Micromanagement in Total War

This article will cover how micromanagement is employed in the Total War series. Firstly, a definition of what micromanagement means in the context of a turn-based and real-time strategy game is important to give.

Micromanagement refers to commands given to specific units to make them more effective at what they do. Let's use an imaginary example of one player using archers against an enemy advancing with pikemen. If the player with the archers doesn't do anything each of his archers can fire three arrows before the pikemen reach the archers and begin cutting them to ribbons. However, the player commanding the archers can move them backwards away from the pikemen between each volley of arrows. This allows them to fire more arrows before the pikemen reach them, potentially four or five volleys instead of three. If the archers are able to move faster than the pikemen, this will actually allow them to kill all of the pikemen without taking a single hit in return. An example of a game that has an extremely strong emphasis on micromanagement is Warcraft 3.


An Orc player fighting against a Human player in Warcraft 3.

In Warcraft 3 players control a rather small number of units compared with many other RTS games. Players are limited to a maximum of 100 total population and most units take up at least 2 population. This means that even the largest battles will only have twenty or so units on each side. In comparison, a large battle in Age of Empires II could easily have one hundred or more soldiers on each side. Warcraft 3 focuses the player's attention on a few important units rather than on building a ton of units.

The hero system, where players build an extremely powerful unit that gains experience to grow even more powerful as enemy troops are killed near them, further increases the micromanagement talent needed to succeed in Warcraft 3. For example, in the image above you see that the Orc player's shadow hunter hero is casting healing wave, which heals friendly units. At its first level the spell bounces to three units, healing all of them for a small amount of health. As the shadow hunter gains experience from killing enemy soldiers, his spell can be upgraded to bounce to more targets and heal more damage, making his spell an extremely potent healing ability. Each player may have up to three heroes at one time and they are extremely important to keep alive because they are the most powerful portion of any army and their abilities, health, and damage all improve as they level up.

Additionally, most regular units in Warcraft 3 have special abilities that can make them more effective in combat. In the above image, the Orc player's shamans, a spellcaster in the game, are casting bloodlust and purge. Bloodlust makes friendly units attack and move faster. Purge removes beneficial spell effects from enemy units and also slows their movement speed down. Both spells can turn the tide of a battle if used properly.

In essence, Warcraft 3 is a game that forces players to focus on using their units to their maximum potential rather than just building more of them. Thus, micromanaging each unit to keep them alive and attacking the most appropriate targets is an extremely important part of the game.

So, with that definition out of the way, let's move on to how micromanagement is used in Medieval: Total War 2.

Micromanagement in Total War
The only area where true micromanagement occurs in Total War is in the RTS component of the game, where armies clash on the battlefield. It begins with the deployment of soldiers on the battlefield, which both sides are usually allowed to do before the true battle begins.


The deployment screen. Players are allowed to move their troops wherever they wish in their area of the battle map and then hit start battle to begin.

Choosing the right location to deploy an army on the battle map is extremely important, as picking the right terrain to fight in can win or lose a battle. The geography of the battle map is based off of the campaign map. If there is a big forest on the turn-based map it will show up if there is a battle in that location. Many areas have hills, bridges, and other important features that a deploying commander should take advantage of. In the above screenshot, the hill in the foreground was where I chose to deploy my army, as it provides a great base of fire for archers and also tires the enemy force out as it moves up.

Choosing the right way to deploy the components of an army is also important for achieving victory. Ranged units like archers, ballistas, and catapults can all take a heavy toll on an advancing foe but they are extremely vulnerable to cavalry charges. This makes it a good idea to place them in a location where they can easily be defended by friendly spears, pikes, or heavy cavalry. In the example below an English army with dismounted heavy infantry and archers is facing a large Scottish force. The English player chose to place his archers slightly in front of his heavy infantry line. This allows them to fire on the Scottish army as it approaches and inflict as many casualties as possible, but also keeps them in a position where they can retreat and regroup quickly behind the protection of the infantry line.


It also helps that the Scots apparently didn't know how to make plate and mail armor, giving the English force a tremendous advantage in quality of troops.

