By thinking about it, MOM did not had very good tactical battles. Most of the time, I resolved them with auto-battles. The game where I had the best tactical battle experience is in romance of the 3 kingdom. If you want REAL tactical battles that implies doing more than move and attack, I strongly suggest you learn from their games. Koei has been doing this for more than 20 years and they know what they are doing.
I decided to screen shot some samples of the rule book to explain more easily how could the tactical battles work. I have included more stuff than what you might need, the idea is to help the brain storming of ideas. This has been taken from R3K XI which use a common world map and tactical map which means that some of the stuff below would only work if you had both map fusioned. Still in the older games, the world and tactical map were separated.
Note that the content below is just a suggestion to help brainstorming some new ideas. I do not say that Elemental should be exactly like that. I just say that many ideas and features should be in elemental to make interesting tactical battles. Enjoy.
(note: I have placed my pictures on my website account, I hope there will be no problem linking the pictures. If there is another way to upload pictures, let me know)
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First, there are various units types that you could have according to their primary equipment. The equipment will determine the RPS relationship and the kind of tactics the unit can use.
Since the world map is also the tactical battle map, units have various kind of orders they can perform when moving on the world map that can be military or non-military actions:
During Combat, Units can perform strategies. They are special actions that does not imply using troops to attack your opponent. They have the effect of weakening your ennemy making other attacks more powerful. Each commander have various strategies available and each strategy cost a certain number of technique points to use.
Units also have tactics which are special way to attack your enemy. This is what gives the charm to the battle system. For example, you could try to push enemy units into a trap or on other enemy units for additional damage. Each tactic has a cost in technique points and the ability to use it is determined by the commander and the equipment his unit.
There are also various terrain type which block or allow the usage of traps, technique, buildings, etc. while giving combat modifiers.
Since the world map is fusioned with the tactical map, they allow you to build in advance military facilities and traps. Still, I remember in R3K, that before the battle started, you could set up your traps, or in PTO, you could see the tactical map and place mines while not in war. So if each city had a tactical map of it's own, it could be possible for the players to prepare the terrain in advance.
So this is it. Hope it gives you some ideas and that you enjoyed it.
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Quick Suggestions for elemental:
A- Heroes could have a certain number of technique points when they command the battle. For each battle you would select 1 commander. The commander will also determine which strategies can be used during the battle.
B- Units ave access to various tactics according to their equipment. So equipment will give stats but also enables technique.
C- Being able to build trap when not in war could could be a good thing. Maybe you build them directly in your area of influence on the world map.
Thank You for reading.
[Update]
I have reposted the pictures on a new server, they can be found here:
http://lariennalibrary.com/extern/forum/R3K11Scan/
The screenshots are all blank to me. Is this a bug with the new forum?
Ah Damn! Hmms, I could try giving some direct links. Let me see if you can see one of these page, because I currently have no problem seeing the picture. Unless there are IP filtering on the server. I don't know.
This is the FTP Directory
Here is the adress in case it fails
http://ariel.minilab.bdeb.qc.ca/~ericp/TempElemental/
Tell me if this work, else I'll need to upload them somewhere. Maybe I'll upload them on another forum.
Sorry for the trouble.
I'll double check at my job.
I see them fine, and I love Romance. In fact, I use to go by Xiahou Dun on forums years ago, and thats changed over the years to just Xia.
Romance of the three kingdoms tac system seems like it has WONDERFUL ideas that coulc be ported to EWoM. SD must be aware of romance. Can we do something to bring this on?
Is there still a lot of people that cannot see the pictures?
Can we do something to bring this on?
Well this requires reprogramming, I don't think the engine actually support this. For example, I don't think the engine support that a special ability could change the position of the target units. The engine does not support giving multiple commands to a unit, it's either Move or attack.
I cannot and the problem isn't on my end. The server apparently does not allow direct linking of resources.
You could try a different host, such as www.imagebanana.com
It's not picky about direct linking. You can use something like...
http://www.imagebanana.com/img/nfsx3wpv/WOM_Movement_1.jpg
I could try this, but it does not seem in english. It looks like German.
I don't think the server does not support direct link, I think the ISP block something making all user within that ISP see things that people outside the ISP cannot see. It seem I had similar issues in the past.
