Gabanus Family/Garas/The Elementary truth on Battle Settings

General advise

For any Marshal or General who wishes to truly understand the precise workings of armies on the battlefield, it is important to acknowledge what is known and to continous test your theory on paper before applying it on the battlefield.

• Step 1, take a piece of paper and make 9 columns
• Step 2, mark them: Rear/Back/Middle/Front/Center/Front/Middle/back/rear

There is no 'best' settings, it always depends on the following

• 1) The army composition of both armies
• 2) The settings your enemy uses (most people often use the same settings for a very long while untill it really fails)

General rule of thumb: If you have substantial more archers than your enemy: move all your lines further back to have more rounds or ranged before melee starts. If you have far fewer archers the opposite is true. Cavalry is often too few in an army to consider changing your settings.

Important notes

• - Damage inflicted by archers depends on the range. The further away the enemy is from the archer, the lower the ranged damage will be. It can therefore be advantageous, especially when you expect to lose the melee fight, to have the melee clash closer to your archers than the enemy's archers.

Unit Movement

• Archers never move forward when they have someone in range. Otherwise they move forward 1 column
• Infantry move 1 column per round, unless when defending walls or dug in (special cases)
• Cavalry move 2 columns per turn. When 2 columns removed from an enemy they charge (extra damage) when 1 column removed they just attack

Unit Contact Settings

The effect of contact settings is extremely limited on the battlefield. Their impact is mostly felt only during siege battles and for battle engagement, the determinance of when a battle even takes place.

Non Siege Battles

• Evasive, soldiers will try to evade combat in all cases
• Defensive/Aggressive/Murderous, will each result in the same movement as discussed earlier.

Unit Line Settings

The type of settings depend on the army compositions and the enemy's line settings, but there are some general rule of thumbs.

• Archers in Skirmish formation

One thing that is consistent these days is that pretty much every battle results in an archer shoot out cause the infantry/cav never reaches the archer lines in somewhat equal battles.

• Infantry in Line formation

In the past Box formation was often used as it lowers casulties taken in melee, however due to the strength of the archers the use of box formation will lead to increased casulties against an opponent with archers.

• Infantry in Box formation against monsters and undead

Since the rogue forces have no ranged units they form an exception to the rule above

	Melee Attack	Ranged Attack	Melee Defense	Ranged Defense
Line	Normal	Normal	Normal	Normal
Box	Low	Normal	High	Low
Wedge	High	Normal	Low	Low
Skirmish	Low	Normal	Low	High

Unit Composition

Currently armies are often archer heavy as most even battles result in the melee forces being shot down by the archers before reaching them. Efficient use of cavalry and increasingly stronger armor (Ooc, new code changes are currently introduced to weaken the impact of archers a bit) may well change the composition of armies in due time.

Also Keep in mind that a lot of SF these days is ranged 5. It has become the prefered SF if you can build it.

It is the right of every noble to decide which unit they wish to recruit and you are never allowed to force them into any direction. There are some things you are allowed to do however:

• 1) Publicly explain why the army is in need of more of a particular unit type, or could use less of another type. Often you will find a few noblemen willing to make a switch, if funded.

• 2) Increase the funding of commanders of specific type of units. Be carefull not to withhold entire funding of the others, but you may favor one group over another.

• 3) Destroy your recruitment centers to limit the ability to recruit a certain type of unit in the first place.