That is just how close combat works. Lines meet, formations push against each other and oft time merge before reforming and rejoining the attack. Individual units may try to hold a coherent formation, depending on their training and equipment, like pikemen blocks, and unit may try to position itself relative to its neighbors, but all along the line break through etc will occur. Given the limitations of turn based combat and the visualisation provided you need to imagine a lot of this, but notice that you men always fight as a single group, sticking together within the crush of the fight, and when it comes time to advance again, they do so as complete unit.
Yes I completly agree, and do visualize it this way. When I imagine it this way with things such as lines breaking and such and people getting seperated and such. They go in together get mixed up a little in the fighting, and if reform to advance. In middle during the chaotic fighting I think it would be impossible for a some people to know when most of their unit has died, and while they would actually care as long as they are still fighting with people of the same country. Unless he notices that everyone in total on his side is dying. If after a skirmish and they keep marching a guy realizes he is the last one why can't he just tag along with his fellow country men. I am getting the impression from others that they visualize it where each noble unit does some fancy unique formation alongside other noble units doing the same. I see it more like nobles donate their men to a collective pool sorta where the men will try to stay togther, but they are marching in a line with all other noble's units.
"(1) Note that this is the value where your men will be ordered to retreat. They might still retreat on their own due to fear, panic, low morale and other factors. These factors are totally independent of the value you enter here. The only effect this value has is that if your unit suffers more than this amount of casualties, a retreat will be ordered."
So I would think in general unless you set very low causality levels, that in the example you gave there would be a good chance the unit will have retreated due to morale or something anyway.
Well it could still work because it would just trigger when ever retreat happens where if you had 1 more man then where you would retreat with all those other factors. A bit more complicated I guess.
The second issue has to do with the order of combat in the game. All hits are allocated before causalities. That means that if a unit decides that it is time to retreat after 1 more man dies, all the other hits against that unit are virtually wasted. A possible exploit of this would be to have a few large cheap units set to retreat at low casualties. Since large units tend to attract a greater percentage of the hits, for at least 1 turn you could render a good portion of your enemies hits ineffective as they are allocated against units that retreat.
Hmm yeah that is a good issue. I was thinking that would be like when they are the last people in the group. So to fix that I guess all hits that got removed would have to be moved to someone else which again would be more complicated.
The first thing I feel like I am arguing a losing battle, but don't mind. The second thing really annoys me though. Cuz there is also the factor that when you get way more hits your units get killed instead of wounded. It is so annoying to see because of the timing in the rounds and the rate I get causualties that my unit will then get blasted on at the end and have all dead and zero wounded troops.
