One of the things we really want to drive home in Elemental that we think will make it stand out is that a well equipped army is a big deal.
The Roman armies dominates much of Europe not because Romans were inherently better warriors but because they were well trained and well equipped.
Contemporary fiction tends to trivialize the significance of a non-industrialized society being able to train and equip 10,000 men with swords, plate mail, steel helmets, leather boots, etc. But in reality, being able to do that is an incredible achievement.
In Elemental, your first turns will not be about designing and producing fully armored troops. On the contrary, when you see mounted units equipped with plate mail and swords we want it to give the same feeling as when you see the Mongols in Civilization show up with tanks on your island. It’s a big deal.
Because people in Elemental are a resource, it creates a lot of interesting choices on the type of civilization you want to build. You can, for instance, focus on having mass armies of poorly trained and poorly equipped peasants. These hordes might be able to conquer the world or they might meet a civilization that has a much smaller force but one that is exquisitely trained and equipped. That battle, which players can optionally fight in full tactical detail, should be breathtaking.
And of course, what I jut describe doesn’t even touch on the fact that we are talking about a world with magical items and beasts of almost unimaginable might. As I’ve mentioned previously, someone gets ahold a dragon (and by a dragon I mean 1) that is a huge deal. Nobody is going to be running around with a “throng” of dragons.
If you’ve ever read Tolkien’s Silmarillion you get an idea of just how mighty some of the beings in Elemental will be. For those into that kind of thing, if you’ve ever wanted to know one of the inspirations for the Arnor and Dread Lords you can think of them as Maiar.
There are things lurking in the world of Elemental that are just breathtakingly powerful and rare. And rare, I mean that you may only encounter or hear of one maybe after months of playing the game. We’ll talk about that more later though.
The point being, the armies of Elemental are truly going to be yours. You will have ultimate control over what kind of army you want to have. We’re very excited.
Peasant Army : Conscripts?
Trained elites: Privates?
just checking.
I think that you should have to option to conscript/draft units, but at the cost of town approval, unit morale, and the potential of draft dodgers (i.e. the conscription starts to not produce units if you do it too much), with the "damage" getting more severe the more you draft.
Sounds outstanding to me, although I wouldn't worry about them being slow and expensive. I'd rather it was automatic and trivial. At least, until some jackass opponent intercepted them and left your troops with a week before they starved. Now that will end the killer stack mentality. You can have your killer stack, but your supply line is going to have to be guarded against harrying forces or your killer stack gets to eat their shoe leather. Scouting parties to spot the intercepting force before it arrives, supporting forces to deal with it before it kills you without a fight. I'm teasing myself just thinking about it.
Yea, boardgames have had supply line rules for decades with penalties to fighting capacity if the supply line was breached. I haven't really seen a 4x game deal with them though. I've seen some true wargames deal with it, but not 4x games.
Conscription basically already exists. It's when you make 5000 troops with no training whatsoever. Troops are pulled from your town population, so you're yanking farmers off the field, giving them a sword, and saying "pointy end goes that way."
The opposite is to make 500 troops, train them well, and arm them with magical equipment. Your population hit is a lot smaller then.
I love this, it fits perfectly with my prefered tactic from Master of Magic. Getting one guy armed with so much magic equipment that he lights up like a christmas tree, and sending him to take out legions.
I use to do that all the time.
The thing in this game now is never forget that the channeler can probably conjure a mountain and drop it directly or the xmas tree. That would also put an end to the killer stack. If I remember correctly I do remember Sauron attacking the entire human and Elf armies single handenly and actually winning. So if the Channeler as that kind of power we could also find ourselves face to face with the Channeler and one week later our killer stack is dust...
Pretty neat too if you ask me.
Didn't he fight single handedly every fight after that?
It's not really that important but you're not remembering correctly Sauron never attacked anyone single-handedly, he relied on deceit and minions. Yeah, he single-handedly fought three of the most powerful remaining elves in Middle Earth (Gil-Galad, Cirdan and Elrond) and the king of men and his heir (Elendil and Isildur) at once and managed to kill both Gil-Galad and Elendil before he was brought down.
Regardless your point still stands and, if the player chooses to focus on having a superpowerful channeler at the expense of other things (like champions, settlements, etc), he should be able to do massive damage all by himself.
And I'd just like to add that there are so many ways of removing either kind of Stack of Doom as the only viable strategies, unit caps are not really one of those ways unless they're meant to function in concert with other factors. Even then, I'd prefer an organic unit cap, where you could create a giant 100,000-strong stack of doom, but it'd be crippled due to things like movement penalties, upkeep and even combat efficiency that scale with army size (larger forces move slower, cost more to maintain, and don't fight as cohesively as smaller battalions).
