So, if it is a problem that people tend to make huge blobs of units and crash them at the enemy, something should be done about it. Everything in the game seems to scale so that it is always better to split a huge blob into smaller ones - like it is more efficient to have many estates than a single large one, or many different units instead of one huge. But the question then is essentially how to change this so that the same is true on an army level.
Sure, there are methods already there, like crowded roads. But that is a hindrance, not an encouragement. Would we perhaps benefit from such encouragements, like giving more power to raiding parties somehow? What if it somehow hurt more to have enemy troops present on a number of regions? If you only march your troops in one or two enemy regions, no problem, the population can take that. But what if there were increased morale penalties throughout the realm if many regions were simultaneously under attack? All you need then is a small force to cross the border and spread around the place, so you only need a little bit stronger force to counter it, but then.. and so it becomes a game of guessing what the other will do.
This proposal probably has its problems and it may not be a perfect one, but perhaps we could think of more ways how it would actually be beneficial to split the forces most of the time. When conquering a city, you might still want to blob it and that would perhaps be fine, but for the rest of the time it could be different.
Quote from: Duvaille on March 20, 2012, 12:26:42 PM
So, if it is a problem
Is it a problem? I don't really see it as one.
A larger army will always beat a smaller one unless they're really close in strength and the other army uses some weird line settings. Changing the scale from 20k vs. 20k to four 10k CS armies clashing won't really change things much.
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.
The typical scenario currently is the following: Realm A and B are of roughly equal size. Realm A has a single army, realm B has three armies B1, B2 and B3.
Army A meets army B1 while armies B2 and B3 are in different regions. Army B1 is crushed, B2 and B3 are free to roam around. Realm A does not care if armies B2 and B3 loot; it has managed to cross the frontline unharmed. It beelines to the capital and storms it. Realm A dies.
We need to give a very good reason to Army A to want to avoid this scenario. We need the armies B2 and B3 to do a lot of damage, so much that army A cannot help but to turn around and fight them.
Quote from: vonGenf on March 20, 2012, 01:02:10 PM
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.
Have you actually witnessed what a good brutal looting will do to a region? It's destructive enough as is. The fact most looters just go for the tax gold that the peasants don't care about much is no indication that looting needs to be stronger.
And higher walls? How will that encourage smaller armies when you suddenly need a bigger army to attack something?
There are several reasons why blobbing your army is the most common tactic.
- Big blobs are hard to stop. It requires your enemy to blob up to stop you.
- Big blobs are less susceptible to loss of a few nobles who fall behind. Two out of 20 is no big deal. Two out of 5 is a significant loss.
- Big blobs take less losses. Two equal size armies meeting in the field will both take heavy damage. A huge army meeting an enemy half their size will suffer much lighter losses, and be able to continue on for longer.
- It's getting harder and harder to find people willing to be generals and marshals. And even harder to find willing people who are good at it. It's already difficult enough to find one good general and a good Marshal/VM pair. And you want to find four competent pairs? Not gonna happen.
If you want the big blob theory to not rule the warfare aspect of the game, you have to address all of these issues. The last one is perhaps the most difficult, and probably the most important.
If we want to prevent blobbing, why not increase attrition, similar to WI?
It does not adress the lack of (V-)Marshals or Generals, though.
Duvaille raises an interesting potential solution to the problem of big blobs, though a tricky one:
At present, all combat strength is calculated at the unit level. What if we were to apply bonuses and penalties based on the number of troops of the same realm in the same region, thus achieving a similar level of diminishing returns that we do per unit?
The solution is actually very, very easy. But it requires something we don't yet have in the game: Logistics.
The reason that you rarely see blob-armies in the real world is that supplying them is a nightmare. Check some numbers for WW2. How much it took the germans to keep their encircled armies on the russian front supplied.
Real warfare is a lot about logistics and supply. I've long wanted to bring that into BM, but I've not yet found a way to simulate it that makes it fun.
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.
Quote from: LilWolf on March 20, 2012, 01:09:48 PM
Have you actually witnessed what a good brutal looting will do to a region? It's destructive enough as is. The fact most looters just go for the tax gold that the peasants don't care about much is no indication that looting needs to be stronger.
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.
Why don't we see this happen?
Quote from: LilWolf on March 20, 2012, 01:09:48 PM
And higher walls? How will that encourage smaller armies when you suddenly need a bigger army to attack something?
I though you just said that looting was destructive? Then why is it that an attack doesn't count unless it's against a walled city?
Of course, if you want to breach up walls, then you will need to concentrate your forces. This should be difficult and rare. It
was difficult and rare in the middle ages.
Correct, you don't have the issues of ammunition, etc.
But you have the issue of food. I think one thing we could add quickly is that large armies simply can't forage enough. Our current food levels allow simulate total supply, not the difficulty of acquiring it.
