The issue of units remaining on the front line has bothered some folks for quite some time.
Thus while most of us like Rout Limiting ON others feel that the units should rout away sooner.
It all depends on how you handle the troops and how you decide to use them once they are beyond 300 fatigue.
Past that level I usually will not melee with them as they are losing melees on a higher level. I prefer to use fresh troops to melee with.
If a unit has 500 fatigue I know that I hardly ever will melee with them.
But if a unit has 500 fatigue I would not necessarily say that that unit should rout away. But mass routs did happen.
I suspect that why most of us do not like the mass routs is that most of the players we play pack up the entire army on turn one and hurtle it lock stock and barrel at their opponents. Thus if a wide gap is created in a line then you are a disadvantage. It probably will cost you the game.
I can see both sides arguments to this story. My question would be: how does your opponent play? Does he use his forces carefully or does he send the entire army at you on turn 1?
If you have divisions commitment rather than an entire corps all at once then its more in keeping with how they fought. But if you toss an entire corps at a front with no reserve then the issue is that even with some breaks that disorder a few bns. you still have a large force to break through your opponents lines.
I think that also the scenarios tend to be play balanced in this direction too. It always seems to be a race against time. For instance: why is Waterloo just one day in length? What if both sides decided to fight for another day? Perhaps the Anglo-Allied side would like to rest their troops. How about Blucher's fatigued men (meaning that they should arrive with fatigue from marching thru the mud) getting a rest after a failed attack? The same more or less holds for the second day of Wagram. Why have it last just one day (not talking about the day of the river crossing)? What if both players decided to play it cagey and just maneuver a bit with some preliminary bombardment?
But looking at it from the simulation viewpoint the use of Rout Limiting being ON is a way of the player saying "I want my troops to fight on longer than the GAME allows (not history). Far too often I have seen units pack it in after only 25 men being lost. Even lower amounts.
The low, medium and high fatigue levels all will highly influence if a unit routs. Especially if the unit is fired on in the flank. That is how I rout the enemy units I face (mainly). Flanking fire, even if the unit has a leader, has that effect.
I lowered the morales in Eckmuhl in the last Update, Austerlitz has lower morale levels too, Wagram is next followed by Jena-Auersteadt. The levels in Waterloo are correct as are NRC (I do not mind the Russian golden morale +2). I do not see the morale levels at fault. I have tried D morale for the majority of the line and it was a race for the exits. Thus C is correct for regular line. B was too high and we are working on making corrections to my games in that area.
I personally would like to see the losses in the melees lowered. Especially for cavalry vs. cavalry issues. They did not lose as many men as are seen in our melees. Its far too high. Especially for the attacker in cases where they are meleeing the flank.
In closing, a friend of mine told me about a unit in Lyon's Army at the Battle of Wilson's Creek, ACW, where that one unit of 300 men routed two brigades of CSA forces. In our game you would have to have the units Disordered and with low morale and probably some of them in a routed condition to pull that off. The CSA forces had not yet formed into their unit formation so that explains the rout. But even so some of the melees we read about are impossible to recreate in our games. And that is why I am mainly against efforts to slow up the attack where it regards morale. The options are there though and the players can turn BOTH Rout Limiting and Flank Morale Modifier OFF and stand back and watch the Replay and see their lines fall apart if they think that is historical. For me I saw that happen after only one turn on the line all too often for me to ever want to have those options turned OFF.
This discussion has been done about once every year since the option has been in the game and it never hurts to rehash it. Perhaps one day we will find a closer model to what really happened.
It would be nice to hear about how LG/HW models morale and how the units operate under fire. I found the Sid Meier's morale model to be one I liked. If you had "friends" your units stuck around longer. Once the line started melting away the morale dropped too. That is one reason why I asked for and got the Flanking Morale Modifier in the first place. Some say the option should work as a negative: if you LOSE a friend then your morale drops. And that might be so too. Something to consider.
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Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Prinz Peters von Dennewitz
3. Husaren-Regiment, Reserve-Kavallerie, Preußischen Armee-Korps
Honarary CO of Garde-Ulanen Regiment, Garde-Grenadier Kavallerie
NWC Founding Member
For Club Games: I prefer the Single Phase mode of play. I prefer to play with the following options
OFF:
MDF, VP4LC, NRO, MTD, CMR, PR, MIM, NDM, OMR (ver 4.07)
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