The Problem of Blobs

[Indirik]

Which is why my proposal was to make the damage bigger.

But it still has to maintain some vestige of realism. Two 30-40 man units should /not/ be able to do as much damage as a 500-man army. (And just for the sake of argument, small isolated looting runs /already/ do some extra damage under the current system.)

In the end, you are right that many of these decisions are economic; fortunately, the economic variables can be tweaked at will.

Yes, economic warfare is what we really have now. But we do it through genocide. Wars aren't won by defeating armies. Wars are won by destroying regions.

Here is a proposal: make the total damage suffered by a unit proportionally smaller with the difference between the sides in a battle instead of larger. At the moment, overkill does that on a turn-to-turn basis, but an overwhelmed army will be destroyed easily.

Which makes sense to me.

Maybe you could strenghten the evasive setting, or make retreat easier; or allow more options for a retreating army to damage the area, or even automatic damaging ("the fields caught on fire as the retreating soldiers just threw their torches on the ground to cover their nightly retreat!").

Regions already suffer damage when there is a battle in them. The bigger the battle, the greater the damage. I don't see how adding even *more* damage on top of that will really help anything.

[egamma]

What about reducing the size of the battlefront? Right now, there's some limit (say 200 men) at which the front lines get too crowded. What if we simply reduced that by 25%? That way, instead of a row of 200 men fighting a row of 100 men, you'd have a row of 50 men waiting, then a row of 150 men fighting a row of 100 men. If the 100 men are SF then they'll chew through the 150 a lot easier than they would 200. And, this helps archers, as they will have more targets--the 50 waiting around.

[Zakilevo]

I think that should depend on terrain types. In a plain region, there shouldn't be any restriction. But in a forest or a mountain region, there should be some restrictions on how many men you can field. Historically, it was more difficult to expect any miracle on a plain while miraculous victories were achieved in places where you could come up with more strategies using environmental factors.

[Indirik]

Right now, there's some limit (say 200 men) at which the front lines get too crowded.

I do not believe that this is correct. Overcrowding is a relative limit, not an absolute limit.

[GoldPanda]

To avoid blobs, I think we need better looting and higher walls. Or, maybe, we just need a culture change to convince people that looting is good and walls are high.

Looting is effective. The problem is that repairs are also very effective. Between Courtiers and Diplomats, I've seen regions go from 0 in every stat to 100 in every stat in two weeks. Eventually you get to a point where the enemy is repairing his regions as fast as you can damage them.

Although, I think repairs were made more effective because realms were beating each other up so badly that they couldn't actually fight each other anymore.

And walls are high enough already. Nobody sane attacks walls without twice the CS and a swarm of siege engines.

We're not going to solve a mechanical issue with a cultural shift.

My ideas:

1. Medieval armies usually take more casualties from disease than combat deaths. They don't know about germs and sanitation, just that folks start dying if you have too many of them camping together. The defending side usually avoid mustering until the last possible minute, when the enemy is well inside the defender's territory. (Partially due to slow communication methods, but also to avoid prematurely gathering a large camp of your vassals' men and have them start dying on you.) So, have troops start taking casualties to illness if you have, say, more troops in a region than that region's max population cap, or some percentage thereof. Make the penalty identical to the starvation penalty. Cities would have better sanitation and be able to house more troops, but if you have 3000 troops camped in a field, I believe it's fair to start punishing.

2. In addition to letting us TO regions adjacent to our own realm, let us TO regions that are adjacent to regions where we're already running TOs. Encourage the winners to spread out after a major battle and start TOing entire duchies, instead of one region at a time.

Realms will always blob up to fight. Bigger armies win battles. This is intuitive and fair. I do not believe it is possible to change this unless you alter the combat system so much that it's not even close to realistic anymore.

However, we can encourage realms to delay the blob effect for as long as possible before a major battle, and spread out as soon as the battle has been won.

[egamma]

I think that should depend on terrain types. In a plain region, there shouldn't be any restriction. But in a forest or a mountain region, there should be some restrictions on how many men you can field. Historically, it was more difficult to expect any miracle on a plain while miraculous victories were achieved in places where you could come up with more strategies using environmental factors.

I love this idea. Mountains--30 men across. Badlands--60. Rurals--300. Townsland--80

[De-Legro]

Key word there... encircled. That's when they don't have an open supply line...

Also, ancient and medieval warfare involved mostly foraging, relying a lot less on logistics than modern warfare.

Um yeah exactly. So IF we implemented supply lines using many smaller armies would allow you to encircle the blob, cut of its supply and deal damage to it though attrition.

Yes, then why is most looting performed by blobbed up armies? If looting is that destructive, then the best possible strategy is to spread out your army to loot all the regions at once. If your enemy takes its whole army in a blob, they'll defeat all your tiny armies one after another, but their realm will be dead before they manage to do it.

Yeah the problem here is not enough diminished returns. Militia forming does make larger armies somewhat less effective at looting though. If you have 20-30k of forces, spreading them across multiple regions will make far better use of their looting potential. But people then worry about their forces being defeated while split up and looting isn't currently effective enough to offset this

What about reducing the size of the battlefront? Right now, there's some limit (say 200 men) at which the front lines get too crowded. What if we simply reduced that by 25%? That way, instead of a row of 200 men fighting a row of 100 men, you'd have a row of 50 men waiting, then a row of 150 men fighting a row of 100 men. If the 100 men are SF then they'll chew through the 150 a lot easier than they would 200. And, this helps archers, as they will have more targets--the 50 waiting around.

Overcrowding is relative, based on the infantry lines of the opposing forces. If you force is much larger, they can't effectively squish together enough to allow all the units to engage.

