Have you perhaps played King of Dragonpass? It is remarkably similiar to what you have described..... What I envision is a fantasy world that is already developed, unlike Civilization 4 where you start from the neolithic age, here there already exists a multitude of kingdoms that have existed for as long as a thousand years, for example. ....
Never played Kings of Dragonpass no. The key to the system is the scalability. We don't know for sure but it sounds like thw world has been bombed back to the stone age. All the magic was concentrated into crystals after the cataclysm and apart from isolated pockets the world is completetly uninhabitable. We don't actually know how isolated or large these pockets are. But like you said, its perfectly reasonable to come across a fully developed kingdom. But not all civilizations have to progress to the same level of technology.
The hard part is balancing that single spearman against ten. All I can say right now without writing many pages is that it depends on a lot of things. A single hunter with enough experience could run circles around a hundred enemies, let alone one.
The Silmarillion is a bad example. Try the hobbit!.A simple man in a little backwater town suddenly has in his possession the ability to change the world. Gotta start somewhere!
Well, the world has been nuked, but I kind of expect that the developers mean to start us off with a small town, if it's anything like MOM. The developing tribe mechanic is cool and interesting, but perhaps it would steal focus from the epic wizard battle aspect of things.
Well unless you configure the came for an advanced start, your channeler will have to build his way up from the bottom. I don't see why your civilization would not have to do something similar. But yes, I was digging rather deep when I included the tribal level of existence. More likely we would start off with a single town. But that said, starting as the shaman o a tiny tribe and working your way up would be very cool. Consider that a big part of your channeler's personality comes from where and how was raised.
I'd have to majory disagree. Same equipment for Joe the spearman (and his friends), simply his 'normal' clothes (low-encumbrance, please!) and a long, sharp stick. You have standard 'just run forward and stick'em till they're dead!", you have "Martial arts mo-fo" who uses the spear as much as quarterstaff as anything else, and once you have enough people you can start placing games with hedgehogs / phalanxes.
If you start using your spear as a quarterstaff then you are DOING IT WRONG! Quarterstaffs are very effective weapons because they are balanced, having a heavy stone or metal spear spear tip throws off this balance. To compensate you have to hold the spear offcenter and this means that one end of the staff will be longer. You are not going to bring home the bacon by wacking boars across the snout. A spear is a first strike weapon and the staff was invented as nonlethal defensive weapon. That is not to say that you can't use them in different ways, but these will be limited by the quality, design and balance of your weapon.
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So back to small unit tactics.
We left off at the "group" stage of combat. Why group and not unit or squad? Calling them a unit indicates that they are a standard unit of say 4 people. This title only works when you can consistently recruit other units of the same size. Calling them a squad indicates that they are a smaler portion of a bigger whole. Which they are not, its just your merry band of hunters. In fact calling them a group might not fit the bill either, consider:
Scale affects everything and that includes what you call a number of people. One person is a lone figure. Two people form a pair. Three is the threshold for making a group. Generally four is the minimum for forming a unit of people, but depending on a number of other factors, physical size especially, then units can be formed out of even one individual. The amount of people a unit contains depends on the scale of our combat, a unit could mean a regiment of many thousands, but right now we are still talking about lone individuals.
As soon as we can raise multiple units to send into combat, the combat system must expand greatly to accommodate them. Lets say Joe the hunter is joined by two friends to fight a single enemy. When Joe was alone the only thing your system of battle had to track was how far apart Joe and his opponent stand and upon what ground. With 3 or more entities involved in combat you must now have a "grid" of sorts which is required as soon as there is more than two entities to keep track of. This grid can look like anything, it doesn't matter if the tiles are square or hexagonal. What matters is that the grid keeps track and displays the X and Y coordinates of seperate entities both alone and relative to each other.
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The first question asked in combat involving groups or a group is what kind of group is it? A group of people is a number of people who agree upon the direction the group is to take, either by previous agreement or through elected leadership. A good example is total strangers riding the elevator, another is you and a group of friends walking to a movie theater. A group without direction is a mob. Mobs form and stick together through convenience, either through a common goal or for the instinctive safety in numbers.
The distinction between the two is extremely important. Groups in combat will stick together through common loyalty. Groups of soldiers have leadership and discipline, mobs do not. Imagine a grid like the one I mentioned above. If you have played Master of Magic you will find it easy to visualize an isometric grid of squares. For now keep things two dimentional.
Lets say you have a unit of 8 swordsmen who form a line. They occupy a stripe of land within thier grid tile. Opposing them is a big mob of people who ate bad mushrooms (or something like that) these people are armed with random objects, mostly wooden clubs. Instead of fitting neatly within thier grid tile they spill over the edges in all directions forming a circle shaped cloud. When your swordsmen charge into the mob, the shape changes. The members of the mob that would normally spill over into the tile the swordsmen occupy are pushed back into the main group. This packs them tightly together and without discipline they will have trouble fighting in close ranks. The swordsmen being trained soldiers have no such disability.
If the swordsmen call for a retreat then they will withdraw in an organized fashion, each soldier protecting those beside them. If the crazy mob bites off more than they can chew they will instead form a rout. Individual members will flee in all directions and they will impede and trip each other.
In this fashion the swordsmen can defeat a force more than twice thier size. This is the value of discipline.
