So where did we leave off? Ah yes, you just finished casting a very powerful spell. But thanks to my sense of humor and lazyness the spell description and name were not very helpful. So to get a better idea of what this does you skip the useless spell description and turn to the page that details what the spell does in terms of game mechanics. Unfortunatly due to the aformentioned lazyness I didn't fill this section out either!

The enemy channeler can sense that a huge amount of magic has just been spent. However he doesn't know what the spell does, he certainly doesn't have the spell in his book and its not like we would tell him, he can only observe it in action. Not to be outdone he brings out the big guns and blasts off the rest of his remaining mana in two powerful spells. At the far end of the battlefield a spontaneous whirlwind touches down and bores into the ice like a drill. Large chunks of ice fly up and out of the hole in all directions, shattering to pieces as they land. As the pieces settle, they begin to move. The chunks of ice form up into the rough shape of men and the ice warriors shuffle forwards into ragged ranks. This doesn't take long and when the dust settles there are 1200 newly minted soldiers marching towards you at a slow shuffling pace. Flashing back to our guard for a second reveals bored postures and several games of tic tac toe scratched into the ice, no sweat then.

The larger chunks of ice that didn't break apart start rolling towards the big pit and tumble inside, pushed by gusts of wind. All of a sudden one gigantic olympean sized lightning bolt blasts down into the ice crater like the fist of an angry god. Bits of ice fly out of the pit and flash into steam before your eyes. One of them gets thrown so far that its bounces and rolls to a stop on the foot of one of your guards who flicks it away. As you watch two giant 20 foot tall ice elementals climb out of the steaming pit and slam thier fists together with an intimidating *CRACK*.

--

Things are heating up! Or cooling off as the case may be. With the arrival of those ice juggernaughts things have changed. An enemy of that size can crush one of our guards flat and no amount of training will save them. Having 300 extra lives is handy but they can not be wasted and I would still like to keep the original 7 guards alive if possible. (EDIT: You will learn more about this later) A good start would be to get them some backup.

Digging back through my spellbook you have a look at the summoning section. Instead of conjuring creatures from nothing or bringing them in from another plane of existence, all my summoning spells involve the transport of previously trained troops. One spell catches your eye. Its a spell that creates a two way portal between a battlefield and a prepared portal structure built previously in one of my cities. Troops can retreat through it at no cost, but to pull troops through onto the battlefield takes a lot of effort. We have just enough mana left to form the portal and pull through two random units.

You cast the spell and link the portal to the nearest city which happens to be a seaside fortress. An arch of flames appears behind the honour guard. The flames surrounding the portal flare up and out pops... a bolt thrower? Three of them! They skid to a halt as the guards jump out of the way. The portal flares again and 24 men emerge at a jog, leading with them 3 horse drawn carts packed to the gills with siege bolts. 5 of the men immediately slip and fall, not expecting ice. 3 of the men detach the horses from the carts and lead them back through the portal leaving a 7 man crew for each machine. Your first cast is a lucky one. These men are siege engineers, trained to operate artillery and both destroy and construct fortifications. Given the lack of castles around they are a bit out of thier element so to speak but the bolt throwers will do much to even the odds.

The portal flares again and out walks a pair of gigantic armoured grizzly bears. Walking between them is a tall woman wearing heavily armoured robes and carrying a staff in hand and a crossbow slung across her back. This is Caprice, one of the heroes under the command of my channeler. Caprice is a pyromancer as well as an engineer, the bears are her bodyguards (aptly named Rend and Maul). Not only is she capable of various pyrotechnics but Caprice is also capable of shaping the battlefield with her magic.

--

Taking stock this is what we have on the table. On the enemy side we have a 20 strong unit of elite hammerorc cavalry riding magical wolf mounts with 2 extras, a horde of animated ice warriors numbering at 1200 even, and two giant house flattening ice elementals. On our side of the board we have a 7 man unit of elite swordsmen buffed with a unknown power, 21 siege engineers manning 3 bolt throwers, and a pyro engineer heroine with a pair of ursine bodyguards. The wolf riders are retreating in the face of our bolt throwers and are moving to join with the horde of ice warriors. The horde is still quite a ways distant, advancing at a steady shuffle. The elementals still near the crater are taking slow steady steps forward, each of which shakes the ice and cracks the surface. It seems as if the riders will attack in tandem with the ice warriors while the elementals advance at a slow but unstoppable rate.

