Starting next Monday, we begin work internally on the Elemental combat system. It won’t see the light of day for months (tactical combat part anyway). But this is the place to discuss how you would like it to work.
Right now, a unit has Attack, Defense, Hitpoints, and speed. It’s very straight forward. When in battle, other factors come into play too (range of attack, height, and cover).
But obviously there are a lot of other factors that could be looked at. Blunt weapons vs. Cutting weapons for instance. My personal inclination is to stay away from damage types because they add a lot of complexity without really giving back a lot of fun (in my opinion). I’m sure there are those who will disagree but we’ll have to agree to disagree there and perhaps damage types can be made something available to modders later.
I would like to see experience be used more than as simply a modifier to attack and defense and HP. I don’t mean when you train your units (which gives them more HP) but I mean real combat experience causing them to simply be better at combat but we have not yet come up with a way to convey this well in the game.
I would also like to see Mobility be taken into effect somehow in combat. The Mongols conquered much of the known world because they were strictly a mobile army that could easily outflank their infantry-heavy opponents. How to convey this to players is again, a challenge that would have to be dealt with.
What would you guys like to see?
A morale stat is dangerous because the usual mechanics tend to make a winning battle into a battle that is won with even less losses. On the other hand it can be quite interesting.
In my eyes a good tactical combat adds a lot of depth and fun to the game as in tactical combat you are closer to your units and get the feel of power. I hated the GalCiv 2 battle system. So simple, so boring, no involvement. The damage types were artificial and there was no real difference between them. On the other hand MoO2 and MoM had great tactical combat systems with a lot of options and choice.
Of the ideas described in this thread I like stamina as a currency for special moves and stances.
The most important thing is that choices have meaning. If all different weapons do is giving you different amounts of attack points, then that is boring and pretty meaningless. There should be differences in special abilities, stances and special effects depending on the weapon.
To make things interesting there are things like:
- AoE vs. single target
- Ranged vs. melee
- Damage and armor types (yes, even damage types can be interesting if they are not blunt like in GalCiv2).
- Mobility
- Special abilities and stances
- One shot abilities vs. things you don't run out of
- Active vs. passive abilities
- Terrain effects
- ...
I'm for a King's Bounty combat style. Quite complex and never annoying.
As said before, the game is called Elemental. You ve GOT to have different elemental types of damage and resistance. Why not use the good old fire / ice / air / water / earth / death ?
What would be great would be to make the different types of damage interact with the physical part of your army, for example, fire would be more efficient against leather armors ; or you could enchant a unit's weapon with ice ; this would allow a deep customization of your armies and very interesting combo mechanics. We could use the very deep unit equipment customization to the fullest. I understand this would take a lot of balancing work, though.
You would have to make choices : if the enemy uses lots of fire damage, dont run around in leather. This would impact the whole strategy of the game, as some resources would be more valuable than other depending on the context of each game.
I would like to see:
1) morale i like troops fleeing effect, always found it fun.
2) perks/abilities when your troops lvl up. Eleven legacy's system has already been mentionned and i also think it was pretty good. Imo it was the main interest of the game. Perks to add fire damage to arrows, scare troops away, resist fear, move faster, and what not many ideas have already been pointed out above.
These perks should imo be imo dependent on equipement as suggested above but reasearched (ex: reasearch wooden shield and equip a shield to get access to "basic protect from missile" perk, research iron shields to get access to "ubber shield bearer perk").
This is imo the most fun system and the best at making your trooops unique. You end up caring for your war hardened veterans that you patiently leveled up.
3) Damage types as long as it remains relativly basic: melee damage, missile damage, magic damage. With associated armor and resistance stats (shields add protect against missiles etc..). Imo i think a few damage types are a good idea and add fun. Separating blunt/sharp weapons and types of magic might be alot. What i don't really want is having a list of 20 resistance types to worry about for my basic troops.
From "Elemental: Total Noob":
-Morale: good morale ("Hey, our hero killed an enemy hero!" or "We destroyed one third of the enemy forces!") would mean some bonus in combat and makes sure that troops are interested to remain the battlefield. Bad morale ("Is THAT a Dragon????" or "The Sovereign's first born has been killed!") would mean a penalty in combat and surely some interest into visiting other more safe places than the battlefield.
-Close combat: When giving equipment to a unit, he can be trained into close combat if given a weapon that allows it (staff, dagger...). This skill is used when attacking in... close combat to see if he actually hits the enemy or not.
