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:
Combat Speed
As long as combat speed is separate from movement speed. A guy on a horse can't swing his sword any more frequently than a guy on foot; the only speed-related difference between the two is that the guy on the horse can cross distances faster. I suppose a guy on a horse charing enemy ranks technically has more opportunities to hurt enemies in the same amount of time, but that is best achieved through other mechanics...
Also, Sauron didn't have high combat speed. He didn't swing his mace any faster than the men or elves he was fighting. But every swing blasted a dozen people at once. High combat speed would mean he could hit a dozen different guys individually, or he could hit the same guy a dozen times for massive focused damage. Sauron, in the movie, did not display the ability to whack the same person a dozen times in the space of one or two seconds. Please divorce AoE effects from combat speed.
Morale
Yay. I'm glad you're seriously thinking about including morale and panic. It's a feature that adds an incredible amount of richness to combat for such a simple concept.
Terrain
Also yay. I'd love to see elevation be relevant, too. If fighting breaks out by the slope of a mountain, the side with higher ground is going to have a massive advantage. This makes choosing where to fight your battles a very strategic choice.
WINNER. TAKE. ALL
Don't like. I understand your opinion of it and I agree to an extent; retreating can sometimes be a real pain. But so can not being able to retreat. I mean, let's take a hypothetical situation: I have a company of light cavalry sitting by my border. An enemy army that was outside my LoS rushes in and attacks them, but has no troops as fast as my cavalry. Why should those cavalry be forced to stand their ground and fight to the death? That makes no sense, and it's frustrating when illogical things like that happen.
Rather, make retreating a risky proposition. Total War does it fairly well. While retreating, your troops are extremely vulnerable and can be picked off pretty easily (not to mention they have their backs towards your weapons...). Like others have mentioned, running like hell away from a superior force can be tiring, so retreating should be something that can't be repeated without some rest interval. When units retreat, don't have them appear at your nearest city, but have them move as far from the enemy force as possible. If a friendly city or defensive structure happens to be within range, perhaps they should automatically move there.
Also, if a hero is killed in tactical combat, he/she should die. If I see that things are going badly, allow me to order my hero to break and run and let my other troops cover for him. Give us the choice. Having heroes "tending to escape" would be so frustrating; defeating an enemy hero that never retreated only to face him again a few turns later would make me tear my hair out. Likewise, if it's chance-based, then the rare time when my hero doesn't escape, particularly a beloved hero, would be a "WTF" moment. During auto-resolve, obviously the chance to escape should remain, of course.
How many turns should N be? I dunno. I don't really like forced time limits. For one, it would have to depend drastically on the scale of the battle, and the type. Is it a spontaneous skirmish in a swamp? Something like wouldn't typically last very long. Is it a siege? Attackers in a siege typically come prepared for a long stay, and defenders typically have stores to last for some time... If you do decide on some hard time limit to combat, it should only affect stupidly long combat, where it's obvious that players are running around in circles or something.
Combined Arms
Definitely. Although, I see no reason why foot soldiers should tend to have better weapons and defenses as a rule. I should be able to equip the same heavy armor and weaponry on my mounted soldiers as on my infantry; obviously the added weight should reduce movement speed. But there should be no inherent difference in their equipment. Cavalry and infantry have their own niches, with cavalry generally superior or at least more versatile, but also more expensive.
Also, is there any chance of being able to equip my swordsmen with shortbows, or something? I like units with mixed weaponry, even if it makes them that much more expensive or if their combat efficiency in each type of combat suffers for it compared to a specialized soldier. This isn't a necessity of course, but it'd go a long way towards making unit customization more powerful and fun.
Thresholds
What is the point of this? It doesn't make any sense and it's completely unnecessary. On initiation of combat, give the player a choice between the different options. Auto-resolve, tactical combat, etc. Also, a nice feature would be the option to watch auto-resolve combat play out with the ability to jump in and take control if you don't like the way things hare being handled.
Controlling the length of a tactical battle
Tricky question. I mean, small skirmishes should be quick. In turn-based combat, a small skirmish should be over within a minute for an experienced player. But a battle between the two largest armies that will ever walk the world in a large game should last much longer, even a good 10 minutes. Small skirmishes should be quick, because they tend to be frequent and if they're long they get tedious. Large battles, on the other hand, tend to be few and far between, and they are not satisfying if they go by too quickly. If I fight the equivalent of the Last Battle from the Lord of the Rings (the one showed in the beginning of the first movie) and it ends in 2 minutes... Well, some Last Battle that would be.
I actually think HoMM III got combat length down pretty well. Uneven battles ended very quickly. Evenly matched battles took longer, and generally took longer the larger the sides are, but not to an extreme extent. Basically, I think that turn-based tactical combat should last between 15 seconds to 15 minutes at the most extreme ends of the spectrum.
Randomization vs. Richness
Randomization. Pre-made maps would lead to very formulaic combat. You don't have to study the terrain after you've played on a given combat map a few times; you know exactly where everything is and how to best use it with your current army makeup and that of your enemy's. It'd make combat much more tedious. This is one of my major complains about King Arthur, actually... Sure, the pre-made maps are well-crafted but they get quite tedious.
