New Combat Features

[Morningstar]

I've had a number of things pop into my head but the three that have been rattling around the longest are as follows:

1) Combat should have options to move laterally, not just vertically.  Currently the lines go something like this:

  C |   |  I |  A|   |   |   |A  | I  |   | C

All movement is made up and down the battlefield, in two directions.

This leaves no room for flanking maneuvers or any other sort of tactics where the the armies are not lined up directly in front of each other (which honestly was probably a rarity).  What if the battlefield looked more like this:

      |C |  A|    |   |   |   |AC| I  |   |
      |   | IA|    |   |   |   |AC| I  |   |
      |   | IC|    |   |   |   |A  | I  |   |

Suddenly tactics come back into play instead of just sheer numbers. The game wouldn't be about sitting at home in the capital for weeks recruiting only to march out for one or two battles and head home again.


2) From what I remember, the Generals were left with very little to actually do with the advent of a decent Marshal or two.  So the next two ideas are ways to potentially give them some more flex in their muscles again.  First, Marshals have the ability to override individual troop settings with their own.  But what's lacking in combat is a sense of direction. Orders on the field, as it were.  The suggestion here is that when a General is participating in a battle, he has the ability to direct one aspect of the start of combat.  For example, "Archers target strongest unit", "Cavalry target smallest units", "Archers target largest unit", etc.  It would act as an initial directive, and could be overridden by such factors as "Continue until suffering X% casualties, then act as usual", "Continue until target unit is destroyed, then act as usual", or "Continue until no units fit such parameters, then act as usual".


3) In general, it should be easier to wage war on multiple fronts. Perhaps it's because it's always been a numbers game, I'm not sure, but I've always wondered why every marshal from every army usually takes part in every mid-major battle the realm is a part of.  I picture the General's role as the guy in the command tent with the big map-o-the-world and lots of toy figurines, moving pieces around.  Here, there's always been too much of a "jumbled mess clashes with jumbled mess".  And maybe that's simply because of lack of creativity on the parts of the people waging war.  Thoughts?

[Anaris]

We devs actually have some long-range plans in the neighbourhood of both 1 and 2.  No promises at this point, but we do have plans.

I'm not sure what you're actually asking for with 3.  Could you be more specific?

[Morningstar]

Admittedly, #3 was much less of a specific idea than the others. It was more of a "let's discuss this", I guess.  Drawing back to Minas Ithil, If I can remember back that far, where you and I both played- the wars were always waged in a similar manner. We recruit, we travel, we fight, we travel home, we nurse our wounds. Rinse, repeat.  The army moves together and there's really no reason for multiple armies. The only usefulness most people seemed to get out of them was if a duke simply wanted to lay claim to "his knights" or if a real wanted a quick strike, "active" army, or if there was one devoted to realm maintenance and the like.

But what if, using Minas Ithil's example, the General was coordinating a raid on the Barony (the bastards couldn't stay out of things), an assault deep into Darka, and mounting a defense from an incoming CE force?  With current playerbases, mechanics, and traditional tactics, you would usually conclude that to spread yourself that thin is suicide.  But ultimately, I think it's because we are stuck in a "numbers win" mentality.  Do mechanics force these tactics or do these tactics make this the mechanical rule? I'm not sure.

[Indirik]

It sounds to me like you want to know why every big battle consists of all realms involved throwing all their stuff every battle. Well, there's a couple things that lead to that. First of all, most battlefronts are pretty small. Even if you consider that the frontlines are, say, three regions wide, then one side sits in the middle of that, and control all three regions. If the attacker moves a small army into one region to try and sneak past, the defender can either curb-stomp it with their full army and wipe it out, or send enough forces to defeat it and force them to turn back. Diplomacy and other factors (such as terrain and travel times) usually squeeze down the frontlines to a very small area.

Second, battles in BattleMaster behave a lot like amateur soldering: "The bigger the blob, the better the job." It doesn't pay to send "just enough to do the job". That's how you take a lot of casualties, and even risk losing. So why send 10k to attack the enemy's 8k? Why not send your entire 20k army, and CRUSH THEM!