Our forces are still in a jumbled group clustered around the fire portal. You have some time to deploy your forces, and now more than ever does the individual strengths of your units become important. This battle could go either way depending on the choices you make.

That would literally scare off prospective readers 4 times harder. And the first post is also the title page that gets displayed no matter which page of the thread you are reading. You are of course right that its getting a bit large. As usual. In the past I tried making "part 2" threads but they never seemed to work as well.

The tale grew in the telling and now the tale needs new pants. Any ideas?

Then again we have already finished talking about how damage is not a number. We are on to simplified complexity which is a related but totally seperate topic. I can probably organize things in a better fashion so I will give that a shot tommorow.

@Tamren - Well if you are worried about scaring off readers due to length then I would question your target audience. If the material is solid, the writing well done and the topic relevant to the community I think people will deal with it.

Some sage advice there from Keith.

Thats a great idea. But as much as I wish it were so I don't get paid to do this so the amount of time I can spend on it is probably too limited for detailed mechanical breakdowns. Even then the best I could do for you is algebra or perhaps a flowchart, I don't know any programming languages. Before I start though we have to get far more specific than what we are talking about in this thread.

Oh hell yes. Hitpoints are something that have been abstracted and dumbed down so much that it becomes an almost meaningless limit break. How come I am just as much alive at 100hp compared to 1 hp? What is the difference between 1 hp and 2hp? It just screams stagnation whenever I see a new game made that relies on the same tired dirt simple system. Its a problem that requires baby steps to solve and I touched on that a bit in my post about mmo tanks.

The difficulty with changing the situation is that any increase in detail just slaps the developer in the face with an exponential increase in effort required. Tracking invididual hitpoints for different parts of the body is a step forward. But I could probably divide the human body into 100 trackable parts with ease and that is a 10000% increase in the data you have to store and calculate.

There are some great ideas in this thread.  I especially love the idea of visual queues that provide understandable feedback about the units.

You may have noticed that I haven't yet mentioned either morale or hitpoints. The truth is I never had the need to. This mock battle is very "personal" and at no point did the battle involve more than 100 entities. Because of this we can spend a lot more computer time on little details like the limping guard and the loss of cloaks. For example, you could zoom in all the way to the invidual health of each guard in the unit of 7. You would discover that the limping guard has a bad bruise on the side of his knee, the armour deflected the orc hammer and it hurts a lot but its not crippling. At no point in the system are hitpoints or any equivalent mentioned or written.

Morale is much the same way. You have more fingers than soldiers under your command. This means that you can keep a finger on the pulse of each soldier (so to speak). You are watching, and they know it. When you cast that spell they could feel the power you gifted them with. In fact if you paused the game while the guards were taunting and examined the personal reaction of each you would see things like "OH ITS ON NOW!" (and of course, "YOU ARE ALL SO BONED!")

If we scaled up combat and replaced these guards with 100 spearmen, the mechanics would be much different. The detail is there but it must be condensed in various ways because you don't have enough attention to take it all in. While you can still examine the state of health for each and every one of those 100 soldiers, you won't be able to do this on the fly. Instead the health of the unit is measured in how many combat effective troops remain in the unit. This would start at 100/100 but would drop as soldiers get tired or are wounded or killed.

During the battle you would see signs. Soldiers start breathing heavily after a long sprint, soldiers at the back of the unit lean on thier spears for a moment of respite. Two soldiers break formation and drag a wounded soldier off the battlefield to the care of the reserves and later return. Every now and then you will see a soldier laying on the ground, you won't know the status of that soldier unless he is conscious or his fellow soldiers have the time to examine him. In a mobile fight there will be fallen soldiers all over the place.

After the battle you recieve an after action report. This is where the detail comes back in full, no matter how large the scale of combat gets. You would read that out of 100 spearmen, 6 are dead, 3 are missing and presumed incinerated (to fireballs) and 27 are wounded. Of those wounded 23 have minor injuries and will be fit for duty in a week, one has lost a hand and must retire as a soldier (he will later become a barkeep), another died of blood loss after the battle and the last one has a concussion and hasn't woken up yet.

For morale, again you must rely on signs. The standard bearer holds the flag high and fights at the front line when your men are holding strong. The difference between the spearmen and the guard is that the speamen is an organized unit of soldiers complete with a leader. This "sergeant" is responsible for the morale of the men under his command and will attempt to rectify any problems while informing you. "Let us at em!" "My men are about to break!" etc. If this leader is killed then the fog of war rolls in bit more or his second in command takes over.