-Ranged combat: When giving equipment to a unit, he can be trained into ranged combat if given a weapon that allows it (any kind of bowf, throwing dagger...). This skill is used when attacking in... ranged combat to see if he actually hits the enemy or not.
-Dodge (aka Avoid, Evasive Maneuvers... maybe even Block if you count using a Shield as some kind of dodge): Any unit can be trained in it and is opposed by the close/ranged combats skills. Obviously, it's more difficult to dodge a ranged attack that a close combat one ("Arrow Time" perk ignored) but the idea is: If I dodge it, it cannot harm me. Some kinds of armours decrease Dodge because of their weight, nature...
-Defense (aka Armour, Protection...): The unit needs some training in the type of armour that he is going to use (so he can move unhindered or whatever) but except for that, Defense is a passive that only triggers when the unit is actually hit (aka Dodge failed). It's function is nothing more than to substract a certain amount to the damage received before applying it to the unit. (Bad) i.e. If the Paladin with a Defense value of 15 recevies a hit of 20 damage, the actual damage done would be just of 5. The damage done could never be under 1 or something depending of the considerations you want to make and maybe balance but testing means testing for a reason.
-Initiative: How quick the units are to react to what sorruonds them and all that.
-Movement: Tricky. Means who much a unit can move during a turn. Some options should be considered like Sprint or Run. Maybe as options, extra skills...
-Formations: When I say unit I mean an individual and not a bunch of people. BUt for formations... yeah, a militar unit. In this part I only want to say this: Unity: the longer the individuals of a unit fight in the same unit, the more this value increases, giving them some bonuses in combat (mostly morale). Adding new people to the unit will lower the score but fitting more battles will increase it again.
-Health (aka Hit Points, Life, My Precious...): All the bodies for the same race are actually the same supposing equal health conditions. And just because one gets more experience his body doesn't magically become more able to survive to be behaded or something. If Health reaches 0 the unit is out of combat (maybe we can have nurse/medic units in the game that at the end of the combat can recover a % of these kinds of units), and death once the combat finishes unless healed. Some attacks will insta kill no matter the Health score of the unit (sorry, a mountain sized meteor in your head beats your 4k hit points any day... Sovereigns beware!!!) if certains conditions are meet. When leveling up, Health should not increase (or only do it in a very few level ups and by a very low margin). Leveling up should factor things like Initiative, Morale, Dodge (and/or Defense if the race allows it)... Unless this is D&D and its Heroic Attitude (which is fine for an RPG but not for a TBS IMO).
-Sight: The unit cannot attack those who he cannot see. SO you will have to move him into position before you can command him "Beat the *beep* out of those *beep*!". Could have some extras and/or skills for things like detecting hidden units too.
-Damage type: Er... none? None or a really simple one. And I'm talking only of non-magical combat. If this was nothing but a combat simulator then yeah, go ahead and make it uber realistic until we get sick of it. As it's not (and doesn't add enough fun levels to justify it... and hell, would the AI manage it well? Doesn't it add too much micromanagement that isn't really needed? And there are other types of games that already deal woth such things. ), then better something simple at best. Magic damage.... Should be in and I'm sure that Stardock has it in mind even if Frogboy hasn't mentioned it. Be it resistance, immunity, weakness... And magic doesn't care (ok, depending of the type of spell) of Defense scores: If a Fireball hits you, you are toasted.
-Special Skills: Do I really need to explain this one? Are you serious?
Indeed, having different damage types, such as ice/fire/holy/unholy etc. is a must have in a game like this. The various creatures should have weaknesses & resistances also. Example: Units equipped with longswords of fire [physical & fire based dmg] should be decent vs. an ice troll. Units equipped with longswords of ice [physical & ice/cold based dmg] should be decent vs. a fire imp. Etc, etc.... => Features like this are enhancing the strategical/tactical deepness of the game...without these the combat & tactical gameplay will be seriously handicapped.
Also what about morale & fear effects? I hope that we gonna have a morale system, because without that the combat system wouldn't be that good again...
Couldn't agree more. Well said.
I cannot quote Brad's first post, so I will use "". ->
"My personal inclination is to stay away from damage types because they add a lot of complexity without really giving back a lot of fun (in my opinion). I’m sure there are those who will disagree but we’ll have to agree to disagree there and perhaps damage types can be made something available to modders later."
You gotta be kidding Brad.. If SD won't implement damage types, please allow us to mod them in at least....