Hmm... I like that idea, I think. But how does it work exactly?
If a combat turn is, say, 20 segments, the initiative rating is the number of segments that must pass in a combat turn before a unit can accept orders, and combat runs continuously but pauses whenever a unit needs orders, I think I may be in love with the idea.
I think you should make High morale depend on the unit's integrity, at least. For example, regardless of how the unit is faring in a battle, it shouldn't be capable of having High morale if it's, say, standard bearer, is dead.
I also think units panicking while in close combat should have a chance of being destroyed outright, especially if the panicking unit can't leg it faster than the unit it's close combat with can run it down.
Further, I can imagine watching a big nasty dragon lay into the enemy along side your own troop of puny little spearmen (or whatever) would make you feel something close to invulnerable, so having fantastical units continuously generate positive/negative morale for less fantastical units watching them, seems pretty reasonable. And of course, watching fantastical allies biting the dust is probably a pretty disheartening experience too.
Finally, I think panicking units should be allowed to flee the field, and a percentage of them reappear after the battle as possible reinforcements for whatever unit types fled the field.
I don't know why combat would need to be tile based for that to work. Why not simply use distance measures & areas of effect?
I really, really, really think you should introduce some logical objectives for the attackers & defenders in each battle, because I agree having a maximum turn count is a good idea and that kind of limitation just makes more sense (and it's more fun to play the battles) if the objective isn't simply to annihilate everything that moves. It shouldn't be too hard to associate a couple (or more!!) sensible objectives with the squares armies can stand on in the game.
As for what should determine what N is: if you go with mechanics somewhat similar to the ones I mentioned above regarding unit initiative, I think N should be a random number between 5 and 7, possibly modified by the objective(s). I also think you should count each turn as 1 hour in the game world, so things like light levels and weather can both matter and change during battle.
Should you allow retreats? Yes, but! I think you should let the attacking army decide when, time-of-day-wise, it wants to attack. If it attacks during daytime I think the defender should have the chance to flee the field without repercussions. If the defender is attacked by night, though, how about handling it like this:
Let the defender pick a non-fantastical unit for sentry duty and randomly spawn it as a bunch of much smaller units near wherever the attacker deploys, and modify each mini-unit's initiative rating by a random number. Let the attacker set up, and then see how many sentries the attacker can destroy before one of the mini-units comes up in the initiative order. If the attacker can destroy them all, the defender can't flee the field before the battle. If the attacker can't destroy them all before a sentry comes up in the initiative order, the defender can flee as normal, but loses whatever number of individuals in the unit he had on sentry duty.
I really hope you decide to allow draws, based on whether some, all or none of the fighting sides accomplished their objectives. You might modify this based on how much damage the sides inflicted on each other, but that might be overkill. I'd suggest draws force all involved to remove themselves from the tile the battle occurred on. It could make going for a draw a viable strategy for critical positions - or in general, even (for the defender, I mean), if you decide to reward armies for accomplishing objectives during battles.
Two requests: Multiple outcomes/randomness is good, but please don't go overboard with it. Keep possible outcomes to a few reasonable ones and make the most reasonable ones the overwhelmingly likely ones. I don't ever want to see Elemental's equivalent of snotlings fight off a cavalry charge.
Secondly, please make numbers matter. A lone lance-guy on a horsey charging 50 footmen should die horribly, no matter how good lance-guys on horsies are against footmen.
Very cool idea.
Hmm.. I'm biased. I'd love battles to be 30mins and upwards, and, well.. You do have that auto-resolve feature. But bias aside, I don't really see how you could make any one combat system that flexible and keep it fun & interesting for everyone. Which is why I'd rather you spend your energy on making 2 hour battles worth fighting... The bias talking again.
Normally I'd want you to go with the randomly generated ones, because no matter how interesting your hand-made ones are, they won't be as interesting as randomly generated battlefields two years from now. And if that is the choice, please consider this a vote for random maps.
But you've been talking & talking & talking about how moddable Elemental is, so assuming it applies to battlefields in normal, randomly generated games, I'm fine with either RNG or hand-made battlefields - under the assumption that I can supplement the hand-made ones with more from nice, creative Elemental players.
Randomization vs. Richness.
As was mentionned before by others I would like to have BOTH of the hand crafted maps AND the random generated ones, why? Well, the hand crafted map can provide you with truly unique tactics and challenge, they tend to be memorable if done well. But on the other hand after a long while and many playthrough they -hurt- replayability in the long run. It's fun to see something new.
Quoting Frogboy:
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).
Remaining Questions and issues:1. 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?
2. 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.
End Quote:
Winner. Take. All.
I don't like that very much I'm afraid. If I have a city surrounded and under siege, if I can keep my attacking army safe and fed, I should be able to stay there Indefinitely unless my enemy can move me by Force. There should be no time limit unless my army starves to death or is otherwise defeated in battle. If I can surround a city and starve them out without lifting a sword or casting a spell, I might want to do that. A player might also do this to prevent Having to go up against a more powerful opponent. At this point the player/AI Being Besieged should be Forced to come out and attack me leaving the safety of their walls and fortifications.
