Hi,
I think that will be interesting to have battles that can't end within on day.
That would represent armies that are too exhausted to continue to fight and yet have to reach a victor.
Those bogged down armies can then receive reinforcements.
The prerequisite will be a stamina stat which would represent how long a unit can fight without rest.
Such a battle would need : lots of soldiers. A system that don't kill a unit in one hit. No fatigue system (because with it you just can't battle for so long).
Even if it sounds nice I would really hate not having fatigue or one hit-kills.
Actually, fatigue would be critical to his proposed system -- it represents the fact that the battle has gone on for hours, and they just can't finish it that same day.
Yep. I guess for this to work you'd need some kind of initiative mechanic, with armies from neighboring tiles being involved in one titanic battle. Such a thing has been executed before, but my guess is that it is unlikely to be done here. Not enough medieval battles lasted longer than one day to justify it (now if this were civil war time frame then absolutely).
To be honest, the only battles i can imagine lasting longer than one day would be sieges, and usually after the attacker has been bloodily repelled, yet not broken by the defender.
Certainly there have been battles that have last for quite a long time (Waterloo, for instance, was ~3 days) and many that have gone on for hours (a quick search turned up the battle at Cercy which started at sundown and ended after midnight, 1346).
With that in mind, I would love to see the tactical battles be able to end without a victor due to fatigue or morale. I would think it would actually be somewhat easy to do, much like a ship with multiple move points in GalCiv can attack multiple times per overall game turn.
I'm not sure how the overall composition stacks of units will work, but if units are stacked up into armies then I would expect many battles to result in one side withdrawing (basically retreating one space) rather than outright annihilation.
The problem is that most medieval armies weren't large enough to create situations where a battle would last more than one day. The reason that Crecy lasted so long was that the French didn't arrive until quite late in the day, and did so in dribs and drabs (who then charged up the hill piecemeal). When the army is small enough that it can all fit on one field (and when fighting is resolved hand to hand it lends itself to a relatively speedy resolution) one side generally will break and run within a few hours).
I must agree with lwarmonger.
So a draw in rarely archieved in Medieval battle.
My initial intention was, that i'm tired of tactical battles whose resume into wipe or get wiped, rout or get routed, forgone conclusion.
Perhaps instead of Stamina will could use more extensive set of objective like :
Hold X turn as objective, repeated few times would represent an smaller army trying to stall a bigger one until reinforcements come.
Break Through enemy line as objective, another obvious one.
Escort as objective.
Waterloo was a battle of the napoleonic age, not the ancient or medieval ages
Heh guys what about the Trojan war ? It lasted 10 years !!!
EDIT: Sure, it was "war"
This discussion mainly makes me want to know more about how the devs intend to handle the relationship between the main (strategic) map turns and turns in the tactical layer. But I quite like the idea of some system that might enable two roughly equal forces to fight to a draw during one strategic-level turn and find themselves needing to start their next tactical turn by deciding whether to keep the fight going or to retreat. I'd love to see the strategic map enabling us to consider whether or not we could get sufficient reinforcments quickly enough to a combat zone.
Right, I was just pointing it out as a battle that lasted multiple days
I like the idea of battles that end with survivors on both sides, including morale and fatigue mechanics. Why? This brings up the issue of RESERVES. Consider one of the big problems with 4X games, the 'Stack of Doom (SoD).
Round 1: SoD attacks stack A and wins. Stack A retreats, and stack B fights next round.
Round 2: SoD wins against stack B, but less so because they are tired. Reinforcements reach stack A.
Round 3: SoD loses against stack A, because the troops are ALL tired, and A has had time to rest and resupply.
Round 4: SoD breaks in battle with stack B, and flees because it knows stack A is resting this turn.
I'd like to see this sort of thing allow inferior numbers to 'guerilla war' a numerically superior force. Of course, it just forces 'stack cohesion' where the new SoD is actually three stacks that stay close together. Gr. I still like the idea better, if we're getting together battles that measure in the thousands.
Maybe a slider bar in the cultural panel, that lets you control when your leaders are AUTHORIZED to withdraw from the field? Or maybe certain leaders grant less of a combat bonus, but their troops suffer less morale and fatigue loss?
And let's not forget the Persian Archers, who 'lost' battles daily (ran away) but returned every day to kill five men for every one they lost.
And to steal an idea from another thread, maybe I see a battle isn't winnable, and my mobile units (Bear Riders and Gryphon Knights) have orders to withdraw, leaving the peasant rabble to delay the attacker?
