in which occasion will you raise taxes

[Saber Cherry]

Light infantry are cheaper to deploy, maintain, and support than HI. But this is not reflected in Dominions I or II, making LI mostly useless.

[licker]

Originally posted by st.patrik:
I'm not so bothered by the 'less useful light infantry' thing as I think the rest of you are. It makes sense to me that you're really only going to make poorly equipped troops if you don't have the resources to make well-equipped troops. This seems realistic to me. I guess it's possible that in general there are too many resources available... do people have this opinion?

IT doesn't bother me that much either, but there are two places where it is an issue.

#1 the AI... The AI doesn't understand the worthlessness of LI apparently, so it is disadvantaged against humans, disadvantaged in a fixable way though.

#2 Astetics... Well why have 10+ units per nation if 5 of them are used less than 1% of the time? Call it balance, call it what you will, the fact is that LI are not cheap enough to use over other units. The problem is two fold, supply and upkeep, there is simply no advantage to ever having LI (strategic movement, but if they suck so much the extra speed isn't worth that much since they just die anyway).

It doesn't bother me greatly for MP, but for SP I'd like to see the AI less handicapped.

[PvK]

I can see heavy mercenaries being more expensive than light, and they generally are in the game.

With a fantasy/god-mage medieval economy, though, I don't quite see why better equipped men would necessarily be more expensive to maintain. I suppose you might tend to need a little more "amorer time" to do occasional maintenance. Maybe you'd need more beasts of burden to carry their gear around when on the march. Better trained men might cost more (or take more time...) to produce.

I find it interesting (in a good way) playing Ulm and having extremely heavy infantry available for the same gold cost as other infantry, but a high resource cost. The high resource cost means that it takes a long time to build up a large army of them, during which you need to avoid casualties. In my long stalemated game against the AI, I built up a lot of good men, and then something with a gas attack (or soul vortex, etc) would come along and severely deplete my ranks, and I would be overrun if I didn't have a province with super-low-resource tribal militia to recruit quickly.

I think my suggestion would be perhaps to tweak down the resource costs of some militia, and to add (if not already in Doms II) a "disband" command. This would mean that large armies of militia could be even more easily raised (like you can with tribal militia in Doms I), but also gotten rid of later without sending them on suicide missions. That would be rather more like real ancient/medieval warfare, too; usually there were only a few trained and well-equipped men in a standing army, and then mobs of peasants would be pressed into service to fight major battles, and released afterwards.

I assume too (haven't tried to test) that there are already other factors too such as:

* Raising troops should reduce the province population
* The more men on patrol in a province, the greater the chance of catching spies and scouts

It would be interesting if when men were disbanded, the program remembered some of them, and gave them a chance to show up as part of an independant army, mercenary band, or independant uprising in the future. Or, they might even be available for re-hire later by the same player.

PvK

[ October 29, 2003, 18:52: Message edited by: PvK ]

[st.patrik]

Originally posted by licker:
IT doesn't bother me that much either, but there are two places where it is an issue.

#1 the AI... The AI doesn't understand the worthlessness of LI apparently, so it is disadvantaged against humans, disadvantaged in a fixable way though.

#2 Astetics... Well why have 10+ units per nation if 5 of them are used less than 1% of the time? Call it balance, call it what you will, the fact is that LI are not cheap enough to use over other units. The problem is two fold, supply and upkeep, there is simply no advantage to ever having LI (strategic movement, but if they suck so much the extra speed isn't worth that much since they just die anyway).

It doesn't bother me greatly for MP, but for SP I'd like to see the AI less handicapped.

I completely agree that those considerations are good.

1. The AI thing should be fixed so that the AI recruits the highest resource troops it can, while exhausting its gold supply for the turn. [maybe this isn't clear - what I mean is that if you on a certain turn have (after buying a commander) 200 gold and 200 resources, the AI should buy troops with that ratio of gold to resources, etc. - try to exhaust both gold and resources]

2. While I'm ok with LI being used less, I agree with you that they shouldn't be in there if they're not going to be used at all, ever, as you say, for aesthetic reasons. So for example for Man I can't imagine ever wanting to buy slingers when I can buy longbows. Similarly for most all militia I think.

[Pocus]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:
I don't think resources need to be factored into the upkeep system explicitly - that would be a bit confusing. Factoring it into cost, instead, and just using cost for upkeep, seems simpler.

the interest of changing the upkeep formula to take the average of gold+res value, is that you achieve the result of giving added value to LI, without having to browse one thousand units and reevaluate their cost.

PVK:

I don't quite see why better equipped men would necessarily be more expensive to maintain.

I strongly disagree with you. Think of two extremes, a foot knight and a peasant. In dominions it can translate to a Ulmish infantry (say 10-34 gold/res) compared to a milicia (7-2).
Now to think that you need only 30% more gold to maintain a foot knight compared to a milicia is ridiculous (no offence intended against you, I just feel I need to use a strong adjective).

A drafted slinger would get a food ration, and some copper coins each month. A foot knight will ask for at least 2 men to service him (keeping an armor and quality steel weapons fit for battle ask for much time and effort), and I'm not even speaking of his wage.

This would translate in dominions by taking into account the resource cost into the maintenance one. Believe me, it would be a boon to the lighter units, which are very often discarded.

In the pbems I saw (multiplayer environment being the epitome of optimisation), I never saw a single velite, peltast, light infantry, etc. used in war. I think this is quite the proof that something must be done.

Your concern about your Ulmish infantry is right on the other hand. We should not level all units to the same ground. But even if the upkeep would rise, you would still pay the upfront cost of 10 gp, same as a light infantry. But in the long run, you would pay more to maintain them. Seem quite balanced when you compare their armaments.

[Jasper]

Originally posted by st.patrik:
I'm not so bothered by the 'less useful light infantry' thing as I think the rest of you are. It makes sense to me that you're really only going to make poorly equipped troops if you don't have the resources to make well-equipped troops. This seems realistic to me. I guess it's possible that in general there are too many resources available... do people have this opinion?

What bothers me is that light troops aren't usefull in battle, while they clearly were usefull throughout history. Light troops were not "poorly equipped" troops, but troops used in a different manner -- a manner that simply doesn't exist in Dominions (or any similar computer game for that matter).

One simple way to address this would be to have a battle deployment area that was broader than deep, but with the flank areas marked so that only light/fast troops could be deployed there.

Another would be to allow lighter troops to deploy one man per "square" rather than 3, so that they would be an effective missile screen. Combine this with a slight increase in the accuracy and damage of missiles, and you'd have very good reason to screen with light troops.

Both of these would help allow light troops to be usefull for their traditional roles. I suspect you'd still need to tweak their gold cost down a point or two to make them viable however.

These changes are perhaps too dramatic to actually have a chance at implementation, but IMHO they would greatly improve the variety of viable troops, and the number of interesting battle tactics.

[Saber Cherry]

Traditionally, heavy troops, with their expensive armor and weapons, were also better trained. I mean, a lot better. So, in general, light units were cheaply levied, poorly paid, poorly trained, and used as cannon fodder. In Dominions II they are as expensive as HI...

I kind of think that milita should also have -1 HP and -1 strength, and maybe even drop to a price of 4gp, to reflect the fact that they're not really soldier-types, just unfit peasants forced into the army.

PvK - as it stands now, why would you ever buy slingers or militias? Even if they cost zero resources, I wouldn't buy them. I was playing Machaka, and realized that their primary infantry units are a waste of money... so I only bought archers and hoplites. And even with the archers, I would prefer to have an indy province with actual armored archers. There's just no use for 10gp light infantry, and their low resource cost does not make them viable, as gold is so limited in Dom II.