1-A. This ties directly into the Winner-Take-All time-frame. Why have a time-frame at all? A battle can only end when one side is dead or runs away, period. Why introduce some artificial time limitation? If a player doesn't want to fight they'll hit auto-resolve and be done with it, end-of-story. Also, you can't make a battle last Two Hours unless you have a massive army. It's unrealistic to think that a fight between 10 guys will take anywhere near as long as a fight between 10,000 guys. Either way it all comes down to How The Player Decides To Play The Battle that will determine how "Long" it lasts. If we have Lots of options and different types of commands, then battles will last longer. If we only have a few options, then battles will go quicker....
Having said that....Please Don't Gimp This Up like I've seen you do with previous "complicated systems" so far in this development cycle.
I'm not trying to be a smart ass or be disrespectful, I love you guys work dearly, but time and time again I've seen you take "the simpler route" or "the simpler choice" when coming to decisions regarding this game. I've also seen you say "Let's Show Them What a PC GAME Can Do" and I constantly hope you'll realize what that means and not be afraid to "complicate" things just a little bit. We play War Strategy Games because they ARE More Complicated then action games or racing games or even RPG's. Strategy and RPG titles are BEST on the PC for a REASON. People play PC Games Because you can get way more in depth and detailed and have options and tactics that mirror reality or Sci-Fi or Fantasy. Please....Prove me Wrong and for Once in the development of this game pick the more "Complicated System" instead of the "Less-Complicated System" which I've seen you do time and time again so far...and been disappointed in Every instance. Find a middle ground.
I'm NOT SAYING Bog the battles down in Micromanagement. I'm not saying fill the screen with options which most players will never use or want to use. Just do it Right Without Dumbing it down...this once...Please. Having plenty of options does not make things boring or complicated. No matter how much you might like Sid Meier's 10 Rules, he's WAY OFF on the "Don't Complicate Things" part. That only applies to part of the gaming population and definitely, Definitely, Does Not Apply to Computer Gamers.
2-A. If the world is being built in 3D, then Why exactly can't each battle map Actually mirror the terrain on the strategic map? Is it a memory issue or what? Have each world map drawn out in 3D, then when a battle takes place and the camera moves in for the battle just have the battle map be a piece of the strategic map only enlarged to actual scale. Shouldn't be That Hard to accomplish as I can tell you some other games that do just that. The only difference is they don't have the variety of content that Elemental has.
IF you have to chose either "Randomization" or "Richness"....Go with RANDOMIZATION. If you make your own, "Rich-Detailed-Maps" then they will start to recycle very quickly. Yes, we'll be able to make more with the map editor, sure you can make hundreds and hundreds, but will you Really be able to make "Hundreds to Pull From" in a reasonable time-frame? If I play the game for four hours a night, five days a week, how long until I start repeating maps? A week? Less then a week?
I'd Much Rather Have Maps That Semi-Accurately Resemble The Actual Land The Battle Is Taking Place On. In my "opinion" any other Serious War Gamer would too. That's just my opinion though.
Battle duration under player control
I Don't know if it been mentioned but I had an idea about Tactical battle relating to duration.
I suggest that the player can at any time activate the auto-resolve (Auto-finish) even during the tactical battle itself.
I have 3 examples where this could be useful:
As for me, I'd prefer a more logical system of retreat than Winner Takes All.
To Allow Retreat or Not?
I have 2 ideas that could help mitigate the problem of dragging a war on.
The First would be a pre-determined vector of retreat. Say for example that I am attacking (Or defending it does not really matter) so I deploy my units (If there's a deployment phase) inside a restricted area that is not directly on the edge of the map (Think deployment in the Total War series)
Then the battle start and become joined around the middle of the map unless the defensive side decide to stand it ground will the attacker advance under ranged fire then the battle would be joined at about 3/4 of the map on the defending side.
Now let say one side need to retreat, the only way it can do that would be to move it units to the edge of the map it came from as opposed to simply clicking retreat and having the battle ended or doing a free for all retreat (Where every map edge are viable retreat route. One example of this is NOT the Total War series but rather more like X-Com,
In the original (First 2) X-Com to retreat from a battle you had to return you units to the transport craft lest you would leave them behind. This allow the opposing force (I.e.: The one not retreating) to mop-up the enemy and thus prevent the abuse of indecisive battles.
This would also have the very nice side effect of allowing a few more tactics that would not be available otherwise especially on the offensive side. Two that come to mind are envelopment (Moving your units in a way to prevent retreat by cutting the retreat route) and Skirmish Raids (Sending a bunch of Fast and mobile troops to kill some slower enemy units and then retreat before they can retaliate properly).
What kind of Turn Base game play is planned?
From the Journal, Frogboy got me a little confused. He talk about unit having specific speed that will determine what an unit can do in it turn by transferring Speed to the equivalent of Time Units in X-Com unless I'm mistaken. Then one side play it turn exhausting it TUs or maybe keeping some in reserve for retaliation and then the other side do the same.