What if every region could only supply X amounts of troops automatically? Beyond that, troops need to spend time to actively forage, and the more there are, the longer it takes.
Quote from: Tom on March 20, 2012, 02:49:37 PM
Correct, you don't have the issues of ammunition, etc.
But you have the issue of food. I think one thing we could add quickly is that large armies simply can't forage enough. Our current food levels allow simulate total supply, not the difficulty of acquiring it.
What if every region could only supply X amounts of troops automatically? Beyond that, troops need to spend time to actively forage, and the more there are, the longer it takes.
Blobbed up armies would still have a tactical advantage in battle. Both sides would have more stragglers. This would equalize the forces when one army is bigger than the others by making it more difficult for the big army to bring its whole strength at once, but it would not encourage equal sized armies to split into smaller armies.
Quote from: vonGenf on March 20, 2012, 02:46:28 PMYes, 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.
Why don't we see this happen?
You do see it sometimes. In many cases its usefulness is reduced by things like terrain, the presence of enemy forces nearby, fortifications, and the RL realities of player response times and activity. If you could count on 100% reaction and movement, then maybe it would work. But units cost money, and you don't want to lose them. 50 good infantry could run you 300 or more gold. Plus banners, siege engines, carts, etc. Units are expensive. Losing a 350+ gold unit to do some small amount of regional damage is just bad economics.
Quote from: Indirik on March 20, 2012, 03:15:32 PM
Losing a 350+ gold unit to do some small amount of regional damage is just bad economics.
Which is why my proposal was to make the damage bigger.
In the end, you are right that many of these decisions are economic; fortunately, the economic variables can be tweaked at will.
Another equivalent proposal would be to make the damage ot the unit smaller. 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. 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!").
Quote from: Indirik on March 20, 2012, 03:15:32 PM
You do see it sometimes. In many cases its usefulness is reduced by things like terrain, the presence of enemy forces nearby, fortifications, and the RL realities of player response times and activity. If you could count on 100% reaction and movement, then maybe it would work. But units cost money, and you don't want to lose them. 50 good infantry could run you 300 or more gold. Plus banners, siege engines, carts, etc. Units are expensive. Losing a 350+ gold unit to do some small amount of regional damage is just bad economics.
I think that this is actually a very important point.
Dealing economic damage to an enemy should, I feel, be more powerful and cost-effective than it generally is today. For one thing, if a realm is no longer able to effectively refit its army (even though it has not yet lost many regions to TOs), it should be a much stronger incentive to agree to peace.
I've got some ideas for this, but I think that this is probably not the right time and place to discuss them. I'll flesh them out a bit more, and bring them to a separate thread in a while.
Quote from: vonGenf on March 20, 2012, 03:33:49 PMWhich 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.)
QuoteIn 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.
QuoteHere 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.
QuoteMaybe 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.
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.
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.
Quote from: egamma on March 20, 2012, 07:06:07 PMRight 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.
Quote from: vonGenf on March 20, 2012, 01:02:10 PM
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.
Quote from: Zakilevo on March 20, 2012, 07:42:44 PM
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
Quote from: Gustav Kuriga on March 20, 2012, 02:17:48 PM
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.
Quote from: vonGenf on March 20, 2012, 02:46:28 PM
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
Quote from: egamma on March 20, 2012, 07:06:07 PM
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.
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.
Quote from: Duvaille on March 21, 2012, 07:25:17 AM
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.
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.
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.
Quote from: GoldPanda on March 20, 2012, 07:53:49 PM
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...
Quote from: Geronus on March 21, 2012, 06:12:15 PM
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.
This will surely encourage multiple armies over one giant army.
Quote from: Tom on March 21, 2012, 05:27:24 PM
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.
I also think that option #1 is the best, most realistic and most promising idea to eliminate blob armies.
Now the tricky part is implementing it so that players don't feel it is a punishment. I would totally love to have a simulation of diseases and epidemics in the game, it would be so much fun to code and watch - but it would be no fun to play. That's why it's not there.
Quote from: Duvaille on March 21, 2012, 06:39:26 PM
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.
That sounds extreme. It will make things too easy for big realms with big multiple armies to crush small realms.
Regarding the looting, I see an opportunity there to give realms an incentive for several small duchies - by summing up on the duchy level first and then on the realm level.
So basically:
LootEffect = MyRegion + Sum(MyDuchy) + Sum(MyRealm)
This would count the region itself 3 times and regions within the same duchy twice.
Quote from: Tom on March 21, 2012, 07:04:56 PM
Regarding the looting, I see an opportunity there to give realms an incentive for several small duchies - by summing up on the duchy level first and then on the realm level.
