Geffalrus wrote: ↑Sat Aug 10, 2019 3:59 pm
Here's something I've been thinking about regarding the larger battle size discussion:
Take two units.......Average Phalanx and Italian Foot. One pike phalanx costs exactly as much two Italian Foot. In rough terrain the pike unit gets destroyed. In the open, things are a bit more balanced.
Assume the pike is facing two Italian Foot units in open, in charge range, and the foot units are side by side.
- If the pike unit charges one of the two Italian Foot units, and gets a cohesion drop, then they have a decent chance of winning the entire fight because the Foot unit might fully break on the melee round of combat, at which point the pike now only faces one outclassed foot unit. This is because in a normal situation, it takes one turn to line up a flank charge, and then another turn to initiate the charge.
- If the Italian Foot unit does not cohesion drop on contact, then the Foot units have a better chance of winning. If two or more Indecisive rolls occur, then the second Foot unit can line up a flank attack and auto-cohesion drop the pike unit. Once disrupted, the pike unit is relatively easy prey for medium sword units. Even if the charged Foot loses the melee combat round following the Impact, they have a higher chance of surviving long enough for the second unit to flank the pike unit.
Now, increase the number of pikes and Italian foot proportionately and keep them lined up in a similar fashion.
- As the numbers of both increase, you start to have more and more Italian foot facing empty space, and more and more pikes fighting with their flanks protected from easy assault.
- This is in part because the Foot are trapped by their 2 space movement speed. The larger the amount of overlap, the larger distance the Foot have to travel to flank the engaged pikes.
- The longer it takes to flank the pikes, the more time they have to win individual combats with the engaged Italian Foot and leverage their higher POA and the cohesion penalty medium foot have facing heavy infantry in open terrain.
- Additionally, more units mean more rolls and more opportunities for luck to go the way of the pikes. And once it does, the numbers advantage of the Italian Foot start to disappear, at which point the pikes start to look like a better investment.
Basically this is the surface area problem where the larger the object, the greater the ratio of the interior of the object vs. the surface of the object. Obviously, I used an extremely simple scenario to illustrate this. In reality, there are other things the Italian Foot player can do. But that goes for the pike player as well. At a certain point, the pike player benefits from greater total numbers by having less exploitable flanks. This of course can be the case for other units. Ultimately, it might be a way to dilute some of the advantage that mass cheap foot armies have in certain circumstances.
If you are one of these "middling players" who accepts that luck evens out over a period of time, but still feels that the vagaries of the rules (e.g. double-drops) and RNG combined spoil some of their matches, then what is wrong with raising these arguments? The central argument here is about quality of gameplay, but your assumption seems to be that players are complaining because they lose matches because of RNG. This is just wrong. We all lose matches because of double-drops/RNG, and we all win some because of it too.