Actually that is depended on the type of military organization being used. Typically the larger army is slower but not always. As for cohesiveness that largely depends on how command is structured. The only consistent flaw of larger forces is they cost more to maintain hence as I stated before the best way to go about this is to allow the player to make any size army he wants. However, as the army size increases the burden on his economy should grow to the point where his economy can't support fielding that many soldiers. Real world applications don't always make good game play mechanics but in this case it is easily the best choice.
Peasants should be raised into conscripts by requisitioning a # of troops from your population with "0 weeks" training. These Peasant conscripts would be useful for raising an army quickly to meet an unexpected threat (at the cost of many lives once they enter battle). When returned to town conscripts should be able to be disbanded so they are re-added to the population pool as farmers or whatever.
Once you "train" a number of your population they should be considered professional soldiers. These soldiers will not return to the plow so the decision to develop a standing army should be undertaken carefully lest you leave your town underpopulated relative to the army they must support.
This is one area where I'm more than happy to depart a little from reality for the sake of gameplay. Movement penalties and combat efficiency reductions would both be efficient ways to help prevent Stacks of Doom. The advantage of having several smaller penalties compared to one giant penalty (in this case upkeep) is that it's more scalable. The penalty needs to go up faster than linearly, which means (if the penalty is large enough to be effective at smaller scales) it'd get to the point that even if you own 1/2 of the map you won't be able to field much larger armies than someone much weaker than you. Several penalties allows for greater scalability because the point at which any of those penalties becomes individually crippling is far postponed.
I think the best way to avoid Stacks of Doom, is to provide reasons (or more accurately not abstract away reasons) to keep your armies split up and spread out. The fact that a stack is going to be limited to the slowest unit in the stack seems like the only movement penalty that should be needed.
The biggest thing that causes stacks of Doom is to not really care that much about protecting your borders - you just garrison your soldiers to protect cities and everything else goes to The Stack. Making border integrity important is going to get rid of the SoD problem.
I don't really get why everybody wants to prevent a stack of doom so badly. They happen in real life too. When you're getting ready for a major push traditionally, you don't send groups of 10 soldiers all over the place. You form up a few thousand and siege the keep. There's strength in numbers.
I mean, do you *really* want a game where if you want to bring an army to bear on a well fortified city, you can't do it as a stack? So you line up 200 units, and move them all individually into different areas near the city, then send them in one by one? That would be horribly slow.
The best solution is to make tactics in tactical combat matter. If a small army can defeat a large army with better tactics, a "stack of doom" isn't a problem. Besides, a stack of doom coming at you means there's only one thing to defend against. Beat it, and you just broke the entire war effort.
(Artificial limits on stack sizes also create the Age of Wonders 2 effect: everybody stacks only the strongest unit they can make, because with limited room, using anything but your strongest unit is just a bad idea. The whole "peasasnt rabble" thing falls apart under that model.)
@tridus I agree no ARTIFICIAL limits. However, there should be natural consequences, some of them not good for putting all your eggs in one basket. A few I can think of:
Powerful spells that AE damage an entire stack.
Resources/caravans/towns less protected.
It's a good argument for not abstracting away something when that something provides a natural and easily understood counter to doing something else.
I have no problem with a Stack of Doom, but it should not be the end all, be all. It should be a strategic decision that along with it's inherent strengths also exposes weaknesses.
I can see where you are coming from but I would hate to have more penalties placed on my army just because I have a larger number of troops and if you’ll notice I said economy not purely up keep costs. I suppose you could abstract up keep to include everything but I had envisioned not only a financial cost to building a 100,000 strong army. Considering Elemental is leaning towards having everything as a resource your troops should need food, water and supplies. If the economy used in elemental is well done it wouldn’t be difficult to expand this out as a limiting factor for armed forces. So instead of paying only tons of gold for a huge army you would also have to provide them with an equal amount of food, water, and supplies. Other people have suggested this as well I’m really just expanding / restating what they have said.
Now that I think about it I wouldn’t be opposed to economic warning signs / strains manifesting in different ways. For example let’s say you make a 45,000 man army but your economy can only support 40,000 soldiers. Just like in real life your army should start to receive less food, water, and supplies. This would start to have an impact on combat effectiveness and their mobility. Then the player would have two options: A. Expand his economy to support 45,000 soldiers or B. Reduce the size of his army.
Yeah, those are things I've mentioned too. If I want to put my entire army into one stack, it makes an awfully tempting target for some world altering magic. It's also slow, and gives you only one thing to defend against. Glad to see someone agrees.
Perhaps it's better to say, and would be better to have in-game, that large armies require more training and greater discipline to move and react as quickly as a smaller army in a similar circumstance. Logistics is the killer: most ancient armies foraged a great deal--sometimes foraging involved paying the locals, sometimes not--and there just aren't many places in the world capable of supporting large populations with ancient agricultural techniques.