Some other examples of deployment decisions a commander might want to make include grouping heavy cavalry units together to make a powerful opening charge, setting up long ranged weapons like cannons on hills to give them a better field of view, and choosing which special formations certain army units should employ. For instance, some cavalry units can be set into a wedge formation which gives them greater penetrating power in a charge.

So now the battle deployment is completed properly, is there anything else a commander can do to influence the victor? Of course. However, it's important to note that not every unit has the same potential for improvement with appropriate micromanagement. Some types of units can accomplish a lot more with careful control than others. So I will go through the main types of units in Total War and describe how to manage them appropriately.

Cavalry
Cavalry benefit the most from careful player stewardship. They are the fastest units in the game, which allows them to be sent as a quick reaction force to anywhere the battle is going poorly. They move fast enough that they can also be used to strike enemies in the vulnerable portion of their line, for example circling around to hit a pike-wall in their unprotected rear to inflict heavy casualties. Any time an opponent's infantry shows their rear is a great time to slam them with a cavalry charge. Cavalry also are great to micro because they do a lot of damage to enemy troops. Any fast, high damage troop is a great unit to micro as they can run circles around an enemy force while slaughtering anything they touch.


As these rebel archers discovered to their dismay when they tried to pull back to the safety of their village.

Cavalry have one more significant advantage over the other units in the game-they can disengage from melee combat without suffering catastrophic losses. If an infantry unit is in combat with another infantry unit it cannot pull back gracefully, it will take a few moments for the unit to regain cohesiveness and finally move back. This time period is long enough for a unit to lose quite a few of its members while it's trying to assemble.


In this example, the spear militia unit on the left is engaged in battle with the peasants in the middle so they are unable to just keep moving past without fighting with them for a while.

Cavalry differ from infantry in that they can usually be ordered to back out of close quarters combat and quickly move to a different location in the battle. This is a great feature to take advantage of at the start of a battle when the combat is usually between both side's archers and siege weapons. A player can send their heavy cavalry in for a quick charge to slaughter a couple units of archers or crossbowmen and then pull them back when support arrives for the ranged units.

Ranged Infantry
There are many types of ranged infantry available depending on which faction you play. England has access to powerful, extremely long ranged longbowmen and yeoman archers, Spain and Portugal have a number of javelin hurling units that do high damage but do not have as long a range. Most of the Italian factions rely on crossbows instead of longbows. What they all have in common is that they can be fiddled with to great effect in a battle.


Peasant archers, one of the weakest ranged units in the game.

The biggest advantage archers have is that they are more mobile than regular foot infantry. They do not wear thick armor so they move faster and tire less easily. This allows them to kite enemy troops. Kiting is a term that refers to moving back from an enemy while harrying them with ranged attacks-effectively inflicting great damage while taking minimal or none in return. How this plays out in battle is that a player with archers can have his archers split up in all directions and run while turning to pelt an enemy with arrows every so often. It may take a great deal of time but eventually the enemy infantry will die and the archers will take almost no casualties.


In this example, the Scottish infantry finally gave up and ran for it.

There are two considerations that a player using this strategy needs to keep in mind. One is that if an enemy has light or heavy cavalry it will not work very well, as cavalry can certainly outrun archers. The other is that some of the heavy infantry units will not take much damage from ranged attacks, so you may be stuck retreating when your archers run out of arrows or quarrels. Still, ranged infantry have a great potential for improvement with careful management by a player during battle.

Ranged Cavalry
Ranged cavalry are the best of both worlds-they're fast cavalry and they can also shoot at a range! They are also able to fire while moving so they can retreat while inflicting heavy casualties along their entire retreat path. The only major problem these units suffer from is that they carry much less ammunition than ranged infantry, particularly the cavalry units that throw javelins. This means that they may be left without any ranged capabilities a few minutes into the battle. However, this does not leave them useless. They still function as reasonably powerful light cavalry units and they still have a charge bonus. They can be useful for harrying enemy archers and for hitting the vulnerable rear and flanks of enemy positions.