On damage types, my memory fails me, but I'm thinking MoM didn't actually have damage types per se. A chaos spell like fireball did damage and a death spell like wrack did damage, but only if the target failed their resist roll. BUT a unit with the Bless or Righteousness enchant had bonuses to their resist roll _only against chaos and death_.
Brad, are you more open to element-specific resistance? Or are you trying to avoid a resistance stat altogether?
Edit: well, MoM had fire immunity, cold immunity, whatnot, so it did have some concept of the type of the actual damage, iirc
If I may, I will link in some of my old posts from the ideas forum.
https://forums.elementalgame.com/337570 "Morale on the battlefield" - basically explaining how crucial morale is for realistic tactical battles, how it can tie in with the strategic game and add a whole extra dimension. Plenty of ideas on implementation, comparing and contrasting systems from other games.
https://forums.elementalgame.com/332690 In particular points 9 and 10 - "Separate training and experience", and "Research different kinds of training". So experience is a different stat that gives interesting bonuses, including morale, efficiency etc (not just hack-n-slash) and being able to research individual formations, maneuvers, bonuses etc that you then train troops for - or in this system actually design them in. Interestingly after that post Empire total war actually implemented some of that. I suspect they had the idea first tho
Lastly, the last point of https://forums.elementalgame.com/333849 talks about some more bonuses experience can give - although they are strategic in nature in that they relate to unit strength depletion and recovery.
Luck. Luck should be a factor- and it can be used for many spells etc, just a gentle nudging of fate. (Just gives a little help on rolls, etc depending on the level of luck of course). Just my 2c.
I belive not including damage types would be a bad idea. I'd like to see blunt, sharp, ranged, fire, water, earth, air at a minimum.
As far as mobility being a factor, make unit defense dependent on what side they're attacked from. That way, a fast-moving calvary unit can flank infantry and attack from behind for a significant bonus. Units with enough speed or mobility, or which are entrenched in some way, should be able to automatically turn to defend themselves if flanked.
Many of the questions you pose will depend on one major factor about which we do not yet have conclusive information: Will, like in most games, areas only be able to contain units of one side? That is, whenever a unit or an army of one side enters a tile occupied by another player, will there be a conclusive battle so that only one side remains? Many games treat tiles like this; but not all. If not -- that is, if tile occupancy is not disjunctive -- that opens up a whole new set of options for combat. For example: Since combat need not be conclusive, because during one time period an army may not totally eliminate the other side, there could be combat rounds during which faster units might attack first; but also combat rounds, in which units with faster weapons might attack first; that is, one could imagine that a combat turn have, for instance, 10 distinct combat phases, in which during the first phase, all piercing weapons get an attack (if a target is in range), the second round, all slashing; the third round, all piercing again; the fourth, all bludgeoning; the fifth, all slashing again; the sixth, arrows; the seventh, all combat spells; the eigth, all area of effect weapons (fire breathing dragons); the ninth, the bludgeoning again; the tenth, all catapults. (It's just an arbitraty example, much like the old AD&D initiative system, just slightly more so.) If your side has no weapons of that type, nothing happens; some of the heavier-hitting weapons might hit harder, just later. Whoever is left alive at the end of those 10 turns, remains in the that square together with the enemy. This might give slightly more raison d'etre to different weapon types. This system works very, very well in the game Star Chamber, for example.
Nevertheless, even if the more traditional type of battle system is chosen -- tile occupancy is disjunctive, hence all battles must be conclusive and fought for how ever many rounds it takes to clear the field, or whatever -- I believe that different weapon types might not be merely gratutious (e.g. more complexity for complexity's sake), but more "fun". Why? Because if implemented with a clever counterpart (armor), there will be more strategic choices available, and the strategic element of reconaissance (spying, scouting, information gathering) becomes more important: Is my opponent utilizing more ranged weapons, more mounted, more siege, more blunt, more slashing, or more piercing? If so, I should research and build accordingly: Armor could come in three main types (you could call it light, medium, or heavy; leather, chain, plate; the nomenclature wouldn't matter), from which players can create "pure" versions (e.g. Valyrian Plate, 100% type 3) or hybrid versions (e.g. Bob's Mounted Knight Armor, 20% Leather, 60% Chain, 20% Plate). Armor mitigates damage by subtracting its value from the damage done to its target; but some armor is better at mitigating an offensive type than another. Chain or Medium armor (or whatever you want to call type 2) should mitigate offensive damage to its full value vs. Slashing (or whatever type 2 attack is called) at 100% of its value, but mitigates piercing at only 30% and bludgeoning at 20%. That is, a pure Chain Mail armor with a AC of 10 should subtract 10 points of damage from every successful slashing attack, but only 2 points of damage from every successful bludgeoning attack. Similar rules apply for Piercing / Light and Bludgeoning / Heavy.
