Victor1234
Educated
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2022
- Messages
- 255
Ah but that's a different question, of spacing not melee intensity/timing. I'm not very familiar with medieval historiography but as far as I know what you wrote is the consensus about the Battle of Agincourt, but is unique to that battle and the French specifically, with the English having no spacing problems. The English archer's staves and muddy field ruined the French knight's momentum in the charge, they got stuck and unhorsed and the follow on French infantry crushed them between themselves, the English and their own dead horses/comrades in a moshpit like you said. This sort of effect did happen in other battles too obviously, but only when things went wrong like at Agincourt.
In the classics there is a general spacing debate though, about the Greek hoplite phalanx. One side says that the phalanx fought mainly with doru spears with enough internal spacing in the formation for it (and that's another never ending debate, whether they used overhand or underhand thrusts...) the other side says it was more of a shoving match to knock the enemy dudes down and kill them after, focused on shields and the rankers behind each front man pushing to generate force against the other side doing the same. My opinion is the shoving match would get pretty chaotic and easily lead to a mosh pit effect like you said, but I can see both sides have their points (like with the overhand vs underhand thing), so it's not as clear cut to me as the intensity debate.
As far as the game goes, I checked out your video. I can see what you're trying to do and how Total War looks in comparison, but honestly I think you'd be better off improving the battle AI logic (and making it moddable) than focusing on this specific issue. Your average player isn't going to appreciate it and it'll just look weird/stupid to them and possibly turn them off from the game.
For this specific clip, I think the behavior is mostly believable. We know multiple cavalry charges were a thing. The only things that bugged me personally were how the cavalry threw missiles immediately before impact instead of while charging (didn't seem like they'd have time to switch to anything a second before impact) and the infantry behavior in the early part. It's immersion breaking to see individual infantrymen leave the safety of their formation in that clip to do 1 on 1 duels with the horsemen, putting themselves at a disadvantage for no reason.
The whole point of a formation and casualties during routing is that single soldiers are much easier to cut down than when they're in formation, even though some cultures practiced champion combat, which is basically what this is showing until nearer the end. Even the late Eastern Romans/Byzantines did during the Muslim invasions at the tail end of antiquity (I don't know enough specifics to know if for example the Japanese samurai would've found 1 on 1 horseback vs foot to be fair though).
Conversely, the cavalry doing 1 on 1 duels with the infantry like that with so much space for the infantry to gather around looks off. Again, it's not my area, but I do know that in the late medieval period, militias in modern Belgium/Netherlands found ways to beat the French mounted knights by adopting tactics that saw them swarming in groups of 3 against 1 knight, with specific roles for each infantryman (1 would try to kill the horse, 2nd would try to knock the knight off, the 3rd would be ready to kill him once on the ground, etc). It seems the infantry are being very polite to queue 1 at a time to take the horsemen on, but looks much better when they all charge nearer the end.
I think you should also make a new topic for your game in the Codex workshop part of the forum since that might get more eyes/visibility on it than here.
