Help:Troop Settings
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Here you can fine-tune your units actions on and off the battlefield. These settings are only for your current unit, but will stick with it through recruiting additional men, renaming or anything else.
Encounter Settings
How your men should react to encounters with the enemy. This setting can determine whether combat takes place at all, and how your men act once it has started. Whenever you are in the same region with other units, the encounter settings you give here are checked in order of priority. The first match determines the actions your men take. So if you say "fight Realm A" as priority 1 and "keep peace with Realm B" as priority 2, and you face a force consisting of both A and B troops, your men will attack. But if you reverse the order, and list keeping peace first, your men would keep the peace, because the attack order has the lower priority. Normal nobles can usually leave these settings alone, because there are also implicit settings. That means if your men have looked through all your settings and found nothing (maybe because there is nothing there), they will look at whatever the current army settings are. If they still find nothing there, they will look at the realm diplomacy. But if you want to go against the official realm politics - you can.
Designation
This setting affects available orders and payment for your men. Police units especially have options that other units do not have. Mercenary units are meant for campaigns far away from your realm, which incur a huge morale penalty on non-mercenary units. Sentries and Vanguards are specially designated army units. All these unit types are described in detail in the manual, on the Unit Settings page.
== Combat Tactics This setting determines where on the battlefield your unit will deploy and in which formation. The combat line obviously will affect how soon your unit comes in contact with enemy forces. The effectiveness of this setting does depend a lot on those of other units within your army. For example, archer units up front can inflict horrible casualties on the enemy, but rely on infantry forces to move ahead of them and shield them from enemy close combat forces before those can engage. Archers further back are safer, but can not do as much damage. The formation determines your units' efficiency on the battlefield. The available formations are:
- Line
- Your men will deploy in a wide line, usually 2-3 ranks deep depending on their number. This is the default setting.
- Box
- A tighter formation with more ranks. Box formations can take a cavalry charge with less casualties and disorder, and will generally withstand more casualties before panic strikes. They are, however, slightly less effective in offense in return.
- Wedge
- A wedge formation will allow the unit to break into enemy ranks easier, doing more damage than other formations do. However, the unit is also easier to break up and will likely suffer more casualties itself.
- Skirmish
- Deploying your men widely, in a lose formation with considerable distance between them makes them less prone to archer fire and other ranged attacks. However, a skirmish formation is not well suited for close combat and a skirmish unit engaged in melee will take horrible casualties.
Note that combat tactics settings can be overridden if a general with command staff is present on your side in the battle, as he will automatically integrate your unit into his larger strategy.
