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Originally posted by Jasper:
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Originally posted by Chris Byler:
Provinces with terrain should place obstacles on the battlefield. Bogs, underbrush, rocks, etc. (Farmland isn't much of an obstruction unless it's rice fields - or maybe in late summer/early autumn.)
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IMHO this just doesn't work with Dominions style of plotted orders, as you can't see how the terrain is laid out when making your orders. Short of a major restructuring of the turn order I don't see anyway to handle this.
Just place the obstacles and let the armies deal with them as they may. If you don't like the results, don't send heavily armored men into a swamp.
Yes, this amounts to saying that in a swamp province, even the "worthwhile" parts of the province are swampy. This may be somewhat unrealistic but I think it would make terrain more important and make some units better depending on terrain, which is a goal I value above realism if it comes right down to it.
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Jasper, if I have an army of C'tissian light infantry against your Ulmish heavy infantry, the battlefield damned well *will* be entirely swampy if I have anything to do with it.
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I disagree. It's difficult to force someone to fight in bad terrain, asland worth holding is on good terrain. Even for historical kingdoms that benefited from dense terrain battles in general still had more open than rough terrain.
If you consider some provinces not worth holding, you are of course free not to hold them. I won't try to stop you. Certainly plains and farmland provinces provide more income and supply and are useful for a variety of purposes, and a nation needs some armies that can fight well in the open. But not every province is open, and if you *want* to make an army that specializes in rough terrain and keep them in rough terrain provinces, you should be allowed to, IMO.
The Alps weren't worth holding, but Hannibal marched across them anyway. If he had been attacked there, I don't think the battlefield would have been level and open. Attacking an enemy army while it is passing through rough terrain - even if they have no intention of occupying it for any great length of time - is perfectly legitimate. And of course if you want to occupy mountains or swamps - even though they have low relative worth - you have to be prepared to deal with the consequences.
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I can see C'tis being able to work _some_ swamp into a battle on it's home terrain. Of course, were it possible to make good tactical use of terrain, even a small amount would be enough to gain a substantial advantage. Unfortunately dominions just doesn't handle this.
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Although it would be nice to be able to tailor your deployment to a particular battlefield, the current state of Dom II makes this difficult.
Possibly the battlefield could be generated based on a deterministic algorithm from data about the province, current scales and the season, and then players could inspect the battlefield of any province they can see before planning their deployments (and they might get a surprise if Wolven Winter is cast there before the battle). I don't know how much additional code this would take, but I suspect it would be considerable. This terrain idea is just one of several ideas for LI/LC, and I suspect it's one of the less practical, as much as I would like it.
Terrain that can't be seen in advance, where you have only a general idea based on the province's terrain type(s), would be much simpler to implement and I think you could make at least some educated guesses about what tactics work better in forests or swamps, and what units are better suited to carry them out. It's not like there won't be any battles in plains - plains are valuable and people will still want to fight over them. But not every province is plains, and it borders on the ridiculous to have two armies meet in the depths of the Black Forest or the Alps and there miraculously happens to be a huge open clearing, and that's where they fight.
Oh, and we're also leaving out rivers - I hope I don't have to tell you how common battles near (or in!) rivers were, and how the river could play a part in them. So why are battles in Dom2 always far away from the river, even if there is one in the province? Some units could fight even while standing in the river itself (water elementals, amphibious units), others could enter the shallows and be somewhat impeded. And there is often marshy or sandy ground near the riverbank that is poor footing for a man in full armor - and worse for a horse in full armor carrying a man in full armor. And you *certainly* can't say that the land along the river isn't worthwhile.
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And if light infantry had 1-2 points more defense, average heavy infantry might start to tire before they had already killed 3 times their own numbers and routed the rest (elite or experienced heavy infantry would still do well against average LI, but elites are expensive and experience takes time to acquire).
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Giving LI in general more defense makes no sense to me. IMHO attempts to give LI an edge in melee against HI are just wrong (well, outside of rough terrain).
Well, maybe HI should get the defense bonus too - they just won't benefit from it as much.
In my experience, it's rare for a Dom2 melee to Last more than three rounds unless at least one side is mindless (or you have HUGE squads fighting on very little frontage, which only happens during a storm attempt). Even with Fanaticism on both sides, casualties are just too high. This makes fatigue for combat units almost entirely meaningless - even a high fatigue unit that's in the front line for the entire battle will hardly be winded by the time someone breaks and runs.
You'd like to see LI get crushed if they stand and fight in the open - I don't necessarily disagree. But currently they don't have any other option *besides* standing and fighting, and *every* place is the open (even deep forests and high mountains), and that's what makes them worthless. So I suggested something (slowing down the death rate in melees) that might help them take advantage of one of their few strengths - low encumbrance. (Fatigue for moving on the battlefield would do the same thing - HI would be at least a little fatigued by the time they reach enemy lines, if they can't make the enemy come to them.)