The Problem of Blobs

[vonGenf]

It's a nice dream you live in. Players, for the most part, don't like taking risks. They don't like to take personal initiative. And they generally don't like having to analyze stuff themselves.

In all of my time as general or marshal, I've often used orders such as "next turn, if X then do A, if Y then do Z, and the first to act is to report to the others". If I didn't repeat the orders based on the outcome on the next turn, as soon as possible, the rate at which the order was followed was consistently drastically lower. The vaguer the instructions, like "then move to the least defended region", the poorer the rate of deployment. Having someone take the time to analyze the big picture and willing to take responsibility for everything is extremely comforting for most players. They don't want to waste all of their time analyzing all the military data, and they don't want to assume any risks themselves.

What I want is to find a way to tweak the game such that

(1) The rate of deployment is not the most important metric when assessing an army. It's realistic, but it makes for poor gameplay.

(2) Personal initiatives do not imply total responsibility for the whole army blob, but become localized decision that only affect your local neighborhood. If that's the case, I predict that you will see more initiative, because taking the right initiative will actually increase your army's chance of victory. In a blob, any initiative decreases your chances, and there is no such thing as a good initiative.

While I think disease is a sensible option, I am not certain it will affect these factors very much. I'm not yet sure what would.

[de Aquitane]

Any personal initiative introduced has the risk of simply becoming a "ask the general/marshal"- feature that futher increases the power of micromanaging generals. It is the nature of team pvp to be afraid of making mistakes. Though I am unsure what that team nowdays is.

[Foundation]

In a spread out strategy, however, this is much less important. A single noble leading a unit is very well capable of seeing that a neighboring region is under more pressure than the region he is in, and move there to help the defense. Personal initiative becomes possible without completely destryoing the army's strategy. Marshals still have a role, but this role becomes more to define the tactics the army follows. Precise orders are still important, but full compliance is less important.

Personal initiative requires more activity, not less.

I tire of the sticks solutions. Always the stick. Always.

"Let's make what the players do suck so bad that they won't want to do it anymore". That's what you are proposing. Blobbing is not the cheese of a minority, it's the standard of the majority. And there are many compelling reasons to blob despite the fact that blobbing has several distinct drawbacks.

We already have starvation. What would this attrition add? If you want to make sieges better, then make it so that surrounding armies block off incoming caravans. No need for a frustrating attrition mechanic that will break the whole game. Armies can already only go so far due to morale, increasing attrition morale loss on top of distance morale loss and you severely limit how far realms can go to wage wars. Even if you split the army (which is borderline impossible if you want to go far, without adding an extra week of travels), nobody's gonna like having their troops just randomly die all the time.

It's a nice dream you live in. Players, for the most part, don't like taking risks. They don't like to take personal initiative. And they generally don't like having to analyze stuff themselves.

In all of my time as general or marshal, I've often used orders such as "next turn, if X then do A, if Y then do Z, and the first to act is to report to the others". If I didn't repeat the orders based on the outcome on the next turn, as soon as possible, the rate at which the order was followed was consistently drastically lower. The vaguer the instructions, like "then move to the least defended region", the poorer the rate of deployment. Having someone take the time to analyze the big picture and willing to take responsibility for everything is extremely comforting for most players. They don't want to waste all of their time analyzing all the military data, and they don't want to assume any risks themselves.

Of course there are some like me, and probably you, who are less risk-avere and have more initiative. But that's not the majority of the player base. It's actually a dwindling and constantly more marginal portion of the player base.

Which is why I find foolish any gameplay moves that push towards strategies than rely on more active players, when there is always less of them. Finding someone willing to be a marshal or general is already pretty damn hard. Finding someone both willing to take the title and the responsibilities that come with it is next to impossible.

Agreed, completely.

[Tom]

I tire of the sticks solutions. Always the stick. Always.

Propose a carrot.

[Anaris]

I tire of the sticks solutions. Always the stick. Always.

Propose a carrot.

Propose as many carrots as you can possibly think of. Personally, I'd much rather try to triage two dozen carrot solutions than try to refine a stick solution so that it does as little damage as possible while still having the desired effect.

We know that stick solutions are not the best way to go about things. But carrot solutions that work and retain some semblance of verisimilitude can be extremely hard to come up with.

[GoldPanda]

Propose a carrot.

1. Give regions some small morale/loyalty/control bonus from the number of friendly (same realm) troops in it, as seeing their own armies give the peasantry some patriotic pride, or something. This would encourage us to keep some reserve forces adjacent to the main blob, so that more regions get the bonuses. The blobs would only form before major battles.

It would also be a nice additional way to repairing regions, compared with the Priest/Ambassador spam that realms are using now, as it would generally allow for more participation.

2. Make looting multiple regions simultaneously more effective than looting one. (This is already sort of true, due to the peasant militia, but more carrots for the attacker is always nice. This game is already very biased toward the defenders: digging in, fortifications, etc.)

3. Make Marshals and Vice Marshals a "big deal". Give them faster honor/prestige gain, just like Cavaliers/Heroes. The bonuses do not even have to stack. Let Vice Marshal titles show up in message signatures. Give Marshals/Vice Marshals extra honor for actually showing up and leading their armies to victory. Make them positions that nobles would actually want to compete for.

[Penchant]

1. Give regions some small morale/loyalty/control bonus from the number of friendly (same realm) troops in it, as seeing their own armies give the peasantry some patriotic pride, or something. This would encourage us to keep some reserve forces adjacent to the main blob, so that more regions get the bonuses. The blobs would only form before major battles.

It would also be a nice additional way to repairing regions, compared with the Priest/Ambassador spam that realms are using now, as it would generally allow for more participation.