Now if that the road they want to take it's fine, I don't mind but I rather see the Turn-Based Tactical battle work more like Final Fantasy Tactics (Especially the first one (PSX).) The idea is that Speed determine the turn order of the units and then either the same speed or another statistic akin the the FFT stats of Move would determine the range of what it can do trougt a TU system or a simple "You can move X tiles during your turn).
Keeping the same example as Frogboy, Sauron having such high speed would get a lots of turns and use them to slaughter it opposition while the humans and co. would only be able to attack when their own speed allow them.
To makes things clear imagine this turn sequence for the previous exemple:
And so on.
The real problem under this method is how to determine what can an unit do during his turn. Final Fantasy Tactics use the Move Stats as I said earlier which could be translated into Agility or something. So you would have X unit having Y Speed and Z Agility. So you get for example Wizards or Archers with High Speed but low Agility therefore they could move often but not be able to do much during those turn while on the other hand you would have Soldier who have low Speed but high Agility (For foot based units) so they move less often but when they do they can attack more targets or move further than the Archers. In this system Cavalry would have high Speed and High Agility but as expected be limited in the actual damage output per attacks.
How Big is that Battlefield?
One big reason why battle can take much longer than they should is the size of the battlefield. I don't know if some of you guys can remember how painful if could be in the early X-Com UFO missions (Against Scouts) to find that pesky lone Sectoid in the dark. Of course having the ability choose to fight only big battle will nullify that scenario but if the maps made by Stardock are all one size fit all (especially if they decide to use pre-made map (Which I honestly prefer) you could end up having to large an area to cover with you troops. Now I sure that Frogboy and Co. already thought about this but I just wanted to say it just in case.
A "simple" (Nothing is really simple in game development) would be to create large maps and then use only parts of it for tactical battle by selecting either random or not a smaller area of that map for an appropriate Battlefield size.
For exemple say create a bunch of (off the top of my head) 200 x 200 maps then let say the battle in question is about 16 units vs 16 units so the game select an area of, I don't know, 32x32 to fight the battle in. This would allow the battle to feel somewhat random (It's the same map but the exactly the same area) while reducing the work needed to create the various maps to use even with specifics area predetermined inside that big map (Thing as a simplistic comparison about the Region Map in Simcity 4 all fractured in smaller city lots of varying size except in this case the "lots" could safely overlaps).
Say creating 50 such large maps would be simpler and cheaper (In my mind mind you) than creating 100s of smaller maps of varying sizes.
Of course no matter the direction Stardock takes, the more maps the better, always
Anyway that's all for me and thanks for reading this massive post but Tactical battle really get me going and I hope you like at least some of those ideas.
Sounds good mostly. As for the questions, I think there should be some kind of turn limit, after which the battle ends in a draw. But the amount of turns it requires should be enough that it happens rarely and would pretty much just be there to prevent endless battles. And randomized battlefields please. Even if you make hundreds of different premade ones, I'll guarantee you it won't be enough with the amount we'll be playing
Objectives would be fantastic to have in tactical battles, and maybe we could even take it to affecting armies on the map. Like, say there is an army inbound on your city, and you know you can't take them in a fair fight. You send a raiding party with the objective of burning their supply train, which would have some negative effect on the army, or force them to return. Their objective would to be defend the supplies and/or kill or capture all the horsemen.
Stuff like that would make the combat incredible, in my opinion.
side note: I've tried to post this about four times, and the forums keeping blowing up on me. Am becoming further convinced that the government is somehow involved. Supplies short, morale low.
attempt eight: have formed rudimentary society consisting of my laptop, a chair I found, and myself. Supplies are full again, thanks to a recently found deer. The tribe will eat well.
The forums seems to have gobbled up my post (it posted, now its not here?). I apologise if this somehow double posts.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).Forcing a player to play out a match in a time frame or number of turns kind of runs contrarey to the turn based nature of the game, in my opinion. If attacking is supposed to carry some form of weight, which is clearly is, than withdrawing removes a significant chunk of that weight and drags out the inevitable conclusion longer than is needed. However, its also a good move early when you need to really protect your units as you develop.I think there should be a threshold for the size of a battle that, once passed, prevents either side from withdrawing and has to commit to the battle. This allows the early game 'careful' strategy while preventing it from becoming the late game 'turtle because I'm going to lose and want to annoy you' strategy.As already mentioned, this will force later game battles to last longer if not properly addressed, which brings me neatly to: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?You mentioned it already, I believe Brad, that a tactical battle can be auto-resolved at any point during the battle? I think this is pretty sufficent to both prevent the longer battles from drawing out into 2 hour slug fests for those who don't want it and to ensure that battles can be as short or as long as a player wants.Another threshold could be in place, say 80% chance to win, that then allows the person with the 80% chance to automatically end the battle in a multiplayer game if the battle also past the above mentioned threshold to prevent withdraws. This prevents the losing side from drawing out the fight in spite.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.As long as there was enough of them, and being tile based it shouldn't be difficult to produce hundreds, I'd prefer the hand made ones that had room to add in additional features to give a sense of cohesiveness - if the map took place on a tile that had a tree or large stone, the game could just add a large scale version of the depicted tree to an already produced map to ensure that it looked correct according to the map. If Disgae: Hour of Darkness - a tile based tactical battle system based on randomised maps - tought me one thing is that random maps can be a blessing and a curse: lots and lots of randomised, similar maps are still just similar maps.
