Black_Warder

Join Date 06/2006

My 1b and beta in general thoughts

regading combat, skirmishers, city managment and misc....

First I would like to thank Nathikal for hist post that made me start to really think about this stuff.

Not sure if this was already recommended, but I didn't see it on the comprehensible suggestion list, so I'm going to assume 'no'.

The Glade Runner, a start-level Elven unit in Age of Wonders II, was designed for skirmish combat. Due to the game mechanics, he failed horribly and was little more than a decent scout.

I've been thinking...why is it that the only battles that seem important involve 10,000 vs. 10,000? Guerilla warfare and brief skirmishes, to harass enemies, have been forms of tactics for a long, long time. One nation gets taken over by a vastle superior one (militarily speaking) and, although they have lost a number of cities and their own grand army has been scattered, they fight back with small groups, harassing key points and making it so the enemy never rests.

If nothing else, the ability to concoct these sort of strategies ought be an option. Skirmishes would impact the morale of both sides - you can never rest, as you're constantly on the lookout for attacks - and guerilla warfare would use small numbers in a strike team to try and optimize damage. Not only a subtle way to fight, but a brutally effective one, especially if spells of invisibility and concealment become an option. It will require thought to properly initiate, but could be even a sort of game or a unique combat mode. Say, give an overland army a 'skirmish' mode button. When in such a mode, they move slower and have concealment in rough terrain - heavily forested areas, deserts, mountain ranges, etc. Such a mode can be used only be very small armies.

When attacking, then, you don't just initiate tactical or automatic combat. Instead, you are given the option to engage in a brief skirmish (a timed tactical) or guerilla warfare. For guerilla warfare, your small band of soldiers appears on a battlefield at, say, night, with the enemy camped out ahead. What happens then is up to you...but begin with the soldiers caught unawares, have some sentry soldiers patrolling, etc. To be caught ends up having the alarm raised, and an angry army facing your small band.

Skirmish and guerrilla warfare might sound cool in books and movies but it's not something that would be fun in a 4X game like elemental.

My Idea

I think that it can be implemented by giving an harass ability, basically you pick an army and order it to harass a certain area, the AI will use the army to hit and run attacks on caravans, outposts, resource centers etc etc etc, each time your soldiers encounter resistance you will have the ability to command them in the tactical battle or let the AI do it.

In this way, designing fast moving, lightly armed, stealthy, elite units will have more impact in the game. Offcaurse, the defending player will have the option to assign troops to guard an area and chase intruders, so designing garrison units will also have impact (not to mention that they will be a resource drain on the defender economy)

So in this system, lets say that you want to build a skirmisher, you enter the design unit screen and you equip your man with equipment that will enhance their move rate, stealth, endurance and some attack rates to hurt the enemy so I give him some very light armor, ranger backpack to enhance sight and slightly stealth, cloak of camouflage to make him more stealthy, ranger boots to farther enhance strategic movement (only usable with light armor) a long bow and a sword (equipping 2 weapons should double the training time for a unit and maybe ecquire a minor penalty to attacks that only better training would nullify) and a healing potion (for kicks and giggles).

Managing armies stacks

This leads me to another point, managing armies, I think that there should be an army management screen to allow us to change the layout of our army and make subgroups with different characteristics.

For example in the above case of a skirmisher (Rangers™) army; I've built and gathered a 100 strong group of man with different equipment loads and I want to organize them to several raiding groups, so using the army organizer screen I can, with a simple click and drag, make 5 sub-groups of about 20 rangers each ( with a different mix and match of weapon loads for each ranger) and mark each group as skirmishers.

Same thing could be done to organize cavalry and infantry units in your normal armies.

The AI role:

The AI in here should play a critical role in order to lessen the micromanagement aspect of managing several stacks of of skirmishers on the strategic map (at end game you might find yourself with several tens of those)

Lets take for example our Rangers army from the above example, we move the army (swiftly he he) toward our enemy borders, upon reaching them we hit the harass command and designate the area we want them to harass, a pop up window will appear asking us what the priorities to attack, defend and flee from, after doing so, the AI will disband the army to it's pre-designed subgroups and each subgroup will independently conduct raiding ops in the designated area.

