TheGrayMouser
Member
Hello, thought I’d post some findings in playing around with the oob’s and pdt entries in this game to illustrate how flexible this engine is and things one can do.
My intent was to make the AI more competitive but as I played around some interesting things were discovered that could have some value to other tinkerers as there are a significant amount of entries in the Ren OOB files that one can play around with.
IMHO, the most important issues the AI has in providing a good game is its use of pike units and its tendency to disorder its own troops via movement and stacking.
Pikes:
Pikes are coded with the “binary value” of 3 in the OOB’s, which means they can form block and column but cannot initiate melee in column (btw this is NOT hardcoded to Pikes, any unit can be coded any way you want, you want longbowmen to act the same, code them 3)
There are several issues with this. One, the blocks cannot attack gates or onto bridges, yet when in column they cant attack at all which means a Swiss battle can be held up at a bridge or gate by 10 skirmishers. (this effects the human as well)
Two. This is the big one. The AI has no idea how to use pikes. I believe the AI, as the Ren game is a modified Nap engine, wasn’t programmed that blocks are an offensive formation, and not only a defensive formation vs cavalry. Thus, it will advance in column, get stuck in front of a players units and, well, do nothing. The AI only forms block when directly threatened by cavalry. The second a cavalry unit isn’t in a position to charge a pike , the AI always switches back to column. As units coded as “3” in the OOB cannot initiate melee when in column, the AI never really brings its most powerfull melee units to bear vs a players infantry.
Solution: code pikes (and Tercios) as “1”, so they can melee in column. The only drawback is they can also form line… The workaround for this is, as a player, just DON’T DO It
For me, its really not too much of a big deal if the AI occasionally forms lines with its pike or tercios as there is no inherent advantage/disadvantage to being in line when defending in melee. (of course tercio’s would fire a little better in line…) I personally prefer an AI that can actually attack me with pikes and have the oddity of the occasional “thin red line of pikes”. The natural tendancy of the AI , when programmed to attack, extreme attack is to form column and attempt to achieve high stacking within a hex.
This change might very well give pikes too much ability to close rapidly and engage so possible adjustement to their movement rates might need to be considered.
The second thing I wanted to do is reduce the amount DISORDER the AI creates for itself, while piling up its troops, cavalry/infantry in various formations all in the same hex.
It appears the movement algorithm is for a unit to get to point B from A in the most efficient manner. Since there is no additional movement cost to enter a stack of units, the AI will often plow cavalry units thru its own infantry stacks in order to get to the front.
I found by limiting the counters allowed per hex, juggling the cavalry modifiers etc the AI is handling it formations better .
In an experimental 50 Yard hex scale PDT I reduced the stacking to 1200 men total, and reduced the counter limit to 3 units per hex. Cavalry stacking is reduced to 1/6 or 200 men.
Overall, I found the AI handled its formations much better, there was little to no cavalry entering stacks of infantry. With only three counters (exclusive of leaders) allowed per hex, there were much fewer opportunities for the AI to attempt to move a line unit into the same hex as units in column etc.
Ideally I want to make it so cavalry could never enter a hex of infantry. It is possible to do this (by increasing how many counters one counter of cavalry equals) but the unfortunate effect is then cavalry can only stack one unit per hex and thus cant break into squadrons. As the adjustments I had already made seems to limit the # of times the AI puts its own cavalry into an infantry stack, I didn’t really follow this line any further but I kind like the idea of cavalry never being allowed to stack with infantry(a mechanic found in many other tactical games)
Since Ren is so flexible in making adjustment to a unit on a UNIT by UNIT basis, cavalry formations can easily be tweaked to make up for the much less #’s allowed. IE armor, melee values and even the charge multiplier if needed.
Another “problem area I see in Ren is the block formation itself. Unfortunaltely, The game engine nullifies the Block ability to negate a cavalry charge if ANY unit, other than skirmishers is in the same hex as a block. So you cant stack a pike block with a “sleeve of arquebusiers” as it makes the whole stack vulnerable to cavalry charges.
Ideally JT will change this in newer versions of the game. Even better would be if it was a moddable entry in the PDT to allow a ratio, per stack, of x # of men in block provide the anti cavalry bonus to y # of men in a stack not in block.
Anyways there is no true solution to this except a combination of changes which includes allowing units other than pike to block, as well as reducing the # of men and counters in a hex.
