A couple suggestions to promote good formations

[Poorlaggedman]

I think what's needed is to set a very apparent advantage to having good formations beyond the formation 'buffs.' While the best formations may seldom exist in actual WoR gameplay I think every bit you gravitate towards maintaining them should help you in a few ways. Ideally it would be good enough so that people will prefer cohesion more and even so when on the move. Basically when moving it's from one point to the next in a mob and what people refer to as "line battles" occurs when stationary. There's no advantage seen to moving cohesively. The only time anyone moves in a battle line is when attempting to roleplay. Complex maneuvers may remain beyond the grasp of the average gamer but there's no reason that keeping formations should be pointless in a game on a war where they weren't pointless, where if the formation fell apart the men would generally leave the field as fast as they could. This is of course not noob-friendly and experienced players will serve a practical purpose helping keep order and making sure players understand the value attached to certain behavior.


Lone wolves are still a problem, contrary to what some people want to say, and this will also help to curtail them. It's just too easy presently on most maps with cover provided and with heavy smoke to get among the enemy and cause an entire force to turn around for one guy. A big factor in Civil War combat was visibility. How can we simulate day turning to night from black powder smoke and not expect constant suicidal meelee runs which would have never even crossed the real-life combatants' minds to embark on? The Civil War was vicious at times but I think society is a little perverted today in its perceptions by the sick events of the 20th century and into recent history. Soldier's speak of unwritten code and expectations of conduct even between opposing sides. I have respect for the tenacity of the Japanese foot soldier in the second World War but I don't see why we should be simulating the Samurai code of conduct in gameplay for the American Civil War but that's basically the leeway given to players currently.


I didn't include it, but I think the loss of color from suppression should really only be reserved for the highest states of suppression as a way of the game to tell you that you should have already ran away. Before that there should be various progressive levels of trembling and visual and audio distortions and perhaps an audible heart race, heavy breathing, etc..

https://youtu.be/JjUuaVXTJsY

[Charles Caldwell]

Something clearly needs to be done to improve ordered play and stop the scourge of lone wolfing, these suggestions are by far the best I seen.... I'm just hoping those who make the decisions, listen!

[Bravescot]

I agree fully with what is being said here. I get shot far too often by lone wolves picking off anyone who is an officer, NCOs or holding the colours. It is beyond infuriating not because I am being shot, but because we will shoot that person right back and they’ll just come back regardless how many tickets they are loosing.

[Oleander]

These are good ideas. Some things I would suggest is suppression from team killing, and maybe an auto-desert if you are away from a formation for too long like Officers and Flag Bearers have now. I REALLY like the surrender idea.

[Sox]

Good post.

In my humble opinion this is, as you say, quite complex, but I think there are a few reasons why we do not see this type of gameplay in WoR.

The first obstacle to formation gameplay lies in spawning. For whatever reason WoR has no facility that allows you to spawn into a map as a unit. For example, my regiment is the First Georgia, & as such we have five formed Companies as per the Company tool provided by Campfire Games. Once we arrive at any given map however, we are given the same two Regiments to choose from as everyone else, so right from the outset we are split up. We cannot count on getting an Officer, we cannot count on getting a flag, we cannot even count on getting NCO's. So instantly, everything that has been organised 'on paper', counts for nothing.

The second obstacle is a knock on effect from the first one. Once in the game you are then forced to rush any attempt at finding your comrades by the already ticking clock. At 'best' this involves your leader drawing a line (IF you were lucky enough to grab an officer slot) or having him yell over everyone else ''form on me'' & at worst someone shouting ''let's go'' and all the sheep running off after him.

The third and final obstacle is propably the worst one, the lack of a third person view for moving. I've heard all the arguments against this, but the simple truth is that a third person view could have been locked into movement only, which is vital for an era based upon men moving in formations. This is the major hamstring to formed movement, yes it's possible to do it in first person, but it's impossible to do it quickly enough to avoid being shot to pieces while messing around in first person. Going from column to battle line should be the fastest way to get men into a cohesive fighting formation, and it is not, the 'tactical blob' is. The Devs cite 'purity' for this oversight when in fact, the feature hampers THE most important feature of a game from this era, the ability to move and fight in formation.

