Making leadership matter
 

Been thinking about the role of leaders and leadership in this game. It's curious - lack of leaders is almost never a real constraint on the ability to move troops around, and with a few limited exceptions the leaders have no effect on the troops they lead. Funny how giants consent to be led by paltry human independent commanders, etc. Further, most leaders (even those with battle skills) usually tend to hang back, rather than being in the thick of the fray, leading their troops!

In short, leadership is there as a concept, but has very little impact on the game play itself.

Here's an idea to make leadership important: have all leaders grant bonuses / penalties to the troops they are in charge of. In this way, a powerful general could take mediocre troops and make them do great things - and on the flip side, powerful troops would not reach their full potential if ineptly led.

Example: I'm playing Atlantis LA. Normally, there is no reason to recruit snow captain or ice captains. Human independents or Angakoks can led your troops just as well, and why waste time recruiting an ice captain when you could recruit a mage instead? But now suppose that a snow captain grants a +2 morale and +2 attack to all Atlantian troops under his leadership? And suppose that human independent commanders grant only a +1 morale to humans ... and a -2 morale and -1 defense to any non-humans they command? Now there is a real reason to use snow commanders and ice commanders, and the decision about which commander to recruit each turn at each fortress is more complex.

This also opens up possibilities for truly legendary generals, and even greater differentiation among nations. I'm thinking of heroes here that have average abilities for themselves, but extraordinary leadership bonuses - how about hero of Man that grants +5 accuracy, +5 range and +1 damage to all troops under his command? Or a hero of Ulm granting +3 defence and +3 reinvig? Or a hero of Pangaea which automatically barkskins all troops under her command?

Finally, commanders should be in there with their troops fighting, not hanging back! This is a fantasy game, not WW2. Not sure of the best mechanism to achieve that...

Re: Making leadership matter
 

It'd make more sense to have higher leadership open up more options for advanced troop commands/placement rather than mysterious bonuses that are basically battle spells. Also, ye olde generals tended to not wade into battle. Of course, there's nothing stopping people from sending commanders in with their troops, or else thugs wouldn't exist.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

Actually, Rome was the first power where the general wasn't in the thick of the fighting.

Alexander the Great notably had to make all his battle plans ahead of time, because come fighting he was in the thick of things riding with his Companions (heavy cavalry).

At least in the 'ancient era', commanders were expected to lead from the front to inspire the men. And even after Rome many militaries continued to adhere to that for quite a while.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

sourdust, I concur with your observation but not so sure about the solution you present.
I tend to favor more iRFNA suggestion re. commands/placement but doubt that it's doable.
So, perhaps good commanders can be recruited together with a few of the troops of same race/kind.

Oh and in modern warefare there's at least one army in which the motto and practice is for commanders (low - to medium lvl, not top generals) to be in the thick of battle. Said army has sadly been involved in too many wars over the last century :(

Re: Making leadership matter
 

maybe another thing is to limit leadership a little more.... as it is the number is too high for most commanders... specially after experience increases... to make leadership more important we should reduce the current number at least to half...

Re: Making leadership matter
 

Reducing leadership would just mean you recruit twice as many indy commanders.

That's not really solvable without giving specific bonuses to national leaders. Or removing indy commanders. No Independents maps exist.

I like the idea of troop bonuses for national non-mage commanders. Unfortunately the only similar thing that can be modded is Standard. Useful, but not quite enough in most cases.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

you could give them a autocast sermon of courage or strength of giant, legion of steels, etc., couldn't you?

Re: Making leadership matter
 

FYI: the last time each army was under the personal command of its monarch was in 1859 at solferino where the armies of napoleon the 3rd and victor emanuel the 2nd defeated the army of franz joseph (the first :) )

Re: Making leadership matter
 

Yeah, but there's a difference between personal command of the monarch and the mid-level commander actually fighting with his men.

The easiest way to motivate recruiting that kind of unit would be to play a non-Indy map (or just remove the Indy commander and leave in special Indy mages if you prefer) and drastically reduce the leadership of all national commanders who aren't clearly military leaders - so a grizzled old mage can take a dozen bodyguards to a fight but you need the more commandery looking units to cart big armies around. You still wouldn't get bonuses from your particular commanders, but at least the Snow Captain-type units would see a lot of play, and deciding whether to recuit a mage or a 'commander' from each fort would be a significant decision.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

True. Most of the spell effects seem overpowered though. Other than maybe on expensive capital only commanders.

