Simultaneous movement

[Ironhawk]

Yeah assassination spells are a great way to paralyze an army that is not prepared for it. If you are facing a large army that has only a couple of high leadership commanders, killing one will make all the troops under it's command stop moving for that turn. This tactic is a particularly vicious thing to do on the eve of a major enemy attack.

[merlinme]

Well, in the game which originally got me to raise this question, I'm really not convinced that the system was working as it says in the manual. I tried invading his province I'd say at least six times (in a single player game, so the game was fairly static. I was holding a chokepoint province which I was attempting to break out from.)

EVERY time it occurred in my province. This isn't impossible if it was 50/50 each time, but it seems rather unlikely.

One thought which occurs to me is that maybe it was because he was invading me from three different provinces? In which case, I assume I would have to move before ALL of them to fight the battle in his province, so in other words, 1/4 chance rather than 1/2. I would still have expected to move before him once in six attempts though.

The other thing that I found strange was that when I got tired of attacking the same province (his capital) and attacked one of his other provinces, my army successfully moved out first time. Which again, could just be chance, but it seems a bit strange. Basically, when we were contesting movement across the same province border, he won every single time. When I moved on a province where (I'm fairly sure) he wouldn't have been trying to attack me from, it worked first time. His army moved into the province I came from, but my army finally moved out and attacked another of his provinces. So basically I was able to work around the problem. It was strange though; it didn't feel like it was random at all.

It's a problem with turn based games to get a sensible move order, but I'm not sure I like the system as it stands. In particular, sending one militia unit from several different provinces in the hope of forcing a vastly superior army to stay where it is (while you raise reinforcements) seems rather a cheesy tactic.

I was hoping it didn't work like this; the manual implied that the size of the army mattered. Does anyone have any hard data on this?

[thejeff]

You definitely don't have to move before all the invading armies. I know I've seen cases where one of my invading armies made it and one was stopped by an attack.

[merlinme]

Yes, but if we have friendly armies A and B, all in the same province, and enemy armies C, D and E, in different provinces (all moving into your province), and army A moves into hostile province C while army B moves into hostile province D; then if the move order is A, C, D, E, B, then army B would fight a defensive battle, while army A would move away.

At least I think that's what you meant, that one of your armies invaded but one stayed still?

What I'm curious about is if you only have one army, do you have to move before _all_ armies attempting to move into your province? So if someone moves six armies into your province, do you only have a 1/6 chance of moving out of the province?

For ultimate cheesiness, you could script your 6 armies to Retreat, so you'd stop someone's much bigger force attacking you, and you wouldn't even necessarily take any casualties.