Originally, Elemental was going to have continuous turn combat. That effectively meant real-time. Ultimately, after playing around with it, we decided to implement turn based (simultaneous turns based on combat speed) with tiles.
The evolution of tactical combat in Elemental owes a lot to the beta program. 9 Months of public beta testing of the game engine with corresponding debates has led to some important changes that would not have happened otherwise.
A lot of the discussion resulted in us thinking about the game in ways we didn’t think of before. Specifically, how do we address game design issues that have plagued our genre for decades now? If you’re a strategy gamer, you know them well.
For us, the challenge of tactical combat has been about giving the player as much control as possible over how long tactical combat should last. This ultimately led to the realization that the funnest way for us turned out to be to have the strategic elements of combat very clear and well defined.
Elements of Tactical Combat
In no particular order these are the things that matter:
Remaining Questions and issues:
Perhaps Beta 2 will shed some new light on the state of that game element but I am skeptical at this point. I hope I am totally wrong.
Yeah I'm also worried about this. As it stands fielding an army composed of hundreds of units, let alone thousands, is a fairly significant achievement... To make it even worse, cities are so population-limited that you'd need to cover a massive land area in large cities to have enough population (and a strong enough economy) to field such armies. To achieve armies numbering in the thousands of units, they would really need to rescale all the numbers in the game.
I wouldn't call it simplifying. That is how the squad based system works.
PS. It can be tweaked via modding even. Let's say you change the biggest squad size to 100 from 1000 for example. -> The battles will be very different in all apsects even with 1 change like this.
Which is not to say it couldn't be done per say, but it really doesn't totally feel out of whack now, as far as creating soldiers goes cost wise, with both pretty good gear, listed as Elite Troops, and coming in small to medium groups.
Perhaps we could partition to have the Company, Platoon, etc have really solid Savings\Bonuses when built. That way, after roughly the first 150 Turns, army growth could explode as individual unit would become simply obsolete.
I can see the City Max. size getting a HUGE increase at some point though. 3-4X in housing Pop. would be an easy adjustment I suppose.
Frogboy has already spoke about how little Pop a Hut\House produce. That value can be pretty much anything really.
These month + long waits between Beta's is friggin killer...
twitch twitch
Umm .... I think its SUPPOSED to be a fairly difficult achievement. Nuff said.
If you want to wield 5,000 soldier army that is naked with a club, that is one thing. Wanting to do such a thing with decent armor and weapons should be next to impossible.
Now, if you wanted 10-100 well equipped soldiers, and the rest of your army naked with clubs ... that is a perfectly doable matter.
on the other hand, an adventuring nation might have 10-20 soldiers super-well equipped at high levels. and maybe only a couple hundred soldiers naked with clubs as a standing militia.
That's my understanding as well, Tasunke. Sending a 10,000 man army towards an enemy land to crush them in a manner befitting Mordor should be an achievement; something special, not something that happens every game. Personally, I hope it's not a common affair because it would spoil the epic nature of the confrontation in my mind. Mods after release will easily provide this kind of function, upping housing and population limits and such, and I suspect we'll see mods that focus on purely epic battles as well.
Oh? So far, I haven't seen anything to make me think a 5,000 soldier army is possible at all, even if you try to make it out of the most basic units. At least, not while actually playing the game. Sure, as of now the AI is basically not there so I could just conquer most of the world, fill it with cities, and build press end turn for an hour or two to build such an army, but at the point it'd be a complete waste of time. If even the biggest cities are limited to what, 1,000 people? how do you expect to field a 5,000 person army on a regular map? One of the goals of Elemental was to get out of the city spamming disease, which will just make it harder...
So yes it should be an achievement. But right now that would have to be your goal of the game, not merely a means to winning.
Current population limits are simply too low, IMO, and unit costs and upkeep is likely too high, for this to be possible.
I plan to make every penny of my empire go towards a highly effective mounted archer militia. Won't require much beyond arrows and horses, easily trained by harassingmy enemies, able to guard a large area including ally cities, a golden horde if you will. I think finding enough horses will be my biggest challenge as there are certainly more men than horses. That said, I wouldn't be suprised if I regularly get up to five hundred of these guys every game, assuming I have the means. It seems like any more than that and heores would become aristocratic benched units as opposed to front line warriors and who wants that?
