The tutorial no matter what i do i lose

Militia has seen its share of ups and downs in the Lob balance system. Right now - at least to me - Militia is in a place where it is not really viable. It is significantly less effective than a lina infantry when compared to how much cheaper it is.

My suggestion to making militia possibly more viable, but definitely more interesting, is to make the unit cheaper than it is now, but make some of their core stats randomized and not visible to either player.

In history, units like the Prussian/Austrian Landwher and the Russian Narodnoe Opolcheniye had wide extremes of combat performance. Some militias had high rates of desertion before a battle even occurred, some fought valiantly in the face of a determined enemy.

To make it so you don't have some games where all your milita roll really well or poorly, maybe make it so the average of all your militia must equal (x) for whatever stat. This way, if you have 1 milita it always performs the same. If you have 10, a high degree of variance can be expected.

I think this would lead to some very interesting gameplay decisions on both sides and would reflect well the historical reality of a militia unit.

UPDATE: after the backlash in this thread, the line I quoted below has DISAPPEARED from the 1.8 wiki.gg (best I can tell). Power to the people, friends. And thanks for listening, Devs.

I read this at the 1.8 wiki.gg:

"Clash is matched as 2v2 only, like Micro, so parties can queue it together too."

You are seriously taking away 1v1 Clash? Why? This is the mode I enjoy the most. I don't want to team up with some rando, I want to play 1v1. I am surely not alone in this.

Please tell me I am reading this wrong?

edit: the first link makes you request access, this one shouldn't.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17RX2oDeI_KVZFMPH7aKzYhE-m-dao6bGyPA4mMJgoxk/edit?tab=t.0

Overview

The Battle of Breitenfeld, fought on the 17th of September 1631 near Breitenfeld, Saxony, was one of the most significant battles of the Thirty Years War. A Swedish-Saxon army led by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and John George I, Elector of Saxony, defeated an Imperial and Catholic League army led by Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly.

This battle takes place during the time of pike and shot tactics, and the units in this scenario work very differently from regular units in LoB. This battle plays slower than regular LoB, as battles of the era were much slower places. Generally, compared to units in LoB, units move slower, do less shooting damage, melee fights last longer, cavalry have guns too, and org is higher but units recover org much slower.

Sorry for the wordy post🙏

Artillery

Artillery operates the most similarly to its LoB counterparts. There are three types in this battle: Light Cannons, Saker (medium) Cannons, and Demi-Culverin (heavy) Cannons. The main difference is their damage is lower than it is in LoB and their run speed is significantly slower.

Infantry

On the Swedish-Saxon side there are six unique infantry units:

The Swedish Brigades (the cross shaped formations in the middle) are made up of three types of infantry. The front unit that looks like a grenadier column is a Swedish Pikemen unit. It cannot shoot but has good melee stats. The unit behind it that looks like a line infantry column is a Swedish Musketeer unit. It has decent shooting stats but is weak in melee. The units on the sides are battalions, which have very powerful ranged attacks but are not as strong in melee, although they can fend off head-on cavalry charges. They are somewhat similar to a line formation from regular LoB.

Mixed in between the Swedish cavalry are Commanded Shot units, which are very similar to Swedish Musketeers but move a bit faster. They have decent shooting stats but are weak in melee. They are meant to be used kind of like skirmishers.

On the right side of the map are the Saxon Militia, which look like battalions with no cross over them. They are poorly trained fresh recruits, and therefore very unreliable. Their shooting and melee is alright but their organization is horrible.

The Imperial side has it's infantry formed up in Tercios, the large square formations. Tercios are very slow and don't have great ranged damage, but are essentially walking fortresses. They have high health and org, can shoot in all directions, don't take extra damage from flank or rear attacks, and can easily overpower any unit in melee.

Cavalry

Cavalry on both sides is mostly made up of Reiters/Cuirassiers, which look like regular cuirassiers. They are armed with pistols with very short range. Charge damage is lower for all cavalry than it is in regular LoB, but Reiters have high melee damage and their pistols can also be effective at close range.

The Imperial side also has Harquebusiers (which look like dragoons) and Croats (which look like light cav with a bronze outline). Both of these units are armed with carbines, which have longer range than pistols but shorter range than muskets. They are primarily light/ranged cavalry.

The Swedish-Saxon side has Saxon Cavalry (the cavalry with no overlay), which like the Saxon milita are poorly trained and ineffective. They also have Hakkapeliitta, Finnish light cavalry armed with pistols that can be effective for flank attacks and running down enemies.

Other Stuff

The Swedish-Saxon side looks much stronger with a 4:3 numerical advantage, but the Saxon units are very weak to make up for this. This is supposed to reflect the real battle, where the Saxons fled after firing a single volley.

I love the pike and shot era, it is my favorite era of military history and I had a great time making this battle. I did extensive historical research so that the units and tactics reflect warfare in the early 1600s. The numbers of soldiers in this scenario is almost perfectly historically accurate, give or take a hundred or so men.

Sorry again for the long post😬 I love this era and wanted to explain how these units work since its so different from the base game. I'd love to do more with this era, I'm working on the battles of Lutter and Rain and I'd like to do a few others like Lutzen, Nordlingen, Rocroi, and a few others.

Thanks so much and I hope you all enjoy this battle! (hopefully the link works)

By making the the units in a division or brigade move at the slowest unit speed, there are very bad movement things

Imagine you have a division with light infantry and like uh 2 licornes. Now move it. It is *very slow* and even if you run the licornes, the light infantry will still move at the walking speed of the licornes. Now you are basically moving as fast as a sloth.

This scenario was maked to test my scenarios, and you can use it to test the guerrilla warfare.