Speaking of 'purity' brings me to the final point, team killing. The reason stated for this feature is 'realism', and that is pure hokem. Friendly fire was not this much of a problem in the American Civil War, EVER. Am I the only one that finds the concept of running a comrade through with a bayonet, BY ACCIDENT, more than a little ridiculous? It brings nothing, at all, to gameplay AND is largely a-historical. Most problems related to griefing are results of team killing - fact. It is a feature that this game could easily do without. There are YouTube channels with over 20k views featuring this, on some it's even a weekly feature for the owner to come into this game and kill Confederate flag bearers while he's actually a Confederate himself, it's beyond a joke now.

In reality there is only one way that you'll ever cure the lone wolf problem, and that's by showing them a better way. Sadly that is left largely to the community, because of all the above. I have no idea if the Devs will ever actually make it so that the Companies we formed on their website will actually matter, but I KNOW they'll never get rid of friendly fire, and I KNOW we'll never get a third person view for moving. So these problems will go on, team killers will thrive, tactical blobs will rule, & the only way to combat these design flaws will be private servers with enforced rules that make competative play a joke.

[Poorlaggedman]

I have to admit I kind of like formation movements being tough, it makes drilling have a real purpose. It would be cool if you could do third person on the drill maps at least, with it being some optional variable for the servers later on. Obviously it already exists on the drill maps we just can't move with it. I do worry slightly that people will prefer it so much they'd exclusively want to be on 3rd person servers.

You could make it so formation statuses themselves take time to complete. So if you're in a raggedy blob and you jump into a line it takes a little time before it becomes officially a line. You can't just hop straight from "skirmishing" to a tight formation you have a warm-up period before officially adopting the better status. Truly people could play however they want but the advantages of formations should be apparent enough that people see the advantages, even to pause under fire if needed.

Also maybe formations could mature the longer they keep ranks. So lets say for example you have a "close formation" and you're doing a good job keeping it over several minutes, perhaps even through maneuver. Then your close formation becomes close formation+ then close formation++ and then close formation+++ maybe causing a very slight variation to spawn time, players to spawn loaded, or else it adds more leeway to temporary breakages in it. So instead of going from "close formation" to "loose formation" it would go from "close formation++" to close formation+" before dropping further over additional short intervals of time. Kind of like a reserve bank of good formation behavior you can lean on in times of need.

Just like the formation statuses takes a few seconds to build they take a few seconds to drop unless the whole line just scatters. So if you're 'in formation' and then suddenly collectively only meeting the requirements for 'skirmishing' then 5-10 seconds pass before it's officially dropped. If you were in formation and you just left it, and the parent formation is still there then maybe it instantly drops. Maybe too complicated.

and maybe an auto-desert if you are away from a formation for too long like Officers and Flag Bearers

I'm actually hopeful one day even Officers won't have to be auto-deserted and can even have some cumbersome reload feature for their side arms.

Friendly fire was not this much of a problem in the American Civil War, EVER. Am I the only one that finds the concept of running a comrade through with a bayonet, BY ACCIDENT, more than a little ridiculous?

Yes but meelee is also significantly over-represented itself. I know they're going to change that in some ways. When I read the first-hand accounts of hand-to-hand they often paint a picture of bewilderment on the part of the combatants like the one I use with W.H. Bird and his Lt. getting overran by Iron Brigade troops near Willoughby Run at Gettysburg. I think you can do it better while still allowing for occasional full-on skewering of people with bayonets but it would take a lot of design effort. Often times the brutal blows seem to come in a chain reaction like the famous story of the Michigan officer stabbing an enemy soldier and then getting bayoneted. It didn't happen all the time, demands for surrender were more common than skewerings.

Save-Flag-Gettysburg-Troiani-1200x480.jpg

I believe autosurrender would be a powerful way to finish off smaller formations to the point that it would be the preferred way of closing in rather than a 1-1 slugfest that leaves only a few survivors. Yes you may enter into hand-to-hand with them but as the enemy formation dissolves they will either run away or be autosurrendered. So mobbing up on the enemy as a finishing move would be the most effective way to disperse them. You wouldn't have to crowd up and kill each guy like we have to currently, resulting in the friendly fire. The smart ones would take their shot and run off to reform somewhere anyway.

[Soulfly]

I am not a fan of this auto-surrender, it may sound like an easy way to prevent lone wolfs to happen but personally I want officers and NCOs to be responsible for this....in my old Battlegrounds 2 days you were simply shot in the back if you were running off the line....and kicked from the server the 2nd time, guess what happened after the 3rd time?

