Re: Qm said
 

Now that I think about it though, while an 'animal-leadership' rating might tame elephants/mammoths/ to some extent, it doesn't necessarily solve the problem of a trampler rush.

Many nations can put together a rush based on chariots, troglodytes, or minotaurs. While you might categorize the later two as animals of a sort, where do chariots fit in? With the right scales, they can be just as nasty as elephants - they're cheaper, and often have better moral and protection to boot (I scoff at your slings and arrows!).

Maybe units with long weapons DO need a bonus against tramplers (heck, and charge bonus units while we're at it!). It would give us a reason to actually buy those pike-men/spear-men...

Re: Qm said
 

There's a long way between Black Hawks at Conjuration3 and when normal armies aren't useful any more.
You could use your animal leaders with 10 elephants to expand and push research in Conjuration. Should be able to get there within the first year and have a nice backlog of elephants waiting for a leader.
(On the gripping hand, do any of the elephant nation even have Nature magic and income? Arcosephale, though only N1 right? )


More importantly, even if it addressed the elephant rush problem, it introduces all sorts of micromanagement and unforeseen hassles. Does every nation get animal leaders? Do no animal leaders have regular (or magical?) leadership? What about the ape nations? Do they only have animal leadership? So they can't use independents? Nature mages should get animal leadership. But then you can mix elephants and regular troops. Unless no nature mages can lead regular troops. Do indy elephants come with animal commanders? Are the various summon animals (pack of wolves/bears/lions, etc) spells now even more useless?

In general, the problem is tramplers, particularly elephants and this fix addresses animals in general.

I like the repel idea better. It's more specific to the problem.

Re: Qm said
 

It's easier to find a counter to chariots/minotaurs, because more nations have access to size 4 creatures than size 6, and chariots can't trample anything of size 4 or bigger. That way, you can at least put up a front line with archers behind it, whereas elephants just trample all over your whole army. (And of course they do more damage, since trample damage is (8 + 2*size difference) AP.)

That said, I'm not entirely convinced that you can't delay an elephant horde for a few rounds with the right tactical placement. Tramplers do great against large masses of troops, but tend to spend a lot of movement chasing down stragglers. Break your 300-man army up into 20 15-man squads and see how much time that buys you. I doubt it would win the battle vs. a large horde, but it might let you inflict a few more casualties.

-Max

Re: Qm said
 

All we really need to do to fix elephants is to drop thier protection. It's really as simple as that, guys. Drop thier prot to like 5-6... maybe 7 and you will see a radical difference in thier usability. Instead of just plowing unstoppably through any number of troops, they will get cut down by arrows and the hordes of the troops that surround them after a trample. If they are unsupported by infantry to take heat off them on the ground and archers to counter-attack the enemy shooters, they will be cut to ribbons -- as it should be.

Re: Qm said
 

Historically elephants were done in by their morale. They also tended to not be coordinated extraordinarily well. How about reducing the maximum number of elephants in a squad? Come up with some number and the player is forced to have more commanders. With the smaller squads, more morale checks will be made, which will force them back on their own army.

Thematically, you could have the limit be based upon a size factor. With smaller troops, they are in a more compact area making them easier to control. The larger the size, the more area they take up making them more difficult to control.

Re: Qm said
 

As I was saying last night on IRC, I think animal leadership would be a bad idea. It would most likely make it more difficult to use animals, many which are rarely used already. It can also have unforeseen consequences and unbalance other things in the process. For example, when Machaka's riders die, they become animal spiders. Will all of Machaka's commanders have animal leadership? Will I have to haul around some other commander so I can keep using the spiders? If the problem is elephants than I think the solution should stick to elephants.

Re: Qm said
 

Ridiculously *awesome*, you mean!

Actually, question - if I have a mixed unit of undead and normal units, and my last undead leader routs, does the entire unit rout or just the undead?

My biggest problem with messing around with animals is that all of the Bandar are animals. OTOH, the bandar are supposed to be pretty weird, so they could have their own crazy morale rules.

