2 Things this game desperately needs

[Taqwus]

Sandman said:
Would you have to take the soldiers back to their home province to avoid the disband penalty? Why can't we just assume that they make their own way home, like mercenaries?

They quite possibly spent months getting there and might take months back -- if there even is a path that doesn't involve the use of magic they don't have. Given the era, they also probably don't have much savings other than what they're carrying. They certainly don't have months of dried rations for the way home. The villagers on the way home are likely scraping by under their liege's multiple forms of taxation, the soldiers themselves -- particularly ones with substantial training (gold cost) may feel themselves above helping out with farming... oh, and there's the issue of how the ex-soldiers might deal with the local peasant women, too. A local lord is also going to be concerned about the ex-troops overstaying their welcome and taking excessive liberties for a variety of reasons, and is not going to be happy with getting stuck with the bill, either.

Mercenaries are an interesting idea, but the teleportation issue should probably be dealt with at some point -- mercenaries wandering from province to province looking for employment, say, rather than manifesting somewhere at a player's whim. A group that organized itself as a mercenary company, however, should have a greater chance of remaining as a cohesive unit -- either looking for employment together, or doing the whole 'slaughtering the locals and setting themselves up in charge' thing that occasionally happened.

[Taqwus]

Vectoring... yes, would be nice. Thought it'd be easy at first, but then realized I was ignoring supply and similar issues.

Hm. It's theoretically easy in the basic case, but if we start throwing in constraints like "don't choose routes that cause starvation because multiple groups chose the same intervening province", it gets harder to optimize. Not only do different groups of commanders and their troops move at different speeds in different areas of the map, and they only impact supply when they're actually in a specific node.

Relax that constraint, work more on a capable UI for it than multiple-simultaneous-pathing (so that it shows the routes that the armies would take and when they'll arrive, and lets the user adjust the waypoints if the thinks that there'll be supply problems, an excessively tasty target for an army-blasting spell, or a move through a province that seems to have a hidden unit-hurting site) and maybe it's doable).

[Sandman]

They quite possibly spent months getting there and might take months back -- if there even is a path that doesn't involve the use of magic they don't have. Given the era, they also probably don't have much savings other than what they're carrying. They certainly don't have months of dried rations for the way home. The villagers on the way home are likely scraping by under their liege's multiple forms of taxation, the soldiers themselves -- particularly ones with substantial training (gold cost) may feel themselves above helping out with farming... oh, and there's the issue of how the ex-soldiers might deal with the local peasant women, too. A local lord is also going to be concerned about the ex-troops overstaying their welcome and taking excessive liberties for a variety of reasons, and is not going to be happy with getting stuck with the bill, either.

What does this have to do with making the game more fun?

[Taqwus]

Some of us actually enjoy realism. Would you prefer a game which ignored morale, fatigue, maintenance, inaccuracy, friendly fire, the ability to do pre-battle order assignments... like nearly every cookie-cutter RTS out there?

[Sandman]

Taqwus said:
Some of us actually enjoy realism. Would you prefer a game which ignored morale, fatigue, maintenance, inaccuracy, friendly fire, the ability to do pre-battle order assignments... like nearly every cookie-cutter RTS out there?

This has nothing to do with realism and everything to do with imagination. I could just as easily write a ton of paragraphs 'justifying' why disbanding shouldn't cause unrest. The decision is arbitary, and should err on not punishing the player for doing something entirely normal.

[Meglobob]

Sandman said:

This has nothing to do with realism and everything to do with imagination. I could just as easily write a ton of paragraphs 'justifying' why disbanding shouldn't cause unrest. The decision is arbitary, and should err on not punishing the player for doing something entirely normal.

Ah...the old debates are the best, do you want realism vs playability/enjoyment. Its a matter of personal preference really.

Just for the record I prefer playability/enjoyment in a game rather then realism/micromanagement, so I am with the sandman on this disbanding with no strings attached.

This is a fantasy game as well with powerful magic, so there is no 'realism' anyway, nations with magic at there disposal would soon do away with 'realism'.

[WraithLord]

Adhering to the spirit of this thread here are the two things I'd most like to see added.

1. Improve the arena death match. Give better, randomly selected prizes, like money/gems/good items and xp. Add a new death match for squads, i.e. one commander and all the troops he can command.

2. Add, maze/labyrinth/dungeon type of sites, ala MOM magic nodes. Those sites are protected and their defenders must be defeated prior to the benefits of the site can apply.

[MaxWilson]

Taqwus said:
Hm. It's theoretically easy in the basic case, but if we start throwing in constraints like "don't choose routes that cause starvation because multiple groups chose the same intervening province", it gets harder to optimize. Not only do different groups of commanders and their troops move at different speeds in different areas of the map, and they only impact supply when they're actually in a specific node.

Just wanted to point out that if we had an API for .trn and .h files we could do this ourselves by pre-generating a .h file that continues "scheduled" movement and then just doing a "Continue where I left" on that.

There are a lot of nice things you could do if you could write .h files from a standalone app. External AIs for one, which would also let you set a player to AI temporarily and then come back as a human. Imagine a scenario where the AI fights until your dormant pretender awakens, and then you have to clean up the mess...

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Taqwus said:
The villagers on the way home are likely scraping by under their liege's multiple forms of taxation, the soldiers themselves -- particularly ones with substantial training (gold cost) may feel themselves above helping out with farming... oh, and there's the issue of how the ex-soldiers might deal with the local peasant women, too.

If you're talking about realism, you've also got the same problem with unrest being generated by the simple presence of your armies in a province, regardless of whether they've been disbanded. Dom3 is actually pretty minimal on the province-management thing, being more of a wargame than a Civilization game, and you could easily take this idea about soldiers and unrest far enough for it to be a tedious micromanagement detail. Morale and inaccurate fire add a lot of fun to the game because they add new tactical dimensions that you can exploit, but I'm cautious about adding a new detail to the world model purely for realism's sake. In the real world, your population should be fluctuating slightly even without a Growth/Death dominion or huge drought/blizzards/immigration, but it's nice to have that detail abstracted away because otherwise I'd feel compelled to pay attention to it, even though it hardly matters. If the unrest from disbanding were small I'd probably feel that it was a needless hassle.

-Max

[Nick_K]

Weren't employed soldiers quite keen on rapine and pillage in mediaeval times too? I don't think making them unemployed would necessarily dramatically increase this.