Now, you want to manage everything via the game itself it will become less fun (not thinking about the nightmare to code this) because what will happen to skirmishers? they will automatically be punished for not being in a tight formation.....but in a scattered line of a couple of soldiers. I know that the game admin thing is limited at the moment, but even as a normal player you have some power to drill those guys....for example, if a charge is ordered or changing the position and you see half the company reloading or still aiming and shooting, tell them to move (yes, i know...in-game voice might be an issue) and if they dont react give them the rifle butt.....THIS will enforce a reaction and until now never a hostile one.

And my 2 cents regarding the " Friendly fire was not this much of a problem in the American Civil War, EVER" ....the confederates lost a promising General because of friendly fire and there some more accidents like Shilo or Antietam "The 15th Massachusetts was on the left flank of the line, and while it was fighting Confederates in its front, it also began taking fire from the 59th New York Infantry in the second Union brigade line directly behind it. Intervention from General Sumner finally stopped it, but not before the 15th suffered some friendly fire casualties."

[A. P. Hill]

Units could probably maintain better manoeuvrability if they move as most units of the day moved, at the walk.

Everybody is in such a rush to shoot someone else that moving in formation will likely shorten their time to kill, so they feel the need to break ranks and either double quick it or charge every time they move, which of course as we all know is nothing like real life.

I don't know too many people who go from point to point at a dead run, all the time, every minute of their lives.

Sure there are, and will be times when moving at quick time and even charge will be useful, but certainly not every time you move..

Get units to understand that, then the massive lines and manoeuvres will take place.

[Sox]

And my 2 cents regarding the " Friendly fire was not this much of a problem in the American Civil War, EVER" ....the confederates lost a promising General because of friendly fire and there some more accidents like Shilo or Antietam "The 15th Massachusetts was on the left flank of the line, and while it was fighting Confederates in its front, it also began taking fire from the 59th New York Infantry in the second Union brigade line directly behind it. Intervention from General Sumner finally stopped it, but not before the 15th suffered some friendly fire casualties."

Those were isolated incidents, & friendly fire was not a factor to anything like the degree it is in WoR. And would you mind explaining how 'giving them the rifle butt' is any better than auto surrender, seriously? Talking about banning people & TKing them for being out of line is NEVER going to happen on public servers, no matter what you did in your 'old days'. You are missing the point, these are game design flaws we're talking about here.

In online games, if a player CAN do something, then he WILL do it. Anyone who has been, even of the periphery, of game design knows that as a solid fact, allowing team killing and then trusting to players to be respectful is naive' in the extreme. I'll say it once more, it adds nothing to gameplay & the amount of trouble it brings is simply not worth having it as a feature.

I mean come on guys, I've seen it with my own eyes & I know you have as well. I've been on dozens of firing lines when a well intentioned enemy Company has tried to go from column to line in our front, and it takes so long that we've slammed two or three volleys into them, before they even had a chance to shoot back they're wrecked. No amount of drilling is ever going to fix that. The game needed third person view for moving, not firing, moving. Think of it like this, a Company moving in column of two's is less of a target than the 'tactical blob' is, in theory it should be faster to get that column into battle line, but it simply is not. Last week in Arma 3 we even experimented with it, so I know all of this to be true. Even in Holdfast pubbies are moving in columns!!

''Everybody is in such a rush to shoot someone else that moving in formation will likely shorten their time to kill, so they feel the need to break ranks and either double quick it or charge every time they move, which of course as we all know is nothing like real life''.

It's not that it shortens their time to 'kill'. They just want to be in action, so the thinking is, that in a timed match every second spent forming a column is a second wasted. I do agree with you, walking is a lot easier for formations, but with a ticking clock you will never make people think like that. I'm going to be totally honest here, I hate the skirmish mode. They're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, Civil War combat needs the one thing that this mode denies you....time. As I said in my first post, there is a knock on effect here that makes for a very frustrating experience in skirmish. I'm only still here because now all my hopes are pinned on the mythical 'historical' mode, skirmish mode as a rifleman can still be a very immersive experience, but playing as anything else it's like a job, and that's just not fun.

Many of your solutions to these problems are that 'the players need to do this, or the players need to do that' & just by suggesting, that somehow it's our problem, should instantly tell you that it is poor game design.