How's about this -
* Animals are not figured into squad morale, as with mindless or berserk units.
* When an animal is injured (or otherwise hit with morale damage) the squad morale is not influenced.
* Whenever an animal suffers a morale hit, all *animals* on your side take the morale hit. Alternately - all animals in a certain size-dependent radius could take the morale hit, but this might be CPU intensive or something.

This would mean, for example, that you could "let loose the dogs of war!" and any humans in the same unit wouldn't care if the dogs got killed.

It would also mean that a mixed force of elephants couldn't be stiffened *either* by spiking it with phalanxes, or by arbitrarily splitting it up into smaller groups (each of which might break individually but the whole group wouldn't.)

Finally, it would mean that all humans are racist against Vanara.

Re: Qm said
 

DrPraetorious' idea of splitting animals off from sentient creatures seems pretty good. If you do this, the elephants will always have abysmal morale (Unless you put them in a group with other, braver animals...). If you also add animal trainer commanders with standard abilities that only affects animals, you allow players to continue to use elephants against each other without resorting to silly uses of heavy infantry.

I don't think Bandar units should be seen as animals in this regard, as they appear to be intelligent enough to be considered people, except maybe the markatas. Pangea seems like a more likely candidate for special rules. I guess it wouldn't break the game to just give animal standard effects to their leaders, but that would "force" you to send dryads and the like to the front lines.

Also, if you do implement animal leadership, you might want to consider having units require their own size in leadership. I'm sure you can think of a decent excuse for this, and it would reduce the increase in power for cheap animal summoning spells.

Re: Qm said
 

Kind of a tangent, but do weapons on a trampler, e.g. the long spears on LA Arco's elephants, actually do any good? If they get repel attempts that's nice, otherwise they seem kind of useless.

-Max

Re: Qm said
 

Repel and attack when meeting a size 6 monster. Not very useful, but a bonus.

Re: Qm said
 

They don't repel smaller enemies?

Re: Qm said
 

They do.

Re: Qm said
 

Sorry for jumping in so late. I've been busy all week, but thankfully I have free time every now and then, and can follow these discussions.

I'd rather have "hard to lead" unit ability that makes a unit take more than 1 leadership slot. E.g. leading 1 elephant is like leading 3 men, so a 60 ldr commander can only lead 20 elephants, so the squad sizes are smaller except if you use high-ldr commanders, which are national and leave you with one less mage and have to be protected.

Taskmasters etc would be able to ignore this command.

Of course, this is also complicated in the programming department. It's just a suggestion, I don't expect it to get implemented.

<< Endoperez >>

Re: Qm said
 

Make leadership dependent on size?

Re: Qm said
 

The training of war horses and elephants have historically been focused on suppressing the natural instincts of these animals to flee when struck by weapons or startled by noise and large crowds. Training an animal to trample opponents is especially difficult, since they must charge through what they perceive as solid obstacles. All the above factors can be modeled in game with a similar mechanism to repel: force tramplers to pass a morale check for each square they trample, and make them attack with their normal weapon if they fail this check. The difficulty of this morale check can be adjusted based on any number of factors that the designers find suitable. For example, the mechanism could be setup as:

Trample Roll = Morale - 1 per every 20% HP loss on unit
Fear Roll = 5 + 1 per every 6 hostile size points in adjacent squares

If Trample Roll > Fear Roll, then trampling succeeds, otherwise attack with normal weapon and end turn. What qualifies as "adjacent squares" must be further defined of course, but just using the 8 immediately adjacent squares may well suffice. A system like this would make some roleplaying sense, and it should mitigate the problem of trampling rushers without completely negating the effectiveness of these units in a combined arms battle. Swarms of cheap infantry could be used to freeze tramplers in place and whittle them down slowly. This can be countered by using archers or shock infantry to cut through the chaff, which will in turn be vulnerable to other counter-counters, etc. etc.

Re: Qm said
 

Mod +1.

-Max

Re: Qm said
 

I think the best fix would be to adjust the rules for mixed squads so that the cowards in the squad can break before the braver troops.

Instead of having the squad share morale and break as a whole, it could have partial breaks where everyone with morale less than X panics and runs. The braver members of the squad continue fighting, until they take enough casualties for the squad's "rout number" to exceed their morale as well. If there were troops with drastically different morale (like mammoths and wingless), half breaks would be pretty common. Fear, standards that only cover part of the squad, and Battle Fright could also cause part of a squad to flee while other parts fight on.