Also, increasing the pop is a simple matter of modding if you don't agree. [e digicons](\(\[/e]
Well, the Frog said he wanted huge armies, so...
I don't see why cities need to be capped at such small populations. It looks more like an arbitrary limit they just stuck on for testing than something that will be in the release version. Improvements in food production lead to massive population booms in less than filthy stinking rich societies. They're particularly rapid expansion when much of the population is still producing that food, or running family stores. It's only when you're decadent westerners that the population curve doesn't outpace food production in short order.
It probably wont run that deep, but there are a lot of ways to vastly increase food production from the same amount of land without magic or modern fertilizers. Something as simple as raising chickens around the house is a huge boost to a cropper. They eat bugs and seeds, cutting down on loss, and weed growth, while fertilizing the fields and adding to the food supply directly. A ten fold production increase by end game tech would not be unreasonable when taking into account selective breeding, fecal fertilization, crop rotation, irrigation and domesticated animal additions.
WINNER. TAKE. ALL. This is the part where we want to hear your opinions. We do ask that you keep an open mind on what we ultimately go with. My opinion is that the attacking player has the onus to finish the battle in N turns. After N turns, the attacker morale starts to go lower and lower at which point the defender can come out and make mince meat out of them. The question is, what should determine what N is? Or should we allow retreating? Should we allow draws? I’m against retreats or withdraws because it’s one of those things that allows the game to drag on. It’s a strong personal preference of mine that two men enter, one man leaves. (Your heroes will tend to escape though).(2)
Controlling the length of a tactical battle. We believe that users should have a lot of control over how in depth they want their battles to be. Should a tactical battle finish in less than a minute or should they last 2 hours? How do we make it so that players can control this?(3)
Randomization vs. Richness. I won’t lie to you, we have a trade off in front of us and it’s a big one. We can randomly generate the battlefields in tactical combat OR we can have it pick from a series of pre-made tactical battle maps. The randomly generated ones won’t be as interesting but they’ll more accurately reflect the local terrain. I’m preferring the pre-made ones because we can add some spectacular strategic when we’re crafting them and have hundreds to pull from. (4)
(1) I really wish for a clear and straightforward explanation here, because it's non-obvious to me what we're talking about. Maybe I'm just dense, but before we had 'continuous turn based' which was a label that did nothing but confuse me (Seriously. If it was 'effectively real time' then why haven't we just been calling it 'real time, but you can pause?) Now 'simultaneous turns'. What does that mean? There's an initiative order, where I move a unit, then you move a unit? We both choose our actions, and then the actions happen simultaneously when we're both done? What?
(2) and (3) On the one hand, you want to force the battle to fight to completion, so that one force must be completely wiped out before the battle ends. On the other hand, you want to give the users the ability to control how long the battle takes. Okay... I see these two goals as working at cross purposes. Will having winner-take-all battles with no retreat and no surrender really make the game shorter, overall? Even if it reduces the number of turns on the worldmap, it's potentially making the tactical battles drag on and on while I hunt down and kill every single enemy unit, even after they're clearly beaten. That introduces a 'mop up' phase in every single tactical battle, which I see as making the game overall play slower.
On the other hand, if you want to give players control over how long the battle lasts... a retreat option gives that. Being able to pull the plug when the battle has gone on long enough and it's obvious you're going to lose is, again, much quicker than having to fight until every single troop is dead. And it's much less frustrating than having to sit and watch my entire force be systematically destroyed - where's the fun in that?
I'm with the people who have suggested letting tactical battles continue over several strategic turns. After so many tactical turns, it cuts back to the world map and continues the next turn, with those units locked in combat until the fight can continue.
I also think that, if you want retreats to not drag the game out, then find a better way to handle them rather than just not having them at all. What you want to avoid is the scenario where you attack, the enemy retreats, and you're forced to chase them across many turns, trying to whittle them down. So, to prevent that: Don't make retreating a trivial exercise. It shouldn't simply be a matter of moving your units to the exit and canceling the tactical map, it should affect what you can do with that army afterwards.
