Unit abstraction?

[Arralen]

Originally posted by CarlG2:
Hey Arralen,

I played the heck out of Harpoon years ago, ...
Since then I've been dreaming of Harpoon 4 and its ever changing release date...which now seems to be hanging out in the abyss somewhere.

It's dead. At least until the source code is released to the folks which did H3/H2002 ...

Did you ever play the Simulations Canada games Northern Fleet or Red Sky at Morning?

Don't think they where ever available in Europe.

Back to Harpoon 3...from your link it sounds like they took Harpoon 2 and updated it for Windows, fixed bugs, updated units, etc. Is that a good assessment? How does the interface hold up to modern standards, and is it pretty stable?

Yes.
Yes.
The interface didn't change at all - check out the screenshots.
It's really stable, and the code actually got faster when it was ported to Win32, despited a lot of goodies where added in / activated.
In fact, they got even the multiplayer part, that was in it since the beginning but never used, to work - they needed it for the military Version. These changes are "rolled back" into the normal Version.

A.

[General Tacticus]

A few comments :

- When we think of epic battles, we think of tens of thousands of units, if not more... because a battle with more people always seems more important. Yet there are many times and places in History when the scales where much lower, and the battles were no less contested : the Middle Ages in Europe, some periods of Japan history, The Greek cities...

- Saying an army fielded 60,000 men doesn't mean they all made it on the battlefield. Many would be guarding the rear, or the flanks, or an important bridge 10 kilometers upstream, or even the baggage. For that matter, the "battlefield" is an approximation, fighting often occured only a a few, scattered spots.

- Even in fantasy, not all authors need tens of thousands of men everytime.

All that being said, I find a battlefield with 400 people on it, counting both side, is OK. This is a struggle in a smaller land, with less people, but it does not make it less epic. In fact, I am sure that I killed more people in my Mictlan AAR so far than died in the entire Illiad, and I am not yet in turn 10.

And the current scale has one very, very big advantage : you can survey the whole battlefield at a glance, and both see the individual soldiers and the whole army. You are not sending big square of moving pixels against each others, and you are not getting lost in the details and missing the big picture.

That being said, if you want to say each man represents 10, or 100, or 1000000, be my guest.

[licker]

I highly doubt that anyone really cares that much what ever anyone else wants to 'rationalize' as far as unit size, time scale, land dimentions...

It only matters (and even then not to everyone) when people want to effect changes in the game to accomodate some other rationalized view. For many aspects it's entirely inconsequential, for some it's detrimental to the game in some way (added complexity, added system requirements, ...) for others its such a matter of personal taste that its impossible to arrive at a consensus.

I don't get the feeling that anyone here is actually asking Illwinter to change the scope that they have built the game around, its more about resolving the incongruities in their own minds rather than trying to foist a new dynamic on everyone else. As to what 'epic' means... well that's going to differ for everyone, and everyone is going to have a different limit to which they can rationalize the inherent abstractions in the game. Its all good though, as others have said, if you like a game with good strategic depth you'll soon stop worring about the trees and start concentrating on the forest. If you can't (see the forest for the trees that is) then you'll gradually become frustrated and lose interest. Nothing wrong with that, just means Dominions isn't quite your cup of tea.

I dunno, I just find it funny (as in strange) that people need to validate their rationalizations, as if some consensus of forum dwellers saying 'yes it's 100per' or whatever should have any impact on an individuals ability to make the rationalization in the first place. Don't take that the wrong way, its not ment to be critical, just an observation that I see frequently in game forums, and it makes me wonder

I'd be curious though to see a mod where someone tried to change the scale as others have suggested. I don't think I'd use it as I think the added micro wouldn't be worth the bother, but I'd still be interested to see how it shook out.

[DimmurWyrd]

A Thought or two on this topic...

First off let me say that my overall view of games very nicely syncs with the originator of this topic hehe I also really look for the "realism" underlying the fantasy of a game.

That said I think the major reason that the ancients fielded such immense armies and the more modern such smaller ones (before industrialization) is simply that as time passed better and better armaments were developed requiring geater resources and time to manufacture leading to fewer full time soldiers. (note that in medieval armies quite often more than 60% of the force are milities (peasants with farm implements mostly) with a large but almost completely ineffective force of archers (no training worth mentioning and garbage for equipment) so all total maybe 30% of the whole force were effective fighting forces hehe. but that 30% were probably more effective than 100x thier number of the ancient types.

I think DOM 2 represents that fairly well in some ways... for example a nice ulm plate wearing infantry is 28 gold 24 resources but a peasant with a bow and some rags on is 7 gold 3 resources hehe... now you can recruit 4x as many of those archers as the infantry but I'd put my money on the infantry in a fight every time **EDIT** that, of course, is barring magic

[ January 15, 2004, 17:05: Message edited by: DimmurWyrd ]

[PvK]

Originally posted by licker:
...
I dunno, I just find it funny (as in strange) that people need to validate their rationalizations, as if some consensus of forum dwellers saying 'yes it's 100per' or whatever should have any impact on an individuals ability to make the rationalization in the first place. Don't take that the wrong way, its not ment to be critical, just an observation that I see frequently in game forums, and it makes me wonder
...

It makes me wonder sometimes too, though often, as in this case, I think the answer is that the person wants to avoid investing a lot of time in a game, only to find out that it's not interesting to them, generally due to logic/realism/history issues. So, the player explains the elements they would like to see included in the game, to see if there are other players with similar interests who have come to the game before them and can explain how the game fits their interests or not.

PvK

[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by General Tacticus:
I am sure that I killed more people in my Mictlan AAR so far than died in the entire Illiad, and I am not yet in turn 10.