Great! But I have to ask, how feasible is all of this as a whole from a programming perspective? I am convinced that all of this is perfectly possible, but even I admit that as long as money is an issue it will probably not be practical for a long time.

I touched on this a bit when I mentioned the scalability of combat. When combat moves to large scales, detail becomes less important but no less relevant. I think we could probably create another thread to discuss the particulars of health alone. Heck, maybe a dozen threads.

Oh and the player don't absolutely have to know those things in combat. Just the attack/defense/armor ratings and fatigue malus. Sometimes they'll see that soldiers will die in one hit, they don't have to know all the dice thrown.

The only thing I don't like with such a system is that armors are all designed with a two numbers : weight and armor rating. But you can add some rules like shields don't add bonus in armor defense against a flail.

Cull my quotes? You think I made too many of them?

About comp calculation : if you've ever played steel panthers you know roughly your chance of hitting a target. But when you know the algorithm used to calculate it .. It's just a big big one, with lot sof things involved. So I think a complex system, with lots of details can be made.

And the system I described is fairly understandable. A big armor will prevent damge but not getting hit. A light armor will increase your chances of getting hit, but won't really help against damage. the way injuries works doesn't even have to be shown. You just see your soldier "injured" "greatly injured" or in coma.

The key with scaling though is that you don't have to let the amount of numbers overwhelm you. Bigger fights don't mean more numbers, just bigger numbers. All you need to do is pick out the most relevant and condense them together into more simple scores. These scores can then be used in your calculations. Each little bit of data in the background is still being updated and tracked, but the amount of calculations being done at any given moment is reduced. You saw a bit of this in action during part 1. When you look up the attack strength of the guards, it is listed at 100, its a safe bet that 100 is stronger than 90. When we go dig into the equipment inventory of the guard, then you will see more of the numbers that combined to make that 100. The guard unit is only composed of 7 members so the equipment they carry has a huge effect on thier performance in combat.

Realism can also help you in a way by helping to draw the line between what is important and what is relevant. It helps a lot if the position of individual soldiers is tracked ala the Total War games. If they are not then you end up with a simpler system such as the one used by MoM. When a unit of 100 spearmen charges into another unit of 100 spearmen, the computer doesn't have to calculate the "attack rolls" (and thus the armour values, weapon strengths hitpoints etc) of every single soldier at once if it keeps track of the position of each. Only the front line of both groups can actually hit each other and do damage. So the computer drops all other soldiers on the backburner and concentrates on those 40 or so. At this level it still matters if 8 soldiers out of 100 are armed with steel instead of copper, but only if they are involved in the fighting. Because the computer can put more of the calculations on the backburner it can make use of more detail to render a more realistic fight.

Yes we all know that gameplay > realism.

But more realism than before wouldn't be that bad. It would add a lot to strategoies. And I'm sorry to the poor sister that like the graphics.. but if you make a game with that on mind you'll have a dumbed game

Devs should never assume their buyer are retards or 8. Realism is just a way to raise the tactics available. The war3 system is just too simple for a game like that. It's like the tactical combat system of GalCiv2. The game is a blast, but battles are boring. They're nice when you look at them, but they're totally uninteresting.

And against a dragon's breath it would depend on the kind of breath. Fire? You need armor that let you move fast. Hevay armors should be a nightmare to soldiers. Ice? The contrary. Acid? Nothing but magic could stop that. And why not some in game info llike "events" that would be written like rumors and give you advices? Like in HoMM "I've often heard of the fact that a soldier on fire can prevent furthermore damage by rolling on the ground. Or a magical wet barrier or.. etc..."

I just don't like battle for Wesnoth because it's a game of chess. I just can't stand games without a bit of luck. (Even if I play go ).

Oh, and the spell description of Tamren made me think about a .. spell creator !! Like in Morrowind. You could create a spell and why not it's graphical visualization in game!

You just learned to control ice bolts. Then you create a spell that throw one bolt, several bolts or just use them as trap on the field. For that last one imagine your opponent that says "Where did go those flying shards of ice?". You would need two spells to create such a spell : a "trap spell" that let you place traps. And an ice spell that let you imbue the trap.

And if you learned a "mass effect" spell you could create a "raining shards of ice" also know as "Swinging in the rain".

Wouldn't that be awesome?

I spoke about damage. Always doing the same amount of damage is just a shame. Or 0 or the max. It's too binary for me.