I think it might be a good idea to move the after-battle mop-up phase to the strategic rather than the tactical level. When a commander sounds the retreat, their troops all run away independently - they're no longer a single, disciplined army, but rather scattered small groups who need to regroup and consolidate before they're a fighting force again. Maybe have a calculated percentage of your troops desert entirely, maybe have the troops return to the nearest town after a time, maybe have them scattered around the world map in small units that the enemy can more easily hunt down and destroy.
(4) Accurately representing the local terrain, and providing a variety of different landscapes to fight on, is much more important to me than having hand-crafted battlefields with lots of detail. Reflecting the landscape of the world map means that there's an important strategic element to where you fight your battles, as opposed to 'Oh, I'm fighting on Map #6 this time'
However, I'm not so keen on pure randomness. In particular, if I fight a battle at a particular location on one turn, I don't want to come back the next turn and fight another battle on the same location only to get a different randomly generated map. I'd prefer for the second battle to be recognizably the same terrain as the first. So my preference is to have the battle map reflect the terrain as accurately and reliably as possible. If you can do that with hand-crafted maps, by making enough variety of maps that the game can pick one that will closely represent the local terrain - okay. If not, then go with the random solution.
(1)
Well just like in games like AOW this should be an option to limit the turn times. I personally hate RTS games (with the exception of the Total War and Homeworld series) and prefer that if there is any mechanic that resembles RTS which time limits would be one, could be an option. One I would never use and I do play with up to 8 players and it really does not take a lot of time in my experience. Now the simultaneous turns that AOW has would be nice as long as it too is an option.
pssst....Dragonlance , it has TONS of Epic Battles. I think someone's even planning a Mod or something.
Quoting Tasunke, reply 355Quoting pigeonpigeon, reply 351Don't take this the wrong way anyone, I was as psyched about it as anyone, BUT, unless something radical is done with material costs, build times etc, fielding the ultimate 10,000 man Battle force may not happen on anything but the HUGEST of maps that make it so you never see another player for 4000+ Turns.Perhaps Beta 2 will shed some new light on the state of that game element but I am skeptical at this point. I hope I am totally wrong.Yeah I'm also worried about this. As it stands fielding an army composed of hundreds of units, let alone thousands, is a fairly significant achievement... To make it even worse, cities are so population-limited that you'd need to cover a massive land area in large cities to have enough population (and a strong enough economy) to field such armies. To achieve armies numbering in the thousands of units, they would really need to rescale all the numbers in the game.Umm .... I think its SUPPOSED to be a fairly difficult achievement. Nuff said.If you want to wield 5,000 soldier army that is naked with a club, that is one thing. Wanting to do such a thing with decent armor and weapons should be next to impossible.Now, if you wanted 10-100 well equipped soldiers, and the rest of your army naked with clubs ... that is a perfectly doable matter.On the other hand, an adventuring nation might have 10-20 soldiers super-well equipped at high levels. and maybe only a couple hundred soldiers naked with clubs as a standing militia.
I have seen used the term EPIC in relation to the battles that might/would/will be possible in Elemental. I cannot for the life of me see how 100+ guys, no matter how shiny they are, vs another 100+ guys, approaches EPIC.
Perhaps a Dragon is a MUST have after-all...
Randomization vs. Richness
Richness. If Elemental is to follow in the footsteps of MoM and XCOM, then there can be no question – Richness.
Richness would give the game greater replayability. To choose richness is to choose a game with soul. To choose Randomness is to choose a game that trades soul for technical mastery. I don’t still play X-Com for the random new experience – I have played and beaten the game so many times that every possible strategy is encoded in my DNA. And I still play it. I still play Mechwarrior: Mercs, Fallout, MoM, PS:T, MOO2, and a few other ancient entries because they are inherently rich experiences. There is nothing new left about these old games; they were well made, they have a soul that will continue in perpetuity.
Randomness creates the illusion of replayability but in truth offers little more than the instant gratification of something vaguely new. Furthermore, given the unprescedented customizability of Elemental, random tactical maps would limit the possibilities of community mapmakers to only creating strategic maps. To choose Randomness is a myopic choice; Randomness is ultimately hollow.
PC games are simply a modern form of the ancient art of storytelling. In the history of storytelling, it is the richness of the story that decides whether one endures while another fades. Neither gimmick nor spectacle creates anything enduring. The soul of any work is its richness. In the matter of Elemental, maps should be made by artists, not algorithms.
Richness. Definitely Richness.
