Light Infantry... what the ****

[Jasper]

Originally posted by Firebreath:
Is there a place to suggest improvements to the appropriate people somewhere in this forum? Something like heavy inf. get a heavy encumberance penalty (+100%) when fighting in mountains, 50% in forests, etc. A 'attack and swarm enemy flank, then run away before the center has time to react' command might be interesting for fast LI.

The place for suggestions is pretty much here. The developers skim through, and sometimes pick up things without commenting.

My first thought was that a general battle effect from a province's terrain doesn't make any sense, as the battle will be fought in some open area. But your suggest could represent the effect of carrying heavy equipment through rough terrain and showing up to a battle tired, which is quite reasonable!

Perhaps heavily encumbered troops could start with some fatigue in "heavy" terrain provinces?

[Wendigo]

Perhaps heavily encumbered troops could start with some fatigue in "heavy" terrain provinces?

This is a pretty interesting idea, and the type of flavour thing IW favours adopting.

Maybe also easy to implement, same as we have extreme cold/heat penalties to encumbrance depending on province weather scales, we could have some penalties depending on province terrain.

Just should be careful not to make 0-encumbrance troops too powerful from such change.

[Jasper]

Indeed. Plausible, simple to implement, and doesn't require extending the user interface.

I have my doubts on how it might affect 0-encumberance troops as well, and no trick comes to mind to alleviate them. Perhaps it's not so bad if such troops get a bonus in rough terrain? It's certainly thematic.

Not applying this penalty to commanders might help, so as not to penalize mages which often an effective counter to 0-enc units.

[Pocus]

in the same trend, perhaps heavy terrains can give added fatigues to troops, each round. This added fatigue is moreover not given linearly, but is derivated from the encumberance, so that light troops get only +1 penalty in the heaviest terrains, while HI get an added +2 to +4:

unit encumberance; added fatigue:
1-3 : +1 in swamp or mountain
4-5 : +1 in forest, +2 swamp or mountain
6-7: +2 in forest, +3 swamp or mountain ...

modify this by -1 if terrain survival ability is presents.

[Jasper]

Faster fatigue during the battle gives me mental dissonance, as there is no terrain on the battlefield. If the field _were_ uniformly covered in rough terrain, then units like HI, cavalry, and archers should be useless.

Partially covering terrain would be ok, but is just too complex for the dominions battle engine to handle (and is perhaps better handled in another game...).

[Wauthan]

Good idea Pocus. It's all about whom chooses the field of battle. Surely an C'Tis general would try to corner his oppponents in a murky swamp since his units got the edge. Then again undead would be even more scary since they would be immune to any fatigue increase. A further possibility for LI is to increase the size of the unit one step, to reflect an open formation. It's a bit of work but plausible enough for a mod. Might be a tad bit hard to figure out just what a "light" unit is considering the fantasy element though.

[ April 14, 2004, 11:35: Message edited by: Wauthan ]

[Firebreath]

I should add, that I have rarely seen a game with such an active and positive post release developer involvement.

Keep it up, whoever you are