Siege Weapons
Siege weapons do not have much potential for good micromanagement. They fire slowly, are fairly inaccurate, and cannot be moved readily. The best you can do is pick what you want them to try and hit and maybe they'll hit it one shot out of ten. I'm not particularly fond of siege weapons, they're useful for attacking cities and castles and that's about it.

Foot Infantry
As I mentioned previously in the cavalry section, foot infantry are difficult to micro because they are slow and cannot disengage gracefully from combat. What you can do is choose the right location to deploy them and use their special formation abilities, such as pike-walls and schiltroms, to maximum effect. These units tend to make up the main line of your army and serve as the axis on which the other components of your army are based. They provide a safe bastion for your archers and siege weapons, a place for cavalry to retreat to when outmatched, and will likely end up forming the majority of your casualties in every battle.

Conclusion
Although the Total War games certainly do not have the micromanagement focus of Warcraft 3, players can still manage their troops to win seemingly impossible battles through wise use of ranged kiting and cavalry maneuvering. However, it's important to keep in mind that the battle map's terrain can limit how much micromanagement can be done. Bridge battles are particularly brutal in this regard, there's a narrow path to fight on and not much that can be ordered to change the outcome.


During the Battle.


After the Battle.

so be cautious in where you choose to fight and victory will be yours!

The next article will be about macromanagement in Total War-how to appropriately purchase units, improve your economic state, and upgrade units and towns.

When Your Ally Quits

When someone on your team quits or has his internet connection drop in a RTS game, it reduces your chances of victory dramatically. You only have a limited amount of concentration available and when the units you have to control suddenly double you will not be anywhere near as effective a commander. Resources to build troops won't be harvested as efficiently, units won't be built in sufficient numbers, and your army won't be managed as effectively in combat.

Unfortunately, many RTS games add even more penalties to a player when their teammate quits. There is usually a limit to how many troops you can have at a time. For example, in Company of Heroes, you can only have a certain population number worth of units fielded at once. As you take territory on the map, this number rises a bit, allowing you to build more troops. Different units also have different population values. A squad of pioneers, the basic worker unit for the Wehrmacht faction, takes up 2 population. A Panther heavy tank, in comparison, takes up 12 population.


In the German army, pioneers were the rough equivalent of combat engineers, not these guys.

In team games, each player can field the same population of units based on how much of the map your team controls. However, if one of your allies quits the game, the maximum population of units you can build does not go up. This basically means that if you were playing a 2v2, you now have to fight their combined force of units with half the number of troops. Additionally, you may be stuck with some of your population tied up in units you don't want, such as pioneer squads, which prevent you from building better troops. This is not a recipe for success. If an ally quits the game you should still be able to build as many troops as you could when he was still playing, otherwise the contest is completely unfair.


You get very little out of losing an unequal battle as well. Unlike the Alamo, no one will want to paint a heroic scene of your outnumbered last stand in Starcraft.

Another major problem in some titles is that when your ally leaves you no longer have access to his resources so you're forced to use your own resources to build troops from his buildings. This is a huge problem if your ally had been hoarding resources the whole game, as his reserves of gold, lumber, and other items are not available for your use ever again. This poses an imbalance wherein your opponents now have more resources than you and can thus outnumber you easily by building more soldiers.


Breaking open his bank to get his resources is rarely an option.

The worst error a game can make is that when a teammate quits, their units and buildings aren't transferred over to their team's control. They just stand around wherever they were when he quit for the remainder of the game. They don't even attack their former enemy if they are in range. This means that you are definitely left facing multiple opponents at a huge disadvantage as you're now one army short whenever battle occurs.

Warcraft 3, in comparison, does things the right way. When an ally quits the rest of the team is granted control of their remaining units. They preserve their resources and population, allowing the remaining teammates to use their resources to build troops from their buildings. The team is still at a disadvantage by losing one player's concentration and skill, but they have a much more fair shot at winning. It is inexcusable for any RTS game to use a different model.

