While many people may not consider Monolithic Armies a problem, I think it hurts the strategic breadth of a game.
What I mean is, in many strategy games, pursuing a strategy of always build the strongest soldiers available of each class is almost always the best and it is almost always easy. For instance, in Master of Magic, the only difference between training spearmen and paladins was a longer training time and a higher upkeep. Once you gained a unit of greater strength than previous units, there was rarely a need to build lesser units outside of the need of provide a skeleton garrison.
The Greatest Middle Age battles were interesting and involved great tactical depth specifically because the range of soldiers taking part in the battle were varied. Spear armed peasants marched alongside heavily armored Knights.
I'm wondering how Elemental will be designed to preserve this essence? If not, then why? In my vision, you would always have a certain number of standard footsoldiers on the field throughout the game (which would improve marginally with improving technology) but new technologies and better magicks would allow you to field specialty units like mounted Knights and fantastic monsters which would give you a unique strategic asset.
That's still entirely predictable, though. You're going to do the same thing every time because its the best you can do within the stack limit.
I've always disliked the idea in medieval strategy games of training vast swathes of soldiers who then stand ready for an indefinate period of time. It's a strategy game relic from the days of Civ 1 that most game designers still aren't willing to move past. It's become very stale, and innovation is long overdue on this point.
Agreed. And not only that, usually wars would only be fought like 3-6 months every year at most (no one would fight in winter, nor in harvest,...). But it's really rare for strategy games to take that detail into account.
But, come end-game, is there ever a reason to make an army out of anything besides, to use your example, 4 of the strongest melee units, 2 of the strongest flankers, and 6 of the strongest ranged units? I've never played the game but I can already guess that the answer is probably no... Once you have the ability to train the strongest units and the economy to support it, is there any reason to go back to churning out lesser units of the different varieties?
Just to clarify, the original post addressed the problem of players being rewarded heavily for always building the strongest units they are capable of building, and never weaker units. So if you were unable to continue to build death knights, you would move to the next most powerful unit you are capable of building. The net effect of this behavior is that you typically end up with armies that are non-mixed or "monolithic."
In most strategy games, there is little incentive to give ships / soldiers less effective equipment, even at a lower cost. In Galactic Civs and Sword of the Stars, for instance, it was almost always more cost effective to swell the ranks of your combat fleet with not only the best technology, but also the largest size of ship classes.
And this is a perfect illustration of my point. You are basically left with very little reward for strategic creativity--- your strategy is already set for you. This is a perfect example of a rational player being forced to build a monolithic army.
Now, the pleasure I get from playing a strategy game is in analysing a complex environment and coming up with a successful strategy to solve problems. If there are less options and less diversity, there is little challenge.
Well yeah... This is almost always a problem, and my point was merely that limiting army sizes severely exacerbates the problem.
The solution, IMO, is just to balance that initial training and production costs, as well as upkeep costs, so that there is a reason to build units besides the best they possibly can. Although honestly I think shying away from restricting army size will mostly solve this problem on its own. Total War is a good example - towards the beginning of the game, before you're anywhere near capable of fielding a maxed out army, you are generally better off by mixing troops of varying strengths and types. If you only train the most powerful troops available to you, you will be shooting yourself in the foot.
Sadly Total War's limits to army size are still relatively low, and so the problem does arise by mid-late game.
Hm, yeah you are probably right. I can think of a few situations, though where army/ fleet size wasn't an issue but there was still a dispraportionate reward for building "the best and biggest."
In Master of Orion 2, there was generally little incentive to build smaller ships or flesh out the roles of larger ships, even though there was no fleet size (I tried to make fleets of smaller ships work in the spirit of wishful thinking, but it only worked at the very, very beginning). If it were up to me, the higher proportion of larger ships you had in a fleet would produce diminishing returns in efficiency under most circumstances, unless the player was a specific strategy in wish available resources or racial specialties afforded a larger number of big ships a special advantage.
And of course, there is the equally big bane of low end units being easily and utterly rendered useless against high end units which, as you know Pidgeon, has been exhaustively discussed in other threads
1- Frogboy(? - or someone) mentioned that troops don't just appear out of thin air -- if you want a large army you need a large population.
2- I'd like to see recruits have differing potentials -- anyone could become a 'peasant' troop, many could become 'normal' troops, some could become 'skilled' troops, but few could become 'exceptional' troops. Training would bring out these inherent skill levels, not increase someone from one skill category up into the next -- ie no matter how much I train or what resources I have access to I'll never be a Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali.