OK, here are the picture but not in the same order.
http://www.imagebanana.com/view/povy7uyb/EquipmentP1.png
http://www.imagebanana.com/view/lqg1uo8x/EquipmentP2.png
http://www.imagebanana.com/view/u8nrc4qu/MilitaryFacility.png
http://www.imagebanana.com/view/n2zdsmie/Strategies.png
http://www.imagebanana.com/view/shvjc4c1/TacticsP1.png
http://www.imagebanana.com/view/pxdr4kk9/TacticsP2.png
http://www.imagebanana.com/view/pjlsu55m/TacticsP3.png
http://www.imagebanana.com/view/juhq38lq/Terrain.png
http://www.imagebanana.com/view/kjfneopt/TrapsExample.png
http://www.imagebanana.com/view/h9lftbl0/TrapsObstacle.png
http://www.imagebanana.com/view/h7eg1ufu/UnitCommand.png
http://www.imagebanana.com/view/30k4jd64/UnitType.png
It's a bit late, but at least they are there. Not sure for how much time still.
If you replace the "view" in the URL with "img", you can make it a direct picture link to use in the pictures of your first post.
If we can have more toys than just swords, axes, and hammers, I'd be a happy clam.
Spearmen have been vital to medieval military for a long time, if only for their greater benefit against cavalry and the fact that range is a good thing. A common mechanic for spears and longer weapons in general is the 'first strike' factor - that is, whenever that unit is attacked, it gets the first strike. Most spearmen also get some benefit against cavalry.
Regardless - more equipment is more. Would love to have crossbows, spears, lances, pikes...etc.
-N
I would say spears should have the reverse effect of any bonus a mounted unit gets with a lance when charging (more damage against units charging up as they get impaled).
You have to consider that this is a double edged sword. More equipment is good if you have stats to support it. I remember that in the first D&D system you had a weapon table that could look similar to this:
Short sword - 10 GP - 1d6 dmg
Mace - 8 GP - 1d6 dmg
In the example able, why would I chose the short sword when the mace does exactly the same damage. So there are too few variables and too much weapons to differentiate them.
Currently in elemental, each weapon has too few variables to make a good difference. I made some mace mens and they kick ass because the weapon does so much damage than all other. So if your have little combination of variables, adding more equipment will simply make clones of weapon that already exist with a different name.
So according to the information above, if some special abilities could be attached to each weapon, now there could be an interest to have more weapons.
Like mace does a lot of damage, but spears has first strike. So spears could become an interesting choice.
Or like in D&D, have a lot of stats so that no 2 weapons are the same.
You know, in all seriousness, Koei's RoTK games do several of the ideas in Elemental better than Elemental actually does.
The tactical battles you mention are one example. I'm not a fan of the rock-paper-scissors approach, but having tactical combat on the world map, a single unit per tile rather than a big stack of doom, and the offset square/hex grid are all things I prefer to Elemental (and now Civ V is doing all those same things). And having units with different special abilities depending on their equipment and the officer leading them, various strategic ploys such as having the enemy unit retreat or attack their ally, and the ability to create fortifications and traps on the world map, all make for a vastly more interesting combat experience.
Another area where RoTK has beaten Elemental to the punch is having city improvements appear on the world map. It's not quite the same, because RoTK has a pre-defined map with a set number of cities, with a set number of buildable tiles for each city, which aren't adjacent to the city itself but spread out nearby. However, I find it works better than in Elemental, because Elemental's city growth, aside from grabbing resources and occasionally blocking off chokepoints, is just as cosmetic as that in Civilization. Sure, your improvements show up on the map, but you still interact with the city as a single entity. In RoTK each improvement can be targeted independently, so it's possible to attack a city, burn all their farms to starve them out, or burn their barracks to prevent them from raising more troops, and so on.
A third area where Three Kingdoms accomplishes Elemental's goals better than Elemental does is in having dynasties and NPC officers. Again, it's not quite the same because it's based on historical figures, but there's a huge number of officers in the game (several hundred of them) with a large number of special abilities, and other little details. The game itself spans a period of roughly 60 years, with several generations of characters (again, already defined rather than randomly generated), who will join your side once they're old enough, and eventually die of old age if they're not killed in battle. Characters have defined relationships, with parents and children, siblings, spouses, close friends, and enemies. You can marry them off, or have them swear brotherhood. You can capture enemy officers, execute them, hold them for ransom, or try and recruit them to your side. Managing your officers is pretty much the central pillar of gameplay.
