Qm said

[Sombre]

They don't repel smaller enemies?

[Kristoffer O]

They do.

[Endoperez]

Sorry for jumping in so late. I've been busy all week, but thankfully I have free time every now and then, and can follow these discussions.

I'd rather have "hard to lead" unit ability that makes a unit take more than 1 leadership slot. E.g. leading 1 elephant is like leading 3 men, so a 60 ldr commander can only lead 20 elephants, so the squad sizes are smaller except if you use high-ldr commanders, which are national and leave you with one less mage and have to be protected.

Taskmasters etc would be able to ignore this command.

Of course, this is also complicated in the programming department. It's just a suggestion, I don't expect it to get implemented.

<< Endoperez >>

[thejeff]

Make leadership dependent on size?

[Zath]

The training of war horses and elephants have historically been focused on suppressing the natural instincts of these animals to flee when struck by weapons or startled by noise and large crowds. Training an animal to trample opponents is especially difficult, since they must charge through what they perceive as solid obstacles. All the above factors can be modeled in game with a similar mechanism to repel: force tramplers to pass a morale check for each square they trample, and make them attack with their normal weapon if they fail this check. The difficulty of this morale check can be adjusted based on any number of factors that the designers find suitable. For example, the mechanism could be setup as:

Trample Roll = Morale - 1 per every 20% HP loss on unit
Fear Roll = 5 + 1 per every 6 hostile size points in adjacent squares

If Trample Roll > Fear Roll, then trampling succeeds, otherwise attack with normal weapon and end turn. What qualifies as "adjacent squares" must be further defined of course, but just using the 8 immediately adjacent squares may well suffice. A system like this would make some roleplaying sense, and it should mitigate the problem of trampling rushers without completely negating the effectiveness of these units in a combined arms battle. Swarms of cheap infantry could be used to freeze tramplers in place and whittle them down slowly. This can be countered by using archers or shock infantry to cut through the chaff, which will in turn be vulnerable to other counter-counters, etc. etc.

[MaxWilson]

Mod +1.

-Max

[Chris_Byler]

I think the best fix would be to adjust the rules for mixed squads so that the cowards in the squad can break before the braver troops.

Instead of having the squad share morale and break as a whole, it could have partial breaks where everyone with morale less than X panics and runs. The braver members of the squad continue fighting, until they take enough casualties for the squad's "rout number" to exceed their morale as well. If there were troops with drastically different morale (like mammoths and wingless), half breaks would be pretty common. Fear, standards that only cover part of the squad, and Battle Fright could also cause part of a squad to flee while other parts fight on.

That would make combining cowardly tramplers + brave other troops dangerous - the tramplers might break first and trample their braver comrades on their way off the battlefield. Cowards would remain cowardly even when surrounded by braver allies - it takes something like a standard or Sermon of Courage to really improve their morale.

That might require enough changes to the morale system to make it more of a Dom4 thing than something that could be done in a patch, though.


In the short term maybe elephants just need to cost more resources. They may not wear much equipment, but the effort involved in catching or breeding an elephant and then training it for war is far from trivial in its own right (*much* harder than doing the same for a horse). A high resource cost would make it difficult to accumulate elephants quickly, especially without productivity. Training a large force of elephants would take years.

And really, how likely is it that the people of a sloth-3 province are going to bother to take the trouble to raise and train even one elephant, let alone several? That would be far too much work.

[OmikronWarrior]

Hmmm... This discussion interests me. I think I have a "solution" thats going to make a lot of sense with out ripping apart the game (like adding animal command would). I'm going to work on the math, but it basically involves adding some morale checks modified by weapon length and HP.

[OmikronWarrior]

Alright, I must have gone through a dozen different schemes of various complexities (some requiring four seperate moral checks before doing some attack vs. defense checks). I finally settled on the simplest. First, what my criteria were.

A) It had to make sense "realistically".
B) It couldn't create any new abilities, attributes, etc.
C) It had to be simpler than the mechanics governing missles.
D) It would have to employee similar mechanics to those already used by the game.
E) It had to be readily available to any nation thematically.

For A, the obvious solution to being charged by giant creatures would be long pointy sticks that the creature would have to impale itself on to get to you. Hence, weapon length vs. trampler morale became the dominant theme. As for D, I noticed that while the game has "repel" checks for normal attacks, it has nothing of the sort for trample attacks. This doesn't make sense. Therefore, in order for a unit to trample a square, it must pass the following morale check:

(Trampler Morale)+(Trampler Size)+DRN-(Trampler Fatigue)/10

vs.

(Modified Sum of Weapon Length in Attacked Square)+DRN

The "Sum of Weapon Length" is modified the same way presicion is, all points over 10 are doubled. Note that the moral check is based on the INDIVIDUAL trampler's morale, and no survivor bonus is applied, just a fatigue penalty. Which makes sense, the more tired you are the more daunting the task of avoiding a wall of spikes becomes.

What happens next is simple. If the trampler fails the morale check the unit will simply attack normally with whatever weapon it has (trunk, spear, whatever). If it succeeds it now is vulnerable to "attacks of opportunity", much like a normal soldier who succeeds their morale check vs. a longer weapon. Each unit in the square gets a free attack against the trampler (whose defense is reduce by 2 each time it defends against such an attack) which can cause at most an amount of damage equal to the weapon's length (which symbolizes the creature impaling itself on the long weapon). Plus, each such attack will cause a fatigue hit.



The baseline in my head was a squad of 3 spearment (total weapon length 12) should have a "reasonable" chance to parry a low morale elephant, while 3 phalanxes each with length six weapons should stop all but the most determined trampler cold. Meanwhile, isolated and short length weapon fighters should rarely be able to repel even the most uncertain of tramplers.

The match ups.

Mammoth vs. 3 spearmen: The Mammoth has morale 10 and size 6, while the spearmen have modified weapon lengths of 14. Assuming no fatigue, the Mammoth will trample the spearmen 62% of the time. It's enough to blunt a trampler's charge and give the defendants a fighting chance against an amassed Mammoth horde beelining for the capital.

Indie Elephants vs. 3 Spearment: The difference between indie elephants and Mammoths is the elephants have a morale of 8. This means they'll only successfully trample the spearmen 46% of the time.

Indi Elephant vs. Isolate Phalanx (WL6) or 3 short swordsmen (WL2x3)

The Elephant would roll 14 vs 6. A plus 8 difference means it will trample the units 86% of the time. That almost identical to the current situation.

Mammoth vs. 3 Phalanxes (WL6x3)

The Mammoth would still have 16, but 6 times 3 is 18, which would be modified to 26. Thats a deficiet of 10 which only gives the Mammoth a 3% chance of actually trampling.

Finally, SC vs. 3 Phalanxes

I'm assuming a size 6 Commander with 30 morale tries to trample the best anti-trample defense available. Its 36 vs. 26, and the commander will successfully trample 95% of the time. Fortunately, such units don't grow on trees.

Thoughts? Exploits? Understandable?

[Wahnsinniger]

I don't recall/understand what the current system is, but pretty cool and well-thought out. Though it does seem that perhaps the percentages could stand to be slightly higher. (A Mammoth vs 3 Phalanxes should probably have more than 3% Chance. Perhaps add defender fatigue in there as well?)

I don't know if it balances well, but I do like the Weapon Length over 10 doubled though. A good analogy would be building a brick wall against a current of water. The first brick or two would impede it, but only by a marginal amount. But once there's enough bricks, each one would cut the area the water could go through by such a percentage that it would really start to add up (i.e. doubled)