Movement question

[Nihil]

I have read quite a lot regarding this question but found no answer.

The thing is i have two armies en provinces A and B, my enemy has an army in C.

I am going to launch an attack from A and B against C

My question is: what happens if my enemy decides attacking either A or B?

Is there anyway I can force his army not to move?

[thejeff]

Well, you could assassinate all his leaders. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

What will happen is what you expect. Assuming he keeps his army together, you will fight it in C, or one of your armies will invade C and the other will fight his in A or B.

There's apparently also a slim chance the armies will trade places.

[Nihil]

So I cant expect anything, can I? :-)

[Torin]

the other army of yours will invade for sure

[Folket]

Unless he chooses to attack both armies.

[Ironhawk]

It's not quite anything, but its a pretty volatile situation, yeah. The problem is that when two armies have movement which is opposed (A->C at the same time as C->A) the location is decided randomly. People say that the size of the army has some influence on the resulting province of the battle, but I have seen scouts "stop" entire armies. And personally, I have never seen armies switch places. So its tough to tell.

I call the situation you are in being "forked" by the enemy, because he has his army in one spot while yours must attack in parts. Its something you want very much to avoid while you are on offense. Not so bad while you are on defense because you can always fall back and regruop into a friendly prov.

[lch]

I think you can even have "strange" results if you attack from the same province, when your army is divided among your commanders and a counterattack moves against you. Attackers and defenders in the two provinces are determined randomly then. the one thing to make sure that this does not happen is to group your commanders together (via CTRL or "a"), then they will always act as one and won't be scattered in such a case.

[Aezeal]

I'm pretty sure I've seen trading places.. quite often I think too.

[Edratman]

I have seen trading places, but only when I was using a small force, say 5 units or less, in an attempt to block the enemy army from moving. This was done in conjunction with an attack on the original enemy province with a larger force from a third province. Easy to remember because it always pisses me off. I've not seen it the other way, but that is probably because the AI won't attack with a force of 5 units.

I don't believe I've ever seen two armies passing without combat if both had at least 25 units (as a guess).

[NTJedi]

Edratman said:
I've not seen it the other way, but that is probably because the AI won't attack with a force of 5 units.




Unfortunately that's not true... the AI will continue attacking with an army until the army retreats off the battlefield. I've seen it march 1 commander armies with only 4 units right into a 40+ independent province.

[Edratman]

NTJedi said:

Unfortunately that's not true... the AI will continue attacking with an army until the army retreats off the battlefield. I've seen it march 1 commander armies with only 4 units right into a 40+ independent province.



I've not seen that. Or at least I don't remember it attcking me that way. I do recall seeing it lose way too many battles in provinces that I have a scout in when it attacks indies or other AI nations, but I seldom view those battles.

[NTJedi]

Edratman said:

NTJedi said:

Unfortunately that's not true... the AI will continue attacking with an army until the army retreats off the battlefield. I've seen it march 1 commander armies with only 4 units right into a 40+ independent province.



I've not seen that. Or at least I don't remember it attcking me that way. I do recall seeing it lose way too many battles in provinces that I have a scout in when it attacks indies or other AI nations, but I seldom view those battles.



Basically the current AI will march it's armies until all the units die and/or flee. Once the AI commander/mage flees it will gather new troops before marching again.

[Nihil]

Thank you for your answers, they have provided me very useful information.