Note: I'm not saying all battles should be like this. If 300 Spartans arrive at the Haut Gates and defend versus 100 times their number, they just aren't going to be able to hold out for more than a day... okay, bad example. But if an army is trained in that terrain, they'll survive better. Never fight elves in the woods - it only encourages them.
Wouldn't it be simple enough to say a battle should be x rounds long, after that the troops would collapse from fatigue. So the armies retreat back to their respective tiles, however the battle is still active, and after next end-turn they are right back where they were with minor health and mana repair (since they would have rested up for the night). players have the chance of bringing in reinforcements as need be. It would be realistic from a seige point of view, because those usually lasted days or weeks even.
This would work best with the consecutive turn (where everybody goes at the same time) mechanics.
Some things of course would have bonuses to this. catapults and trebuchets could do extra damage to structures during the "rest" outside of battle. Golems and other contstructs that cannot tire must still go back for maintenance (golems need to be re-oiled periodically or something) but would have bonuses because they might get an extra turn or two worth of actions to represent the amount of time they can keep working without tire.
I think that is a fantastic and realistic idea to implement this in a way that makes sense for medieval warfare landisaurus... have some karma.
I'm opposed to a time or turn limit for battles (unless it's an option, of course). For one, if all my units are sitting in their spots waiting for the opponent to come to me, why would they all of a sudden become fatigued after 10 turns? I'd much rather there be a Total War style fatigue system, where units become tired based on their movement and actions, and their fighting ability degrades. If a unit is totally overworked they could become "collapsed" and be unable to attack and hardly defend. If you combine this with a retreat mechanism, then you are given an incentive to retreat units before they become too vulnerable and weak. This could result in particularly epic battles taking multiple turns, without the artificial stopping point of a turn limit.
That seems like a very easy option to have. Its simply a check box that sets a game to ignore the turn limit. I feel that it would be both an upgrade to MoM (that didn't have any relation to how much time a battle lasts) as well as have the option for a classic mode (because there is no reason to change what isn't broken).
A turn limit I think would improve the game since in some multiplayer games, the battles really turn up the game length. Everybody who has played HoMM multiplayer knows that the event of a battle ganertees at least 5 min extra turn time, which seems like a long time if you are just staring at a 'waiting for *green* player" message. Which is why I want to find what we can do to better limit the amount of time spent waiting for other players. Whether that mean a fancy cinimatic view for battles that other players can watch (that might be bad since it allows spying) or putting a turn or time limit.
I agree with Pigeonpigeon in saying that there shouldn't be some sort of forced limit, but at the same time I want to create a system that prohibits limitless time battles. Total war games (at least in my experiance, I haven't played the most recent) are plagued by a bunch of tired troops sssllllloooooowwwwlllllyyy walking accross the battle field trying to chase down the other tired people. It makes the battles take a long time. Without removing the grid (which we've already seen in place with the existing screen grabs) the only way I can see doing it would be by doing something like "this unit has xx actions before tiring out" with perhaps a slight drop in unit proformance when they get to half actions left and again when they only have 10 left... or something like that. But thats basically a turn limit where units are measured on a different basis rather than all together. The problem is then you COULD create a bunch of units that have high actions that run around the battle until the slower, easier to tire, units run out of actions and can't defend themselves. A strategy that would automatically drop a bunch of slow-strong units to bottom tier multiplayer use (beacuse the fast ones would always win) and not really help with speeding up battle. sounds like more trouble balancing than its worth.
I know this problem well, and the best solution I've ever seen for it is simultaneous turns. I don't think implementing a time limit will ultimately cause much less waiting, though. All it will do is split up one big battle into multiple smaller battles over more turns. It'll just redistribute the waiting: if there is one big, isolated battle, then the uninvolved players will have to wait a "significant" amount of time that one turn. If it's split over multiple turns, they'll have to wait less time, but more often. Personally I would rather wait more less often than less more often . That said, like you pointed out, a time or turn limit would be an easy option to add (not sure if it would create balance issues though).
Yeah, that also needs to be avoided. I think the method we both came up with (individual units tiring out separately) is better than an overall battle time limit. It would of course need to be balanced so that fast units wouldn't always beat slow units. For one, fast units shouldn't necessarily have more 'action points' than slower units.
The devs have mentioned a couple times that they never intended to release the battle screenshot with the grid, because it's misleading. So we don't really know how movement and turns will work.