Enter channelers, however and more is possible, of course.
"Amateurs study tactics. Professionals study logistics."
That wouldn't really discourage Stacks of Doom, though, it's more applicable to your total military might. However, I'm starting to agree that there are enough ways of casting down the Stack of Doom from its pedestal without imposing things like those I suggested. Making territorial control important, having raidable caravans (and in general more to protect than a few easily defended locations) would probably go a very long way.
I'd also like to make clear that I don't want to make the Stack of Doom non-viable. I want it to be a viable strategy, but not the only strategy - which too often it is. The only counter to a Stack of Doom tends to be another Stack of Doom, and therein lies one of the problems.
Also, there are two kinds of Stacks of Doom - the one where you pool your whole military into one spot, and the one where (usually because of limitations on army size) you fill all your armies with the best possible troops because there isn't really a way to gain advantage by numbers. But the same holds for both: it should be possible to construct a viable, but not ultimate, strategy that uses both kinds of Stacks of Doom - single (or a few) massive armies, and armies consisting only of elite troops.
I think by making an entire military dependent on more resources than just gold that it would cause stacks of doom to be less likely through creating more targets of opportunity. In most games if you have the money you can create stacks of doom and there really isn't any way to effectively cut off the flow of gold unless you capture cities. If other resources are thrown into the mix you don't necessarily have to capture a city to cause trouble for a large military nation.
This only pertains to your first type of doom stack. The 2nd type where you build an army containing all your best units really can't be stopped per se. Stardock would have to make sure that isn't the only tactic that works AKA make mass cheap units a viable counter to the elite super squad army.
If they have to be supplied, it's very easy to counter even the second type.
If you want to be friendly about it, you make efficiency modifiers. For instance, when lacking supplies, they become fatigued and suffer increasingly catastrophic penalties. If you want to be cut throat about it, they start taking casualties when you cut the supply train off and starve themselves out of the picture unless they fix their problem fast.
In either case, the stack of doom can be countered with another stack of doom, or you can counter whatever defense they have for their supply line instead, and then kill a less doom inspiring stack.
With the previously proposed foraging limit, a supply setup would work wonders. Assuming stealth unit capabilities and reconaissance counters, a major offensive would be the actual strike forces, stealthy units attempting to disrupt enemy movements, reconaissance units keeping the enemy from sneaking their own units in behind your force, and harrying units to both exploit and plug holes. Your lighter supporting forces would be able to exist without one, allowing them to do sneak attacks on infrastructure, all kinds of fun stuff.
I want SoD when my game starts to lacks challenage I want to move on. I want to see SoD because I just want grand battles.
I don't want SoD to be in every game to make the game unchallenaging, but SoD has its place.
Maybe SD Devs or the forum should find a way to have SoD that makes everyone happy?
I've previously suggested some simple way of simulating supply. Take a look! https://forums.elementalgame.com/352235/#2232722
The suggestion works by not limiting how many units you have or using leadership, it works by limiting how far the SoD went away from its last supply location.
With all this talk about 'stacks of doom' I'm left wondering if I mis-understood how this game is expected to work.
It was my understanding that players will not be in direct control of assembling armies. It was my understanding that all we are doing is providing the resources/training for the citizens/heroes/generals/whatever of the game world to use (or not) at their own discretion; and that all we can do as players is make certain resources/training appealing to them so that they'll partake of said resources/training.
I was under the impression we would have no direct control over the world's population, military, trade or otherwise. They would function independently and assemble (and control) troops as they see fit, based on what is availible and what they need the troop to do for them. I just firgured that we couldn't, for instance, create our own custom tailored stacks because the game was intended to do that tpe of stuff for you.
Were you on the Majesty 2 forums and got lost?
Seriously, it sounds like you're talking about Majesty there. No idea where you'd get that idea for Elemental. Go through the rest of the developer journals, they've been quite informative.
It can. The second type of stack of doom (only elite units) can be stopped by among other things, the first type of stack of doom. The second one only becomes a "stack of doom" when stack limits prevent sheer numbers from being viable against it. I mean if I blow all my resources to make 500 elite Paladins or something and you blow all your resources to make a conscript army of 5000 Peasant Pikemen, depending on how the game works, this *could* be a fair fight. But if you have to bring them at me 500 at a time because of a stack limit, I'm going to completely wipe you off the map every time.
One of the things I'm most interested in seeing in Elemental is that peasant rabble army whipped up to try and stand against a much smaller elite force. An artificial stack limit completely kills that as a viable strategy, and we're left with AoW 2 style "bring a hero and 7 of the strongest unit you can make, nothing else is worth bringing on offense" type situations.
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