Combining these 2 ideas, I'd like to think that large armies of exceptional troops would not be possible, as they require exceptional people who, being exceptional, are in relatively short supply. No amount of training time, resources, technology, etc. could enable this.
Thus we'd have armies comprised of a lot of average folks (levies/peasants/etc.), a number of skilled troops (swordsmen/crossbowmen/etc.), and a relatively small number of exceptional units (knights/etc.). What type of exceptional units would vary depending upon resources, technologies, etc. (ie -- knights or samuri or ninjas or ???), but their numbers would be limited.
We could decide to not field large numbers of average troops of course, and just go with exceptional troops, but could not decide to field large numbers of exceptional troops by 'training' regulars to become exceptional.
But that forces you to field armies of troops of all sorts and quality. The best strategy would be to train all your exceptional recruits first, and work your way down the list... That's a little better than when the best strategy is just to mass produce your most powerful troops, but it's still not even remotely ideal. I don't think it's worth settling for that when it seems perfectly well within reach to have a combat system that allows all sorts of viable strategies when it comes to populating your army.
20 Unit stacks in one army. It's been like since Medieval 1. If you know how to Hex edit and what to Hex Edit you can greatly increase the unit size in the Total War games. The whole reason they limit it like that is that most peoples rigs start lagging when you have more then 20 stacks on each side of a conflict. Limiting it to only 20 means 40 unit stacks on screen.
That's how they make the intro movie and demonstration movies for the games where you see MASSIVE amounts of units and you think "I can't wait to make a army that big" but then when you get the game you're like :Wth....how come I can't make a army as big as I saw in the intro?". When they make those videos they're doing so on what most users would consider a "Super Computer" which is why you'll see 40,000 men with no lag.
Medieval 2 is probably the one in the series that best illustrates this. Start up M2 and watch in the intro video, same for Rome. You'll see at least 40,000 men on screen in a siege in one battle but you can't make a army anywhere near that large.
I don't think so. The problem with that equality is that even if those armies were equal in cost, in general most combat systems produce the result that high level units can walk over masses of low level ones without worrying because low level ones can't even damage them (or do very reduced damage). That happens in HoMM for example where Dragons do a lot of extra damage to peasants and get a lot of less damage in return from them because of difference in Attack and Defense stats.
A way of avoiding this would be to make sure any unit can always harm any other unit with a decent chance, but that clashes hard with the concept of "elite troops running over everything" which seems pretty common. Elite units should be given other uses in the battlefield appart from great combat statisctics (they would be like glass cannons) and used in combined arms tactics, not only by themselves.
How about buildings that would enhance the quality of the peasants that you use to make your armies? Build a training ground in a city and all swordsmen built there will have an increase in their initial stats. An archery range and your archers would start out a little better. If there is a cost to these buildings (taking your much needed space and resources) then you would have to consider city specialization.
Well, I think Large armies vs Small armies is a battle of fatigue vs morale. Smaller armies of elite units have the advantage of dealing out potentially devastating hits upon opponent morale, and have excessively high moral themselves ... while the large army's job is to wear them out, and get them as exausted as possible so that they run out of steam before they blitz through the entire army.
Do morale and Fatigue well, and you will see an interesting, and fun, dynamic.
That's a good solution. Another is to break resources balance: 1 full plated knight can cost like 100 peasants, but will die fighting 20. The problem there is to make the knight interesting to build even knowing the fact that he is not cost effective in simple engagements (could be done with maintenance cost, population lost, giving special bonuses to commanded units,...).
I agree with this Pidgeon. This system always rewards the players for grabbing the "lowest hanging fruit" so to speak.
If players are rewarded in Elemental for having non-Monolithic armies, I definately don't want it to be for reasons like "leather armor and plate armor both serve different, but equally legitimate roles." In other words, certain improvements in equipment and soldiery should simply be more expensive and better (sure, a soldier in leather armor might be faster, but still not as valuable per capita as a plate wearing soldier.)
The strategy in that regard ultimately would come in off the battlefield while you are deciding how to manage or exploit the resources that you are given. For instance, I wouldn't be building a large army of lightly armed soldiers because lightly armored soldiers offer some kind of strategic advantage necessarily, but because I pursued a strategy where I sought an abundance of food and population.
