Ancient Wars, SEIV style

[geoschmo]

I have been reading the "Fantasy Mod" with keen interest. I like the idea of a total redo of SEIV as a new game. It got me to thinking about doing SEIV up as a Roman era style empire game. I would never do this, it would take too much work, but it's fun to think about. Let's call this a mental exercise into what kind of things could be done.

Planets would become cities, systems would become nations or "regions".

Ships as they exsist now I am thinking would become some kind of army unit. Call it a company, or whatever. Components in each ship would be smaller sub units of specific type, or perhaps individual men. Your commanding officer would be the bridge component. As components are destroyed that decreases the effectiveness of your ship/army unit.

Fighters/sats and mines I am thinking would have no place in this mod. Weapons platforms would do nicely as defensive armaments for cities. Troops could be used for taking and defending cities.

The thing I can't see doing at all is any sort of naval combat. But I guess that wasn't a huge part of combat in those days anyway. To do Naval combat you'd have to have a diffent kind of "ship" and someway to restrict it to only water sectors, and someway to keep the land units off the water sectors. I don't see any way to do that in SEIV.

So anyone care to contribute? All I need is ideas. Since this mod will never get done you don't actually have to do any work.

Geoschmo

[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.

[Suicide Junkie]

I think the engines would be represented as horses, wagons or whatever transportation you're using.

Give the ship a +1 standard movement built into the hull to represent basic marching.

Each component soldier can be given a movement bonus ability. The slowest soldier will then determine the army's speed.

[Singollo]

I think the engines would be represented as horses, wagons or whatever transportation you're using.

I dunno...I'm probably being needlessly nitpicky here, but this just doesn't capture the idea well. If adding engines is like adding, say, wagons, then the only way that this would speed the army is if all of the army rode in these wagons, or on the horses, which is obviously unrealistic and kind of silly. Just throwing some wagons into the army doesn't speed up poor Joe Legionnaire, who still has to walk and determines the speed of the entire army. Obviously, there could be specialized armies consisting only of cavalry and the like, in which adding better engines could be like adding higher-quality horses, but these would be the exception.

I guess the engines = wagons/horses would work for terrain (non-combat) movement, in a limited way. If you have 1000 soldiers and 333 wagons, then a third of the soldiers could be cycled in and out of the wagons, resting while the army moved, in order to retain overall stamina and freshness. Even this is of limited effectiveness, though, and it's still pretty unrealistic, historically speaking. Regardless, combat speed would have to be handled separately, using this concept.

I like the idea of each component having its own movement rate much better. That solves things right there. I would do away with engines altogether, and give each component a movement speed, with the lowest speed determing the overall speed of the army.

[Suicide Junkie]

Well I was thinking of something the equivalent of a train. Shove the army in, and row the boat.

But the bonus movement for every troop would work very well to make your army go at the speed of the slowest men.

You even get to go faster if the slow guys are killed!

[geoschmo]

Actually I think you guys have worked it out nicely. You give the army unit(ship) a base movement of 1. Then each sub unit(component) gets a move bonus. The movement of the army unit is then equal to 1+the loswest surviving units bonus.

Cavalry would have a higher bonus of course. And if you have only cavalry units in the army unit then that army unit could move faster than anybody else on the battle field. So you wouldn't put cavalry units in with foot soldiers. You could, but you wouldn't cause they could only move as fast as the slowest guy.

In fast most army units would be stritcly one type of component and a commander(bridge). The Exception might be you might want some infantry mixed in with your archers as protection from roaming cavalry. That would lessen the offensive impact of the archer company, but it would increase there posibility of survival. Even if they are damaged you want your your companies to survive cause that's how they accquire experience.

Geoschmo

[geoschmo]

And as you get more advanced you could field larger army units. This would be done by adding lieutenants(life support) along with the commander(bridge).

Geoschmo

[Singollo]

How about these for "racial techs":

--Religious (Religious)
--Gemworking (Crystalline)
--Sanitation (Organic)
--Construction/transportation (Temporal)
--Shamanism (Psychic)

These would obviously have far different effects than their counterparts, and they need not be modeled after the counterparts at all. (I do so only because it's easy, and for reference purposes.) This would do well to account for the various cultures that might be around in a Roman Empire type game. The Romans would be religious, obviously, while the various Germanic tribes might have Shamanism. (Perhaps "Druidic" for Pictish/Celtic cultures?) The Romans would also have Construction/Transportation, while Middle-eastern cultures would have mercantile technologies such as Gemworking. Indic civilizations, renowned for their sanitation and mathematical city plans, would have Sanitation, which would bestow population and happiness modifiers for various buildings (facilities).

There are many other ways to go with this, that need not have any parallel to the SE4 tech fields. Any ideas?

[geoschmo]

Well my view of this mod would be it would have no racial traits at all, but since I am not doing the mod anyway feel free to suggest it.

I think those things you mentioned would be neat to have as tech areas. General empire advancment stuff that would allow beter cities, and thus better production and reproduction. But since they are all one race, humans, it wouldn't be something someone else couldn't also develop themselves given the time and research.

Geoschmo

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
Well I was thinking of something the equivalent of a train. Shove the army in, and row the boat.

I am coming back to this cause doesn't there need to be some way to increase the speed of an army unit in the strategic map, getting to the battle, that doesn't affect his movement on the combat map, during the battle.

Is there a way to do this?

And can you have negative movement bonuses? If all Army units have a base movement of 3, call that the speed of a guy walking in formation, can we then have armored troops move at a speed of 1, since they have to carry more they can't move as fast right? And could you include a "wagon train" as a component that would give more movement (standard, not bonus this time) on the strategic map without giving more movement in combat?

Geoschmo