So basically:
LootEffect = MyRegion + Sum(MyDuchy) + Sum(MyRealm)
This would count the region itself 3 times and regions within the same duchy twice.
I actually like this idea. We have too many supersized duchies at the moment. Not too many realms are using a townsland region to create a duchy at the moment.
Make the "disease penalty" as severe as the "starvation penalty", and make them NOT stack. That way, the penalty is annoying but tolerable for a few days, and your army only start taking significant damage if you stay blobbed up for many days, and the penalty is somewhat mitigated by healers.
I don't hear many complaints about the starvation penalty, mostly because, I believe, the game clearly communicates what's happening and why it happened.
Quote from: GoldPanda on March 21, 2012, 11:32:43 PM
I don't hear many complaints about the starvation penalty, mostly because, I believe, the game clearly communicates what's happening and why it happened.
Which is the key here I think. It needs to be clear what is happening so that players can actively mitigate it.
Quote from: Geronus on March 22, 2012, 12:12:46 AM
Which is the key here I think. It needs to be clear what is happening so that players can actively mitigate it.
So when you get your turn update on unit status something along the lines of
"Due to the size of the military camp many of your men are starting to suffer from lack of access to fresh water and proper sanitary infrastructure. X men are now wounded"
Things to think about, given time it is easily possible to build a camp to minimise such a problem, the Romans are a great example of how quickly a camp could be put together that provided decent levels of sanitation. Should we provide something to help reduce the effect, something like the dig in action? Second you should be able to muster a large force for a short time without worrying about this, so if it was to be implemented maybe have a few turns before illness is a concern.
In the end though won't people just split the force into adjacent regions to the attack destination then all move as one to the target, have the battle then split up again? I guess if the defending force is also trying to mitigate the effect by rallying in adjacent regions we might get a interesting dynamic of jockeying and conflict over rally points :) Or perhaps armies will just constantly move between to regions to prevent the problem until they are ready to attack.
Quote from: Zakilevo on March 21, 2012, 06:41:29 PM
That sounds extreme. It will make things too easy for big realms with big multiple armies to crush small realms.
Well, the numbers are mock numbers meant to illustrate a point. The severity of the situation could increase more gradually too, of course. But the point remains that the longer the situation persists, I think the increases in morale drops should get worse too. Even something like doubling the effect if you keep looting in four consecutive days without interruption.
Quote from: Tom on March 21, 2012, 07:04:56 PM
LootEffect = MyRegion + Sum(MyDuchy) + Sum(MyRealm)
This would count the region itself 3 times and regions within the same duchy twice.
How about increasing the effect (moral drop= gradually over time if looting persists? Or do it slightly differently, that if looting persists and is not dealt with, loyalty begins to fall quicker and quicker, where sporadic lootings mainly hurt the morale alone. It's like the peasants first think "hey, this sucks!" and then "why there's nothing done about this?"
That's kind of the idea. I think it would work nicely with the current LC. For example, right now on BT the sum I outlined above would sum up to (without naming the regions):
Region A: 4+4+8 = 16
Region B: 3+8+13 = 24
Region C: 3+13+13 = 29
A has two regions in the realm being looted, both in different duchies
B has 4 regions being looted one other being in the same duchy
C has 4 regions being looted, all in the same duchy
And I think BT provides a good worst-case scenario for looting of many regions right now. Divide by some number, substract a small "tolerance" value and we're there. Say, divide by 3 for morale, 4 for independence and 5 for loyalty and substract 2 as a tolerance and you end up with:
A: -3 / +2 / -1
B: -6 / +3 / -3
C: -8 / +5 / -4
Now for other islands, looting one region to the ground seems to be the more common strategy. There are far fewer regions on other islands being looted, but the individual LC values are higher, much higher. We might want to sum up sqrt() values instead.
Maybe I am the only one in here, but I do not see the current system to be so dramatically bad.
Let's be straight: if in a war one side overwhelms the other in term of total cs, there is little one can do to turn the tide. And anyway I do not think what is being discussed here points in the direction of giving a chance to smaller realms or generically the weaker side of a war to increase their chance of survival, is that right?
In the opposite scenario where both sides field a similar or equal cs, and are led by people who know what they are doing, I think the game already allows for some non-trivial manoeuvres which in general I believe yield way better results than just amassing nobles and throw them at the other blob.
In short: I fail to see the motivation for this discussion. Spreading out to loot is already very effective. Especially when one aims for the right regions with the right units.
Quote from: Peri on March 22, 2012, 09:55:50 AM
Maybe I am the only one in here, but I do not see the current system to be so dramatically bad.
Let's be straight: if in a war one side overwhelms the other in term of total cs, there is little one can do to turn the tide. And anyway I do not think what is being discussed here points in the direction of giving a chance to smaller realms or generically the weaker side of a war to increase their chance of survival, is that right?