The player will be able to take command of specific groups if they wish to and once he is done the AI will automatically retake command of it.

There should also be a command to regroup the army at a certain point.

Same thing should be for the defender, you pick an army and you assign it an area to defend a priorities window will pop up and the AI will than divide and use the available troops to escort caravans/ garrison cities and villages or chase raiders according to the player instructions.

Skirmishers in your big army

The same system can also be adapted to the big army, if your army movement speed is 3 and you got some Ranger companies in it with lets say movement rating of 7, than by designating them as scouts in the army management screen they will automatically move in front of the army and around it effectively expanding your LoS and allowing you to search for enemy stealth units and scouts, in effect adding the skirmishers and scouting battle that every one calls for and giving a reason to deploy lightly armed troops in your main armies.

City development

Regarding walls

Right now each city comes with a ready made wooden wall, I think that this shouldn't be the case and that each wall segment in your city should be built by the player for 2 main reasons:

1. I find it an immersion killer to see mines and farms inside the city walls.

2. It make resources raiding on the strategic map really hard since you will need to siege each town in order to hit it;s resources.

3. a minor point, it will add a sense of "living" city to the cities since when you progress farther and farther into the game you will have to build another wall and another one and the city will look like those fantasy city maps with several rings of walls and rural building outside.

regarding farming

I really like the idea of a large city supported buy a lot of rural and mining communities, just like in all the fantasy books and D&D campaigns that I read and played over the years, I think that there should be an option to build "Farmsteads" next to farms, in essence, a Farmstead will only add 5 people, 2 food, 0 prestige to the city and could only be built next to a farm (could be farther than the farm with more farming research).

So in mid-game when I have my bug bustling 10,000 people city most of it food will come from 3-5 farming villages.

Regarding Caravans

I would really like to have more info on caravan routes in game and the ability to influence general resource distribution in my kingdom (like having one village ship mainly food to city x etc etc)

I'm sorry for the messy post it's actually started as a small reply and grew up to this.

I'll clean it up tomorrow after uni.

Best regards

Warder

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Alstein

Join Date 07/2004

+55

I can see a raid and raze strategy working. Force the enemy to split his forces up.

Speed kills in 4X.

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Goodmorrning all:

Regarding garrila and skrimish tactics,

I am not a huge fan of the automated and AI controlled gurrila warfare and skirmish running, but i have given considerable thought to makign the game gurrilla warfair friendly.

Combat Risk, https://forums.elementalgame.com/368771/page/2/#39

Elemental Armies 10-10000 https://forums.elementalgame.com/368984

When attacking a unit i implied that differnt types of missions can be used, and evaluated for probabilty, and that army sizes can be key, that huge armies are significantly disavantaged when being attacked by small raiding parties, and tiny groups.

I would suggest tactics like
Target leadership - attaks a small group including a stronger unit, really hurts the platoon's moral
Raid/destroy supplies, - hurts moral and prevents healing for some turns
Steal supplies - takes any supierior weapons and equipment from stack boosting your coffers at no cost.

I also suggest that larger armies need and must have defined thier supply lanes, which can be targeted for attack in gurrilla like fastion.

Oh i really like the farming supply idea, where one big town is dependent on many smaller farming villages to supply the food it needs to grow. capital idea.

take care

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I don't think that you got my point about AI management.

Currently, when I play the beta, I usually got 5-6 cities around turn 100, 6 cities means 15 caravans one between each city, having even 3 groups hunting them down manually can be annoying but not that hard..... but lets take a look at a mid-game situation on one of the 64-bit version of the game (with humongous map) and your opponent got 46 cities meaning 1035 caravans on a much greater part of the map, even having 10 groups running around and hunting caravans (or attacking unguarded resource points, etc etc etc) can grow old really quickly, I would rather have a smart AI that I can set priorities to and watch him excequt them alone.

Spying System

As for the Target leadership, I think that this belong to some sort of spying system (a subset of the diplomacy screen perhaps?), maybe we should be able to design and build spies that usually will not be actually represented on the map as a figurine but would act the same way spies acts in total war and EU, they could have missions like:

1. Gather information on tech.

2. Gather information on trade.

3. Gather information on heroes.

4. Gather information on spells.

5. Sabotage technology research.

6. Sabotage spell research.

7. Sabotage production.

8. Sabotage training schedules (make training new troops longer or not yielding XP....)

9. Sabotage food production.

etc etc...

