I am working towards a two or possibly three stage system for the AI opposition. Stage one is the Fight or Fly decision, stage two is a deployment system and stage three will be a battlefield tactics decision, except it may not be! This is because the deployment may be all I need, I'm currently wondering if it's going to be the case that once a deployment is decided upon by the AI the actual tactical plan is obvious. Time will tell on that one.
Here is what I have so far for the deployment stage, the results from the fight or fly test are merged together into four deployment groups, these being:
1. Aggressive (Fight or fly result one or two)
2. Balanced (results three, four or five)
3. Defensive, (results six or seven) and
4. Retire (results eight, nine or ten)
For each of the four deployment groups there will be ten possible deployments, imagine a grid of four columns of ten rows giving forty possible choices of deployment. To generate a deployment the column is selected that matches the fight or fly result and a single cell obtained by a di roll or card draw. A result of one being a less aggressive deployment and a ten being the most aggressive deployment for that column. Some of these results will be duplicated so for example the three least aggressive deployment options in the aggressive column (numbers 1-3) would be mirrored as the most aggressive deployment options of the balanced deployment options (numbers 8 - 10). This should mean that I need 31 deployment descriptions. Which is where you 'dear reader' come in! It would help me enormously if you could suggest some deployments to fill the spaces in the grid.
An example of the sort of thing I am looking for is:
"No reserve line, extend cavalry wings, mass at least 70% of any shock cavalry on one wing (dice for which) deploy light infantry and cavalry to screen the assault troops balance to the weaker wing."
It might help to go back and look at the fight or fly test factors which would create the outcomes that I grouped up into the four deployment categories. In principle the aggressive deployment group expects to simply roll over the enemy, the balanced deployment expects a fight but with an advantage to the AI, Defensive expects a stiff fight with the enemy force having advantage, and retire is an AI general having an 'Oh bugger we are in the deep do do here, what can we salvage'. Remember that each column covers a range of fight and fly outcomes so I'm attempting to generate a range of deployments for each column.
It's worth knowing that the deployment layout uses a nine box grid taken from Rob's suggested blog site 'Grid Based Wargames' (thanks Rob I found some rather useful ideas there). These are three lines each with a right wing, centre and left wing. The lines from front to rear being Advance guard, main Line and Reserve. I may add a fourth line but with only a central box for a grand reserve or similar.