In the opposite scenario where both sides field a similar or equal cs, and are led by people who know what they are doing, I think the game already allows for some non-trivial manoeuvres which in general I believe yield way better results than just amassing nobles and throw them at the other blob.
In short: I fail to see the motivation for this discussion. Spreading out to loot is already very effective. Especially when one aims for the right regions with the right units.
In a battle superior numbers/training/skill will generally prevail, though it is no certainty. In a war numbers are a smaller part of the big picture. It shouldn't be a case that you need similar CS to be competitive, strategy should play a much bigger part then it currently does.
Larger force + better/equal leadership should generally lead to a win. Right now the larger force doesn't need to be particularly well led, just not totally incompetent.
Quote from: Peri on March 22, 2012, 09:55:50 AM
Let's be straight: if in a war one side overwhelms the other in term of total cs, there is little one can do to turn the tide.
The problem is that right now wars are not one by the realm with the higher total CS, but by the realm that can bring more CS to the battlefield of the day. Which, while realistic, leads to the issue that hyperactivity is rewarded and casual play punished.
Quote from: Duvaille on March 20, 2012, 12:26:42 PM
So, if it is a problem that people tend to make huge blobs of units and crash them at the enemy, something should be done about it. Everything in the game seems to scale so that it is always better to split a huge blob into smaller ones - like it is more efficient to have many estates than a single large one, or many different units instead of one huge. But the question then is essentially how to change this so that the same is true on an army level.
Sure, there are methods already there, like crowded roads. But that is a hindrance, not an encouragement. Would we perhaps benefit from such encouragements, like giving more power to raiding parties somehow? What if it somehow hurt more to have enemy troops present on a number of regions? If you only march your troops in one or two enemy regions, no problem, the population can take that. But what if there were increased morale penalties throughout the realm if many regions were simultaneously under attack? All you need then is a small force to cross the border and spread around the place, so you only need a little bit stronger force to counter it, but then.. and so it becomes a game of guessing what the other will do.
This proposal probably has its problems and it may not be a perfect one, but perhaps we could think of more ways how it would actually be beneficial to split the forces most of the time. When conquering a city, you might still want to blob it and that would perhaps be fine, but for the rest of the time it could be different.
It's a lot because of player culture. As general, on BT, I've often divided our forces to great success.
All depends on what you want to do, though, where you are fighting and how strong the enemy is. Blobs are necessary when you must defeat a blob army, however, or take on fortified positions.
Quote from: De-Legro on March 22, 2012, 11:08:01 AM
In a battle superior numbers/training/skill will generally prevail, though it is no certainty. In a war numbers are a smaller part of the big picture. It shouldn't be a case that you need similar CS to be competitive, strategy should play a much bigger part then it currently does.
Larger force + better/equal leadership should generally lead to a win. Right now the larger force doesn't need to be particularly well led, just not totally incompetent.
You confuse army size with army strength. If an army has a lot of CS, it doesn't mean that it is large (though it usually is), but rather that it is very strong. A small army with more CS than a large army should, theoretically, win over the larger one.
Quote from: vonGenf on March 20, 2012, 02:46:28 PM
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.
Why don't we see this happen?
Because most generals are pussies that don't want to hurt the peasants' feelings.
I've done this as general of Enweil. Split up forces to loot multiple region, retreating any fragment that gets targeted to keep the enemies on the run. It was very effective. Much more than a blob army where 90% of the nobles do nothing every turn after the second looting attempt stirs peasants mobs.
Or because the general or the troops he commands are too lazy to be able to react quickly and make the tactic effective. Or because they aren't strong enough and doing so means the enemy could just ignore your small forces and rolfstomp your capital.
Quote from: Chénier on March 22, 2012, 12:52:15 PM
It's a lot because of player culture. As general, on BT, I've often divided our forces to great success.
All depends on what you want to do, though, where you are fighting and how strong the enemy is. Blobs are necessary when you must defeat a blob army, however, or take on fortified positions.
You confuse army size with army strength. If an army has a lot of CS, it doesn't mean that it is large (though it usually is), but rather that it is very strong. A small army with more CS than a large army should, theoretically, win over the larger one.
No, larger better equipped and even better trained forces have been defeated by smaller armies. I was making a statement about real life, where the CS analogy doesn't really apply. In a battle in BM higher CS will almost always win (excepting fortifications and terrible line setting failures). Given the current battle system its not going to be practical to implement a way for smaller CS forces to have much chance in a battle. But the changes proposed are about making a smaller CS force have a better chance of winning the war by providing ways to force the enemy to split their larger forces.
Quote from: De-Legro on March 21, 2012, 12:34:34 AM
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.