I think that Crown of Glory has the concept that you probably want to use here, which is scalability... it's just moreso. You have 4000 pikemen in an army... so what is the unit size? If you are going for an extremely quick battle, that should equal 4 units of 1000 men each. If you are going for a detailed battle, you should have 40 units of 100 men each. You scale the number of units based on how detailed you want the combat to be.
Personally I think that if individual units are going to be able to be quite powerful (not just heros), then withdrawals and draws need to be modelled. Now the way to prevent ping-pong is is to use the N turns concept. If an army, either attacking or defending, tries to retreat prior to N turns it is completely destroyed. The other way to do this is to make the size of the battlefield scalable. What if my horse archers are designed for hit and run? They have to be able to do it, either on a strategic or tactical level in order for my strategy to be effective. If I can make the battlefield huge, then I can influence that a bit more without having to enable retreats.
Add retreat mechanics! But make units more valuable to compensate, and include the ability to upgrade or retrain existing units. You can sustain heavy losses, but if you "break morale" you should lose units while retreating and also some of your units should "desert" especially if you retreat in enemy territory, where random people (militia?) pick off any stragglers.
Also, for the love of god, Frogboy, fix your servers.
Wow all of this sounds fantastic! I just have two points to make:
I am completely with Brad on the retreat thing.
1. I dont wont to spend my time chasing down stragglers all day!
2. Every game that has this option always weakens the AI! Why? Because if the darn AI had actually stood and fought against me it would have actually been a tough fight with lots of losses! This in turn weakens me and I have to rest and regroup. But in most games you can just whittle away at the retreating AI until their mighty army is reduced to nothing and you can just go on a rampage with your very intact army! Make the AI stand and fight please!!!
Regarding the maps please give us the option when the battle starts to fight on a random or Pre-Made map! Sometimes I want things to be different but sometimes it would be very fun to fight on a very special site or landmark! Very cool! Why limit it to having either one or the other in the game!?
WINNER. TAKE. ALL.I'd rather be allowed to retreat. Yeah games have the possibility to drag on but then maybe someone needs to try new things to get the ball rolling. I agree with what others have said about TW's retreat system for defeated units. Also, I'd like to be able to personally tell which units to retreat or not. That way it can represent a fighting/tactical retreat so not all of your units flee the battlefield. Also, this depends on if AI units have some kind of situational awareness built in. So say your army is being defeated and you have already ordered units you want spared off the battlefield while you want a few others to stay and act as rearguard. Depending on these units' stats, they can fight to the death or disobey your command and run off TW style. I know that's quite the specific example but I hope it makes sense as it could make the larger battles more interesting. Also there should be draws allowed. It happened in real life, where two armies stalemated for a day or two before things were resolved. Also it could portray a day long battle with breaks in-between fighting. It would make fighting over important terrain or map areas more worthwhile instead of having the armies each fallback a few squares or whatever.
Controlling the length of a tactical battle.This should be decided during the battle or in the pregame set-up menu. It needs to be dynamic for battles outside of cities and towns. Sieges and the like should be timed on the food stuffs the village/city has and also of the besieging army, if their logistics holds or something like that.
Randomization vs. Richness.I'd prefer randomization over richness. It makes things more realistic and entertaining. Pre-made maps can, over time, get repetitive. I'd prefer to fit on the terrain I placed my army on. I was also thinking battlefields should always be... maybe 2x as large as the largest army on the battlefield to allow for maneuvering your troops around. I also think it would be cool to allow battles to "change maps." I.e. say you deploy an army just out of sight of a nearby city to engage the enemy. Things go bad and your army is pushed back across the map but still fighting. Soon you realize your city is now apart of the map even though it wasn't originally.
Random vs Rich
Would it not be possible to randomly place "sets" of terrain? So instead of having to craft whole tactical battle terrain maps, you can create battle terrain in bits and pieces, from tiny little rocks that annoy your footsoldiers, to swathes of swampland crafted meticulously with advantages and dissadvantages. I'm pretty much against purly richness/set scenes because as someone said earlier, once you know the battle terrains, you can setup for particular tactics EVERY time; I don't believe this would be fun.
Winner Takes All
Couple of ideas that i saw earlier are good: 1) allow retreating, but have magic/items later on that prevent it (orion 1/2 had "warp interdictor" = no retreating).
2) As it is turn based, once the option to retreat is chosen, then the units retreating CAN NOT attack/parry/defend/counter any attacks done on them. Which makes sense, as they should be fleeing with their backs AWAY from the enemy.... Also a good deterent NOT to pick a fight that you can't win.
Two new points I'm not sure if they have been mentioned yet: 1) Don't allow defenders in Cities to retreat, as they have no where to retreat to.
2) As an alternative to the penalising gauge I saw someone mention, how about highten all attack stats as a battle goes on? This would accelerate the tactical battles. The gauge should be adjustable by the player, ie come into effect after N turns, have X multiplier. The alternative would be to weigh up the damage each team has done upon each other, and have the team that has done more damage be awarder the attack multiplier based on either player settings, or the difference in damage done. You could have the second system designed so the multiplier would be calculated and applied after N turns chosen by the player.