That would make combining cowardly tramplers + brave other troops dangerous - the tramplers might break first and trample their braver comrades on their way off the battlefield. Cowards would remain cowardly even when surrounded by braver allies - it takes something like a standard or Sermon of Courage to really improve their morale.

That might require enough changes to the morale system to make it more of a Dom4 thing than something that could be done in a patch, though.


In the short term maybe elephants just need to cost more resources. They may not wear much equipment, but the effort involved in catching or breeding an elephant and then training it for war is far from trivial in its own right (*much* harder than doing the same for a horse). A high resource cost would make it difficult to accumulate elephants quickly, especially without productivity. Training a large force of elephants would take years.

And really, how likely is it that the people of a sloth-3 province are going to bother to take the trouble to raise and train even one elephant, let alone several? That would be far too much work.

Re: Qm said
 

Hmmm... This discussion interests me. I think I have a "solution" thats going to make a lot of sense with out ripping apart the game (like adding animal command would). I'm going to work on the math, but it basically involves adding some morale checks modified by weapon length and HP.

Re: Qm said
 

Alright, I must have gone through a dozen different schemes of various complexities (some requiring four seperate moral checks before doing some attack vs. defense checks). I finally settled on the simplest. First, what my criteria were.

A) It had to make sense "realistically".
B) It couldn't create any new abilities, attributes, etc.
C) It had to be simpler than the mechanics governing missles.
D) It would have to employee similar mechanics to those already used by the game.
E) It had to be readily available to any nation thematically.

For A, the obvious solution to being charged by giant creatures would be long pointy sticks that the creature would have to impale itself on to get to you. Hence, weapon length vs. trampler morale became the dominant theme. As for D, I noticed that while the game has "repel" checks for normal attacks, it has nothing of the sort for trample attacks. This doesn't make sense. Therefore, in order for a unit to trample a square, it must pass the following morale check:

(Trampler Morale)+(Trampler Size)+DRN-(Trampler Fatigue)/10

vs.

(Modified Sum of Weapon Length in Attacked Square)+DRN

The "Sum of Weapon Length" is modified the same way presicion is, all points over 10 are doubled. Note that the moral check is based on the INDIVIDUAL trampler's morale, and no survivor bonus is applied, just a fatigue penalty. Which makes sense, the more tired you are the more daunting the task of avoiding a wall of spikes becomes.

What happens next is simple. If the trampler fails the morale check the unit will simply attack normally with whatever weapon it has (trunk, spear, whatever). If it succeeds it now is vulnerable to "attacks of opportunity", much like a normal soldier who succeeds their morale check vs. a longer weapon. Each unit in the square gets a free attack against the trampler (whose defense is reduce by 2 each time it defends against such an attack) which can cause at most an amount of damage equal to the weapon's length (which symbolizes the creature impaling itself on the long weapon). Plus, each such attack will cause a fatigue hit.



The baseline in my head was a squad of 3 spearment (total weapon length 12) should have a "reasonable" chance to parry a low morale elephant, while 3 phalanxes each with length six weapons should stop all but the most determined trampler cold. Meanwhile, isolated and short length weapon fighters should rarely be able to repel even the most uncertain of tramplers.

The match ups.

Mammoth vs. 3 spearmen: The Mammoth has morale 10 and size 6, while the spearmen have modified weapon lengths of 14. Assuming no fatigue, the Mammoth will trample the spearmen 62% of the time. It's enough to blunt a trampler's charge and give the defendants a fighting chance against an amassed Mammoth horde beelining for the capital.

Indie Elephants vs. 3 Spearment: The difference between indie elephants and Mammoths is the elephants have a morale of 8. This means they'll only successfully trample the spearmen 46% of the time.

Indi Elephant vs. Isolate Phalanx (WL6) or 3 short swordsmen (WL2x3)

The Elephant would roll 14 vs 6. A plus 8 difference means it will trample the units 86% of the time. That almost identical to the current situation.