Further comments, unrelated to the topic of discussion: I’ve been playing strategy games since Populous 2. I can say that recent games don’t hold a candle to old school games – newer games just aren’t as much fun (with some notable exceptions, many of those coming from Stardock). In my opinion, the reason that newer games are less fun is because, though they have evolved technically, they have no soul. The original Fallout was awesome – great story, great combat, great everything, and tons of fun. Fallout 3 had more of everything – more to explore, more dialogue, better graphics – yet it was about as interesting as hanging out at a Starbucks. Technically masterful, and entirely soulless. Even the latest remakes of Colonization and Pirates didn’t manage to match to sheer fun of the originals.
As far as Randomness vs Richness ...
If we go with Richness, I would hope for about 10 maps (at least) of every possible permutation: forest on hill, desert plains next to plains grassland, desert plains next to hilly grassland, plains swamp next to hilly grassland ... and mix it up with each of the 10 maps, with sometimes a little gulf of desert creates a sandy valley among the hills of grasses, or a small grassland hill juts up part-way into the desert.
I don't know if your tactical maps will just consist of the one tile, or the one tile AND its borders, or the one tile and its bordering 8 tiles. The more it encompasses, the more maps it would have to make.
Basically 8 factorial times 10, is what it would come down to, if it was to encompass the bordering 8 tiles IIRC.
I have to agree that the richness of the maps in Disciples 2 (yes I am bringing it D2 up again because apparently everyone either hasn't played it or forgot about how great it is) is what keeps me coming back for more:They emphaszed artistically drawn tactical maps that reflected the terrain but also were one of many random scenes that could appear. Its certainly an option that would satisfy me. Especially when I can create my own and share them with others.
I personally don't like the idea of having a limited amount of turns to win. I also think some sort of retreat should at least be allowed. Plenty of good idea's in this thread. I personally think you should be allowed to retreat once.
In this case you would lose control of your units and they would attempt to flee the map. (likely suffering huge casualties, depending on the situation.)
If they are pursued and caught again they would then be forced to fight. i.e winner takes all.
As for the random vs pre-generated maps. Personally I prefer the random maps which more accurately reflect the terrain. I think this could be a huge part of the strategy of where you choose to fight your battles. I dislike pre-generated maps that although can be perhaps better made, they could occur to frequently and be learnt. The map reflecting the world map is a big thing for me. But since you ask.
Why not both? (could even maybe an option in the settings.)
I would like the idea of "If you don't have numerical advantage within N turns, troops will grow tired and not fight as well.
N should scale on how good a general is, how large the force is (small, tactical forces should have a shorter timespan to duke it out) how good the offensive force is (elite troops should be able to fight for a long time), and how entrenched/powerful the defensive force is. If you're facing a fortress city with a dragon, you will need to pull off something like killing the dragon to keep fighting.
Another thing might to be taking M&B's cue. You can retreat, but you will have to leave men behind to do so.
I think that all these tactical condition ideas are great as long as they can be switched on or off as desired for ones idea of fun my be hell for another and having the option to make it be the way it is fun for the one playing or group (multiplayer) is a must I say....
another variation of this idea would be for the N scalar to also vary with the TRAINING of the troops, ie green militia small N, veteran troops more N, specialist/elite troops high N, heros/generals very high N, and average the N across all the troops on a side that are fighting, so losing a hero/general or a few elite units causes a large drop in morale and make more likely the auto-retreat/loss on the battle.
harpo
THANKYOU A MILLION TIMES FOR MAKING IT TURN BASED!
There have been SO many games that I've been very excited about, but then *whoops* the combat is real time, or some HORRIBLE melding of realtime and turn-based (like RTwP). Finally, someone with the COJONES to make a turn based game! YAYYYYYY!
There is always a balancing act between game concerns and realism concerns. However if I as a player can't think of a single in game reason for something other than "That's the way we programmed it.", it annoys me. So if I have a well led stack of experienced units and find that I cannot break an enemies defenses I would expect to be able to lead a retreat in good order. If an unlead or poorly led unit routs off the map however that's another story, I don't expect to see them again, except maybe as bandits. So I'd suggest that perhaps ordering a retreat causes a morale hit, but if the unit can maintain cohesion to the edge of the map they should be able to retreat but remain a usable army. Leadership and experience should play into it. So perhaps a well led unit loses morale more slowly than a poorly led one, and has a chance to not lose another morale step when ordered to retreat. A unit that breaks is gone when it hits the edge of the map.