Additionally, you may want to consider how you would like to implement your intuition that faster Mongol-like units should be superior to (unprepared) infantry: do you mean that light mounted troops should have vastly superior strategic map moves through steppe-like terrain? (I believe they should.) Or do you mean that light mounted troops should have vastly superior tactical moves (on the tactical battle grid)? (I believe they should.) Yet if the latter is the case, you need to consider how you want the tactical playing field set up; the little we have seen so far indicates that there is not much room. If an opponent merely spams her field full of infantry, the light Mongols will have no way to maneuver around. How much movement do you want on the tactical field? It seems to me that there might be reason to want to have a LOT more room/movement, if your Mongol horde is to succeed as you believe it should.
Other elements I would like to see included in combat are, in all brevity:
- Armor: Armor should not add HP, but mitigate damage. (This way, some earth spells can explicitly affect armor, while others might do direct HP damage, bypassing armor.)
- Armor Piercing / Double Armor Piercing / Triple AP / Etc: Armor Piercing might be a flag attribute which lowers the damage mitigation armor does by 50%; having double AP does not lower it more than 50%, but merely be effective against Hardened Armor.
- Hardened Armor / Double Hardened Armor / Triple HA / Etc: Hardened armor is tempered to avoid Armor Piercing effects. Armor with the HA flag will disregard the first level of Armor Piercing; if a weapon has Double AP however, it will still cause its armor piercing effect vs. armor and hardened armor, but not Double-hardened armor. A weapon with 4x AP will still only cause 50% armor mitigation reduction, but will do so vs. even Triple Hardened Armor. Scouting your enemy will become very important!
(The law of diminishing returns should apply to this universally: If it takes X resources (time, valuables) to give a weapon the Armor Piercing or a piece of armor the Hardened Armor flag, it should take more to make Double, and more than twice that for Triple.)
- To-Hit: A target's attack value must exceed a target's defense value in order to score a hit. Random factors can / should play a role (no pun intended) here. One could imagine that this random value can be easily modded or even changed in the game setup screen. For example, you might choose at the start of each game: Should the To-Hit calculation be (Attack + d4) - (Defense + d4) >= 0 for a hit, or d6, d10?
- Damage: Melee Damage = (Strength + Weapon bonus) - Armor value.
- Statistics: Ideally, you will want every unit in the game (not only the sovereigns) to have something like strength, dexterity, constitution and willpower values, so that these might become (in a patch, in an expansion, in a mod) affected by spells. Strength is the value added to melee weapon damage, dexterity determines Attack and Defense, Constitution should help determine HP and resistance to poison and possibly fatigue, while Willpower should determined resistance to many types of magic spells and morale. Potions should affect statistics in this way.
- Defense: Should be a value reflecting the units ability to avoid melee blows. Armor should have nothing to do with this. If anything, Armor should have a negative affect on a unit's defense value. (The higher the armor rating, the higher the penalty to Dexterity.) Default might be Defense = (Dexterity + training specialty) - Armor penalty.
- Attack: The ability to score a hit. Default could be Melee Attack = (Dex/2 + Str /2) + training specialty, while Ranged attack might be pure Dexterity.
- HP: HP could be a factor of size and constitution, with additional training to reflect "combat hardiness".
- Injury: A unit which suffers HP damage should not be as effective as a unit which does not. A unit which takes HP damage should have to make morale checks (which it should also do should a leader fall) and have its abilities reduced in relation to the gravity of the wound (5 of 10 HP should be quite serious and should reduce the effectiveness of that unit by more than if it had only taken a 2-HP blow).
- Fatigue: I would like to see fatigue, but would not think it necessary. Anyone who has ever engaged in serious combat sports (I do mixed martial arts at a semi-competetive level) knows that fatigue is *the* single most crippling factor, at least in unarmed hand-to-hand combat. It would be nice to see if performing a combat action (attacking, moving, defending) could cost a certain amount of fatigue points. Ideally (a patch, an expansion) it would be nice to have units be able to have an "Exertion" slider, which would let them "save their energy" by performing tasks at higher energy levels (yielding full damage, full defense values), while they could set the slider to 20% and have their respective values reduced by that amount, but also only suffer a mild fatigue cost.