PS: to those who think controlling THOUSANDS of troops is an issue in turn based battles.... Look to how you create thousands of troops... You build them as ONE unit, control them as ONE unit. The only issue is having LOTS of different unit stacks, but I cannot see my self controlling more than 15 stacks in the one battle. Already that would be a large mainenance cost, especially if they were stacks of 1000s !!!!!!
A few thoughts:
Regarding battle duration, most fighting should take the better part of a day for a large battle, but should have an 'army fatigue' feature to keep it from going on forever. Not even the best troops would be able to keep up a fight in chain or plate, bashing a broadsword into the enemy's lines for hours on end. If the troops are a bit sullen after the SEVENTH charge into the enemy pikes for no gain, and the commander hasn't seen his brother in three hours and fears the worst, they may be inclined to break off. Modify this timer based on troop morale, supply levels, command ability, and you have a feature that can vary the length of a fight in a meaningful way. Prince Roland, Lord of the Northlands, leading his royal guard and personal horsemen, can fight all day, his bloodied axe leading the way. His weakling brother Eron, with the local peasant-spearmen levy and a band of hired swordsmen that haven't been paid in a month and haven't eaten since last Thursday, attempt to pull out of the fight after a few charges.
Figure some way to give advantage to the army with more staying power if their foe decides to retreat. For instance, if Eron up above gets discouraged and wants to retreat but the Kraxis Warlord who hasn't even engaged with his cavalry is fresh, give them the opportunity to attack the retreating (fleeing?) enemy. On the other end of the spectrum, two sides, heavily engaged with moderate losses but no real gain against each other's massive army - one quits the field, the other side, their own 'army fatigue' meter low, just lets the fighting die off and the enemy leave in good order. Lulls in the fighting, spells, or other abilities could rejuvenate the fatigue meter as well.
Maps - With massive cities in the neighborhood of 1000 citizens, armies will probably get to a few thousand for more developed nations, but I can't see it getting to the size of Cannae, roughly 145,000 total for both sides. Even so, an army of 2000 spearmen, in massed formations eight deep, still take up about 3 ft of frontage per person, and would stretch 750 ft across. For a battle that size, there needs to be plenty of room to maneuver, at least a mile square. With cavalry, all manner of creatures including dragons the size of a city block, the space requirements need to go up. It killed me in the Total War games to see an army of Mongol or Turkish horsemen stretch across the entire battle map. Cavalry need room!
Why not use both map types?
We can use premade maps over certain landmarks, while using random generated maps over anywhere else.
e.g. The "Well of Eraida's Sorrow" is a landmark that has a matching, premade custom map associated with it. Many "landmarks" or "points of interest" can be created, each with a linked custom map. A certain, random number of these landmarks can then be distributed throughout the game world. When an army fights in close proximity over one of the points of interest, the armies will always fight on the premade, tactical map. When an army fights anywhere else, they will fight on a random generated map, taking into account the general terrain type (mountainous, plains, etc.).
Mock up:
Overview map
Tactical Map
And yes, feel free to bow before my mighty paint skills. =P
edit: Ah, after reading through I see that irongamer and others have mentioned the idea already. Basically... I agree with them.
-Knowing the loser loses all, players will be hesitant to engage unless they have an obviously overwhelming force. This will tend to slow down the game as each side waits for said advantage, and tends to promote 'gamey' Strategy&Tactics (ie doing things designed to fit the game's rules instead of according to good S&T) -- similar to Civ4 SOD type warfare. Maneuvering to obtain an advantage due to terrain is good, but waltzing around waiting for overwhelming numbers may not be.
-If units gain xp over time, WTA kills off the loser's promoted troops, exacerbating the loss. Maybe that's a good thing to some -- it would further tip the balance to the winner and speed up the game's end by increasing the steamroll effect. To others that's not a good thing, as it makes it hard to come back from a loss and removes the back&forth ebb&flow. Being on the ropes then coming back is a lot of fun, and making that even harder than it otherwise would be might not be a good thing.
-If there's differences in unit training/quality, this is one good way to express it (other than merely increasing hit points, armor, damage, etc.). Peasant troops may only have Stand&Fight and Run! Away! options. Veteran troops might add in Organized Withdrawal and Ambush. Elite troops might add in Feints, Spoiling Attack, and Fighting Retreat. Penalizing a retreat with total losses removes one way to distinguish better trained troops.
-Retreats can be offensive (in the 'big/meta picture'). Say a large force unexpectedly approaches your capitol and your main force (who's location is unknown by your approaching foe) is off towards another foe, and you only have a small blocking force available to delay the attackers. Luring the approaching foe away from your capitol and towards your main force by forcing battle would be hard if your blocking force would automatically be wiped out. If some of the blocking force could survive it would present the attacker with a more difficult decision -- delay the assault on the capitol to finish off the blocking force (leading the enemy towards the approaching friendly troops and buying time to reinforce the capitol), or press on to the capitol and risk the blocking force causing trouble behind him.