If it means anything... I fully support a set number of rounds for a battle to occur. Think of it like Ogre Battle. I love the idea of different squads taking turns whacking other squads and then getting reinforcements.
Based on what has been written it seems likely we will see 2 different "Battle" systems in place. In SP there will be "Pauses" to allow the "Commander/Channeler" a restbit to assess his/her current battlefield standing. In MP this cannot be allowed or you can face those who would "Pause" constantly just to Urk the other player, often to a point of simply "I am outta here!"
So it seems reasonable that a "# of turns" then a 15 second (arbitrary #, possibly set pre-game launch) "auto-pause" mechanic would fit nicely. When the "auto-pause" happens, each player gets to asess his/her situation and provide their troops new orders, be it Flank more left or simply "Retreat to fight another day". That provides balance for all involved with no way to "screw over" the opponent(s) with some sheer fustration based mechanics.
P.S. Some Medieval Battle absolutely lasted more than 1 day. They often started at sunrise, and if neither side was vanquished or run-off before sundown, seing as you couldn't really fight in the dark, both sides would retire for the night and be back come sunrise "to get it on" some more.
Very, very few medieval battles were like that. At the moment I can't think of any (outside of sieges... Manzikert perhaps, but I think even that battle was resolved in a single day as the Byzantines were routed trying what you suggest), however I do know that the number of Medieval battles that started at sunrise, went on till dark, then had both sides retire to fight again the next day were insignificant when compared to the medieval battles that were resolved by one side breaking within a few hours.
I can think of a few that weren't seiges.... the Battle of Thermopylae (3-7 days: about 480 BC > has a movie based on it ), Battle of the Persian Gate (This might count as a seige, but its what came to mind > 30 days: 300BC ), The Battle of Poitiers (4-7 days: 732AD)
The reason that most battles were not multiple days is because by the end of ancient times, stone walls and fortifications had become standard. So no general in their right mind would have a battle when they could retreat to a castle or someplace similar. That is even accurate to the game if you think about it. With the acceptions of War armies (things we build up, stock full of our strongest units and charge somebody else) most guys are just little scout heroes with a few peasly troops that are enough to kill the guys protecting mines/nodes, but we wouldn't attack enemy castles with per se. Watch most computer AIs. When you start to threaten their town, they will rush all their strongest people back to their bases. HoMM does it, MoM does it... I suspect AoW does it, though I have not looked that close. So those seiges will be what lasts a long time.
Most seiges lasted several days. Shouldn't be hard to find those that last multiple days because most did, just look up seiges.
Once you start looking at games from a realistic standpoint, you start to transform them into something unlike a game. Entertainment should always be the first intention of a game.
I just think the idea of more epic battles lasting for long periods of time where you can draw upon reinforcements would be much more entertaining than, "two parties meet up, one dies."
I think the best way to achieve multi-day battles is through a combination of good fatigue and retreat systems. If units tire out and become essentially useless in the fight, and if you can retreat units, or squads, on an individual basis, then I think multi-day battles will occur naturally as the best option for one or both of the combatants in some circumstances.
But I think it needs to be done very carefully. Even battles that last for more than one day should not be able to last too long. If they can, I'm afraid that we'll see the same prevalent problem as in HoMM: a single battle (often the first real one) being the determining factor in a war. If battles can last long enough, both sides will send a continual stream of reinforcements until one side runs out, at which point that player has probably lost the war in all but name. In Elemental I want to see the tides of war shift back and forth as various battles are won and lost, rather than all-or-nothing battles deciding the game.
Also. battler have a better liklihood of lasting multiple days because of the magical nature of the game. Spells might be used as delaying tactics to prolong a battle. Or to keep healing and rallying soldiers. Also magical type creatures might have supernatural stamina and resilience. Like a dragon might take days of battle before finally all those little pinpricks actually take their toll.
Considering the game will have battles at different fort type structures (aka=sieges), which frequently do last multiple days... I see no reason why battles on the map must be one day only. Also take into consideration the enormous 64_bit maps where armies will be massively larger by middle and late game.
Also having a method for battles taking multiple days(aka=turns) opens more gameplay strategies such as assassinations between turns on enemy commanders, engineers repairing/reloading siege weapons between turns, additional consideration for which spells to cast before, during and after battle since you know the battle continues into the next turn.
Also take into consideration a battle between two single very powerful units. For example in Lord of the Rings how Gandalf fought for days against the Balrog before victory!!
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