New Concept For Troops and Fighters

[Atrocities]

Even worse would be if you do this for fighters, which I assume in general would tend to be destroyed in combat. Some squadrons could be almost wiped out in combat, and then restored fully for free, even though the losses should represent nearly all of the fighters being blown to shreds.

This is how they do it Star Wars Empires At War and in Rise Of Nations.

[Spectarofdeath]

I think for troops it would work, and be a great idea, I hate building one unit at a time, it just seems so unrealistic (And today congress authorized 50 more soliders to be trained and 10 tanks built!! wooohoo universal domination here we come) but I'm still not sold on the fighters yet. I can see the repair of the troops working the way Shinigami says but for fighters I don't know how you could do that. I suppose you can give them a extremly high repair time to simulate the time it would take to get new fighters and pilots into the squadron, but the fact that these fighters and pilots aren't costing any resources to train/build seems a little unrealistic on this front. Even boosting maint. and const. costs.

[President_Elect_Shang]

You could boost the maintenance cost on fighters but repair time for units is generic. If it takes 2 turns to replace (repair) 10 tanks it will take 2 turns to replace (repair) 10 fighters. And as I said below, I don't like the thought of a brigade or corps or whatever taking 80% losses, repairing/replacing those losses and coming out with a higher experience rating than before the fight. That is flat out impossible!

[PvK]

Atrocities said:

This is how they do it Star Wars Empires At War and in Rise Of Nations.

Those are lite mass-market games which I am not interested in playing because they don't make enough sense to hold my attention, exactly because of game design decisions like that (and worse).

[Suicide Junkie]

Yeah, Atrocities... are you arguing for or against this?

[PvK]

I don't see a solution that addresses all of the issues - at best there are ways to trade some issues for other issues.

For example, while SJ's clever idea to remove or reduce the repair ability for units prevents unrealistic free repairs, it adds the problem of units which only represent the few survivors of a squadron or division, but which still take up just as much space, creating a new micromanagement problem and one which the AI is unlikely to ever figure out without heavy micromanagement scripting, if it's even possible).

It seems like another case where Malfador added many new features with interesting possibilities in SE5 but the UI and AI haven't yet caught up.

The macro-unit idea is a good one but I don't see that it solves the problem without adding new ones. I think Malfador really needs to address the issues the new features created in the UI at least. In this case, adding the ability to group units and then to select some in and out by criteria such as damage level and design, and adding better automatic functions for controlling their resupply, etc.

PvK

[Atrocities]

I suggested this concept more for use with a mod, not a solution to problems with SE V. It seemed like a cool way to do troops.

[Suicide Junkie]

If troop combat is anything like space combat, you won't have many wounded. It will be lots all dead, lots unharmed, and one or two damaged.

[President_Elect_Shang]

Suicide Junkie said:
If troop combat is anything like space combat, you won't have many wounded. It will be lots all dead, lots unharmed, and one or two damaged.

Unless the troops are wearing some form of VacSuit or EVA suit I think they will all be dead!

[shinigami]

Just thought of another minor issue, let's say you've created an all infantry unit, 50 soldier components. Now you have a unit with 50 weapons. Multiple units makes for hundreds of weapons being fired. Won't that tend to bog down the game engine, especially on an older system?

I really like this idea but it seems that a modder who uses it will be pulling his hair out trying to balance all the issues.