Using spies should not relay on 1 spy per mission but should relay on spy rings, each mission success rate will depend on the number of spies in the same ring in different cities.

For example: lets say that you want to learn what techs your enemy got, so you design and build 1 spy give him the "Gather information on tech" mission and send him to your enemy city that produce the highest research points lets say 100 per turn, the success chance for this mission will be (0.1*RPinCity)% for gaining knowledge 10% in our situation and (0.02*RPinCity)% for stealing or 2% in our case, several turns later you train another spy, add him to the first spy "ring" and send him to the same city but because you already got a spy in there the second spy will only get (0.075*RPinCity)%, or 7.5% in our example for a total of 17.5%, because this city already got a spy in it, but if you send him to the second largest RP producing city with 84 RP than he will add 8.4% for a total of 18.4%. If you add a third spy in the same city the spying coefficient will drop to 0.05

This numbers of course could change from research, spells, spies level, counterespionage etc etc etc...

Designing and building Spies

Spies should be designed and built like any other unit in the game, with different loads for different missions, The spies gear and experience (level) should determined their Spying coefficient their "Don't catch me" coefficient and their counter espionage coefficient.

Example: Lets say that we want to build an info gatherer guy, so we equip him with fine cloths (i.e merchant disguise) to raise his "Don't catch me level" and we equip him with "Bag of bribes" (raising spying coefficient) and a potion of disguise (very expensive big boost to both spying and "Don't catch me " coefficients).

Spies training times should always be much longer than normal soldiers training time.

Spies are only trainable in the palace or special espionage schools that comes later in the espionage tree (barracks like building only for spies).

Army Logistics

I agree in general about the armies supply lines, each soldier should have an upkeep the most basic one and generally unchanged one should be food, each soldier should count as 1 citizen when it comes to total food consumption, beside food, each soldier should cost an upkeep of a percentage of the materials that made him.

For example, if a lightly armored archer cost me in materials 0.5 leather, 1 wood, 0.1 iron than the upkeep of said archer should be something like 0.1 leather, 0.2 wood, 0.02 iron....

Upkeep costs should varies according to what the army is doing, an army in garrison duty should cost less upkeep than an army that is actually fighting.

I think that when an army is on the move it's supply should be represented by caravans, those caravans could be attacked and defended just like in any harassment mission, the longer an army does not receive supplies it's attack and defence modifiers should drop.

And to finish, here is a cool spell for eviiiiiiil players.

Consume essance

Basicly, you take one hero/wizard/channaler that got essance kill him and absorve some of it's essance, this will inqure a large hit to prestige, foreign relations and hero recruiting chances.

Warder

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I just skimmed this, but I have one quick thought on walls. Instead of having to manually do each wall segment, you could build walls around all the existing buildings in the city. Any buildings built after are put outside. You can then put another round of walls up when you feel like it.

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Exactly what I had in mind.

Warder

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Quoting ,

quoting post

Regarding walls

Right now each city comes with a ready made wooden wall, I think that this shouldn't be the case and that each wall segment in your city should be built by the player for 2 main reasons:

1. I find it an immersion killer to see mines and farms inside the city walls.

Having lived in the middle east with a view of one of those ancient city walls from my apartment... I would find it an immersion killer to have all the mines and farms outside the city walls.

Whether it is an ancient greek village, or town (i.e. the Siege of Athens), or Middle Eastern... cities all had those farms and other things inside the walls for protection. That was the whole point, to be able to withstand a siege of hostile enemy forces. You couldn't do that if you didn't have any way of producing food inside the city walls. You wouldn't last a week if you're all starving. While there frequently were dwellings outside the city walls, they were generally the poorest members of society who needed the protection of being able to flee inside the city walls and didn't have much to lose outside of it.

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Woot? I would like to know where you seen such places in teh ME, just so I can go and check them out myself....

(I currently live in the ME)

Warder

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