I doubt it very much. The Trojan War written of by Homer seems to have covered large parts of western anatolia which had recently formed itself into a powerful coalition with the decline of the Hittites to the East. This was a heavily populated area.

The Mycanaens (Greeks) where essentially taking on a major rival to their trade supremacy which bought them vast wealth.

To give you an idea of the scale of the conflict shortly after the Trojan Wars the defeated peoples of Anatolia rose up and destroyed Near Eastern Civilisation as far as Egypt where the "Peoples of the Sea" were turned back and went on to settle in Palestine, Sardinia, Italy, France, Corsica . . .

It is not suprising the tale has been passed down considering the incredible human epic the Trojan Wars unleashed and the fact that the dispossed peoples of Anatolia went on to found Rome, the Etruscan league etc and then went on to mold the future of the Mediterrainian.

If I ever write a book it will be this story which has emerged recently with the ongoing translation of Hittite archives and the reports back from the dig at Thera which have provided what seem to be the missing links. Starting in 1628BC with the Volcanic eruption that destroyed of Thera (which had flush toilets and running water!) and the fleeing of the Minoans to surrounding environs including Mycanae and West Anatolia.

Regarding battle sizes I would note that Meso American Cultures (Mictlan) regularily fielded armies of over 50 000 and even battles in that backwater England were generally of 1000's not 100's.

Cheers

Keir

[CarlG2]

Hey Keir Maxwell,

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:
I'm like you Carl in seeing game mechanics as attempts to as accurately capture "reality" as possible. I came to gaming through history, and history through gaming, and I have never left.

I got to this type of gaming in a similar fashion... My original roots were in pen and paper fantasy rpg's and board wargames, though, which led to computer rpg's and wargames, etc. I know that my knowledge of the then modern world expanded exponentially when I started playing Balance of Power way back when...

On the scale question I use a figure scale in my imagining. Most discussion uses the term unit to describe a single warior you recruit. Like you I find the numbers way to small otherwise and I think Pocus has it about right suggesting 100 for a standard unit. Sure there are problems with this but I find concerns over all 100 men having lost their legs far and away secondary to fundamental questions like how many dudes are at the battle. Is this a skirmish or a battle? Damn Games Workshop! Ooops - got off topic.

I could not agree more on all points (including the GW comment!) As far as the issue of afflictions, etc., I guess I don't have too hard a time imagining that a wizard could call forth powers that could afflict a large number of troops. Like you, I guess, I am more put off by the warband-sized armies (when using a 1 to 1 relationship).

I do not believe it to be a good idea to try and mod Dom to enable players to get 1000's of units at a battle. To much micormanagement involved. Others, younger and/or more fanatical, may think different but the thought scares me. You need to recruit by regiment to do this.

From my relatively limited playing of the demo, I think that the game system would quickly spiral out of control if one were to try to maintain a 1 to 1 ratio and implement tens of thousands of units...talk about micromanagement to the nth degree!!! There are some great monster boardgames out there that are fun to think about (if one is into rulebook reading for fun, like I am), but playing them is darn near impossible... I always wanted to play a full campaign of Vietnam 1965-1975, but didn't have a place where I could set up the game and leave it for 2 or 3 years!

Personally, like you, I prefer the representation in games of one unit representing a number of men (probably goes back to my board wargaming days). Fitting in with that representation, I would like to see units cause less damage as they take casualties, and not necessarily lose attack or defense factors (i.e. fewer blades swinging, but those swinging have the same chance to hit)... I've always enjoyed the tough decisions that must be made when considering to refit an experienced unit, since there is always a trade-off between increasing the survivability of the unit (i.e. recovering hit points) vs. reducing the morale and/or better attack/defense Ratings that a more experienced unit possesses (i.e. to represent the inclusion of raw recruits into the unit).

The key advantage of both TW and Chariots apporoach against Dominons is that you recruit a unit with multiple warriors (at whatever the scale is) rather than one warrior at whatever scale. It just looks better and its alot less fiddly than the dom system of making larger units. I would like a unit in Dom to be a regiment. Sure regiments are not perfect but they are better.

From where I am sitting right now, I concur 100%. Granted, I have only been playing around with the demo, but the sentiment just expressed is pretty much why I started this thread. First off, I wanted to see what the scale "officially" was, and from there determine if others who have a similar game philosophy as mine could get past this issue and continue to enjoy the game as a whole. As PvK most eloquently put it in an earlier post, I have limited time to game these days and didn't want to waste that time learning a game system that I might ultimately be turned off to due to certain inconsistencies in the games' "foundation". One of my biggest pet peeves in gaming is the seeming lack of adherence to proportion and scale (most RTS' are absolutely TERRIBLE in this regard, and I agree that Medieval TW doesn't exactly earn 5 stars in its adherence to historical reality...) One game series that has really impressed me, though, is the Europa Universalis series. I find it hard to fault when it comes to the size of armies that one can raise, support issues, attrition, etc. The diplomatic system is pretty impressive, as well, IMHO.

Other than that, and lots of minor gripes, Dominons slaughters the competition - including Chariots, the TW series, etc. It is the best strategy game yet made for those with a love of deep involving and highly challenging games. The added ability to produce your own scenarios and nations (I'm working on Middle Earth)

I keep hearing this over and over again, and I am most likely going to be ordering the game. I've been waiting for a good grand strategy game based on Middle Earth, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with. I myself have been looking for a game engine that I could mod to create a Conan/Hyboria scenario (I had a bLast in days past playing Hyborian War by RSI, a play-by-mail game).

Anyway, thanks for all of your comments; and, thanks to everyone who has posted for a lively and interesting conversation.

Good gaming,
Carl G.