Auto-routing alternatives

[Zeldor]

cleveland:

No, my Golem had absolutely nothing to do with it. My elephants had probably around 70% HP of my whole army, golem was doing fine but 1 feebleminded mage with bodyguards decided to help the golem, they died and it was enough to get over 75% limit and start routing of my other mages. If I had no elephants it would never happen, quite stupid solution.

And about limit:
Yep, it should be really increased. Sometimes there are situation when you just cannot finish it very fast. But you need most of the time just few turns more. Usually with all that stales there are just few units and processing that is very fast. My tartarian in urapara would just get few more afflictions [I wonder what happens if he gets all possible ones] but many mindless beings would be saved from that humiliating death.

[thejeff]

Of course the old (dom2) 75% or units was worse. 2-3 points of PD routing or dying meant your SC pretender fled the field.

[vfb]

I'd prefer to not see the combat length extended beyond 75 turns. In the late game you can end up with 2 big armies fighting each other, both sides with Fog Warriors up, some Army of Lead/Gold, Antimagic, Rigor Mortis, Storm Warriors, Life after Death ... etc etc. That kind of fight can just drag on and on, and mages don't help much because they fatigue out almost as fast as the armies.

What I'd like to see is, instead of death at turn 50 or 75, just move the attackers to a friendly neighboring province, as if they had retreated. No need to auto-route the attacker at turn 50 either. The defender still has a chance to wipe out the entire attacking army, by cutting off all avenues of retreat.

[Endoperez]

vfb said:
What I'd like to see is, instead of death at turn 50 or 75, just move the attackers to a friendly neighboring province, as if they had retreated. No need to auto-route the attacker at turn 50 either. The defender still has a chance to wipe out the entire attacking army, by cutting off all avenues of retreat.

That would actually be far worse punishment: you have to rescript your entire army, redistribute your troops among your commanders again, etc etc. So much hassle for what was, essentially, a defeat.

You had a good point about long battles, though.

[Ironhawk]

Are people seriously bumping into the auto-rout limit in pitched battles that much?? I havent seen it once in any of Dom3 games where it wasnt something that probably should have been decided by auto-rout anyway (like a horde of chaff unable to damage an SC or something).

[thejeff]

I just hit it, I think, in a battle against Ermor. Fog Warrior regenerating chaff against Will of the Fates, Army of Lead longdead horse, with neither side having any real large area evocations to do serious damage.

The attacker broke with a lot of troops left on the field, I think it was the turn limit, but I didn't count and I'm not running it again. It ran for at least an hour.

[NTJedi]

Endoperez said:

That would actually be far worse punishment: you have to rescript your entire army, redistribute your troops among your commanders again, etc etc. So much hassle for what was, essentially, a defeat.

You had a good point about long battles, though.

It's a far worse punishment when units/commanders die because of a battle time limitation. It's only natural to want spending the time reorganizing the units/commanders instead of completely losing the units/commanders.
"Let's see 55 disorganized units and commanders of mine in my friendly provinces OR 55 DEAD units and commanders of mine. "

[cleveland]

vfb said:
I'd prefer to not see the combat length extended beyond 75 turns...That kind of fight can just drag on and on, and mages don't help much because they fatigue out almost as fast as the armies.

So what? You don't have to watch the whole battle.

[Loren]

Zeldor said:
OTHER important thing that should be done with routing mechanics:

'never routs' attibute given to the defender of the capitol [just fort, not province]. The last soldiers defending the capitol should never even think about leaving the battlefield. They have nowhere to go so they should fight till death. That's good both from thematic and gameplay aspect.

In one game cleveland attacked my army with quite large force. I have won the battle but I had elephants that died. They triggered the auto-rout sequence and it was my last province. So I have lost 38! [thirty eight!] mages! due to auto-rout into enemy territory. I could have successfully defended that fort for 10-20 turns, until someone would bring proper siege force. But no, they decided to run away into enemy territory when winning just because some elephants died. It has sense when you have a place to run away and regroup.

Yes, I think rout behavior should be changed when you have no hope of retreat. It should still happen (people do panic) but the threshold should be much higher, both in terms of morale and time.

Perhaps what should happen in a case like that is if you can't rout you run for the edge of the battlefield but can't leave it. Your morale might recover over time, though.

[Argitoth]

Some of you claim that increasing the turn limit will give supercombatants more power to last longer.

A lot of you don't realize that it can go both ways. You can sometimes fail to kill supercombatants because your army runs out of turns, or maybe your army has super combatants too.

Someone else claimed that it's better to use SCs in an army as a good way to kill another SC.

You know what makes it harder to kill SCs with SCs? Say you have a huge army with a few SCs and you have a goal of killing your enemy SCs. You attack. BECAUSE you have too many units in your army, the units get in the way of your own SCs meleeing the enemy SC. Because your army retreats, they could potentially they all die, including your SC.

Lone SCs can have a bigger advantage over accompanied SCs. Someone of you who would hate to make SCs more powerful in Dom3 don't realize that you are against features in Dom3 that would make SCs less powerful, because you just don't know any better.