Quote:
Originally Posted by Wrana
To squirrellord:
Unfortunately, these require writing a new game engine. Except the first one about heavy cavalry - but then, it's not particularly needed: they already can kill 1-2 infantry a turn, which is not worse than with Size 3 trample.
The last one is actually present: your troops gain supplies from your nearby forts, which decline with more distance from fort. And some nations do get supplies-producing units.
And, of course, fire-and-flee order is present - it's just mostly useless. If you are going to try and make a new engine... well, then we can discuss this. This game was made by 2 people, after all!  |
Cavalry and trample:
I suppose what I mean by trample is the horses trample - the rider should still get his normal attacks. But 'trampling' into the enemy unit would allow more cavalry to take their attacks (again, mimicing historical behavior). For a late example of the continued importance to shock cavalry of breaking into the enemy ranks, consider the ~17th century pistol and saber cavalry, who used their pistols to open holes in the enemy formation so they could interpenetrate. The lance helped achieve a similar effect before professional pikemen became common (ie, before ~1350).
Infantry units who have their ranks broken should also take a morale penalty, fwiw.
Supplies:
Local supply by a fort isn't what I'm talking about. The crusaders during the first crusade managed to supply an army in the holy land far from any local supply centers. This seems like an emminently reasonable thing for at least organized civilizations to be able to do.
Fire and Flee:
Except flee actually involves running away, not just withdrawal to a prepared position or merely keeping the opponent at arm's length. There's no 'ambush', no 'turn and fight after fleeing so long'. And no real disadvantage to the pursuing army in pursuit. (The actual history of medieval warfare shows that unrestrained pursuit is a failure of troop discipline, and generally leads to disaster. I'm reminded of the triple alliance of the Khan of Persia, the Crusader states, and the Georgian christians against the muslim armies. The Crusader states defeated the rearguard (left flank of their enemy) and pursued them for miles. While they were busy chasing beaten enemies, their allies were defeated decisively and lost the battle, whereas if they'd regrouped and flanked the muslim armies it would have been a decisive allied victory).
I find tactical flight of the nature i'm talking about distinct from retreat, which is what the fire and flee seems to represent (since it actually cedes control of something the size of a province). You might also consider the experience of the Romans (infantry) agains the Parthians (primarily light cavalry). The Romans couldn't bring the Parthians to melee, the Parthians rode circles around them and annihilated every legion ever sent to fight them.
I suppose there are two problems here: 1) the battlefield is so small that rather little force is sufficient to compel a foe to melee. A cavalry unit should be able to keep out of range of a melee unit indefinitely if it so desires. 2) ranged units do not attempt to keep out of range of shock units. Given that classical light infantry (slingers especially) and all light cavalry routinely used their improved mobility to deny shock combat to the enemy, this is a failure of modelling.
New - army strategic choices
Speaking of bizarre. Anyone who knows anything of pre-Napoleonic military combat knows that the hardest thing to do was to compel an opponent to fight. Generals should be able to be given strategic settings that tell them when to engage and when to refuse to engage when challenged by another army. The only way to force an army to fight when its determined to flee should be when every route of escape leads to an entanglement with military forces (in which case the initially encountered army should be fought, potentially in combination with whichever military units it tried to withdraw into. And I don't mean go to battle map and have every unit start withdrawing, I mean no battle occurs (the enemy army never gets that close) unless the retreating army is cut off.
New engine:
Most of this is really just tweaking the engine a bit - I'm sure given access to the code base I could figure out how to implement all of that. Honestly, some of it (handling units as entities instead of individual people) would probably make things easier in the long run.
So, for example:
-Starved fortresses surrender: Implement a counter during the phase where you check to see if the walls are breached that counts down until fortress surrender. (trivial)
-light infantry attempt to fall back when shock troops get too close: Each light infantry unit would need a metric of too close, although you could just make it 'is within movement range of an enemy shock unit'. Unit then moves backwards until it reaches a 'safe' distance and reforms. This is a quick If/Then check at the start of the units action. (easy)
-Units behave more like units and less like mobs: This is the most profound change I proposed, actually. Its also the most desirable. So, there are two ways you can go about this: (1) define a unit entity which has a depth and facing size, and move that unit entity instead of moving individual guys (this substantially decreases the processor work because it aggregates decisions). Or (2) have individual models know where in the unit they are and check stay in the same position relative to other models in the unit. This is aided by doing things like checking the slowest speed in the unit and capping all model speeds at that speed. I'd vastly prefer #1 for a number of reasons, such as because you can have individual sub-entities which take damage and make attacks, but you don't need to make many AI decisions below the unit level (substantially increasing game performance). I'd need some help implementing this because I'm not used to working with graphical applications, but given a week and someone to ask questions of I could probably figure it out. (Moderate)