Withdrawal should be difficult.
I would like tactical battles to be on a map significantly larger than the area between the two forces. If Combat takes place between two adjacent tiles, then the map should be at least 9, with at least as much distance to the nearest point of withdrawal as is between them.
Harrying forces and skirmishers that fight on the move and can't be properly designed to work in a static environment are then functional. It solves many things besides just withdrawal. It would also be nice for combat to take place over larger distances when other troops are in the area. This will allow you to cut off the retreat of the enemy you've beaten.
Withdrawal should also come with penalties based on the conditions. The Total War games use some. An attacker that then withdraws without even fighting should be hit with a severe penalty. A defender a lesser one, but still something that stays with them. Cowardice is often ill received even when it's mistaken intelligence. Commanding units on the field would be seen as incompetent or worse. Units under their command would at the least have poor morale for a while following the occurrence.
Combat length. Why end the battle.
Whether five minutes or five hours, all you need is a time limit. No need to play with morale or anything. Just pick it up where it left off the next turn. Adding any troops that moved in from the edge of the field.
There are multiple uses. An attacker that fails to destroy his target within enemy territory will be slaughtered in short order as reinforcements arrive to flank the entangled troops. It will be a short, and bloody mess. A defender with insufficient troops present, but more coming, instead of running to fight another day, can take a gamble and try to hold for additional turns. Something quite likely if fortress combat is a little less pointless and boring than most TBS games...
It means you actually can defend. The attacker always has the advantage, because the attacker chooses when to attack, and where. The attacker makes the decision where the large battle is going to take place, the defender has to react. It is always insufficient when knowledge is not gained before hand. Games try to get around this with defense bonuses and such, but if your fortress defenders can actually hold out for several turns as you fight the opponent to a standstill at the walls, they've got a damn good reason to siege you down.
Taking a castle should be a major offensive, it would be nice to have it be one. One where you can make building that castle be as big a deal as it should be and still be worth it.
Edit: It would also be nice if combat moves ate into main map moves. As in you fight to standstill for the day, you eat an entire turns movement for the army, continuing into the next turn, preferably. Perhaps set up with the attackers remaining moves for the current turn extending the duration of the battle if combats are resolved mid turn instead of in a phase system.
WTA, no.
Personally I feel that the abiliy to skirmish , harass and guerilla your enemy to death is all very viable and interesting tactics combined with the greater armies providing control and siege abilities.
For example I'd love to have my great glittering standardbearing Cav/Inf/arch army in the fields defending and attacking while having smaller patrol and harass forces in say, mountains and forests able to handle enemy scouts and darting out now and then to pick of a few of the enemies main army troops.
It allows for living breathing strategies and tactics not only dominated by the bigger side.
On a side note; in all my years of gaming ( and there has been a lot of those ), I think very few games have engaged me as much as Dominions 3, on the combat side of things at least.
Turnbased tactical combats is allmost always a dealbreaker in bigger MP games ( and I love those, and yes, I know E:WoM is not exactly catered to that in the first place ) , autoresolve can always be done but more often than not leaves you with a foul tase in your mouth as your halfling slingers charge into a wall of halbeards.
In conclusion then? I'd like to see the ability to fight my turnbased battles as I see fit (when not in a MP environment) but being able to (Dom 3 wise) predefine army setup and tactics. With the AI being written as it is I would think there would be huge benefits in providing general combat "AI scripts" , ie. "Flank and attack rear" , "provide shield cover" , and using these for auto resolve.
You could even provide general Cavalry, archer, infantry, skirmisher etc. templates for those not inclined to the micro.
Ok, really against the "morale loss after N turns" - why should your forces abruptly lose effectiveness after a certain number of turns? It's good that an unsuccessful attacker should lose morale and eventually his forces break and run, but that morale loss should be tied to things that the player has control of, things happening on the battlefield - how heavy your losses have been vs. the enemy's, how much ground you've taken from him, etc - not an arbitrary number of turns. I see why you might want an arbitrary turn limit, to prevent both sides from grabbing a good defensive position on the tactical battlefield and waiting for the other to attack, but honestly if these kinds of stalemates are common there's probably something wrong with the combat mechanics - you've made defense just too inherently good vs. offense.
I'm also going to support the posters who mentioned a costly retreat option - one that makes your army vulnerable and/or makes you lose control of them while retreating, usually leading to heavy losses. It should be considered a victory for the other side, just a victory where the loser is able to salvage a portion of his forces to fight another day. Make it costly enough and you don't need artificial limitations like "only the attacker can retreat" or "only retreat once per day" - it won't be something you want to do over and over anyway, your army should disappear quickly if you're retreating frequently. You might not want retreating from a besieged city though, it ensures that sooner or later they'll be forced to stand and fight, however much they may withdraw from you on the field they have to defend their home city to the death.
Edit: Really like Nick-Danger's idea of making more experienced/better trained troops better at retreating. It limits retreating in an intelligent way, opening up some interesting tactics for a smart player to use with elite troops, while still ensuring that retreating isn't something you can practically do every battle with every army.