Until the blob just chooses to rofl stomp any given adjacent smaller army... As they would have done anyways.
Quote from: De-Legro on March 22, 2012, 01:02:06 PM
No, larger better equipped and even better trained forces have been defeated by smaller armies. I was making a statement about real life, where the CS analogy doesn't really apply. In a battle in BM higher CS will almost always win (excepting fortifications and terrible line setting failures). Given the current battle system its not going to be practical to implement a way for smaller CS forces to have much chance in a battle. But the changes proposed are about making a smaller CS force have a better chance of winning the war by providing ways to force the enemy to split their larger forces.
A superior army that is archer-heavy could be defeated due to winds. Army composition and line settings, without necessarily anyone making horrible choices, could also lead to unexpected victories. Randomness exists.
I don't agree with making weaker armies more likely to win on the basis that they are weaker.
Quote from: Tom on March 22, 2012, 12:12:59 PM
The problem is that right now wars are not one by the realm with the higher total CS, but by the realm that can bring more CS to the battlefield of the day. Which, while realistic, leads to the issue that hyperactivity is rewarded and casual play punished.
To a certain extent. When we first beat Riombara, we didn't do it thanks to our superior activity. Hell no, Riombarans were vastly superior to us as far as army movement and cohesion goes. We won because we had a stronger economy, that allowed us to recruit larger armies and that allowed us to afford to engage in moves of attrition (sacrificing costly units to do regional damage).
Superior economy > superior activity. Which is how it should be, and is realistic.
When Enweil fought Rio again after the invasion, Rio had a stronger economy and Enweil a much weaker one. Therefore, Rio was able to easily win. Normal.
Quote from: Tom on March 22, 2012, 12:12:59 PM
The problem is that right now wars are not one by the realm with the higher total CS, but by the realm that can bring more CS to the battlefield of the day. Which, while realistic, leads to the issue that hyperactivity is rewarded and casual play punished.
This is a very good point and it would be certainly cool to diminish the advantages/disadvantages activity creates.
Still, I can think of very few and radical examples (which most of the cases ended in locking multiaccounters, by the way), where activity on the two sides of a war was completely different, or where could be considered the main reason for leading one side to victory. If one averages out in time the fluctuations of activity, more or less all realms behave similarly.
For how the game currently is, however, generals and marshals are forced to keep in very good consideration meta-gaming concepts such as activity and player response if they want to be successful. This could very well be a bad thing you would like to get rid of and motivate the whole debate perfectly.
Quote from: Chénier on March 22, 2012, 01:08:19 PM
Until the blob just chooses to rofl stomp any given adjacent smaller army... As they would have done anyways.
A superior army that is archer-heavy could be defeated due to winds. Army composition and line settings, without necessarily anyone making horrible choices, could also lead to unexpected victories. Randomness exists.
I don't agree with making weaker armies more likely to win on the basis that they are weaker.
You assume you would have to be adjacent to cut off a supply line, that is hardly the case. Secondly I'm not saying weaker armies should win because they are weaker. If the larger army manages to engage in a pitched battle they should win. What I am saying is that weaker armies need to have methods by which they can compete. It doesn't have to level the playing field but I believe weaker armies (and weaker realms) need a bit more love so the default thinking isn't "oh hey that realm is larger, lets never fight them"
Quote from: De-Legro on March 22, 2012, 11:48:36 PM
You assume you would have to be adjacent to cut off a supply line, that is hardly the case. Secondly I'm not saying weaker armies should win because they are weaker. If the larger army manages to engage in a pitched battle they should win. What I am saying is that weaker armies need to have methods by which they can compete. It doesn't have to level the playing field but I believe weaker armies (and weaker realms) need a bit more love so the default thinking isn't "oh hey that realm is larger, lets never fight them"
A realm is larger? Gang up on them...
Small realms already have a ton of advantages. To increase these advantages would result in removing all incentives to grow (Fheuv'n, for example, has acquired a few more regions but it hasn't made the realm any more rich than it used to be).
The main problem with smaller realms, imo, is the lack of active nobles to fill in key positions. It's much easier to find 6 or so committed people in a realm of 60 than in a realm of 16.
Wait, wait, wait. Let's take a step back and think about the original problem here. The thread is getting off track. We've established that:
1. The realm with many smaller armies should win over a realm with a single blob of equal strength.
2. Activity should be less influential on who wins the war.
These two are inherently contradictory, since to have more effective smaller armies, it necessitates more collaboration and coordination. More nobles need to be active to function as several units than one large blob that can afford to lose a few here and there.
So again, what is the problem here? If we have no logical, sensible, contradiction-free problem statement, there can be no reasonable, actionable solution.
1. The problem is, there is hardly any incentive for having small multiple armies over a big army.
So far people suggested,
Disease - To stop a blob from forming. Making people only make a blob when it is necessary. Also, this will probably make battle fronts wider.