Mammoth vs. 3 Phalanxes (WL6x3)

The Mammoth would still have 16, but 6 times 3 is 18, which would be modified to 26. Thats a deficiet of 10 which only gives the Mammoth a 3% chance of actually trampling.

Finally, SC vs. 3 Phalanxes

I'm assuming a size 6 Commander with 30 morale tries to trample the best anti-trample defense available. Its 36 vs. 26, and the commander will successfully trample 95% of the time. Fortunately, such units don't grow on trees.

Thoughts? Exploits? Understandable?

Re: Qm said
 

I don't recall/understand what the current system is, but pretty cool and well-thought out. Though it does seem that perhaps the percentages could stand to be slightly higher. (A Mammoth vs 3 Phalanxes should probably have more than 3% Chance. Perhaps add defender fatigue in there as well?)

I don't know if it balances well, but I do like the Weapon Length over 10 doubled though. A good analogy would be building a brick wall against a current of water. The first brick or two would impede it, but only by a marginal amount. But once there's enough bricks, each one would cut the area the water could go through by such a percentage that it would really start to add up (i.e. doubled)

Re: Qm said
 

The current system is the trampler does 10 + (2xsize) of armor piercing damage to every unit in the square it "tramples". Actually, the defender gets to escape if they beat a defense check vs. 10 with fatigue penalties to their defense, but absolutely must take at least 1 point of damage no matter what. Assuming units have a defense of 10 (which is the game's baseline), they'll get trampled roughly half the time. And with an elephant trampling, thats 22 ap damage, which is death for most infantry.

Beyond the game imbalances that such a system imposes, it just doesn't makes sense to me that a unit can ignore a wall of spears (the most effective military formation through out ancient history) and attack with impunity. And I see Length 6 weapons as being as long as an elephant itself. 3% may be a bit low, but it still makes sense and makes the system very workable.

I considered making the defenders pass a morale check to see if they'd stay "in formation" (including a "chicken game" check where whoever rolled the lower morale would "flinch" and loose, but the reward for the trampler winning was being impaled upon the sticks, so no good there), but ultimately I decided such systems were too complicated with out providing a real improvement for the gameplay. As for fatigue, how would you calculate the fatigue distribution over multiple units? And for that matter, does the defending unit being tired somehow make a row of spears seem less intimidating? No, fatigue will still come in play when a trampled defender attempts their "attack of opportunity" while being trampled.

Re: Qm said
 

Well, I guess the fatigue doesn't fit realisticly, but It'd hopefully make the numbers more balanced...

In any case, it'll make lesser used Spearmen-type units more useful. Thus you could probably rush a player with a bunch of tramplers, since they'll doubtfully have spearmen units in their normal army, but it gives them a chance to amass some in an attempt to stop you.

Props.

Re: Qm said
 

That's what the manual claims, but in fact I have had trampled units with high protection fail to take any damage at all.

-Max

Re: Qm said
 

Well, maybe before we get into adjusting specific units, let alone making new rules, we might consider just tweaking those numbers a bit. 10 attack for trample seems a bit high to me - how hard is it really to see where the elephant is going and be somewhere else? Even a few points less of "trample effective attack" will lead to more units getting out of the way and fewer getting stepped on... while the trampler still ends up tired and surrounded. A little less damage could make more units survive the first trample, too (meaning you have to trample them again, which is time consuming and fatiguing). At 8+size*2 ap, some heavily armored tough guys like Ulm could have a decent chance to survive the first trample.

Repelling elephants doesn't make much sense to me. If an elephant is heading for your phalanx, you should get out of its way and stab it as it goes by, or after it is past you, not stand there until it snaps your spear like a toothpick.


P.S. Maybe the "must take 1 damage" only applies to people *hit* by the trample (and not lucky/ethereal)? "No matter how heavy your armor, an elephant stepping on you will do *some* damage" makes sense; "An elephant rushing into your square will damage you even if you get out of the way in time" doesn't. Even heavily armored troops could beat 10 attack some of the time.

Re: Qm said
 

Note that it's not 10 + (size*2) AP. It's 10 + ((size of attacker - size of defender)*2) AP. That means an elephant will usually have an 18 AP attack, which is survivable by tough Ulmish guys, as you noted.