Might be a nice concept to base a mod nation around.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

Unfortunately I am fairly sure that what you propose is quite impossible to implement in a mod. The closest that can be managed is giving all national commanders a hefty Standard effect, but I'm not sure that would change anyone's behavior.

Traditionally the solution to "making leadership matter" is to simply run NI games to force players to use national commanders.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

You think a single cast of sermon of courage at the start too powerful? If it were iron warriors or body ethereal, then yeah, maybe. But then again there is always a price.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

Not sermon, though I'd rather use Standard for that.

The other suggestions, Strength of Giants and Legion of Steel would be a bit much, I think. At least as an add on to an already balanced nation. As I said, a mod nation balanced around such troop boosts would be interesting.

I also don't think the small AoE effects, like Iron Warriors or Body Ethereal fit very well. They're most likely to affect the command and/or a couple of others and would probably be used to boost thugs rather than normal troops, which misses the intent. I'd rather see larger area, lesser effect, even if the total effect is more powerful.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

Standard's about the solution to the issue, if it exists.
The problem is that leaders you send to do the fighting (thugs) tend to die, so you have to rely on others leading the troops. There's little way of changing that.

However, I strongly disagree with the proposition that there's never a lack of leaders.
If you manage to trap an army somewhere and assassinate its leader, you may pin it for quite a while by repeatedly killing whatever commander is recruited in that province before he can move (through a combo of assassins, seeking arrows, earth attacks...). This doen't happen very often, but when you can paralyze an army without nearby commanders, you can reap a huge tactical advantage.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

I repeat my suggestion, perhaps clearer. To make it worth while to recruit national commanders give them a retinue upon recruit. It's not a novel idea, I saw it in one of WH mods. It's a nice perk and has the psych. effect to encourage the player to recruit a commander.
Ex. recruit an emerald lord, get 1-5 emerald guards depends on dom strength, only once, only when recruited.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

commanders who cast #onebattlespells are an interesting idea actually...

Re: Making leadership matter
 

The biggest problem with the idea is that there's no way to mod spells to affect only "human" or "atlantian" units. So any commander you have is going to be exactly as good for any units you have. Giving commanders sermon of courage isn't too bad, but you have to be careful to not make priests superfluous. Then you run into problems like it not being possible to give +attack skill modifiers below +4, or defense without quickness. Things like that. So the number of things you could give these commanders would necessarily be very limited, or very powerful. There's no real in-between.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

I didn't find a list of possible spell effects beyond the limited table in the modding manual. Do you have any?

In case of too powerful, you can always increase gold cost and then you still don't recruit a mage.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

I can help out with resources for spell modding if you're interested. But basically, you can do any effect which any spell currently in the game does, but you can't do any new ones. For example, there are spells which increase strength (and MR, and attack) by 4, so you can do that. But you can't increase strength by 3.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

You can also change range and AoE, right? So you could make a spell that did +4 str in a 10 AoE centered on the caster. Can you then make that a #onebattlespell? I have some vague memory of only being able to do that with existing spells.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

shouldn't you be able to do a new spell using #copyspell, then change AOE? This new spell is then assigned as onebattlespell.

I think any further discussion on *how* to mod commanders should go into the mod section, I think.

Well, I was curious to where this ominous spell effects table (mentioned in the manual 9.14 spell effects) exists.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

Yeah, you can change AOE, range, make it only affect undead, whatever. There is a huge amount of flexibility. But the effect would always be (for example) +4 strength. And you can't do entirely new effects - for example there is no spell to add Poison Spines to a unit, do you can't make a new spell to do it.