[Poorlaggedman]

Get units to understand that, then the massive lines and manoeuvres will take place.

Give them a reason to or else it's just reenacting. I have seen a few cases where groups advanced at the quick time but it's very rare. It also doesn't work well and for very little benefit presently. The time it takes to maneuver is too critical for no real advantage but to preserve stanima. You could just make stanima harder to come by but then you're really just giving the defender a huge advantage in many cases. I would order it myself, especially advancing over short intervals at a time while building up a smoke cover. Faster spawn times depending on the strength of the formation would go a long way to allow more of it. I'd be surprised if the developers didn't already have designs on tweaking the paces of the flag spawns.


You've got to give players a real reason to do things for their own further enjoyment, not just so they can be liked by other players (friend or foe). Why wouldn't someone hide in a bush and then come up behind you and your buddies stabbing you in the back if he can?

The game and its features are the main tool to shape player behavior, not any sort of coercive community tactics. In matters of personal freedom vs gameplay I usually side with the personal freedom. In this case it would be the freedom essentially to transform your Civil War avatar into a drugged up berserker suicide charging alone at the enemy vs the freedom of other players in not having to deal with that BS. We accept stanima limits because we don't want people sprinting all over non-stop. We accept map boundaries because we don't want endless flanking. We accept spawn requirements, suppression penalties, and so on. Why not accept basic limits on how players can fight to the last man or just fight completely separated in hand-to-hand. The player is fearless, relaxing in comfort behind a screen. The player's avatar in the game tires, gets scared, and doesn't want to die a pointless death isolated at point-blank.

The concept works both ways. If you don't want to be autosurrendered you don't get into hand-to-hand without plenty of help nearby. If things start to go south in hand-to-hand, if you're getting wiped out - you run. In fact, it would be impossible to meelee when you're out of line and enemy in formation are close by. You'd be kicked out of meelee mode entirely and start becoming suppressed as a first warning sign when you start getting near an enemy formation. This would also help clean up charges as well and hopefully people would see the value of going in together as a wall of bayonets rather than a gagglestream.


Autosurrender, as I envision it, is something that might not even happen in a whole gameplay round once players are accustomed to how it functions. It's the game's way of telling you that you messed up or you were outsmarted.


Autosurrender wasn't my creation, I have no idea who thought it up but I thought it was genius years ago when I heard of it. We argued over it on the RNL Forums for a real long time and it was never put in. Some people felt like it was a loss of freedom. It would have really, really helped and the game died for the most part anyway, last updated 2011. Granted it was a WWII game and people had much greater killing capacity but lone wolves remained an enormous issue and that would have helped. In that game the idea was more radical. By spraying down an area enough with bullets you could force isolated players to become horrendously suppressed fast and to surrender. In a game like WoR we have the ironic luxury of having single shot weapons. Players crowd close together but you can still literally touch an enemy player several times a round whereas in most games you never get that close with so many players nearby. So we don't need autosurrender to be initiated at a distance by gunfire.


Banning lone wolves is totally impossible to police in a fair manner. Everyone always had an excuse for being separated or "lost" and 'rules' are always enforced selectively. How are you going to be an admin one team and telling players on the other team they're lone wolfing? You can't. In some terrain you have no way of knowing because you have the Fog of War. And the enemy also has the Fog of War so you can't know if they were going at it alone or legitimately lost trying to find their squad. You're returning to the action from the spawn, come upon an enemy from an odd angle and all the sudden you're a rule-breaker. Admins never police their own team as well as the enemy's either. I really hope for a game where the only rule in a standard event is to obey your team leader and we don't have to have these arbitrary rules of "play in formation" "play in double ranks" "no lone wolfing." It's all just a freaking nightmare to enforce and there's scarcely an event where people weren't throwing some accusations of wrong-doing around. That's what I'm hoping to avoid here by wanting the game to simulate the real-world disadvantages and disadvantages to certain activity.

On a Civil War battlefield 99% of soldiers who are alone and are physically grabbed by someone in an enemy formation are surrendering. Want exceptions to the rule? Okay, if you're on a horse you don't auto-surrender. Where's Forrest? You could also make it so flag bearers don't surrender and players near a flag bearer won't surrender (even when out of line). Keep in mind though, to trigger the autosurrender you have to be point-blank to enemy or hit in meelee.

Desertion timers I vehemently disagree with but I don't see a way around them for the flag bearer class alone.