About the minimum 1 damage: I thought so at one point too, so I specifically paid attention to IIRC a PD commander when he was getting trampled. No Ethereal, no Luck, and it was definitely the same guy. No damage. It's hard to tell exactly how much damage is taken during a trample because of the displacement, so I don't know how common it is to be undamaged, but I know it happens.

-Max

Re: Qm said
 

Here's a question I've never been quite sure of: once an elephant gets past the front lines, it can hit troops that have no free spaces to dodge into. Do they just get crunched, or do they dodge "through" the elephant?

Re: Qm said
 

On the subject of long pointy sticks:

The repell idea makes sense as the best way to stop tramplers. It also would make weapon length more important in the game, esp. if my idea of allowing all units to trample were implemented.

There's no need to make the system complicated. Simply do a "size vs. length" check. A size 6 elephant vs. a length 4 spear, do the 2d5 thing, if the elephant's roll plus size is greater than the spearman's roll plus length, the elephant gets to trample, if not, not.

Spearmen would get stomped with moderate frequency by elephants, but not much by trample-enabled cavalry. Swordsmen, on the other hand, would have to watch out for cavalry. Which adds to the rock-papers-scissors thing (swordsmen beat spearmen beat cavalry)

Jotun would become way cool with this trample rule... which giants should be!

Re: Qm said
 

Hmmm....everyone could trample....Not sure how that would balance, but that would add a whole new level of cool when your Knights Break through the enemy lines a square or two before ramming their lance into someone.

Re: Qm said
 

> Do they just get crunched, or do they dodge "through" the elephant?

They jump to one of the closest free spaces. In large battles, that can be a very long jump http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Qm said
 

I guess they get thrown a long way but luckily land on their feet http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

With regards to balancing tramplers... when there's only a few on the board, they tend to get surrounded and pulled down quickly. When there's a lot, they tend to form a "wall" that is much more powerful. In itself it's a good thing, but it seems a bit too strong and needs to get toned down somehow.

If the repel idea isn't liked, the reducing quantity per squad (via making leadership take size into account) would make it harder to accumulate large masses of tramplers. (Leadership 40 = 80 halflings, 40 humans, or 6 elephants)

Reducing elephants per squad would make it somewhat harder to mass huge hordes, and greatly increase the likelihood of a rout by at least some of them.

Re: Qm said
 

The simpler suggestion of increasing their resource cost (to represent the difficult task of catching/breeding and then training an elephant, not to mention the expense of feeding it while you are training it, and the expense of a proper howdah and harness) would also make it more difficult to mass huge hordes of elephants. But alone, it doesn't address the "elephant plus hoplites" problem.

As a quick fix I favor higher rescost, but ultimately I'd like to see parts of squads allowed to rout while their braver squadmates fight on. Even if I have to wait for Dom4 to see it. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Qm said
 

The simplest way to limit "unit mixing" with elephants from a mod point of view is to make elephants "magical" and create "Elephant Commander" with nice morale for elephants for the elephant/mammoth using nations and give them magical command. This is hardly abusable... someone who can deal with large numbers of massive mammoths probably isn't going to take any lip from a flying snake either. Elephant morale should probably be raised to 9 or something.

Re: Qm said
 

How does that limit unit mixing?
As long as those nations have mages with any regular command, no one will bother with the Elephant Commander.
Send out a mage (you have to use a fortress turn to recruit the Elephant Commander, anyway). Say 15 elephants mixed with 10 high morale regular troops is enough to boost morale.

Re: Qm said
 

another possible solution to masses of elephants is adding a large guttony rating. Make them consume 60 points of food.

the elephants and their elite keepers will starve if you mass to many. Diseased elephants may not be much concelation to those on the wrong end of an elephant rush.

Re: Qm said
 

If they have the gold to build all the mages required, I say let them. It's a great idea.

Mages don't cost much more than a commander anyway.

It would also allow a group of 20 elephants to be routed.

How many elephants do you need to kill to get your first rout check with 5 60+ group of elephants all mixed with each other?

With smaller groups (forced) at least SOMEBODY will make a route check.