Yea ... ultimately the player should be rewarded for using the best resources, so better units are going to be "better" ... but I would certainly like a strategic difference between finely crafted mithril studded leather, and mithril plate.
and even if not armor (in a system where full plate is simply better), then I want a differentiation between weapon types.
I would certainly like for the decision between Maces, Axes, Swords, Longbows, Crossbows, Shortbows, and Spears (pikes, pole-arms, and pole-axes) to be interesting strategic decisions. Maybe maces are simply better vs armor value ... so evasion is better against fighting against mace. Well-trained and well armored soldiers will still be better against a mace than simply a well-trained soldier, although a well-trained soldier might be better against a mace than simply a well-armored soldier. Stuff like that.
HoMM actually is one of the few games that didn't invariably run into exactly that problem. Have you ever played as a necromancer in, say, HoMM 3? And raised an army of thousands of skeletons? Black dragons better beware, because those skeletons can wreak havoc on them. Thousands of skeletons will do major damage to even Black Dragons... This is not the only scenario in which low-level units are still effective. For example, they make excellent meat shields (using up retaliations).
And medium-range units can be even more damage in large numbers. One of the reasons for this is that HoMM doesn't really limit the number of creatures in a stack, just the number of stacks in an army. This allows you to make huge armies of weak creatures, under the right circumstances, that can still be effective against stronger units. In HoMM you will hardly ever end up with an army consisting of 7 stacks of Black Dragons (unless you also have armageddon...), because you'd be better off combining those dragons into fewer stacks and adding in full stacks of other, weaker units.
Monolithic armies won't make sense in Elemental because there can be many different factors involved here such as:
Let's say your population could support 1000 troops total, and 10% have exceptional potential. The choice wouldn't be 1000 exceptionals or 1000 normal troops, the best you could do is 900 normal troops (starting relatively soon) and 100 exceptionals (starting relatively slowly). This suggestion would prevent ending up with 1000 exceptionals (or any number > 100).
Let's asusme there'll be some sort of rock/paper/scissors aspect (pikemen advantage vs cavalry, or firemage advantage vs cold), this would add another, similar, dimension -- large numbers of less-skilled vs. small numbers of skilled, multiplying options/choices.
It's also 'realistic' as not everyone has the same potential skills, and training can only bring one up to one's potential.
Nick, your idea for exceptional individuals is an interesting idea, but perhaps there is another way to go about it than just having a "pool" of them waiting to be tapped. What if, instead, those exceptional individuals would be your experienced units that emerge from many battles and many victories? Sure, you can throw any old unit an ax of uuberness and a suite a full plate mail, but perhaps they can't get anywhere close to tapping into its full potential unless they have reached a certain level of experience.
To stream line the process of requipping elite units, there might be a feature in which you highlight an army and then give the order for X number of soldiers over level 10 to return home to re-equip with the gear that they are more fluent at using.
No.
First monolithic means "of a single stone".If army is made of various kinds of units, it's not monolithic. You're arguing an army shouldn't necessarily be made of the best available units. CtP2 maanged that. As I said, there were bombarding units. You could mix bombarding units stacks, which would often have some melee troops to defend them, with other stacks like the one I described, which were used to finish opponents.
As Brad said, the problem is the notion of a 'best' unit, which you suppose exists in the game. If there's a unit that's better than any other unit, then it'll never make sense not to build it (I'm talking best quality/price ratio). What's needed is a system where there's a kind of rock-paper-scissors system, where units are better against some units but not all. Just avoid hard coded rock-paper-scissors but provide a system that's rich enough that superiority of some units vs. others will emerge. Still, if there are several kinds of units, you'll always build the best of each type, but in different proportions.
There is such a thing as a monolithic strategy--- in this case, building the highest calibur units every chance you get. You know what we're talking about. Juggling around definitions doesn't prove a point.
HoMM has the problem: cost wise, high level units beat low level units (except probably in some exceptions, not all units are perfectly balanced). Make Black Dragons fight the same cost in Peasants and Black Dragons will win and that's not counting that they fly so they will probably first strike and that they have magic inmunity (for good and bad).
What is good about HoMM is that low level units can damage high level ones, but sadly they aren't cost effective. Low level units are used because the game forces you limiting how many creatures you can recruit of each type (with semanal grow) and how early you can recruit them (allowing only one building per turn and making some buildings depend on others).
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