Technically you can only use #onebattlespell (automatic casting of spell at start of battle) for existing spells, but in practice we've got a very good workaround so it's not actually an issue.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

Wouldnt changing that change the whole consept of the game. It is going to make it even more complicated. Instead of planning how to reach some research target now you'd have to plan how to buff your units by buying more than 1-2 commanders early on.And that time would have been used to get mages. So I feel(I could be wrong) but if commanders start giving bonuses, then all the races that rely on magic will be severely hurt since they cannot cope with some nations armies without magic and the need to get the commanders to buff the troops to be competative(even though a bit on the loosing side since that races with good magic dont generally have good starting armies and good recruitable troops) with the nations that will do so.It will make their research even slower thus taking them out of the game if they choose to use commanders. If they don't then the opposing armies(imagine vans or sth similar) will have better troops and better buffs(coming from the commanders) and thus completely steamroll them.
It is a good Idea but I reckon it will have a huge impact on the ballance of the game and then many more things will need to be changed. I am one of the people who supports the moto "if it's not broken don't fix it".
edit: But yea having a mod around that idea wouldnt be too bad.(and it always can be playtested to see how it works out at the end)

Re: Making leadership matter
 

I agree.
Conceptually it would be a great way to boost the weaker troops and force some hard decisions about recruiting commanders vs mages.
In practice it would be used to buff thugs, sacreds and other elites for early rushes.

This is particularly true since in general a buff that boosts a strength is better than one that boosts a weakness, so good troops benefit more from a given buff than weak ones. And that the only real way to control the strength of most of the potential buffs is to change the AoE, which again means it'll be more effective on a few elites than on a mass of chaff.

A mod nation designed around the concept could avoid most of the pitfalls.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

The Bretonnia mod is interesting.

When you recruit a commander, you get a few free troops to go with him. In battle, the commanders are always accompanied by a free knight (even if he's killed he's back in the next battle). Between these two effects it's quite tempting (but definitely not OP) to recruit commanders, so I think it works well.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

The Bretonnia mod is interesting.

When you recruit a commander, you get a few free troops to go with him. In battle, the commanders are always accompanied by a free knight (even if he's killed he's back in the next battle). Between these two effects it's quite tempting (but definitely not OP) to recruit commanders, so I think it works well.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

Yeap. This is what I had in mind :)

Re: Making leadership matter
 

This would also make assassins even more useless than they currently are.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

regular assassins are pretty worthless anyway.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

Not entirely. They are useful to bring in cursed daggers and lycanthropos amulets to enemy thugs. They are useful to kill regular commanders who would be able to lead troops out of a province where the only leader got killed. That's situational, but not a reason to make them even less useful.
They are also useful in forcing opponents to deploy bodyguards instead of fielding the troops where they are more useful.
I don't like making assassins totally useless in order to make commanders more useful.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

Good point.
They would still be useful for passing cursed items and, if minimally equipped can also deal with normal commanders, even with a few body guards.

Besides, none is saying that if/when assassins become too niche that CBM can't do something about that.

Bear in mind though that the assassination mechanism as implemented in dom is inherently underwhelming.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

If I asked you to kindly explain this statement, but limited you to a single sentence, would you care to do so? :)

Re: Making leadership matter
 

It's difficult to explain in a single sentence. Since this conclusion is based on many other concepts, facts and underlying strategic principals. The essence of it is basically an attempt to inspect every possible action/commander/spell-cast as an investment of a resource, be it gems/gold or more subtle (like time) that yields X gain over the next turn, 2 turns, 10 turns etc. So you buy the assassin, equip it and then have it lie in ambush or move towards ambush but most of the time it's idle. This is already bad for ROI. Then there are so many counters to assassinations once your enemy is alert and skillful that you're most likely to lose it.

I'm not saying it's bad. Sometimes you'll score a significant hit and/or make your opponent paranoid (so he will "waste" resources on counters) but I am saying that you could most likely put your money on a better horse. This is my point of view - based on experience and my own judgment, not on pure number crunching.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

That is a long sentence :), but thank you for the explanation!

Re: Making leadership matter
 

I admit I had fun and some actual use with Nagini seducers in a recent MP game. Bottle of Living Water and scripted to Frozen Heart x 5, they were pretty successful. Even snagged me a few blood and other useful mages.

Mostly I'd bought them early on when I couldn't afford Nagarishis and used them for a lot of site-searching and forging, so I'd gotten my money out of them before sending them off to seduce.

Re: Making leadership matter
 

I agree. Seducers/Assassins that can do other useful stuff are way better since they can do that useful stuff and every so often take advantage of an opportunity to seduce/assassin.