[Duvaille]

There are obvious risks for small marauding looting units, and it will always be safer to be in a blob. So logically it follows that the rewards of marauding need to be larger than remaining in a blob. Blob warfare is not bad in itself and huge battles are interesting in their own right, like conquering a city. But to increase the variety, there should be ways to encourage the blobs behind the walls to march out and split into smaller forces.

This is why I suggested a slight modification to looting. If one region is being looted, no problem there for the defender. The region just suffers some pain and can be repaired later. But if two regions are looted simultaneously, the entire peasant population becomes a little more nervous - even those behind the walls. And with each region being looted during the same turn, the effects increase exponentially. Rumors spread that the enemy is wreaking havoc all around the realm, and will soon come to destroy and pillage the capital too!

Actually there should be two exponential multipliers. One is the number of regions being effected simultaneously, and the other the number of turns this has been going on. So the longer the defenders are not able to address the issue, the worse the effects get. Thus even small marauding parties spread around the countryside can ramp up a quite demoralizing blow to the peasantry of the entire realm, if they are not properly dealt with in due time.

So, if the defenders chose to address the issue with a blob, they would only attack one target at a time, while the demoralizing effects continue to increase. Soon enough someone would think that should we split this blob perhaps in half... and there you go.

Of course the nastiest thing would be that your enemy has a blob almost big enough to take your city sitting next to it, and at the same time he pillages many of your other regions. If you split your forces, he will take the city. If not, your peasants will soon revolt. But if you could spare just a few cavalry units... and there you have your small scale warfare.

[vonGenf]

So, if the defenders chose to address the issue with a blob, they would only attack one target at a time, while the demoralizing effects continue to increase. Soon enough someone would think that should we split this blob perhaps in half... and there you go.

Of course the nastiest thing would be that your enemy has a blob almost big enough to take your city sitting next to it, and at the same time he pillages many of your other regions. If you split your forces, he will take the city. If not, your peasants will soon revolt. But if you could spare just a few cavalry units... and there you have your small scale warfare.

Yes, yes, yes. This is exactly what I had in mind.

[Duvaille]

Plus, if I may add, the larger realms would tend to suffer the most from the marauders, as they have more potential targets to defend, which gives the underdog more options while adding more worries to the dog above. If your realm consists of three regions, feel free to blob if that is going to help you. But if your realm has twenty regions, you need to start having some border patrols.

So, if we made the looting not be essentially about gold gained and gold lost, but the overall stability of the target realm, it might do the trick.

[Tom]

Hm, it would not be too difficult to code this, as we already store the number of times a region was recently looted, so by summing that value up over all regions of the realm, we could easily get a "total looting in the realm" value.

Which could than add to the morale and loyalty effects.

[Geronus]

Looting is effective. The problem is that repairs are also very effective. Between Courtiers and Diplomats, I've seen regions go from 0 in every stat to 100 in every stat in two weeks. Eventually you get to a point where the enemy is repairing his regions as fast as you can damage them.

Although, I think repairs were made more effective because realms were beating each other up so badly that they couldn't actually fight each other anymore.

And walls are high enough already. Nobody sane attacks walls without twice the CS and a swarm of siege engines.

We're not going to solve a mechanical issue with a cultural shift.

My ideas:

1. Medieval armies usually take more casualties from disease than combat deaths. They don't know about germs and sanitation, just that folks start dying if you have too many of them camping together. The defending side usually avoid mustering until the last possible minute, when the enemy is well inside the defender's territory. (Partially due to slow communication methods, but also to avoid prematurely gathering a large camp of your vassals' men and have them start dying on you.) So, have troops start taking casualties to illness if you have, say, more troops in a region than that region's max population cap, or some percentage thereof. Make the penalty identical to the starvation penalty. Cities would have better sanitation and be able to house more troops, but if you have 3000 troops camped in a field, I believe it's fair to start punishing.

2. In addition to letting us TO regions adjacent to our own realm, let us TO regions that are adjacent to regions where we're already running TOs. Encourage the winners to spread out after a major battle and start TOing entire duchies, instead of one region at a time.

Realms will always blob up to fight. Bigger armies win battles. This is intuitive and fair. I do not believe it is possible to change this unless you alter the combat system so much that it's not even close to realistic anymore.

However, we can encourage realms to delay the blob effect for as long as possible before a major battle, and spread out as soon as the battle has been won.

These are great ideas, though to implement option 2 I think we'd need to overhaul the TO system yet again to make them easier to accomplish. It takes a lot of men to run a TO efficiently even in the system on Testing, so you wouldn't be able to afford to split up to any significant degree and still expect any of your TO's to succeed within less than a week.

I will say that I love option 1 though. That's a great idea and will definitely discourage mustering huge armies in one place until you're really ready to go... Could make things tough on big continents like Atamara though, where realms routinely send their armies marching for hundreds of miles to the front. Then again, maybe that's not such a bad thing...

[vonGenf]

Could make things tough on big continents like Atamara though, where realms routinely send their armies marching for hundreds of miles to the front. Then again, maybe that's not such a bad thing...

That would make them march on a 3-region wide front. Works for me! It's the whole point, really.

[Zakilevo]

This will surely encourage multiple armies over one giant army.

[Duvaille]

Hm, it would not be too difficult to code this, as we already store the number of times a region was recently looted, so by summing that value up over all regions of the realm, we could easily get a "total looting in the realm" value.

Which could than add to the morale and loyalty effects.

I'll toy with numbers a bit, but these are not necessarily realistic.

Loot two regions simultaneously -> -1 realm wide drop in morale
Do it in the following turn as well -> -2 realm wide drop in morale
Third turn -> -3 morale drop etc.

If you loot three regions, it could be -2 realm wide drop the first turn
Second turn would give -4 drop if you keep looting them
Third turn -6 drop

And if you are looting four regions at the same time, begin with -3 drop, and then -6, -9 and so on.