I made an experimental Spanish Colunella formation consisting of 2 300 men pike units, 2 300 men arquebusiers and a 300 man rodelero unit, plus a brigade leader.
Using my alt. 50 yard scale PDT with max men 1200 and 3 counter limit I coded the pikes “1” ( so they can melee in column, I coded the arqebusiers 1 as well, and I made the Rodeleros skirmishers (S class, they cannot break down further)
I set these formation up two stack of pike and shot each, rodeleros and leader behind , coded the ai to “attack” and then fought against them
The AI had no problems keeping the formation I set in the editor. Whenever threatened by cavalry the AI blocked the pike and shot together. Generally, the AI kept the pike and shot units together. The rodeleros often popped out on the flanks and or stacked in one of the pike and shot occupied hexes. Since coded as skirmishers they didn’t nullify the block ability. I think it worked out quite well.
Now obviously there are some issue with this. Cleary we don’t want arquebusiers going off on their own and forming block. As a player you could prevent this by simply NOT doing it (house rule time). The Ai, well, eventually a pike unit will likely rout and or the ai will move it away from the arqebusiers and theres nothing you can do about it…. So its just an embryonic idea.
BTW I don’t suggest that ALL pike and shot formation need be set like his. The Swiss and Landsnect formations would be untouched. These setting might make more sense for the smaller(and later period) pike and shot formations where they should be more tactically integrated.
Another issue is coding units as S class We don’t want large infantry formations coded as S to be “overrun” by cavalry units charging so you’d need to carefully consider your cavlary stacking limits and adjust unit sizes accordingly. In my experimental alt PDT, most cavalry units are 150 men with a stacking limit of 200 cavalry. A 300 S class sword and buckler infantry unit cannot be overrun (unless multiple cavalry stacks charging comes into play. As the unit exceeds the 1/8 skirmisher stacking rule for melee combat , they act like formed infantry anyways in melee, in terms of casualties they take and inflict
Other lines of experiments to improve the AI behavior led to some mneet discoveries.
To try to get a workaround vs the ai charging anything and everything with cavalry units not suitable for melee, I wanted to see if there was SOME way to prevent the AI to melee at all with certain unit types . This lead me to experiment with NEGATIVE melee modifiers in the OOB’s.
I was hoping a negative melee modifier would make it impossible for a unit to initiate melee but instead, its just applied as a negative modifier (this lead to another concept I’ll go into further on)
My solution: I coded some cavalry units with the binary value of 3 nromally used for pike units
It actually worked, the game keeping some the attributes of the unit as cavalry and coded as a pike
As Units coded 3 can form block or column but cannot INITIATE combat when in column, and as cavalry units can only form column the effect was exactly what I wanted.
Now the unit card says they “can block” but when you try, you get the message” only infantry can form block”, when you try to initiate melee yo get the message cannot attack in colum. These units defend normally when attacked though.
Even better , they CAN charge and over run skirmishers(if they are >= in # of men) leaders and wagons ( didn’t test vs artillery but assume would be the same) It is clear the game doesnt consider an overrun to be the same as melee
So what utility would this have? I was thinking it could be used to have an exclusive class of skirmishing cavalry that can still drive off infantry skirmishers and harass formed troops with missle fire , but under the AI control cannot charges pike blocks or any other bodies of formed troops and be doomed to immediate destruction…
I created a scenario testing this and the AI appeared to handle these units the same as any other cavalry, it swarmed right up to my infantry units and basically pummeled them with missle fire
There is one oddity I noted. I gave my experimental skirmish only cavalry the Bow weapon class which has quite powerful stats. I was surprised when these unit caused incredibly low casualties. I believe (not fully tested) that , coded as “three” as a hybred unit, the engine is applying the infantry column reduction fire (fires only at 25% effectiveness for most nations)
Couple work arounds: A, you could use a weapon PDT slot to make a “skirmisher only” bow or whatever and assign HIGHER values to compensate, or you could up the column modifier to 100% effectiveness. Since that would change the fire value for ALL unit in that army in column, you could code your cavalry skirmishers a using a different army slot for that specific battle. Somewhat cumbersome but it would work.
Things I discovered when playing with the files:
Melee and armor modifiers
Armor: One can assign max armor of 10
However, 10 means the unit cannot take casualties, EVER and thus can never accrue fatigue.
