Leader Bug?

[Gary McClellan]

My gut instinct is that it's the combat dialog which is bugged and probably not the leader bonus. Combat dialog reports nothing correctly ever. I pretend that all the manual rules are functioning as I presume they do because otherwise I'd rage quit at every severe loss. Would be nice if the reporting were fixed. Was a staple of the early wargame software industry to supply the user with the arithmetic so, you could have a greater sense of a quality product. New wargames just cover their terrible code with 3D fire and blood spatter effects.

I'm pretty sure it is the Leader Bonus... or more specifically, the column attack bonus/penalty.  One of the new things that got added into this engine is that infantry units in column get a rather severe penalty for melee.  That value is definable by the scenario designer (and it can be a bonus or a penalty, depending on the era simulated and the needs of the designer.)

The amount that the leader bonus is being "off" is equal to the defined column penalty, when the standard leader bonus is taken into account.

To wit, in the standard pdt, it's a -60% penalty, but a Leader in combat gives a -40% penalty in tests.  If you think about it, that makes sense, because a leader is normally +20%.  So -60+20=-40%.

I also tested it by changing the column attack penalty, and the displayed amount changed by the same amount.

Now, don't get me wrong.  For UNITS the column attack modifier is working perfectly.  We tested it pretty heavily when it was added, but the fact that somehow leaders are being charged with that penalty is what slipped through. (Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa).

Is it directly affecting combat? That's harder for me to test, because, as you said, the reporting is not as verbose as one might like.  That said, from having done identical tests of melees with and without leaders, it seems to me that the attack with the leader typically does worse than the one without.

I've passed all of this up to Rich, who will pass it to John.

In the meantime... yeah, keep your leaders out of melee

[TheGrayMouser]

My gut instinct is that it's the combat dialog which is bugged and probably not the leader bonus. Combat dialog reports nothing correctly ever. I pretend that all the manual rules are functioning as I presume they do because otherwise I'd rage quit at every severe loss. Would be nice if the reporting were fixed. Was a staple of the early wargame software industry to supply the user with the arithmetic so, you could have a greater sense of a quality product. New wargames just cover their terrible code with 3D fire and blood spatter effects.

I'm pretty sure it is the Leader Bonus... or more specifically, the column attack bonus/penalty.  One of the new things that got added into this engine is that infantry units in column get a rather severe penalty for melee.  That value is definable by the scenario designer (and it can be a bonus or a penalty, depending on the era simulated and the needs of the designer.)

The amount that the leader bonus is being "off" is equal to the defined column penalty, when the standard leader bonus is taken into account.

To wit, in the standard pdt, it's a -60% penalty, but a Leader in combat gives a -40% penalty in tests.  If you think about it, that makes sense, because a leader is normally +20%.  So -60+20=-40%.

I also tested it by changing the column attack penalty, and the displayed amount changed by the same amount.

Now, don't get me wrong.  For UNITS the column attack modifier is working perfectly.  We tested it pretty heavily when it was added, but the fact that somehow leaders are being charged with that penalty is what slipped through. (Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa).

Is it directly affecting combat? That's harder for me to test, because, as you said, the reporting is not as verbose as one might like.  That said, from having done identical tests of melees with and without leaders, it seems to me that the attack with the leader typically does worse than the one without.

I've passed all of this up to Rich, who will pass it to John.

In the meantime... yeah, keep your leaders out of melee

Ahh, very interesting, so the game treated leaders as columns!.   Glad it looks like something that can be (relatively) easily fixed.  Cheers!

[Gary McClellan]

Heh, not being a programmer, I'm not sure how "easy" it will be to fix. All I can do is wait for John, and he's doing military work atm. Just glad that we were able to pin down a prime suspect, instead of having no clue what was going on.

[TheGrayMouser]

Just checking to see if there is any update to this bug, ie a rough idea when it might be patched? Currently its basically not playable vs the AI, although I suppose in MP you could have a house rule to simply remove leader from stacks, but that seems tedious.

[geoff]

http://www.wargame.ch/board/nwc/viewtopi...umn#p44073

Here is a similar bug from the middle of Napoleonic Battles development. In this case column fire was mirrored for some modifier of cavalry. I'll try to search the Renassiance strings with Emacs for what the exact name for this bug might be. Might speed things up when someone finally gets around to it.
All I see in .rdata is "Moving Leader..machine language..against defenders". It's probably for logging AI actions for debugging. Don't see any internal string list though but, plaintext module headers like Leader, Column, and Melee are there.