Supply line?
2. I doubt you can fix the second one. Obviously people who invest more time into the game will have higher chance of victory than people who log in once a day to check things quickly.
Quote from: Foundation on March 23, 2012, 03:53:22 AM
These two are inherently contradictory
I think you're trying to suggest fixes to the impossible. ;)
Quote from: Foundation on March 23, 2012, 03:53:22 AM
Wait, wait, wait. Let's take a step back and think about the original problem here. The thread is getting off track. We've established that:
1. The realm with many smaller armies should win over a realm with a single blob of equal strength.
2. Activity should be less influential on who wins the war.
These two are inherently contradictory, since to have more effective smaller armies, it necessitates more collaboration and coordination. More nobles need to be active to function as several units than one large blob that can afford to lose a few here and there.
So again, what is the problem here? If we have no logical, sensible, contradiction-free problem statement, there can be no reasonable, actionable solution.
That's not quite true. Activity is still always going to give an advantage. The point of this topic is blobs which isn't directly related to activity. A offset of this thread was the trend towards having super active generals control everything and provide all the orders. So long as the player base expects that of the general, you will have problems breaking up blobs because smaller armies create more work for the super active general. If the Generals position becomes more about long term strategy, then activity of the realm will still provide an advantage, but it can rely less on having a General that is online right after every turn to analysis the current situation and provide specific orders. However then we just force the issue to having several super active marshals to provide orders unless we then also equip the average knight with the info required to make immediate decisions without specific orders.
No matter what average realm activity is going to be important, given the turn structure there is no way around that.
The original problem is that strategy, maneuvering, etc. don't play as much a role as they should.
Throughout history, superior armies were defeated by more mobile, better positioned, etc. enemies.
While much of medieval warfare was pretty unsophisticated, from a gameplay perspective, gathering everyone in one spot and blobbing into the enemy blob is probably the most boring approach possible.
So far, disease is something I like. It also gives an alternative to siege warfare. Usually, on the brink of defeat, people will gather their army in their capital and the enemy is forced to gather a huge force outside and storm in. With disease added, they could actually besiege them.
What we need to make sure is that it's not a pure frustration moment. So it should add to attrition, and have effects that can be countered. I suggest that disease only wounds soldiers (there's still a chance for wounded to die at the turn), which can be countered with healers. It should also reduce morale. And it should very clearly say what is going on and that spreading the army out would help.
Quote from: Tom on March 23, 2012, 10:48:10 AM
The original problem is that strategy, maneuvering, etc. don't play as much a role as they should.
Throughout history, superior armies were defeated by more mobile, better positioned, etc. enemies.
While much of medieval warfare was pretty unsophisticated, from a gameplay perspective, gathering everyone in one spot and blobbing into the enemy blob is probably the most boring approach possible.
I still believe this holds only when there is a substantial difference of cs or a substantial difference in the ability/activity levels of the whole military command of one of the two sides. When strength on the field is roughly equal, a blob vs blob approach is hardly the one that will lead any side to victory in a reasonable timeframe.
Quote from: Foundation on March 23, 2012, 03:53:22 AM
These two are inherently contradictory, since to have more effective smaller armies, it necessitates more collaboration and coordination. More nobles need to be active to function as several units than one large blob that can afford to lose a few here and there.
I strongly disagree wiht that conclusion. In fact, I think that making blobs less efficient will reduce the effect the activity on the end result.
The blob strategy relies entirely on everyone moving on turn. Stragglers directly impact their realm's ability to wage war, and on top of it they get decimated when the enemy blob comes to get them.
Furthermore, common soldiers cannot move as long as a marshal's orders are not in, since any uncoordinated movement will also directly impact the blob strategy.
Therefore, forming a blob requires orders to be given in advance (which in many realms means marshals logging in early in the turn), and soldiers to wait for orders before logging out.
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.
Quote from: Peri on March 23, 2012, 12:10:17 PM
I still believe this holds only when there is a substantial difference of cs or a substantial difference in the ability/activity levels of the whole military command of one of the two sides. When strength on the field is roughly equal, a blob vs blob approach is hardly the one that will lead any side to victory in a reasonable timeframe.
In a war between equals, both blob vs blob and spread vs spread give roughly equal chance to either side. However a blob vs spread gives victory to the blobbing side.
It's a prisoner's dilemma. It would be better if there were not a single equilibrium point to tend to.
I would be very happy if someone could take everything that was said about disease (the most promising solution), sum it up and put it into a new topic so we can hash it out.
Quote from: Zakilevo on March 23, 2012, 04:00:42 AM
1. The problem is, there is hardly any incentive for having small multiple armies over a big army.
So far people suggested,
Disease - To stop a blob from forming. Making people only make a blob when it is necessary. Also, this will probably make battle fronts wider.
