I'm just wondering and hoping to incite discussion regarding the balance of troop quality versus quanity.
Personally I hope to see both strategies as being viable. However that said I have reservations. If having a large amount of troops can equal high quality troops with good equipment than that might undermine a very exciting part of the game (that part of the game being resource management and unit customization). Anyone have any thoughts on this?
TO think of the way Animals behave in how we might design our games is so very ALIFE I like it.
Ninja hornets. Those guys think of everything.
Of course, on the other hand, certain bees surround those wasps and raise the air temperature to lethal levels by beating their wings. And so the example turns back on itself.
seriously?
Stupid forums
made me triple post
The bee version which originates from where those hornets are do that indeed. They kill the scouting hornets that way and therefore prevent the major attack. Bees can survive higher temperature than hornets due to differences in the metabolism and the carbon dioxide level within the ball gets quite high as well.
OH they take out the scout? That's pretty awsome..
Apparently this is a picture of the bees doing just that.
Nature is awesome.
I used to have an obsession with social insects.
Social insects are a great source of behaviors to model in a lot of Videogame AI routines. I don't know how relevant they are to turnbased strategy games, though...
I still have an obsession with social insects.
Wow, all that from one little comment about bee's.
I'd like to see both. My preferred method would be to have mass quantity of sub-par troops, with a few very strong quality troops supporting them.
These types of games typically only let you bring in a set number of groups of units. My only concern with being able to make customizable units is that it would exacerbate some of the unbalancing problems that occurred in MOM. For instance, magic immune, first strike flying paladins were basically unstoppable in large numbers. Add the trolls regeneration ability and they would be unstoppable. No force could elimiate them completely given the unit number limitations, they would regenerate, and then take out the next army, etc. Not that these specific abilities will be available in Elemental, but I just think that some thought should be put in to limiting exploiting mechanics.
Well you just cited the source of this problem in the first place - that lots of these games limit the number of units per army to something ridiculous like ~8. Stardock has already said that they want the tactical combat to provide epic battles of massive proportions, and for that to be possible it seems they will not be following in those footsteps.
In fact, in the "8 units per army" model, quality is the only important factor. There is no way to overwhelm superior quality troops with poor troops, because you can never bring more of your crappy troops to the table than your opponent can bring of his flying paladins or whatever. The instant you take away the "8 units per army" barrier, the problem largely solves itself. All of a sudden I can now bring an equal cost of peasants to fight your paladins, and 100 peasants per flying paladin might just be able to overwhelm them with shear numbers. Additionally, if combat is at all TW-like, then the fact that your paladins can only attack one peasant at a time will help balance it all out as well. In MoM the paladin could wipe out a squad of, say, 4 units in one turn with no retaliation. In TW-like combat, your paladin might be able to kill one or two peasants before he's surrounded by them and taking hits from them. He doesn't get the opportunity to wipe out an entire squad of peasants with no retaliation, because he can only attack one peasant at a time, out of a squad of many.
well, if he has a really strong attack one paladin could still wipe out more than one peasant at a time. You mention total war, and I really hope these battles are like total war. Morale Was EVERYTHING!!!!
not specifically, but you could charge at just the right angle to slice through peasants like they were butter, and you have just killed 60 peasants with practically no losses. However most of those kills were after they started running, in the initial charge maybe a third or half of them died. Now, if there were more units behind them, as soon as they started running, you generally had to focus on the next unit, so you could have alot of crappy 60 man units, eventually kill a strong unit of Knights, and you would have allot of almost dead 10-15 men units left over, with a few units perhaps completely annihilated depending on circumstance, like the organization of the gigantic peasant mob, how quickly they could move to cover the other, and how quickly the knights could route a single unit.
Regarding one of the first posts: I am quite sure that 10 knights would slaughter 20 peasants. Think about it: well trained, armored & armed fighters against farmers? There have been countless battles where 2:1 ratio was nothing, but still the underdogs won.
Well lets hope there's a knoll-esqe faction that can't build much but troops.
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