(BTW the game cannot handle decimals when playing with the values)
Negative armour. Yep, the game supports negative armor. I tried a unit with -9 armor, and it appeared to take casualties at a higher rate but never would retreat from combat. Not sure what utility this could have but there might be a use for it in some way I haven’t thought of.
Melee values: the game supports at least 3 digits of melee modifier ie I tried 900 and it worked
More interestingly, the game supports negative melee modifiers*******
What use is a negative melee modifier? Hmm it depends what you want to do but here are some ideas
Currently there is a gap in melee effectiveness. A unit with a weapon with no “bayonets” set in the PDT melees at 33% effectiveness
If it has bayonets it jumps up to 100% effectiveness which then can be increased in 10% increments (to really obscene #’s)
As one can see there is a 70% “gap”
With negative melee #s assigned to appropriate units, and dropping the “no bayonets” tag function from all weapons in a PDT, one could
A) fine tune the granularity of melee effectiveness
B) potentially free up more weapons slots in the PDT
C) As the engine bases melee effectiveness solely based on # of men, it is not considering really deep formations tended to be wasteful of manpower, one could assign negative melee modifiers to exceptionally large units to take this into account
You could also use negative modifiers to adjust combined arms units that had just enough Pike to nullify a cavalry charge, but not enough to justify 100% effectiveness in melee.
Anyhow, that’s it for now, theres an amazing amount of things you can tweak in this game. Just to be clear, I really enjoy the game and am just glad it was released, even if nothing is officially changed down the road. If JT ever does consider changing some things though, I would love it to be how pikes are handled in game. Simply allowing a hard coded tweak for pikes to be able to melee in column would avoid many of the changes I have highlight above, just to allow the AI to get its pikes into the fray.
Ideally, assigning a “block protection modifier for units stacked in a hex with a block could be considered. The way I see, there is already code in the game that really isn’t used by the Ren engine, and that is 2, 3 and 4 rank infantry
What if 4 rank infantry, when coded as pikes, provide a 2-1 ratio of protection to NON blocked infantry in the same hex? Ie a 600 man unit of pikes in block would “protect” (meaning nullify a cavalry charge bonus) 1200 infantry. 3 rank maybe 1-1 so 600 pikes would protect 600 infantry and finally 2 rank would have 1-2 or 1-3 ? Would allow a lot of flexibility for armies in the second half of the period where varying levels of pike to shot were being used.
Cheers!
My intent was to make the AI more competitive but as I played around some interesting things were discovered that could have some value to other tinkerers as there are a significant amount of entries in the Ren OOB files that one can play around with.
IMHO, the most important issues the AI has in providing a good game is its use of pike units and its tendency to disorder its own troops via movement and stacking.
Pikes:
Pikes are coded with the “binary value” of 3 in the OOB’s, which means they can form block and column but cannot initiate melee in column (btw this is NOT hardcoded to Pikes, any unit can be coded any way you want, you want longbowmen to act the same, code them 3)
There are several issues with this. One, the blocks cannot attack gates or onto bridges, yet when in column they cant attack at all which means a Swiss battle can be held up at a bridge or gate by 10 skirmishers. (this effects the human as well)
Two. This is the big one. The AI has no idea how to use pikes. I believe the AI, as the Ren game is a modified Nap engine, wasn’t programmed that blocks are an offensive formation, and not only a defensive formation vs cavalry. Thus, it will advance in column, get stuck in front of a players units and, well, do nothing. The AI only forms block when directly threatened by cavalry. The second a cavalry unit isn’t in a position to charge a pike , the AI always switches back to column. As units coded as “3” in the OOB cannot initiate melee when in column, the AI never really brings its most powerfull melee units to bear vs a players infantry.
Solution: code pikes (and Tercios) as “1”, so they can melee in column. The only drawback is they can also form line… The workaround for this is, as a player, just DON’T DO It
For me, its really not too much of a big deal if the AI occasionally forms lines with its pike or tercios as there is no inherent advantage/disadvantage to being in line when defending in melee. (of course tercio’s would fire a little better in line…) I personally prefer an AI that can actually attack me with pikes and have the oddity of the occasional “thin red line of pikes”. The natural tendancy of the AI , when programmed to attack, extreme attack is to form column and attempt to achieve high stacking within a hex.
This change might very well give pikes too much ability to close rapidly and engage so possible adjustement to their movement rates might need to be considered.
The second thing I wanted to do is reduce the amount DISORDER the AI creates for itself, while piling up its troops, cavalry/infantry in various formations all in the same hex.