Supply line?
2. I doubt you can fix the second one. Obviously people who invest more time into the game will have higher chance of victory than people who log in once a day to check things quickly.
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.
Quote from: Tom on March 23, 2012, 10:48:10 AM
The original problem is that strategy, maneuvering, etc. don't play as much a role as they should.
Throughout history, superior armies were defeated by more mobile, better positioned, etc. enemies.
While much of medieval warfare was pretty unsophisticated, from a gameplay perspective, gathering everyone in one spot and blobbing into the enemy blob is probably the most boring approach possible.
So far, disease is something I like. It also gives an alternative to siege warfare. Usually, on the brink of defeat, people will gather their army in their capital and the enemy is forced to gather a huge force outside and storm in. With disease added, they could actually besiege them.
What we need to make sure is that it's not a pure frustration moment. So it should add to attrition, and have effects that can be countered. I suggest that disease only wounds soldiers (there's still a chance for wounded to die at the turn), which can be countered with healers. It should also reduce morale. And it should very clearly say what is going on and that spreading the army out would help.
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.
Quote from: vonGenf on March 23, 2012, 12:10:42 PM
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.
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.
Quote from: Chénier on March 23, 2012, 01:05:07 PM
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.
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.
Quote from: vonGenf on March 23, 2012, 12:10:42 PM
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.
Quote from: Chénier on March 23, 2012, 01:05:07 PM
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.
Quote from: Chénier on March 23, 2012, 01:05:07 PM
I tire of the sticks solutions. Always the stick. Always.
Propose a carrot.
Quote from: Tom on March 23, 2012, 05:20:19 PM
Quote from: Chénier on March 23, 2012, 01:05:07 PM
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.
Quote from: Tom on March 23, 2012, 05:20:19 PM
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.
Quote from: GoldPanda on March 23, 2012, 06:01:10 PM
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.
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.
Quote from: GoldPanda on March 23, 2012, 06:01:10 PM
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!
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.
sounds like a coding nightmare.
+1 for Rob.
Quote from: Revan on March 23, 2012, 08:04:00 PM
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.
Stable'll be updated soon... soon! :D
Quote from: Chénier on March 23, 2012, 01:05:07 PM
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?
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.
If we want to think carrots instead of sticks, we need to give advantages to small armies that are not intrinsic (i.e. mobility, etc.) - I really can't think of many that would not essentially be disadvantages to large armies (blobs). So basically, we're just calling it one way or the other.
I agree that disease is frustrating, which is why I've never added it to the game even though disease was probably the #1 reason for peasants to die as well as soldiers.
I don't think that troop presence works all too well. Players would just recruit small militia units to every region, or force courtiers, traders, etc. to have a unit.
No, we should think of actual battlefield advantages. There are two things that come to mind:
- Archers - the more enemy troops there are, the easier it is to hit somebody. If the enemy basically covers the entire field in front of you, it is pretty hard to not hit anyone by just firing into the crowd. So we could make archers more effective depending on the number of enemies they face. This would also promote mixed armies, and I don't see a downside. Because archer-heavy armies can easily be cut down using small cavalry forces deployed in skirmish formation (they still get a charge bonus, which should pretty much take care of any archers they charge into).
- Maneuverability - not really easy to implement on our 1D battlefield, but ignoring the implementation details, a small army attacking a large army would pretty much have the advantage of being able to choose where to hit, because a front line several thousand man strong is pretty much immobile, you can't switch units around, etc. - the gameplay effect could be that a considerably (less than half) army would automatically attack the weakest units of the larger army, forcing them into melee first. Again, not sure if this can even be coded in our current battle system, but a thought.
I like the first one. The second one won't work very well with the current battle system as you said. How about make it easier for units to follow the marshal settings when it is a small army? I am not 100% sure how marshal settings work but not everyone follows the marshal setting right?
Quote from: Tom on March 24, 2012, 08:53:30 PM
I don't think that troop presence works all too well. Players would just recruit small militia units to every region, or force courtiers, traders, etc. to have a unit.
Didn't I say mobile troops? If I didn't, I meant to. Inciting massive deployment of militia is definitely not a good thing.
Quote from: Tom on March 24, 2012, 08:53:30 PM
No, we should think of actual battlefield advantages. There are two things that come to mind:
- Archers - the more enemy troops there are, the easier it is to hit somebody. If the enemy basically covers the entire field in front of you, it is pretty hard to not hit anyone by just firing into the crowd. So we could make archers more effective depending on the number of enemies they face. This would also promote mixed armies, and I don't see a downside. Because archer-heavy armies can easily be cut down using small cavalry forces deployed in skirmish formation (they still get a charge bonus, which should pretty much take care of any archers they charge into).