Brief History of Artillery Development

Artillery has progressed from serving an ancillary role in siege warfare to being a major branch of every military in the world. When determining the scale of victories or defeats, the number of guns captured was factored in alongside casualty listings. But how did artillery evolve to play such a major role in the victories or defeats of nations? This article covers the early development of artillery to its use by Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus, whose changes in tactics and strategy showed the true potential of artillery to every nation in the world.

Introduction

Francis Bacon, a significant English philosopher, statesmen, and author, credited the three greatest inventions of his time in his work Novum Organum in 1620. He chose the printing press, the compass, and gunpowder. Gunpowder had changed the face of modern warfare by Bacon’s time, forcing new tactics and strategies to develop on the battlefield. Additionally, industries devoted to the manufacture of firearms, artillery, and gunpowder emerged in every European country.


Austrian field piece

Route to Europe

Gunpowder, and its first military uses in rockets, cannons, and other weapons, originated in China. Through trade, firearms technology slowly diffused across Asia to Europe, disseminating to most countries by the fourteenth century. Initially, cannon were not powerful enough to knock down castle walls, but most armies saw great potential in the technology. Many nations invested in small artillery pieces, and the formula for gunpowder was experimented with to improve destructive potential.

Improvement of Gunpowder

A great advance was made when European powder-makers added liquid to gunpowder in an effort to reduce both the dust produced in manufacture and the hazard of accidental explosions. The paste produced was allowed to dry in granules, leading to the term “corned” powder. This powder turned out to be both more powerful and easier to load into cannon. The power was increased because the powder ignited simultaneously, producing a coordinated explosion. Previously, the gunpowder first ignited by the application of flame would explode independently, ejecting a good portion of unlit powder, thereby reducing overall explosive yield.


Example of Black Powder

The Hundred Years War

The Hundred Years War featured the first large scale European employment of cannon in warfare. For the most part, the cannon employed were fairly small pieces, such as the bombard cannon pictured below. Despite their small size, the improvements in gunpowder composition increased their performance tremendously, enabling them to take down castle walls. The traditional advantage that walls gave defenders was reduced greatly. A fortress considered unassailable a century before could now be seized.



A typical smaller bombard.

Cannon also proved their worth in defense on the field. In 1453 at the Battle of Castillon toward the end of the conflict, six thousand troops under Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury marched against a defending French force. The French were set up in a defensive position with over three hundred cannon arrayed against the English. As English forces charged forward, French bows, firearms, and cannon inflicted horrendous casualties. This battle foreshadowed the critical role artillery would begin to play in field combat, inflicting mass casualties to advancing troops at great distance.

The Fall of Constantinople

Also in 1453, the changes artillery would cause to the nature of fortifications were revealed through the final advance of the Ottoman Empire against the venerable Byzantine Empire’s capital of Constantinople. Constantinople was defended by tall, thick walls which had kept it safe from attack for centuries, even as the rest of Byzantium fell to the Ottoman Empire. The Turks deployed a gigantic great bombard artillery piece to fell the walls along with other smaller bombards. Their great cannon took 200 men and sixty oxen to emplace and could fire only seven times a day.


The Great Bombard used by the Ottomans

Some of the weaknesses of artillery of the period were revealed in this siege, as well as their strengths. The great bombard itself was rather ineffective. The cannon was inaccurate and took an extremely long time to reload. The Byzantines were actually able to repair most of the damage inflicted by the great cannon before it was readied to fire again.

However, over a period of weeks, the Ottoman’s artillery began to inflict heavy damage to the walls, aiding the final assaults that took the city. The siege showed that cannon, given enough time, could eventually bring down defenses impervious to all previous siege weapons. This would lead to a revolutionary change in fortifications as the old defensive models used throughout Europe based on Roman or Medieval styles were no longer effective.


Mehmed II advancing alongside his great bombard.

Weaknesses of Early Cannon

Early artillery was hindered by several factors. Many cannon weighed a tremendous amount, causing them to become effectively immobile once they were deployed. Precision targeting was impossible. At best, gunners could aim for a general area on the field. They were also were rather unreliable and dangerous. James II, a Scottish king, was killed in 1460 when one of his artillery pieces exploded near him. Artillery had a slow rate of fire as well, due to the nature of their construction. Breech-loading artillery was difficult to implement due to engineering limitations of the time, so most pieces were front loaded, a much lengthier process.