I have spent many hours playing with the officer creator in that game, building whole family trees of custom officers to play with.
What I'd love (and just speaking in general here, not specifically addressed at Elemental) is a strategy game that could take the above features, actually improve on them, and not have some of the tedious gameplay issues that the RTK games have. Man, but they can be grindy. There comes a point where I'm delegating 90% of my empire to the NPC governors just so I don't have to click the same 'raise funds, raise troops, build weapons' commands every single turn. And there's a ridiculous amount of mop-up required, because the only victory condition is total domination, and you have to conquer every single city including that stupid one in the far corner of the map that requires you to march your troops on a roundabout path through poisonous swamps and takes 20 turns to get to.
R3K is a good source of inspiration but since it only focus on china, it put more details. I agree that even my self, I start to be overwhelmed by information and sometimes I would rather not bother about certain things. Still, R3K is not perfect but there is a lot of interesting features.
Quick replies to the post above:
Personally, I don't like rock paper scisor too.
I like tactical map, if each city has it's own unique map. It's just that in R3K, the fusion of map have unlocked tons of features that would lose it's charm if battle were fougth on a separate map. I also always wanted tactical battle in civ, but placing the world map as a strategic map is an alternate way to solve the problem which seems to work well.
Personally, I like city to city movement (like in the old R3K). You simply jump directly from a city to another. But it would require additional coding to implement a feature like this in elemental, my solution was to increase the unit speed a lot to cross large amount of space.
Personally, I like having a complete city in one tile. I would rather make abstraction of the farm burning and ressource blockade by laying siege on the city.
R3K is focused on characters. Characters are cool, but for elemental it would be too much details. It would be too complex that each action you do requires characters. A simple system of heroes would work just fine. You just need to manage the big and important stuff by heroes. All other officers are abstracted.
Given how Elemental has a more mundane focus then AOW or MOM, ROTK-style tactical battles with magic sprinkled on top might actually work better then copying the approach of MOM or AOW.
To be perfectly blunt, I think that the fact you can describe the process as 'copy the approach of ' /at all/ sums up one of the major things that went wrong with the design of Elemental, because the enthusiasm and nostalgia for those old games led to repeating a lot of the same mistakes. (However, this thread /has/ gotten me to go back to playing RTK again.)
Personally, the advantage of having battles on the world map instead of on a separate tactical battle map is that it doesn't take me out of the game. The concept of tactical battles involves going and playing what is essentially a completely different game for up to 10 or 20 minutes, whereas in the strategic model combat uses the same interface as moving your troops around the world map.
The advantage of tactical maps is that you can have a higher level of detail, which in theory allows more interesting combats. I say in theory because if anything the current tactical maps are less tactical than fighting on the world map (ala Civ or RTK) would be.
As far as the focus on characters goes? I think that's actually a good fit for Elemental. What doesn't work is focusing on officers to the exclusion of everything else, while rank and file soldiers are reduced to being hitpoints for the army and dying by the thousands (though that's realistic for the period RTK is based on)..
But Elemental was supposed to make individual citizens matter - that was the idea behind requiring population for your troops, that you would choose between having people to work your fields and sending them off to die in a war. I'd rather see less of a divide between heroes and normal units - you don't necessarily need to worry about every single citizen, but I'd like to at least have some concept that my empire is made up of individual /people/. You know, be able to have a name and a face for the village mayor, the captain of the guard, and so on.
Right now, even the heroes don't really have anything to set them apart. There's no real sense that this character is a valuable individual - they're just generic merchant #9, whose half-page of backstory has absolutely no influence on the gameplay whatsoever. Keeping with the RPG elements in the game, I wish they'd be distinct enough that when I send a unit off I'm thinking like a leader - 'this guy will get the job done.' And in a perfect world, I'd like to see a system where generic units could be 'promoted' to named characters (when they accomplish something noteworthy, such as winning a battle or whatever). Allow them to be randomly generated rather than being drawn from a short list.
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