- Reach: You are not going to have unit types ("Pikemen", "Knights"), but you might want to have something to model the useful paper-scissors-rock effect that these unit types bring. Pikemen are good vs. mounted units precisely because their long but bulky weapons let them "hide" from a fast-moving mounted attack, yet the pike is clumsier once an opponent penetrates the distance. You won't have "pikes", but you could include weapon length: the longer, the slower, but better vs. first attack against an opponent with a shorter weapon.
- Stances/Special Moves: I dont think this absolutely necessary, but nice to have (expansion, patch): A unit could be give various "choices", much like the common D&D RPG menus on the market (ToEE, NWN): act defensively, hide behind shield, all-out attack, feint, usw. -- the more combat research done and applied to that unit in training, the more options that unit has. Conceivably, the different between an elite crack unit and a green unit might be in its number of options. One could consider that some of the "options" be special "combat moves" they could "purchase" in training, which requires both a longer time required to train, a training master in that barracks where the unit was trained, and the prerequisite combat research. One could imagine that a unit could purchase a "jab" (+2 attack, +1 defense) move option, and perhaps later a "riposte" (+2 attack, +6 defense) or a "roundhouse" (+8 attack, +6 damage, -2 defense). Perhaps you want only Leaders / Commanders to have these options, I don't know. Each unit could come with the default move "attack", perhaps. I think your currently implemented "card system" could display this nicely, a little icon on the card for each "move" a unit is capable of. Perhaps combat research has different branches according to different "styles" -- one branch might teach you more of the "Water Dancer" moves (Brad apparently likes R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series -- imagine these being defensively-oriented moves with large boni to piercing weapons and smaller ones to slashing weapons), while another branch, let's call it Iron Fist, lets you unlock moves which are more offense-oriented and give large boni to bludgeoning and small ones to slashing. This would have the side effect of making research more variable and exciting, as well as adding a nice amount of smaller "milestones". I could imagine a nice pack of 50-100 moves being included in the game (expansion).
- Combat Experience (veteran units who have seen battles): in addition to giving a unit increased morale, attack, and defense values, you might also consider having a mini-upgrade system available, somewhat like CivIV: some units could spend their XP-points on specialties. For most of these specialties, however, you will need "types", since the game does not have a flag for "is a knight" or "is a maceman" or "is an archer" -- this would be another reason to implement a damage type system (piercing, slashing, bludgeoning with its armored counterparts). Experienced units might get a "banner" marker, which means that other units in their squad are less likely to rout. Perhaps combat experience can let a unit purchase one of the above-mentioned "Special Moves", or a portion of one (e.g. "jab" costs 1 experience point, but "hare kajima" costs 5.)
- Unit speed will probably need to be tied in somehow to the amount of resources (not time spent training) a unit is equipped with plus the speed bonus a mount would give; intuitively, a heavily armored infantryman should be slower than a lightly armored one; a heavily armored mounted unit should be slower than a lightly armored one. I think this will be hard to implement, however -- how are you going to distribute the "heavy" attribute to equipment?
Argh, must go, my baby is crying -- will write more later. Sorry so inarticulate
I didn't play many fantasy games but having only "Attack+Defense+Speed+hitpoints" seems more like Civilization. Even Age of Wonder (ten years old already. Time flies) had more (resistance i.e.), not even considering units special abilities (fire strike, climb wall, poison resistance, see in dark...).
I think I remember that Brad stated somewhere that he's a big fan of Dominions II/III. I too. They are not necessarily as fun (or 'as mainstream' if I can say) as other games because everything is abstracted: where Brad can make his sovereign create a volcano to obliterate an enemy city in Elemental, you would just have a line of text and some numbers in Dominions for the same thing. But what it has is what makes or breaks a strategy game: options, tons of them, and most of them viable to win.
A strategy game is not some FPS where once you found the good way you can do it again and again, it's about balanced options and how to choose them given which enemy you face and such...
So my general idea (my ideal, in Platon's terms) for Elemental would have been to see some sort of Dominions IV: lots of races, of units, of monsters, of spells, of weapons...but with a whole world in beautiful graphics where you actually DO things (i.e.: searching the territory with your earth mage instead of clicking option "search sites" and getting "Your mage found The Treasure Cove, it gives 2 earth gems a turn" in the log).
