Now I know the title may be a little extreme, but I didn’t know how else to word it without making the title way too long. “Napoleonic Wars” is mod created by Jimmy, which not only modifies the civs with some new cards and units, but it also (and this is specifically what I want to touch on) overhauls the counter system and the way battles are fought so that they’re (IMO) way more fun. Now this may be partially just because it’s “New” but I don’t think that’s the whole reason.
The basic changes to stances are thus:
Volley mode is normal.
Stagger mode grants more range (affects riflemen more than musketeers).
Melee mode grants more speed (the mod makes all infantry slower so this isn’t the massive change buff you’d think).
Defense mode grants more melee resist but makes your infantry slower (musketeers also get an extra multiplier vs cav, its pretty epic tbh they stick the butt of their guns in the ground and point the bayonet out).
Stand ground mode puts your units in a thin line and increases their range damage.
This mod also changes cav a lot in a different way that I won’t get into here, but it suffices to say that when you get into a fight, you MUST use those different stances if you want to win. The micro gets pretty insane in ways I’ve rarely seen in a normal AoE3 game, and it’s a ton of fun. The developers have played around with this idea a bit (see Line Infantry and early Caroleans), but I would love it if this were broadened out to the wider roster, and was wondering what other people thought.
Sounds interesting, and could be fun, but WE won’t even give us a tiny bug fix/balance patch. Ottomans have been insanely op for like 2 years now and there are a number of possibly game-killing bugs. None of it is likely to change and maybe that’s what WE wants.
you kinda need to make this more annoying to use cause then you will run into the problem the devs had when doing this with the carolean when it came out.
Even if infantry was slower at base, if there is a speed difference people will just put everything into melee and then only switch to volley when needed. even weirder it results in very dumb micro tricks where you effectively pull trick your armies by using speed differential of different stances or break snares or run away by switching stances.
The reason why caro and nizams have the charge button was because of how this idea was first tested
That’s true, but Nizams and Caroleans were OP in other ways. I don’t think it’d be as big of a deal with how caroleans are now. The speed nerf with the mod is 20%, and the speed buff from switching to melee is only 15%. That specifically may not work for the base game, but it works really well in the mod.
P.S. also, in the mod lancers are far more prevalent, so it’s not super easy to run away with your infantry.
With how you described the other stances, that design flaw would be worse in this mod and other nerfs are just masking it. There needs to be trade offs for each stance because by the sound of it you should never ever use volley mode in this mod. If you want to shoot, stagger outranges it, if you want to kite you alternate with melee, and if you want to block go into defense.
The stances need to be situational with drawbacks like reduced RoF or resistances, not just straight up better.
Actually I just realized in melee mode musk type units lose melee resist. Not entirely but they go down a lot.
All the stances as far I can tell do have drawbacks.
Stagger lowers RoF,
Melee lowers resists,
Defense lowers speed,
Stand ground he hasn’t decided on yet.
P.S. I didn’t realize I hadn’t mentioned the drawbacks of the other stances before. I just found out the melee one.
P.P.S ignore the melee nerf, it seems to only apply to one civ as a bug. But it’s given me an idea to mention to the mod creator.
Also I will mention that there is something to the fact that if all the civs can pull trick because their infantry move .17 speed faster, then it kinda becomes not a problem. Because everyone can do it.
If melee mode actually does lower resistance that’s a lot more reasonable. Though I don’t think melee resistance should be what gets lowered as that kinda runs counter to what you want fighting in melee and further incentives just using it for mobility. In my opinion, reducing ranged resistance while in melee mode would be the way to go. That would penalize using it to shoot and scoot as you’d be talking more damage by doing that. I would go as far as saying it should give negative resistance if the unit is already at or close to zero (think of it like a reckless charge like a forlorn hope that increases your risk of getting shot). A similar deal could work for trample mode but reducing melee resistance instead. Trample already increases damage taken so it would be along the same lines.
The problem is that, unless the civ has unique Melee Infantry, the best “Melee Infantry” is the Musketeer (or Carolean). Musketeers (Carolean) can beat Pikeman 1-on-1, and can beat Melee Cavalry cost efficiently. This mean that a Musketeer charge stance/ability just temporarily converts it into a better PIkeman or pseudo-Halberdier.
The solution is to make Pikeman better. But that might cause some other issues.
Right, each stance needs an advantage and a drawback. The other thing is that stance swapping should take time and have a cooldown. Otherwise, you will see players micro-ing between defense stances near-instantaneously to get their advantages without suffering the respective disadvantages.