- Maneuverability - not really easy to implement on our 1D battlefield, but ignoring the implementation details, a small army attacking a large army would pretty much have the advantage of being able to choose where to hit, because a front line several thousand man strong is pretty much immobile, you can't switch units around, etc. - the gameplay effect could be that a considerably (less than half) army would automatically attack the weakest units of the larger army, forcing them into melee first. Again, not sure if this can even be coded in our current battle system, but a thought.
Cavalry in skirmish!? Even an army with a very heavy archer component would laugh at this if they get their box infantry to soak in the charge.
About maneuverability, I tend to disagree. A larger army can much more easily cut off, split, or surround a smaller army. The larger army can also much more easily deploy the weaker units to inaccessible places if such was their desire. And finally, spotting a unit's morale and training on the field, before they fight, would be next to impossible, and these are critical in determining a unit's strength. If you use the argument of maneuvrability (which I find flawed), it should at least target the least equipped, not the weakest. In either case, though, this just means that the nobles who can't afford better units will always have to recruit again and again, remaining poor. Casualties will always be greater for the common knights than the lords and other elite. I don't think this is a consequence that is desirable.
I'm not against the change to archers (perhaps add a chance to friendly/fire that scales according to the proportion of friendly to hostile troops on the front line?), but I don't see how it would change anything regarding to blob armies. All it would do is incite larger armies to rely on archers less, and more on infantry and cavalry.
Which just brings us back to the fundamental question: are blob armies so bad that we can't just accept that they are a necessary evil resulting from the game being based on 12 hour turns and that they have been the norm since probably always? Because it's not like splitting up the army is
never good. It's just
usually not as good.
Quote from: Tom on March 24, 2012, 08:53:30 PM
- Archers - the more enemy troops there are, the easier it is to hit somebody. If the enemy basically covers the entire field in front of you, it is pretty hard to not hit anyone by just firing into the crowd. So we could make archers more effective depending on the number of enemies they face. This would also promote mixed armies, and I don't see a downside. Because archer-heavy armies can easily be cut down using small cavalry forces deployed in skirmish formation (they still get a charge bonus, which should pretty much take care of any archers they charge into).
- Maneuverability - not really easy to implement on our 1D battlefield, but ignoring the implementation details, a small army attacking a large army would pretty much have the advantage of being able to choose where to hit, because a front line several thousand man strong is pretty much immobile, you can't switch units around, etc. - the gameplay effect could be that a considerably (less than half) army would automatically attack the weakest units of the larger army, forcing them into melee first. Again, not sure if this can even be coded in our current battle system, but a thought.
I very much like the archer idea.
As for the 1D battlefield, I think the easiest way to fix it would be to add "left/center/right" as a deployment option, and to start with, run it as 3 separate battles--maybe with the remains of the 3 battles fighting one at the end so that there's one definitive winner instead of a split decision.
Two new ideas:
First, Ad an overkill system for looting. If the numbers are ajusted right the system could make smaller armies a more effective looting strategy.
Logically there's only so much you can loot from a region regardless of how many men you have doing the looting. The system as far as I can tell already bases looting success on available food, tax gold, population ect. The system is there, the numbers just need to be tweaked so a smaller force can loot more effectively.
How small a force it takes should vary based on the type of looting being done. Burning food and looting tax gold for example shouldn't take many troops at all. I could see as few as 100 men easily securing the granaries and burning them down. Same goes for the tax office. Once you smash in the locks and kill the guards the gold is yours for the taking.
Second
Either make digging in more effective, or allow the building of palisades in rural regions. A strong border defense means an attacking army is better off coming in groups. If a blob army meets an equal strength blob army at a fortified border they're likely to lose the battle and have to go home. If they break up into several groups they can enter through several regions. The enemy blob might get one of their smaller armies, but the rest have broken through and can now regroup and hold the fortifications themselves.
This is also a better representation of how fortifications would be organized in medieval countries.
Quote from: Tom on March 24, 2012, 08:53:30 PM
I don't think that troop presence works all too well. Players would just recruit small militia units to every region, or force courtiers, traders, etc. to have a unit.
I wasn't thinking of militia troops either. The peasantry wouldn't be impressed by militia, because the militia-men are their neighbors, not exotic visitors from other regions, clad in shining armor and bright plumage. The militia would also be a drain on the local economy.
And what's wrong with forcing Courtiers and Traders to recruit units? That's not covered by IR, and I don't see anything abusive about making nobles field troops. Just because a noble is a Courtier does not mean that he's not from the military caste. The nobility are "those who fight" after all.
Edit: Very few realms would have enough Courtiers/Traders to provide significant "troop coverage" by themselves.