Where does it translate for combat?
Dominions has almost all the good ideas already discussed in this thread; their units has stats as:
- attack, defense, speed, hitpoints.
- Morale. Yeah, battles are win or lost with morale (and sometimes it's epic, even surprising). Of course, no morale and no fleeing for undead or mindless units (golems, treemen, animated statues)
- Magic resistance
- Encumbrance. Which leads to fatigue
- Size. A giant would crush a human soldier, but surrounded by many he's at a disadvantage.
- Protection. Not the same as defence! Defence is "Shall I be hit?", protection is "Shall I be hurt?".
- Force. Not the same as attack. Attack is "Shall I hit?", force is "How much shall I hurt?".
- length of weapons
- you would divide or reunite your units into formations to go into battles
- and of course all special abilities like protection/immune to poison/fire/cold/lightning, weapon damages (same as precedent), lucky, regenerating, and so on and on and on... It would be a shame to shun damage types.
and others... I'm not here to praise Dominions so I'll make a long story short:
If those two guys can make Dominions III by working on it during their free time, you with all your team can't give us less! Take the best there is and improve on it with what they couldn't by lack of time and money: tactical combat, graphics and good AI.
Is there any way you can tell us if combat is pauseable real time or turn based? Also, what's the unit to battlefield scale? It's hard to comment or make suggestions on how to implement unit speed without this information.
You forgot to mention the TRAMPLE ability of the giant sized creatures in Doms.
It will be pauseable real time...
MORALE! Morale is a must for any game of this nature. Morale should influence the unit's ability to fight, reflect losses and fear producing units, and cause armies to break and run. This is a game maker or breaker for a lot of people. Many RTS's or even turn based strategy (although not many of those) are broken because there is no morale mechanic and all units fight to the death in a "rock-paper-scissors" fashion. This style would completely break combat for me. We must have a morale system in this game (a la total war, or dominions 3, or any other decent strategy game modeling ancient through napoleonic combat).
Wanted to second this. A single defense score is pretty vague. Sure a Knight in full armor with a shield is well protected against swords, slingshots, and other similar weapons. But what protection does that offer against Lightning? Or magical Sleep spells?
With a single defense score, units with high physical defense will also have a high magical defense, which is both bad for balance (magic that can damage a knight will likely wipe out a unit with lower defense easily) and doesn't make any real sense.
A second resistence stat lets these types of attacks be distinguished and should enable some choices. If I imbue one of my units with some essence to create a caster, I probably don't want that unit to be easily picked off by the over sovereign's magic, or mind controlled, or anything like that. So I'd want to beef up his resistence stats. Maybe I don't want to give him heavy armor, because I want him to be highly mobile and I'm grouping him up with an infantry group that can block him off and provides physical protection already.
I like the distinction between training and experience... but it doesn't make sense to me that a battle-hardened peasant conscript would be less resilient than a freshly trained and inexperienced professional soldier, given the same armor and all. I almost feel it should be the other way around... experience give hitpoints, while training gives morale, attack bonuses, whatever.
Anyways... no damage types is an interesting way to do things, but it's a proven system. I hope that you've got other things that will make combat interesting. I honestly think that it's a good thing to have a distinction between maces, axes, swords, etc.
As others has stated, att/def/hp/move is a very poor system for a game with magic and fantasy. Even worse if also the game has tactical combat.
You need "resistance" to magic, so you can have units specialized against magic spells/damage or strong creatures with weakness against magic.
You need some damage types/protection/immunity/weakness. What's the point of fighting a fire elemental if you can't use a water spell to damage it, ehh? And if i fight some ents-like things, i hope i can cast a fire enhancement to my troops weapons.
And of course lots and lots of special attributes/conditions. If i have some phantoms/spectral warriors, they should be incorporeal and be immune to normal damage. A troll should regenerate hp. A demon or anything like that should cause fear. A certain magic ring should have invisibilty (and some modifiers to resistance). Etc. The players can after mix and match these attributes in the unit creator in the mod tools (or mod new attributes, but that would be heavy modding needing python code).
The final point, if it's going to be really a magic/fantasy 4x game, and not a vanilla Civilization clone with some magic and a few dragons thrown on top of it, you need a much more different (and detailed) system than the one used in Civilization or GalCiv 2, as you need it to represent all the variety and imagination and fantastic creatures provided by Fantasy media.