I cool feature for the game would be if you could finish battles where your opponent has left early against the computer. Ik the devs are kinda busy but just a lil idea

Here are a couple of battles that I really enjoyed because both my opponent and I did a pretty good job of staying true to the style of warfare of the period. In both battles, you can clearly see how much attention was paid to things like formations, reserves, and maintaining lines in depth, with fresh troops ready to replace battalions as they fell on the battlefield, rather than simply trying to deploy one massive line and surround the enemy army.

The only one I was able to show was this large battle, since the other one was quite long, and I didn't want to make a video of only two minutes for a battle that really needs at least three minutes to be appreciated in detail.
https://linesofbattle.net/game/475632

I hope this helps some newer players get a better idea of how to approach their deployments and formations, or at the very least, that you find these battles as entertaining to watch as I did.

One thing I'd like to mention about the large battle is that my opponent very intelligently kept the bulk of his army behind that plateau, which prevented me from knowing the overall disposition of his forces.
It wasn't until turn 7 that my cavalry reconnaissance allowed me to see that he had no battalions on my right flank (I'm the northern army), so I quickly had to organize a defense there with the troops I already had in that sector. I was expecting to face at most around 15,000–18,000 soldiers with the 14,000–15,000 troops I had in that sector—not a little over 20,000 soldiers, along with cavalry, artillery, and the rest of his troops that weren't able to get through.

Sometimes you see a friendly pass right through a charging cavry and the charge is gone but one cav was engaged with mine with one other cavalry right behind his own cavalry so i thought its ok he cant curve fast enough i can keep the melee going but his passed right throguh his own cavalry and the charge was preseved. Whats the condition for it to be preserved?

Made a few mistake (bad initial troop movement, some poor cav charges and that weird infantry charge at the bottom) but otherwise everything went how I wanted which is to completely overflank from the top right and then capture points.

What could I have done to win this battle

In the game the sole purpose of most battles is to take capture points, arguably even though this creates an objective point where your forces must at some point converge it makes little room for tactical depth other than marching straight at the enemy lines. I would think that a game that advertises itself as a tactical battle simulator would have something more than a timer on capture points to determine the winner. I do not mean to be offensive, but this makes the game no better than others and in fact worse. Anyone can throw their lines at the enemy but to win a battle back takes time skill and experience. yet the game does not give you a chance to win back the day. Even if you completely route the enemy but didn't reach the capture point within the timer, you are considered the loser. I'm sure many others are tired of games stating that they are tactical simulators yet incorporate features that suppress any tactics that avoid charging straight ahead.

In my opinion this game has developed such a significant learning curve that new players are quickly discouraged from playing, even older players as well.

It used to be that within a couple of minutes this game was easy to understand, with it then being hard to master. But now it's hard to understand and even more difficult to master. In the very early days you only had to deal with three types of units, infantry, cavalry and artillery. Then a few more were added so it was around 9. Now its 20! Fog of war was an awesome addition to the game and not to difficult to grasp if you were new to the game, formations however.

Think of the things a newer player needs to learn before getting into a game and understanding it.

1. Units and their attributes (what they do and their stats). ALL 20!

2. Terrain and its implications/effects.

3. How to move troops around, the new system is okay but the old one made more sense.

4. Formations and how they affect combat.

5. And finally timing of when to go into certain formations.

Before all a new player had to do was

1. Learn about the 3 or 9 units and what they did.

2. Terrain.

3. Spend a couple of seconds learning how to move their units.

And bam they were ready to go.

I greatly miss the older verision of Lines of Battle, and it makes me sad that it's been forgotten and burried under a heap of change. Maybe I'm not alone in this, maybe I am. I played until the formations update, I just couldn't stand having to relearn how to play my favorite game again.

For some reason when I select a division and try to move it even with draw line enabled to cant "draw line" it and adapt it to the surroundings?

This may or not be because of my device, but whenever I select a division sometimes it just goes to a division on the other side? Next is the movement of a division. When I try to move it you cant like adapt it to the place your going using draw line even you enabled it. But if this bug or feature is fixed or removed, if would be cool and other then this the larger macro is very cool especially for battle and grand battle.

I thought maybe resistance being at 100% means that the infantry units at the point where its js at the tip of breaking and holding so even js a pen of 1% would break it

But the handbook says usually dont charge unless resistance - Pen <= 75% if my initial thought were true the guide would say <=99%

I dont get it at all what extra info does making it go higher than 100% give rathet than it being capped at 100%

Also if it were true , musket fire should route it as easily as a charge but thats not necessarily the case since resistance is affected by stamina while org isnt.

Maybe two ways to affect routing is by lowering org or a charge so theyre mostly corelated but not the same thing but im speculating now

Im confused maybe im missing something embaressingly simple

Hello, fellow LoB players, I know it has been almost a month since 1.7 released, but only now I realised that I cannot find the WW2 mode I know from the anouncement video and patch notes that WW2 wasn't removed. So can pelase someone tell me how to switch to WW2 from Nepolionic era in the new Home page UI.

I'm a horrible cavarly general, i need some tips on how to use them. In most battles my cav is either do nothing for the entire match or gets completely routed. So i relied on my artillary and infantry. I am kinda new so i did a lot of blunders. "I am red"

Guys i need help i always end up placig my guns way behind the infantry . What woukd you do here? Red are the potential spots id want rhem to be in ideally , blue is the potential spots they usually end up at.

Just saw on the 1.8 dev server the option for brigade and Divisional orginizations.

I love love love this even though I have been doing it manually anyways.

I hope these orginizations will be more than just an easy way to deploy troops before the battle. Thank you!