Implementing flanking in 1-D combat

[Bedwyr]

Your smaller force still depends on the larger army piling up in the center. If the enemy marshal is smart and distributes his army properly, he wins. Without some luck in lineups, the larger force wins. (assuming equivalent quality troops.)

Emphasis on "if the enemy marshal is smart and distributes his army properly".  That should be true.  If your opponent is as smart as you are, and positions his troops as well as you do, and has more of them than you do, he should win.  If he is not smart, and does not distribute his army properly, then even if he has more troops than you he should have a chance of losing.

But if he goes "bah, I have large army, I no need tak-tiks" and puts everything in the center, then you should be able to eviscerate him with smarter distributions and smaller armies.  And that goes for any distribution.  If you only ever pick the most balanced option available, then someone else can and should take advantage of that.

[Indirik]

True. A smart commander *should* be able to beat an incompetent one, given that the force advantage isn't too ridiculous. But I don't see this as avoiding what we normally refer to as big-blob tactics, where the entire enemy force sticks together in one region, moving en masse. Still, the inability to see how the other force is lining up, and not being able to react, will make lining up a bit of a crap shoot.

One thing that bugs me, though, is the difficulties of scaling this for smaller realms. I'm thinking battles of 10v10 nobles, or so, perhaps less. Should there be some limit below which the battle devolves into the current method? If there is no marshal present, how do the forces line up? Would this system provide us a way to utilize the general in some way?

[fodder]

more armies = more effective?

[Velax]

Sure.  My point was that purely dumping everything (or almost everything) into the center would not remain the be all and end all of military strategy, and in five minutes I could design something that would beat it nine times out of ten with something even close to force parity.

Dumping all your forces in the centre isn't blobbing, though. Dumping all your forces in one region is. The blobber will always have the advantage in any particular battle. Sure, the smaller army might get lucky in the setting up of the flanks and pull off an upset, but the larger army will still have the advantage, which will encourage blobbing.

[Indirik]

Right, Velax. That was the point I was trying to make. When this discussion started, blobbing was suddenly redefined to mean something diffferent that what it has meant for quite a while.

[loren]

Ok well, I've been thinking about how a flanking bonus should affect combat strength because you'd think that better tactics from a smaller force should prevail in some way.  So i went and parsed the last big battle between Westmoor and Sirion (5 turns 16k vs 22.5k).  Some very interesting trends if you do that.  *Note - I count a retreat as a full loss of effective CS, hence the trends)

Unsurprisingly the guy with the smaller cs and in this case loser, had exponential losses and the winner after the first round had linear losses that went down with each turn (between 22 and 8% for the winner and 20 to 77% for the loser not including the first round where it was 10% for both).

Incredibly curious to me was the relation between the ratio of CS between the two armies to their losses.  For the winner the losses followed a fourth order polynomial (R square of 1, ridiculous I know)  The loser followed a exponential decay (R square .9999) though I would love more data points out beyond twice the size to 8 times.

Anyways, I'm still pondering things, but grossly it looks like adding a L R C orientation has certain critical points where things become incredibly non-linear (somewhat unsurprising)  I'm incredibly tempted to run some boot-strap simulations of various army dispositions.  If I do I'll post the results, but right now it looks to me like the flanks don't change the combat qualitatively because it is so mechanistic.  A flank can utterly crumble in a turn if it is outnumbered by roughly 2. It'll suffer 40% losses right around 1.5 Cs ratio and probably collapse the next turn.

In other words for otherwise even armies if you put your values at 50/50/>0 and the other guy is evenly distributed your center line will come in and do ~25% more damage to the center.  Your flank will do ~30-35% and will ultimately come out around 70% original strength and will get the bonus to the middle.  In fact your middle only needs to hold for at most 3 turns before the flank will join.

So if we do a envelope simulation, where the first flank hits at 50% bonus strength, it'll look something like this (Note I'm assuming that >0 means a single unit or two to tie up the flank for a turn and a side collapses at 60% damage from original, really this should be a full retreat at 90% of CS).  Also note this assumes major combat occurs on the first turn in the melee when all units are engaged.  In reality this should combined push all combat back by two turns compared to real BM battles.  The overall analysis holds I just didn't feel like running it to completion, and if you really want you can try it out yourself.  At 60% losses whoever is ahead will get a retreat either the next turn from the enemy or the one following depending on lines units are on, parse your battles and you'll see I'm right =).

Turn 0 : 50/50/>0                        33/34/33
Turn 1 : 42/41/0                          24/25/33
Turn 2:  37/18.3(~retreated)/0   11.5(~retreated)/49.3/0
Turn 3:  0/47/0                             0/36/0

All eggs in one basket could be a definitely bad idea.  You lose quickly or you can win spectacularly if your center manages to hold somehow.  In all likelyhood the former middle's would've both retreated by the hypothetical turn 3's.  This makes the values closer to 32 and 20.5.


A 20/60/20 vs 50/50/>0 works out using the above fun-ness to be roughly an even worse proposition.  The flank collapses even more quickly (it takes upwards of 60% damage in the first turn of all out combat), it could in theory try to delay combat there for two turns with dug in troops and take out the middle by turn 2.  However, this is extremely unlikely as staggered archers would keep the enemy in for at least another turn and their numerical superiority is small enough that it would take them at least 3 or 4 turns to really win by which point they'd get flanked as they won't reach the real acceleration until turn 3.  The flank would come in even more strongly than before and it's effectively game over at that point.

In summary: Because of the exponential damage taken by a flank with significantly less troops if you can hold the middle long enough not to lose (something that would be rather trivial) the best bet is to just mass all your troops on one flank and use only delaying tactics on the other flank.  Overall, this would actually make larger armies even more powerful against a smaller foe as the exponential growth in damage taken would only be amplified.