I agree whole-heartedly. I love the variety and depth of the dominions game, but wish that it was more "up to date" graphically. I would love to see Elemental use a ton of ideas from dominions (combat stats, sovereign death, etc.)
I'll happily take an attack/defense/hp/move and elemental subtypes system but with one very large exception: Qualities. A quality is a modifier to a unit's stats under certain circumstances. A unit gains qualities from equipment, special training, enchanting spells, and other circumstances like regional modifiers or experience. Let me illustrate.
You decide to create a new unit type. First, you have to decide how you want to train it. You've researched and chosen a civic known as "Path of Fury" which gives all of your soldiers "Mark of Fury" (+2 attack and -1 defense to all units). If you train them in the Bloody Foothills region, they automatically gain the "Hardy" quality, which improves hitpoints.
Next you have numerous weapon types to choose from, each one with its own attack values. A sword has +4, a spear has +2, a hammer has +3 and an ax has +3 (these values are arbitrary). However, each weapon gives you a "quality" too. A spear armed soldier gains the "spear" quality, which grants +4 additional attack against horsemen and +2 defense if unflanked but -2 defense if flanked. A hammer armed soldier gains the "hammer" quality which reduces the armor of an opponent for the duration of the battle upon a successful strike. An ax armed soldier gains (you guessed it) the "ax" quality which negates a percentage of an opponent's armor.
So let's assume that we choose the "ax" weapon. Next, we take a look at armor. Like weapons, there is differing basic attributes for different armor types depending on how heavily you armor them (heavier armor meaning more defense, more cost, and less speed). However, you can also add special qualities to the armor as well, if you've done certain research (or have a special resource.) For instance, you might have researched a smithing technique that allows you to reinforce a pre-existing armor type, adding to the defense score but hindering attack. In addition, you could add other qualities to the armor that give it elemental resistance or an improved charge. In addition, you would have various shields available that offer qualities as well. So let's say you equip your axman with "Grounded" quality medium armor (+2 armor and +2 lightening resistance) and a "Grounded" medium shield (+2 armor against melee, +3 armor against ranged, and +2 lightening resistance.)
And now last, but not least, you have the option of plunking them down on a mount, but you decide... "naw, that's good enough."
So now we tally up the qualities. We have Mark of Fury, Ax, Medium Armor, Medium Shield, Grounded +2 and another Grounded +2. Naturally, though, these qualities would be tabulated to represent +6 attack, +3 defense, and +4 lightening resistance. If you wanted to, you could tack on other enchanting spells (flameblow, guardian winds).
The important qualities, like what kind of weapon a unit is using, can be represented by a simple icon above the unit during a battle.
Now, the key element of Qualities is that it is compartamentalized and very easy to mix and match (as well as mod!)
- When choosing between Autocalc and Tactical the decision should be available to the player who's sovereign is partaking in the battle. If two players have a sovereign in their armies than the game should automatically choose tactical.
Nothing bothered me more than having my wizard autocalc'd in Age of Wonders. Since Autocalcing never does as well as when you go to tactical. Being fairly adept at tactical, my friends would autocalc my wizard rather than face me in battle. It's not fun to lose that way. It's anti-climatic and it makes doing things like stealth kills possible. And nobody likes to suddenly get a message that they've lost while they're in the middle of fiddling with things on the other end of the map.
I've been reading a lot of folks on here talking about battles as if they turn-based. My understanding when I read this stuff awhile ago was that the battles were to be real-time ala Total War series. Has that changed, or am I just crazy and thinking of the wrong game?
Total War does a lot of things right for battles in that environment. They've implemented an experience system, terrain bonuses, fatigue system, and morale system. For the most part it works well without resorting to complete 'rock-paper-scissors' gameplay.
I would love to see a more refined real-time battle system similar to Total War. Stardock should take a close look at those systems.
^ Tactical combat will be pausable real time...sadly...a turn based system would be much better in a game like this.
I think the 3 most important things to consider when designing tatical battles are location, location, location. You need a game mechanic at the strategic level that pushes battles away from the cities. Far too many of these games are alternating city seiges. I think this has happened in previous games for 2 reasons. One, there is no meaningful reason to fight outside the city and... Two, unit upkeep is so crippling that you can only support a small number of armies so you end up with very few legitimate armies that can sally to engage an enemy. This limitation forces you to sit in the city and wait to be attacked where you have a few defensive advantages.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