An additional problem that early cannon faced was caused by manufacturing limitations. Each piece was crafted and cast individually. This made it difficult to keep artillery in working order, as each piece was effectively a unique model of gun. Muskets shared a similar weakness when any of their components became damaged. A gunsmith would have to craft a new piece that fit into the body of the weapon, as standardized, replaceable parts had not been invented yet.

Improvements to Cannon

The mobility and strength of Cannon were improved throughout the 15th century. Field carriages that allowed them to be pulled into place by horses or oxen were created, allowing them to be moved intact to the field rather than in pieces. Advances in iron casting technology allowed the gun barrel’s size to be reduced. Engineers developed trunnion, which were cylindrical projections from the gun barrel into the carriage that allowed the piece to be depressed or elevated far more easily than before. This allowed gunners to change their targets on the field more rapidly.


A field piece with trunnion visible on the sides of the barrel.

In the early 17th century, several more improvements were made. The shot and powder of cannon were combined into a single cartridge in the 1620s, which made cannons far easier and safer to load. They were placed into a small fabric bag that was destroyed when the gun fired. Unfortunately, residual fragments of the bag tended to foul up the gun barrel. A new tool, called a worm, was created to clear out any remaining bag fragments to keep the gun ready to fire.


A worm used to clean out gun barrels.

Grapeshot and canister shot were also developed to enhance the effectiveness of artillery at close range. Both of these types of shot consisted of numerous small metal balls inside a metal case or fabric bag. When fired, the casing was destroyed and dozens to hundreds of lethal objects were shot forward in a wide angle, similar to a shotgun. This was absolutely devastating to infantry and cavalry at close range, and added a significant amount of versatility and power to artillery-they were able to employ solid shot for longer ranged combat and switch to canister or grapeshot as the enemy approached to inflict horrendous casualties



Diagram of a Grapeshot Canister

Advances in artillery tactics-Gustavus Adolphus

The visionary Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus brought artillery into the forefront of field combat in the early 17th century. Whereas many nations were focused on creating fielding larger cannon, Adolphus believed that mobility and training were more important for creating a potent artillery force. In that vein, he chose to employ dozens of smaller cannon that could be rapidly shifted to fire into critical areas of battle. They were deployed in flexible batteries that fired into the gaps between his musketeer and pike formations, devastating any enemy troops attempting to penetrate these seemingly open areas.

Adolphus revolutionized the training of artillerymen. His cavalry, foot, and artillery all drilled on the field together in combined arms exercises. His artillerymen were far better prepared for combat than the artillery of other nations due to this vigorous training that more accurately simulated battlefield conditions. At the Battle of Breitenfeld between Protestant and Catholic forces, the Swedish artillery fired three to five volleys for every returning volley of the Catholic artillery. When Catholic cavalry attempted to charge the Swedish positions multiple times, they were driven back by intense artillery bombardment, at a rate of fire unmatched by any other army at the time. Adolphus’s flexible formations also showed their worth when Catholic infantry moved in a flanking attack on Swedish lines. Swiftly shifting his troops, Adolphus brought his artillery and troops to bear on the flanking attack, devastating it with barrages of artillery and musket fire.


Gustavus Adolphus at the Battle of Breitenfeld

Adolphus’s employment of highly mobile, highly trained artillery was a groundbreaking shift in battlefield tactics. It changed the face of warfare entirely, influencing Napolean and many later generals in their own battle formations. Artillery advances focused on creating lighter, more mobile guns that were capable of shifting to new threats on the battlefield. Better training and equipment allowed the rate of fire to increase dramatically, allowing artillery crews to make major differences on the battlefield.

Cannon had evolved from serving as a limited support weapon used to level fortifications to a core component of every general’s army. No one could afford to neglect their artillery services, and the mobility and power of guns continued to increase throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, serving critical roles in all major conflicts of the time. In future articles I will show the continued progression of artillery through the major conflicts of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.