It appears the movement algorithm is for a unit to get to point B from A in the most efficient manner. Since there is no additional movement cost to enter a stack of units, the AI will often plow cavalry units thru its own infantry stacks in order to get to the front.
I found by limiting the counters allowed per hex, juggling the cavalry modifiers etc the AI is handling it formations better .
In an experimental 50 Yard hex scale PDT I reduced the stacking to 1200 men total, and reduced the counter limit to 3 units per hex. Cavalry stacking is reduced to 1/6 or 200 men.
Overall, I found the AI handled its formations much better, there was little to no cavalry entering stacks of infantry. With only three counters (exclusive of leaders) allowed per hex, there were much fewer opportunities for the AI to attempt to move a line unit into the same hex as units in column etc.
Ideally I want to make it so cavalry could never enter a hex of infantry. It is possible to do this (by increasing how many counters one counter of cavalry equals) but the unfortunate effect is then cavalry can only stack one unit per hex and thus cant break into squadrons. As the adjustments I had already made seems to limit the # of times the AI puts its own cavalry into an infantry stack, I didn’t really follow this line any further but I kind like the idea of cavalry never being allowed to stack with infantry(a mechanic found in many other tactical games)
Since Ren is so flexible in making adjustment to a unit on a UNIT by UNIT basis, cavalry formations can easily be tweaked to make up for the much less #’s allowed. IE armor, melee values and even the charge multiplier if needed.
Another “problem area I see in Ren is the block formation itself. Unfortunaltely, The game engine nullifies the Block ability to negate a cavalry charge if ANY unit, other than skirmishers is in the same hex as a block. So you cant stack a pike block with a “sleeve of arquebusiers” as it makes the whole stack vulnerable to cavalry charges.
Ideally JT will change this in newer versions of the game. Even better would be if it was a moddable entry in the PDT to allow a ratio, per stack, of x # of men in block provide the anti cavalry bonus to y # of men in a stack not in block.
Anyways there is no true solution to this except a combination of changes which includes allowing units other than pike to block, as well as reducing the # of men and counters in a hex.
I made an experimental Spanish Colunella formation consisting of 2 300 men pike units, 2 300 men arquebusiers and a 300 man rodelero unit, plus a brigade leader.
Using my alt. 50 yard scale PDT with max men 1200 and 3 counter limit I coded the pikes “1” ( so they can melee in column, I coded the arqebusiers 1 as well, and I made the Rodeleros skirmishers (S class, they cannot break down further)
I set these formation up two stack of pike and shot each, rodeleros and leader behind , coded the ai to “attack” and then fought against them
The AI had no problems keeping the formation I set in the editor. Whenever threatened by cavalry the AI blocked the pike and shot together. Generally, the AI kept the pike and shot units together. The rodeleros often popped out on the flanks and or stacked in one of the pike and shot occupied hexes. Since coded as skirmishers they didn’t nullify the block ability. I think it worked out quite well.
Now obviously there are some issue with this. Cleary we don’t want arquebusiers going off on their own and forming block. As a player you could prevent this by simply NOT doing it (house rule time). The Ai, well, eventually a pike unit will likely rout and or the ai will move it away from the arqebusiers and theres nothing you can do about it…. So its just an embryonic idea.
BTW I don’t suggest that ALL pike and shot formation need be set like his. The Swiss and Landsnect formations would be untouched. These setting might make more sense for the smaller(and later period) pike and shot formations where they should be more tactically integrated.
Another issue is coding units as S class We don’t want large infantry formations coded as S to be “overrun” by cavalry units charging so you’d need to carefully consider your cavlary stacking limits and adjust unit sizes accordingly. In my experimental alt PDT, most cavalry units are 150 men with a stacking limit of 200 cavalry. A 300 S class sword and buckler infantry unit cannot be overrun (unless multiple cavalry stacks charging comes into play. As the unit exceeds the 1/8 skirmisher stacking rule for melee combat , they act like formed infantry anyways in melee, in terms of casualties they take and inflict
Other lines of experiments to improve the AI behavior led to some mneet discoveries.
To try to get a workaround vs the ai charging anything and everything with cavalry units not suitable for melee, I wanted to see if there was SOME way to prevent the AI to melee at all with certain unit types . This lead me to experiment with NEGATIVE melee modifiers in the OOB’s.
