Von_Lipwig's Blog

I think you should easy the fighting itself as much as possible. You should have to calculate much, it only takes a lot of time and it is easy to make mistakes. I have thought long about the whole stats thing. Here is a little bit of what i think 'could' work (not sure if it does).

Give the following stats to a unit:
Initiative - Which unit will start? I saw you were questioning on how to do this. Attacker should always start.
Attack (charge) - First stat used only by the attacking unit.
Defence (hold ground) - stat used only by the defending (where the impact is) unit.
Fighting skill - After the initial charge, the remaining men in the units will only use this stat.
Morale - of course.
Good vs - Strong vs cavalry for example. It doubles the stats if fighting against such a unit.

---------------------------------------
So, to make an example:

Unit of regular swordsmen charge into a unit of regular spearmen. Swords have 3 charge, spears have 5 defense. Swords are good vs spears, so the charge is 6.
Charge and defense are always one, the rest adds up. In total, the swords do 2 (1 + (6-5)) damage, the spears do 1 (1 + (5-6)) damage.

Then the fighting continues. Only this time with only the fighting skills. Swords have Fighting 5, spears have Fighting 3. Damage is always 1.
Swords do 3 (1 + (5-3)) damage, spears do 1 damage.

Morale is actually the number of damage that a unit can take before fleeing. Morale for regular troops are 6. However, the spears have +1 because their woolooloo brothers are near.
After charge and one normal fighting the morale for the swords is 4 (6-2), the spears is 2 (7-5). The spears will flee if fighting continues.

Then the health - Damage reduces health. You say 100 men = 100 health. I always used a different number, much lower. This way heavier units can have more health, while having less men. Regular units have all 10 health. The health of the swords in this stage is 8 (10 - 2), the spears have 5 (10 - 5). If the health drops to zero, a unit is broken (literally broken up - it does not have to loose all its men).

If you use this health system, you can use your larger unit system. If a health point is lost, the unit loses the percentage of men equal to the health lost. So, a unit with more health (say 20), will lose less men then those with say 10 health, even if they received the same amount of damage. The percentage will always be counted from an original unit size (100 men for regular troops).

The swords have lost 20% (2 damage total). They had 70 men, but normal size is 100. Thus the swords will have 50 (70 - 20) men left. The spears have lost 50 % (5 damage total). They had 150 men (a larger unit), but normal size is also 100. Thus the spears will have 100 (150 - 50) men left. But the spears flee because of morale loss.


---------------------------------------------

As you see, the 'good vs' stat is very, very important. I always liked the 'paper, rock, scissor' system. Of course, you can always choose different.

About the campaign and battlefield separated: Only if the calculation of casualties is easy and fast.


Just a small piece of my ideas. I have never worked it out completely, so i don't know if this would help you.

The rock, paper ,scissors relationship is there to ease combat.Now the question I think that needs to be answered is when you create an army of units, can they all inhabit the same grid, or does each unit that up an individual grid.

Also how big are the forces you invision? Cause if it is more Civ type battle but you are wanting hundreds of units to be on a front then your map must be big enough to accomodate for it. Actually if you make your map big enough you could have the simpler Civ style battle but at the same time have a complex battle system.

_______________________________________

For example imagine in the centre of the map there a river valley with rich farming and it leads also to one of the ports for the Guild. Now for the Nobles This may be a tempting target to go for, as they can secure farmland and help feed their armies, they will also get taxes of it and the trade from the port will also be good.

Now imagine if that valley is over a 100 grids wide and a few thousand long, the river snakes through the middle and at some points there are fords but the rest of the river is quite wide. Now if you had a hundred units you could form a line in the valley the problem is now, your foces are now spread which can lead to a an enemy concentrating his forces at certain points and knocking holes into the line. That then might force you to concentrate your forcesto say 20 grids wide but with multiple lines, but this then allows the enemy more space for movemnet so that if he fast he could surround your army.

The problem about having the battle system on the land map is that if your tradition turn is meant to say represent a week, then battles between very large armies could potentially take a long time to play out, which could break the feeling of time in the game. While a total war system for battles may preserve the time frame of the game, having it turn based could destroy the pacing of the game.

My suggestion is if you go with the civ style combat then to give it more tactical edge and so forth, you need to add a lot more gribs than you assumed you would have needed. Of course that means the map will be a lot bigger than what you had in mindbut having the map bigger and thus possibly quite hard to follow on a forum screen as you may have to scrolla lot to get to your bit of the map.

Damn, this is a lot to consider.

Flim, from what I'm reading this system of yours looks really quite solid and seems relatively easy to manage, as well as adding more depth due to the whole 'good against' value. It sounds like you have a way better brain for this side of things than I do. Is there a time that you will be on Steam so we can try and work this out further? Your idea kinda speaks to me and I would like to see if we can take it to the next level, and maybe even finalise a first version without an acceptable timeframe. That is, if you have the time for it.


Lordd, I'm thinking a few dozen units per player max (that is including different units in a combined army). Right now I'm thinking that only units of the same type can merge, so conscripts can merge with other conscripts, but not with townsmen for instance. This way it won't screw up the stats horribly.

I was also thinking of quite a large number of squares. I want plenty of room to maneuver.


---


As for archers, how can we make them useful? Because the way I see it, archers may be able to attack units from one grid off. Maybe they don't have a CHARGE value, but they ignore DEFENCE too? Wait, I'm going to have to look deeper into the whole system Flim suggested. I want to make archers useful but not OP.

Maybe... it's an idea to 'link' archers to other units? Then the archers' attack gets counted on top of the other unit?