So it's mostly an effect of how battles work. It usually doesn't pay to split up your armies into multiple, small task forces unless there is no enemy to fight. i.e. looting several regions after you've already beat the enemy. You're mostly best served by keeping the army together in a blob, and overwhelming the enemy completely.

[Indirik]

But what if, using Minas Ithil's example, the General was coordinating a raid on the Barony (the bastards couldn't stay out of things), an assault deep into Darka, and mounting a defense from an incoming CE force?  With current playerbases, mechanics, and traditional tactics, you would usually conclude that to spread yourself that thin is suicide.  But ultimately, I think it's because we are stuck in a "numbers win" mentality.  Do mechanics force these tactics or do these tactics make this the mechanical rule? I'm not sure.

It's a combination of mechanics and the relative sizes of realms. If you're fighting realms that are about the same size as you, then you will need all your forces to face them. If your mobile force is a total of 15k, and you are facing enemies that each have 10-15k mobile armies then how could you attack all three at the same time? You'd send 5k to each, and end up getting all three wiped out.

[Anaris]

Ah, OK.

Yes, as you can see, we are aware of this problem, and we have been trying to come up with good ways to counter it.  Problem is, it's not a simple thing to fix, and there don't seem to be any silver bullets.

We've got some interesting ideas that should help, but until we start testing them out, or at least fleshing them out more, it's really hard to tell what their effect on the game will actually be. 

Hopefully once we've got our new coding paradigm in place (which we've been working on figuring out for a little while now, but seem to nearly have nailed down), we'll be able to move forward on a bunch of good new things that will help improve the game in a number of ways—including making combat more interesting.

[Chenier]

3) In general, it should be easier to wage war on multiple fronts. Perhaps it's because it's always been a numbers game, I'm not sure, but I've always wondered why every marshal from every army usually takes part in every mid-major battle the realm is a part of.  I picture the General's role as the guy in the command tent with the big map-o-the-world and lots of toy figurines, moving pieces around.  Here, there's always been too much of a "jumbled mess clashes with jumbled mess".  And maybe that's simply because of lack of creativity on the parts of the people waging war.  Thoughts?

It's partly your general, partly the nature of most wars, and partly the geography on which wars usually take place.

In Enweil, when I was general, the armies were split as often as not (well, one of the three armies was usually on its own no matter, I'm thinking more about the two main ones). But that's because the context called for it. Had the context been different, I would have lumped them (though still not as much as most do). There's are good incentives not to lump everyone, but there are also very strong incentives to do so. It's all about context to determine if you are past the point where lumping is the most efficient use of your resources or not.

But as Indirik pointed out, game mechanics favour blobs. My wars were rather atypical, and I had the luxury of commanding the biggest, strongest, and wealthiest realm on the continent. We didn't *need* to lump everyone together to win the battles. And since they were all occurring in foreign lands, the battles weren't my primary concern either, since they were often easy or way too costly (fortified). Many other factors were involved, though.

[Shizzle]

How about attrition, in a similar way to what we have in WI? A big army needs more food, has a larger food caravan and moves slower. An option could then be for an army to attack 'from behind', trying to destroy the food supplies :)

[Chenier]

How about attrition, in a similar way to what we have in WI? A big army needs more food, has a larger food caravan and moves slower. An option could then be for an army to attack 'from behind', trying to destroy the food supplies :)

I'd rather bonuses to small armies than penalties to large ones. The loads of dissuasive measures against this and that has been making the game more and more unplayable, with the majority of our time now being sunk in things that barely affected a few spare characters back in the days. This is a trend I'd rather see reversed.

Travel times are one way to do it, having army organization be influence by army size is another (does it actually work in combat yet/anymore?).

[Indirik]

I'd rather bonuses to small armies than penalties to large ones.

One of the multitude of things on the back burner are force multipliers. These should help a properly planned/managed army put up a better showing against a larger, unorganized force.

But even still, you have to remember that a small army fighting against a comparably well led larger army *should* lose.

Travel times are one way to do it, having army organization be influence by army size is another (does it actually work in combat yet/anymore?).

The organization thing was removed quite some time ago. And even before that, it did nothing. (Except, I understand, for a very short time after it was introduced.)