I was hoping a negative melee modifier would make it impossible for a unit to initiate melee but instead, its just applied as a negative modifier (this lead to another concept I’ll go into further on)
My solution: I coded some cavalry units with the binary value of 3 nromally used for pike units
It actually worked, the game keeping some the attributes of the unit as cavalry and coded as a pike
As Units coded 3 can form block or column but cannot INITIATE combat when in column, and as cavalry units can only form column the effect was exactly what I wanted.
Now the unit card says they “can block” but when you try, you get the message” only infantry can form block”, when you try to initiate melee yo get the message cannot attack in colum. These units defend normally when attacked though.
Even better , they CAN charge and over run skirmishers(if they are >= in # of men) leaders and wagons ( didn’t test vs artillery but assume would be the same) It is clear the game doesnt consider an overrun to be the same as melee
So what utility would this have? I was thinking it could be used to have an exclusive class of skirmishing cavalry that can still drive off infantry skirmishers and harass formed troops with missle fire , but under the AI control cannot charges pike blocks or any other bodies of formed troops and be doomed to immediate destruction…
I created a scenario testing this and the AI appeared to handle these units the same as any other cavalry, it swarmed right up to my infantry units and basically pummeled them with missle fire
There is one oddity I noted. I gave my experimental skirmish only cavalry the Bow weapon class which has quite powerful stats. I was surprised when these unit caused incredibly low casualties. I believe (not fully tested) that , coded as “three” as a hybred unit, the engine is applying the infantry column reduction fire (fires only at 25% effectiveness for most nations)
Couple work arounds: A, you could use a weapon PDT slot to make a “skirmisher only” bow or whatever and assign HIGHER values to compensate, or you could up the column modifier to 100% effectiveness. Since that would change the fire value for ALL unit in that army in column, you could code your cavalry skirmishers a using a different army slot for that specific battle. Somewhat cumbersome but it would work.
Things I discovered when playing with the files:
Melee and armor modifiers
Armor: One can assign max armor of 10
However, 10 means the unit cannot take casualties, EVER and thus can never accrue fatigue.
(BTW the game cannot handle decimals when playing with the values)
Negative armour. Yep, the game supports negative armor. I tried a unit with -9 armor, and it appeared to take casualties at a higher rate but never would retreat from combat. Not sure what utility this could have but there might be a use for it in some way I haven’t thought of.
Melee values: the game supports at least 3 digits of melee modifier ie I tried 900 and it worked
More interestingly, the game supports negative melee modifiers*******
What use is a negative melee modifier? Hmm it depends what you want to do but here are some ideas
Currently there is a gap in melee effectiveness. A unit with a weapon with no “bayonets” set in the PDT melees at 33% effectiveness
If it has bayonets it jumps up to 100% effectiveness which then can be increased in 10% increments (to really obscene #’s)
As one can see there is a 70% “gap”
With negative melee #s assigned to appropriate units, and dropping the “no bayonets” tag function from all weapons in a PDT, one could
A) fine tune the granularity of melee effectiveness
B) potentially free up more weapons slots in the PDT
C) As the engine bases melee effectiveness solely based on # of men, it is not considering really deep formations tended to be wasteful of manpower, one could assign negative melee modifiers to exceptionally large units to take this into account
You could also use negative modifiers to adjust combined arms units that had just enough Pike to nullify a cavalry charge, but not enough to justify 100% effectiveness in melee.
Anyhow, that’s it for now, theres an amazing amount of things you can tweak in this game. Just to be clear, I really enjoy the game and am just glad it was released, even if nothing is officially changed down the road. If JT ever does consider changing some things though, I would love it to be how pikes are handled in game. Simply allowing a hard coded tweak for pikes to be able to melee in column would avoid many of the changes I have highlight above, just to allow the AI to get its pikes into the fray.
Ideally, assigning a “block protection modifier for units stacked in a hex with a block could be considered. The way I see, there is already code in the game that really isn’t used by the Ren engine, and that is 2, 3 and 4 rank infantry
What if 4 rank infantry, when coded as pikes, provide a 2-1 ratio of protection to NON blocked infantry in the same hex? Ie a 600 man unit of pikes in block would “protect” (meaning nullify a cavalry charge bonus) 1200 infantry. 3 rank maybe 1-1 so 600 pikes would protect 600 infantry and finally 2 rank would have 1-2 or 1-3 ? Would allow a lot of flexibility for armies in the second half of the period where varying levels of pike to shot were being used.
Cheers!