[egamma]

How can we arrange it so that a brilliant commander might be able to pull a victory from defeat?

[loren]

Well they already can in exactly the same fashion that we already see weaker armies win.  The other guy has his retreat settings set lower than you do which quickly rights an imbalance.  Calvary can be used effectively against unprepared infantry formations.

Digging in may actually be incredibly useful again as when a flank falls is incredibly important.  The sudden influx of troops to the middle plays absolute havoc on the other side.  If you look at turn 2 you can see that the eventual loser actually was ahead at one point.  If that kept up for another turn they would've done incredibly well.

[Zakilevo]

Well they already can in exactly the same fashion that we already see weaker armies win.  The other guy has his retreat settings set lower than you do which quickly rights an imbalance.  Calvary can be used effectively against unprepared infantry formations.

Digging in may actually be incredibly useful again as when a flank falls is incredibly important.  The sudden influx of troops to the middle plays absolute havoc on the other side.  If you look at turn 2 you can see that the eventual loser actually was ahead at one point.  If that kept up for another turn they would've done incredibly well.

Don't underestimate sentry+dig in. You can over come up to 3k CS ;)

[Bedwyr]

Right, Velax. That was the point I was trying to make. When this discussion started, blobbing was suddenly redefined to mean something diffferent that what it has meant for quite a while.

Except that I already came up with one scenario where you would want a smaller army to take lesser losses in the center via a strategy of focusing on both flanks.  I'm sure other people who are better at BM tactics than I am could come up with others.  But, of course, no matter what we do to the combat system, more CS is better.  There's nothing you could do to the combat system (that I can think of) that would change that, aside from your earlier suggestion about actual flanking by approaching from different regions, but I can't see how that would end up working in practice.

Concentrated combat power is one of the keystones of warfare.  I don't see "blobbing" as an issue in the sense of "it works better if I have all my troops fight together" because that's how fighting works.  Unless something shapes the battlefield to reduce the fighting area and you have some other force multiplier (strong defensive position, etc), then there's no way to change that.

But, if you really want to give smaller forces a chance, why not have various terrain types reduce the maximum width of a battlefield?  If you have fortifications, or are dug in, and the enemy can't actually flank you, then you have a nice force multiplier.  Alternatively, you could have reducing the maximum width of the fighting field be one of the effects of digging in or those hypothetical engineer paraphernalia.

[Tom]

The solution to blobbing is not to be found in the combat code. The combat code correctly calculates that 10 men will always defeat 2 men, period.

To solve blobbing, we must find ways to threaten more than one region at once. Basically, it's a problem of strategy, not game mechanics. As soon as some general comes up with a way to spread out his forces into raiding parties without them being crushed by the blob one by one, blobbing will end.

The only game-mechanics I can think of that would help there is an automated orderly retreat, provided you have enough hours left in your time-pool. That way, people would not have to log in to flee, only keep enough hours spare.

[loren]

Don't underestimate sentry+dig in. You can over come up to 3k CS ;)

Its important to understand what both of those do, and what they modify. 

Sentries provides a bonus to CS.  You could calculate what the precise bonus is if you were patient enough.  I'm actually uncertain what it is.  Digging in reduces hits taken, not hits given.  This would only affect apparent CS for the calculation when determining how many losses they take, not how much damage they inflict.  In effect sentries gives a flat multiplicative modifier of CS, digging in simply delays a retreat.

In the context of what we're talking about with changing the combat code, only the effects of digging in on lengthening combat sequences is new.  I'm actually very curious about using to flanks setup with units in They Shall Not Pass and piling everything else into the middle.  This could in theory drag combat out to five turns (3 turns in my analysis' parlance) on the flank and the middle would just absolutely crush the other side.  It would probably eat up 20% of total CS, and might be the only way a smaller army can defeat a larger one.  Obviously however, the commander of a larger army could just send 70 15 15 and the smaller guy still wouldn't be able to beat him at 50/50/0 or even with 10/80/10.  In other words the more disciplined army with greater leadership skill in game would win.

[Longmane]

The only game-mechanics I can think of that would help there is an automated orderly retreat, provided you have enough hours left in your time-pool. That way, people would not have to log in to flee, only keep enough hours spare.

Something along those lines could/would be spot in so many situations and no mistake, for both defenders and attackers/raiders alike.


NB I'll actually be posting a piece in my General Tactics thread that deals with retreat/feigned flight when I get to it.

[Geronus]

The solution to blobbing is not to be found in the combat code. The combat code correctly calculates that 10 men will always defeat 2 men, period.

To solve blobbing, we must find ways to threaten more than one region at once. Basically, it's a problem of strategy, not game mechanics. As soon as some general comes up with a way to spread out his forces into raiding parties without them being crushed by the blob one by one, blobbing will end.

The only game-mechanics I can think of that would help there is an automated orderly retreat, provided you have enough hours left in your time-pool. That way, people would not have to log in to flee, only keep enough hours spare.

Interesting idea. I like it, on the following condition: That cavalry can and will catch non-cavalry units and force a battle instead of letting them get away; that and that cavalry will almost always escape non-cavalry (assuming there's a chance that retreats can fail). This was a primary benefit to having lighter cavalry forces available in the first place: They could be used to hunt raiders/stragglers/retreating armies and also be used very effectively as raiding forces themselves.

[Tom]

Yeah, and that is where it gets tricky. You'd have to calculate region types in (cavalry isn't all that good in dense forests or mountains) as well as some region border properties we don't even have in the database yet (bridges, mostly).