2 Dimensional Battlefield

[Rizky]

For now the battlefield is just 1D, i.e row 1-10. How about make it 2D. 10 x 3, 5, or more, depending on region types or fortification. It will open more dinamics and strategy to the battle game, and more realistic. Armies could move up or down, striking from the side, avoiding charge, or probably limit a box how much can it contain a number of army.

[Anaris]

This type of thing has been considered a number of times in the pastâ€"and, in fact, is still being considered.

However, it is a change that will require a huge amount of work just to make the code continue to do what is expected, let alone add the extra behaviour that makes it desirable, so...it's not something that we can just bang out in an hour or so.

[pcw27]

This type of thing has been considered a number of times in the pastâ€"and, in fact, is still being considered.

However, it is a change that will require a huge amount of work just to make the code continue to do what is expected, let alone add the extra behaviour that makes it desirable, so...it's not something that we can just bang out in an hour or so.

What if it wasn't truly 2d but just three lines of the existing 1D map. In line settings you would choose "Center, Left Flank, Right Flank" along with the existing front, middle, back and rearguard. The units in different lines don't directly interact or fight each other as that would be too complicated, but if one side takes a whole line whatever lines are adjacent to it take penalties and have an ever increasing risk of retreat.

[Anaris]

What if it wasn't truly 2d but just three lines of the existing 1D map. In line settings you would choose "Center, Left Flank, Right Flank" along with the existing front, middle, back and rearguard. The units in different lines don't directly interact or fight each other as that would be too complicated, but if one side takes a whole line whatever lines are adjacent to it take penalties and have an ever increasing risk of retreat.

It is possible that that would require less work than making it fully 2D.

But I wouldn't bet heavily on that.

[Chenier]

This all just seems immensely complicated for no gain. The field is an abstraction that accounts much better for what you'd expect than more rigid specific settings.

Like, what happens if one army has everyone deploy on the top line, and the enemy is all bottom line...?

Also, assigning people to specific lines looks really, really tedious. "Hey, do we have anyone on the top line? Yes? No? Maybe??? Hey you, did you switch to top line as I asked???" The micromanaging would be just atrocious.

The 1D system has worked fine for over a decade. Why break it for something that'll end up just incredibly more tedious to manage, with a great risk of the game being utterly unplayable during a bug-ridden transition period? And a whole bunch of players getting really frustrated over ridiculous battle results due to bugs in key pivotal battles?

Let's just fix the few bugs (like archer targeting) that plague the current system instead of trying to replace it altogether.

[Anaris]

I actually have answers for those, because the dev team has had serious discussions of both a 3-section battlefield and a full 2D battlefield in the past.

For a 3-section battlefield, if you try to put all your troops in one flank...that becomes the center. If you try to game it by putting a very small number of units in the other two sections, too bad, the section with the most men is still the center. That's practically the definition of the center, actually.

For a 2D battlefield, while there's a possibility we would still use a similar method of allowing armies to deploy on flanks, we certainly wouldn't allow any finer-grained control than that 'vertically".

Implementing a 2D battlefield would enable some much more interesting possibilities, like obstructions in the battlefield (trees, river with a bridge, etc), fortifications designed like a star fort, chokepoints, and other cool things that make combat much less of a straight "my army's CS is bigger than yours" slugfest.

[pcw27]

To make it work you'd probably need flank settings added to the "army info" tab, possibly even give generals and marshals the ability to assign units to flanks on their own.