Stupid flying units getting killed makes me angry

[Vynd]

OK, right off the bat I want to say that this is a great game. But... could we please get flying units to quit moving in front of routed units and forcing those units to attack them? Man does it piss me off when my expensive flying troops or, heaven help me, Pretender, gets clobbered by a bunch of retreating heavy infantry or cavalry! And I get even more annoyed when, after my units manage to survive, they go and do it again, and again... Why can't they attack them from behind so that they don't get hit back? Why?!?

I just had to get that off my chest.

[PDF]

Yeah, the flyers are idiots ... I'm trying to do something with Demonbreds diving from the skies, attacking rear to cast Immolation, but they always land in the worst place, right in the middle of the nastiest enemies and get killed before casting ...

[Anglachel]

Originally posted by Vynd:
OK, right off the bat I want to say that this is a great game. But... could we please get flying units to quit moving in front of routed units and forcing those units to attack them? Man does it piss me off when my expensive flying troops or, heaven help me, Pretender, gets clobbered by a bunch of retreating heavy infantry or cavalry! And I get even more annoyed when, after my units manage to survive, they go and do it again, and again... Why can't they attack them from behind so that they don't get hit back? Why?!?

I just had to get that off my chest.

For every bone headed manuever that fliers do like that there is the compensation that they are EXCELLENT castle stormers en masse amoungst a plethera of other things. Nothing more beautiful than storming a castle and having the opponent's entire army surrounded on all sides by a flying ring of death consisting of devils, vampires, and fiends in the blink of an eye. Learned the value of fliers when I tried to take a Caelum castle with mainly ground pounders. Oh, they were good ground pounders. Demon knights, vine ogres, and such. Got my *** handed to me when a mid sized squad of manikins clogged up my huge vine ogre squad and consequently clogged up my large demon knight squad. The arrow towers and the 17 odd Caelum mages and priests made short work of me after that. I think fliers are meant to be specialty troops and shouldn't be expected to handle the work-a-day battles that ground pounders would excell at doing. I think this tendancy of fliers to cut off routers and get beat on is just a side effect of thier extreme advantage in tactical movement. I have had faster moving non-fliers cut off routers and get hit as well but they are usually calvary and can take it better. Save your fliers for specialized strikes and surgical hits and expect them to take a beating.

P.S.:I am not accusing you of whining. I hate that they run down routers so effectively and get beat on as a result too. I just take it as one of the tactical disadvantages of a HUGE tactical advantage of flight. Think of them as arrows that shoot once and stay around to beat on troops.

[Norfleet]

The tendency of fliers to cut off routers is a VERY GOOD THING, not a bad thing!

Yes, they take losses, but if you use the right fliers, the fact that they impede the flight of the enemy troops allows you to KILL THEM ALL! No survivors! The few losses you may take are nothing compared to what you might lose if you allowed them to escape and regroup.

Wipe them out. All of them.

[ May 03, 2004, 01:02: Message edited by: Norfleet ]

[PvK]

I'm with Norfleet.

Also, the argument is from a perspective that is a way too literal interpretation of the game mechanics. If pursuers never were placed in front of fleeing units, the pursued would never fight back. Just because the game system uses that as an abstract mechanic to represent the chance of a unit being cut off and fighting, does not make the AI "dumb". It just means you're taking the situation too literally. The existing AI is fine - it's just an abstract representation.

PvK

[Norfleet]

I'm less concerned with the fact that the pursuers won't fight back as long as they can keep running, than the fact that they will get away! This can be supremely annoying and offensive to my sense of thoroughness. A huge pack of fliers can more or less eliminate this troublesome nuisance. There are very few, if any, survivors when an army gets mauled by a swarm of a few dozen devils on Attack Rear. KILL THEM! KILL THEM ALL!

[LintMan]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
I'm less concerned with the fact that the pursuers won't fight back as long as they can keep running, than the fact that they will get away! This can be supremely annoying and offensive to my sense of thoroughness. A huge pack of fliers can more or less eliminate this troublesome nuisance. There are very few, if any, survivors when an army gets mauled by a swarm of a few dozen devils on Attack Rear. KILL THEM! KILL THEM ALL!

Sometimes I wish the combat AI would be a little less aggressive about trying to eliminate those fleeing units: it's quite frustrating to take more losses, post-enemy routing, to friendly fire than during the main battle. Ie: your 45 crossbowmen fire a huge cloud of bolts at the 4-8 fleeing militia that your flying troops have completely surrounded.

I'd love to have a per-army setting that lets me toggle between "kill them all" (which is the current behavior) and "drive them off", where it would cause your armies to immediately re-focus on any non-routed enemies whenever their current target routes. Sometimes you can ill-afford the extra losses from prolonged (but victorious) battle that the kill 'em all option causes.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by LintMan:
it's quite frustrating to take more losses, post-enemy routing, to friendly fire than during the main battle. Ie: your 45 crossbowmen fire a huge cloud of bolts at the 4-8 fleeing militia that your flying troops have completely surrounded.

Crossbowmen should DEFINITELY not do this unless the target is completely clear, if the target is routing: Crossbowmen simply lack the precision needed to actually strike their targets with reasonable confidence.

Fliers (and cav), on the other hand, should be encouraged to not only pursue enemy routing troops, but perhaps have a command to preferentially pursue routers. I know that's what *I* use light cav for in Medieval: To run down enemies as they flee and KILL THEM ALL!

[Tris]

This seemed an appropriate place to reply to Norfleet's sig...

"Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions, and you are a conqueror. Kill all, and you are a god!""

Actually, if you think about it, when you "KILL THEM ALL" you just end up being a very very lonely man.

[Vynd]

Disagree if you like, but I stand by my original opinion: flying units being stupid and plopping themselves down in front of routed units and getting themselves killed makes me angry. Chasing down units from behind, or flying up next to them and attacking them, I can live with. But personally I'd rather see a few units escape (to be killed in the next battle) than lose my expensive flying units. The whole point of using the fliers to Attack Rear is to wipe out the enemy commanders and cause an early rout, thus keeping my casualties down.

I'm not saying that this is a game breaker or anything, just that I find it personally very annoying. Also, I think the various explanations people have offered for why flying units should be getting themselves killed in this manner are more along the lines of rationalizations. I don't believe for a second that the designers sat down and thought: "Let's counterbalance the power of flying units by making them more likely to get killed by retreating units. Plus it'll help deal with the 'units should sometimes get cut-off and be forced to fight back' issue we've been worrying about." I like my own explanation better, which is that the combat system is fairly simplistic and simply can't handle concepts like "don't stand in front of retreating units, attack from the side instead."