That's understandable and I some-what agree, BUT, I can think of some scenarios that WILL come up during gameplay. Answer these, or at least think about that.
It's Early to early-mid game. It takes you 20 Turns to complete your "Uber Knight of Doom". You make 2 of them, taking 40 turns, while you next city produces "Foot soldiers" at a rate of 1 every 4 turns. When you attack you have 2 full units. Unit 1 is 2 "Uber Knights of Doom" and Units 2 is 10 "Foot Soldiers". You send in the Foot Soldiers first to test the enemy, expecting to bring your Knights in for the kill or to them keep back to cast the spells you gave them (yes, magic knights of doom). Then enemy, being two rather large lizards, quickly swat away the 10 foot soldiers and then make a quick snack out of both your "Uber Knights of Doom". You couldn't retreat and you lost ALL those men/units. *sigh* Now it will take you 40 Turns Plus the time it takes to replace the cannon fodder Foot Soldiers.
In the Early game to Mid-Early game, protecting units is very important. If you take heavy losses those losses take Serious Amounts of time in game to recover from. Early in the game a losing fight like this can end your plans for domination in one quick swoop, because 2 rounds later the enemy Empire next door came to say "Hi, time to DIE!!" three turns later...
RETREAT NEEDS TO BE AN OPTION!!!!
If you don't put it in as a option, a lot of players who can't accept being defeated will simply Save/Re-Load after every losing battle. I.E. Save before the fight, then re-load the game afterwards if I lost or lost one of my favorite units.
I might be misunderstanding, but to me that's exactly what the "randomization" option sounds like - it generates a tactical map based on the actual strategic map where the battle takes place. You make it sound like these tactical maps should be pre-generated when the world map is created, Brad makes it sound like they're generated at the time of battle, which is a big difference from a coding perspective, but from the player perspective it should be the same effect in the end?
By the way I approve of either, as long as we're generating a new/unique tactical map based on the strategic map. Custom premade maps are a great option for modders to play with, I can envision some epic handmade tactical battles that are scenarios in their own right.. but for the basic game I think there's more replayability and more immersion if every time we enter a tactical battle, we see a unique representation of what was on the strategic map at that particular spot.
Here are some suggestions for keeping it simple but still strategic and fun:
Movement points of units determines movements/attacks per turn. So, what Frogboy said.
Each side is given a ranking that is recalculated every combat turn. The side with the lower ranking suffers a morale loss proportionate to the difference in rank, and vice versa. The ranking can be based on the number and strength of units, but would be even better if successful attacks or defenses also added a bonus and losses incurred a.... well a loss.
Unit defense/attack statistics increased or decreased depending on the type of terrain they are positioned at.
Winner Take All
Players set combat turn limit. Upon reaching the limit, certain options become available.
Allow players to set the starting formation of their armies when they initially combine their units into a squadron. Surprise attacks could catch armies in less than ideal formations.
Controlling the length of a tactical batttle
Calculate the number of moves available to each side per turn and establish an acceptable average time per move. If at the end of the combat turn, a player exceeds the average, add +1 to a Rout counter, where if X number of Rout counters are accumulated against one side, they are forced into a disorderly and lossy retreat, i.e. they are routed. The logic here is that the indecisive army that takes too long to move will find itself losing all of its advantages.
More importantly, have this as an option that can be enabled/disabled and allow the Rout Counter limit to be set, as well as the acceptable average time per move.
Randomization Vs. Richness
I have a solution that incorporates both of these without actually having to design/develop both!
First, design as many pre-made maps as you can and have them specific to the types of terrain. That's the Richness part taken care of. Now, when a tactical battle commences, have a pre-made map that fits the terrain type be randomly selected, and then have the features/objects on that pre-made map be randomly rotated in 45° distinctions. Meaning that for each pre-made map, there will be eight configurations. The Randomization part is handled because the same map won't be playable in the same way everytime, but will still have the pre-configured goodies.
What Frogboy said.
Retreat Conditions
Allow armies to retreat at any time and have their losses determined by two factors. Firstly, the current ranking of each side (see above), and secondly how many cover units the retreating side has, i.e. how many ranged attack units, with more cover units equating to fewer losses.
i dont quite understand why the attacker(not saying i disagree or dont like the idea, just dont understand the reason behind it)
yeah i kinda agree, in any game of the past retreats were VERY BAD
both in civ and in MOM they were too random and pointless
useless cause you often end up losing what yoiu just didnt want to lose and too random so frustrating
i rather dont have them unless you can think a good way too do it
as for N one factor i would use is the area where the battle happens
i mean in a town there are more supply and defenders can last longer, while in a desert they are caught by surprise and with no food water cant really fight for years
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? 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.
uhm here i prefer a bit of randomness tbh otherwise all combat would risk to be the same "just get top of the hill, behind the trees, shoot with archers etc etc"
maybe a set of premade maps with random details ?
or the core of the map premade and a portion random?
I mean, let's take a hypothetical situation: I have a company of light cavalry sitting by my border.
and why is your cavalry sitting on your border without a chance to fight in case caugth by enemy?
thje point of tactic is just position units where they belong to
on the border should be some scout, or army ready to fight enemies
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