As far as time limits go, if there is one I don't want to lose because I hit the time limit as an attacker even if my forces are in good order. IE: If my foe is down to a ninja water-boy armed with a nerf spork I'd better not lose my cadre of elite dragon riding hell-knights just because I ran out of turns before finding which bush he was hiding under.
Randomization vs. Richness. I won’t lie to you, we have a trade off in front of us and it’s a big one. We can randomly generate the battlefields in tactical combat OR we can have it pick from a series of pre-made tactical battle maps. The randomly generated ones won’t be as interesting but they’ll more accurately reflect the local terrain. I’m preferring the pre-made ones because we can add some spectacular strategic when we’re crafting them and have hundreds to pull from.
Why not have your cake and eat it too? Use randomixed terrain (but store the seeds, it should remain the same from turn to turn) for most tiles with a sprinkling of hand crafted tiles placed when the map is generated. It can also be an option for the magic system where earth-shaping or illusion spells can alter the battlefield map to something more favorable. Or even tech improvements. Perhaps 'Fortress design' gives your cities optimal battlefield maps when battles are fought at their walls.
How about morale drops by 1 for every attack and defense?
If you lost more troops than the enemy, you take an additional 1 hit to morale.
On average, champions start with 90, Sovs/Creatures start with 100, elites start at 75, regulars start at 60, draftees start at 40. High morale is 70+, Normal Morale is 50+, Low morale is 30+, Panic is 0.
Spells, flanking, terrain can all effect morale ... having a covered flank? +3 morale. High ground? +5 morale. Nearby enemies way weaker than you? +5 morale. Enemy unit routs? +1 morale for single units, +3 morale for parties/companies, +5 morale for larger units, +10 morale for routing legions.
Flank exposed? -2 morale. Surrounded? -3 morale. Nearby enemies way stronger than you? -3 morale. Nearby friendly unit starts routing? -2 morale for single units n parties, -3 morale for companies, -5 morale for next size, -10 morale for next next size, -20 morale for a nearby routing legion.
Cavalry charges you? -4 morale unless you have spears. If spears, only -1 morale.
Archers fire at you and you don't have a ranged weapon? -2 morale.
Attacked by something scary? -2 for mild fear, -4 for frightening, -8 terrifying, -15 for Unspeakable Horror
I've been playing MoM recently, since waiting for Elemental got me in the mood .
I might be weird, but I don't mind the concept of CtC. I think CtC helps keep my play time down and I think it works for Dragon Age and Total War. But comparing to MoM, I always make sure that the opponent steps into my swinging axe vs. me stepping into his. Changing the format to CtC would probably change my strategy so that I don't get a near-automatic first strike capability.
Yep, all good.
Another fun tactic in MoM is to put an invisible stalker on a wizard's tower. The attacking enemy just stands there for N turns and then they lose the fight. It doesn't matter how many troops they have, the stalker still wins . In general, I think the fight should end after N turns regardless. I have run into a couple fights that ended in draws (like the final armies both ended with 0 offense troops) so I feel any game needs a way to 'eject' out of a fight. I like tying N turns into a morale issue of the attacking force. I also agree that the 'N' value should be tied in some way to the size of the two armies. Whether or not morale is also tied to leader/general loss, I am neutral on. Works either way for me.
Retreating? Yep. At a morale loss, or if the player/computer loses control of troops. But not automatic retreat; a 'run for the hills' retreat, where they get no defensive modifiers and enemy calvary gets a chance to tear them to shreds. Draws? Nope.
OR? Say it isn't so .. In reading the first page of posts, I'm in agreement that there's *got* to be some middle-ground somewhere. Like having specific 3x1 tile that has a 35% chance of being in a hill terrain battlefield and that 3x1 cannot be within 4 squares of another 2x2 tile (Adding richness to random). Or, having some pre-made battle maps chosen 70% of the time with random the rest of the time (Adding random to richness).. I definitely prefer not having a specific 'click here' strategy after the battle has started. But, I want some pretty, too .
edit: Can't get the formatting right. Ah, well.
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