2. Make looting multiple regions simultaneously more effective than looting one. (This is already sort of true, due to the peasant militia, but more carrots for the attacker is always nice. This game is already very biased toward the defenders: digging in, fortifications, etc.)

3. Make Marshals and Vice Marshals a "big deal". Give them faster honor/prestige gain, just like Cavaliers/Heroes. The bonuses do not even have to stack. Let Vice Marshal titles show up in message signatures. Give Marshals/Vice Marshals extra honor for actually showing up and leading their armies to victory. Make them positions that nobles would actually want to compete for.

I personally am not for the looting increase option as I am apart of a realm that was looted several monthes ago in multiple regions at once while in a two front war and could not stop the looting efficiently. There is one region that borders a city that was able to get to full population, the rest of the regions are still recovering with several still being limited a little due to population not being high enough. In my opinion multiple region looting simultaneously is already plenty strong.

[Revan]

Is anything that is introduced to try and address blobbing really going to work if there are still people out there who simply don't trust their nobles to follow orders in a timely way? I can't help but think solutions like greater attrition simply mete out more punishment to the kinds of players and realms who have enough trouble taking on more active foes as it is. I'd rather suffer under the status quo than see something that perhaps made it even more of an unequal playing field activity-wise.

3. Make Marshals and Vice Marshals a "big deal". Give them faster honor/prestige gain, just like Cavaliers/Heroes. The bonuses do not even have to stack. Let Vice Marshal titles show up in message signatures. Give Marshals/Vice Marshals extra honor for actually showing up and leading their armies to victory. Make them positions that nobles would actually want to compete for.

Don't Vice Marshals already get a signature when sending letters to their own army? What purpose a wider signature if they're supposed to be responsible solely for their own army? I liked the idea posted somewhere about Vice Marshals automatically being included in the Marshals message group. Let the signature show up there too but nowhere else. We don't need to further muddy the message channels or basically give armies two leaders differentiated only by four letters before their name.

Anyway, honour/prestige gains suggests treating Marshals like a class. That's not the way to go. A better thing would be for some sort of mechanism that sees Marshals, perhaps even Vice Marshals, getting an income through realm taxes or ducal pots or some such. A tangible reward for stepping forward beyond a minor title after your name. It seems harsh that Bankers get an income for sitting around doing nothing and marshals get nothing despite rushing around doing everything!

[mikm]

What if we had ambushes that enabled isolated units to do great harm to blobs.
Some units with stealh abilities that can only be trained by infiltrators. They could ambush enemy units one at a time-do damage to them and then hide again.
They could also move beween regions undetected and the when no defending forces are around loot that region. When the defenders come to stop them they would simply vanish.

[Indirik]

sounds like a coding nightmare.

[Foundation]

+1 for Rob.

[GoldPanda]

Don't Vice Marshals already get a signature when sending letters to their own army? What purpose a wider signature if they're supposed to be responsible solely for their own army?

No. At least not on the stable islands. Vice Marshals still have message signatures that say "Knight of Bumtown" instead of "Vice Marshal of the Golden Lions".

I believe knights would be more likely to obey orders from "Vice Marshal of (your army)" rather than "Knight of __". They might not even know where Bumtown is.

[Foundation]

Stable'll be updated soon... soon! :D

[JPierreD]

If you want to make sieges better, then make it so that surrounding armies block off incoming caravans.

This could actually be very useful as economic warfare. How about troops with the Aggressive stance in a realm they are not at peace with have a chance to intercept incoming caravans (not the old caravans, of course, but the new implementation, when food is no longer teleported) at the end of the turn? All caravans, naturally, not only those of the caravan at war.
Alternatively give them the option to confiscate any caravan moving through the region. If they do not meet opposition at the end of the turn (battle), they will have high chances of doing so. If they do and win the battle, they have slightly lower, as they were busy with it.

I know it is a more modern concept, but many wars were joined because merchant navies of neutral nations were being seized or sunk by a warring country blocking another.

It would make spreading the army more useful. Opinions?

[Chenier]

I'm not convinced that changes are truly warranted to begin with. Especially since most measures to encourage armies to split up will inevitably favor hyper-active realms, given them a much more significant advantage than they already have. Of course they'd make smaller realms more competitive (they already are, though, imo), but at the cost of something else that was denounced in this very thread...

That being said, I kinda liked GoldPanda's first suggestion, but I'd modify it it slightly. If regions had a bonus to stats due to presence of friendly troops and simultaneously have penalties due to presence of hostile ones, it would encourage troops to spread to be more tactically efficient. The gains/penalties for such presence would follow a harsh rule of diminishing returns, so that the sum of the effects of 200 troops in two regions is far greater than the effects of 400 in a single region. Incites spreading the forces, without giving direct penalties for keeping your forces together (other than the challenge of hunting down more dispersed enemy troops). This could work via the improving of the "war, looting, or blablabla makes morale fall" code. The key element, however, is the publicity and visibility of this mechanic. You can have the greatest incentives to spread out, but if people don't know about them, or don't understand them well, they won't factor it in. It must be clear to the players that the presence of troops is making the peasants feel safer/worried.

As for the food aspect, I believe this is vital. Maybe the caravans were a hellishly complex code. But it was because it controlled a very fleshed-out system which, although imperfect, made a lot of things possible. What we need for siege warfare is not the implementation of some new disease or attrition mechanic, we simply need to regain the possibility to starve cities out. As it is, you can reduce a realm down to their last huge city, and never manage to starve it out if their duke and/or stewards are off in far-away lands regularly buying food that then just teleports back to the capital.