Ancient Wars, SEIV style

[Singollo]

I like the idea of having individual components represent small companies of warriors within a larger integrated unit. You could have small divisions composed of frontline warriors, bowman, pikeman, etc.

You'd have to do a lot of component adjusting and removal. For instance, ranged weapons would not be the norm now; you would have maybe two families of distance-damage weapons only, representing bows and javelins. These could be upgraded by improving arrowhead/javelin shaft composition, with greater resulting accuracy, range, and damage. Pretty much everything else would have to be weapons with range 1, or maybe 2 (for pikes and the like).

Engines would be tricky to handle. They don't really fit in well with the concept of ground combat. Perhaps experience (which should now include morale) could bestow movement bonuses as well as the other combat bonuses? That way a more experienced, determined army could march further than a disorganized rabble. Other than this, I don't know how you would represent the addition of engines; if a ship is now a unified conglomeration of soldiers, the "ship" can only move as quickly as its slowest constituent, and you can't just add in "fast warriors" to increase the movement of the army.

Cavalry presents an interesting dilemma. If anything matches the fighter analogue, it would be cavalry (even this is not a good fit, though). You can't really make cavalry part of this army/ship, because cavalry tactics typically consist of separating from the main army and outflanking. They don't just line up with the other soldiers; they do their own thing. I suppose you could represent this with a particular type of medium-distance weapon, but IMHO this is unsatisfactory. If you made fighters into cavalry, they could then separate from the ship/army and conduct their own movement.

If this is done, the concept of fighters would have to change, because in addition to being faster than infantry, cavalry is more powerful and does much more damage, which is not true of starfighters when compared to ships. Fighters would have to be bigger and more powerful, and significantly faster than all other ships. Yet they would have to have a weakness to avoid having them unbalance the game (although cavalry really was overwhelmingly powerful).

Hmm...now it sounds like cavalry should be its own ship type. But then you couldn't have it be part of a ship/army, in accordance with your idea.

Interesting concept.