongside the packed sprites. That was the reason for the 3 to 4 week delay between the Battle of Atalayuclas 'happening' on the map on turn 2 and us being able to fight it in SoW.

Even so, the extra uniforms and flags mix has got to add more load.

Rather than go back to whisper keys we could just send couriers at each other from 10 yards. Its pretty fast.

We're back in action. Steve (Sspoom) and Darr (Wittmann) can both make this weekend. They can both make Saturday and Sunday apparently for a 19:30 UK time start. Can I have a show of hands from people for which days you can make, either/or or both. This is quite a big battle and I think around 7 players a side will be needed, so please play if you can. If anyone can be invited over from the GCM group they are very welcome, we just need to get them patched up before hand so doing that 24h in advance would be appreciated. Maybe Mark and Ron you might please look after those guys?

Players will need the Antietam add-on pack to play.

Game settings:

Please go into your settings and set Trees at 50%
You must use a full screen game view; we are finding that the extra Nap sprites and the couriers add load to the game and additional window sizes can cause crashes.
Note that all the effects of fences have been removed from the map and the Antietam Creek is uncrossable except at the three stone bridges.
The bridges must be crossed in road column and with "use roads" switched on.

Hi guys,

I have a bad news and a nice one.

The bad news is that I can not play this weekend.  

The nice one now. I've just installed the anniversary edition, so I have all the maps pack on.

Next time I hope to be there.  

Vive l'Empereur  

I'm available Saturday, but Sunday is uncertain for now.

Either day is fine. Just as a reminder, each player will need the Antietam csv file. It contains the modded terrain values.

Thanks Kevin, link to csv file added in first post!

EDIT: I just had a thought, is the "remmed fences" version compatible with the "restricted movement" version? I'm guessing it is because the restricted movment version is just a replacement bmp file isn't it?