There is another way... but it is MUCH more complex... something I would like to find out if it works when I go to college for game programing...

If some sort of simulation could be used to determine the properties of a mixture/compound of elements and then how those mixtures react when certain forces are applied such as temperature or other materials...

Imagine this:
Player digs Rock X out of the ground. Player reads description card which appears stating the composition of Rock X. Player refines Rock X, which contains 85% iron, to purify the iron. Player creates Alloy Y by putting Iron and Rock W (50% copper, 25% iron, 10% oxygen, 10% tin, 5% trace amounts of varius minerals). Player uses Alloy Y, who's physical properties such as malleability, temperature data (how it reacts to various temps), hardness, conductivity, ect, and creates Armor Set Z. The stats of Armor Set Z are then calculated based on the properties of Alloy Y and the thickness of Alloy Y on various areas of the armor(since 1mm of metal stops a spear much less than 10cm of a metal).

As I said, very complex, and probably requiring to much computatonal power... for now anyway... But I figure computational power will be sufficient, or begin to become sufficient, about the time I finish college.

Most strategy games make use of army upkeep costs, which pretty much is the most simple and efficient way to simulate weapon and armor upkeep, feeding and clothing the soldiers, paying the soldiers, and all other costs associated with having an army. This is why durability is not taken into account in most games, since it is assumed the upkeep costs cover repair costs. If the player is required to send supply caravans which I would assume the player pays for, you must also make sure the upkeep cost is fairly low, since you will be providing supplies which traditionally would be covered by upkeep costs.

As far as hit detection, they are using physics to simulate the look of objects, so (I would assume) it is a fairly small jump to go from simulating how a weapon looks when being swung to how the weapon does damage when being swung, since one already has most of the variables required for said damage calculation. Mass of armor and weapon, velocities of armor, weapon, and creature. All thats really missing is a some collision detection and armor mitigation values.

Ya, from what I understand, the models already have hitboxes due to the physics stuff mentioned in the dev journals, its just a simple matter of letting the collision detection deal with the collisions between weapons and armor on separate units and figuring in damage based on angle, velocity, and armor thickness.

On another note, for item stats I hope they use non-integar amounts... A soldier is never carrying exactly 50 kg of gear, it is always something more like 50.487kg... Integars just seem to be to far apart for their application in most games.

From what I understand, there is often a lot of shoving going on as well, as both sides try to push the other back and gain ground. This would often make larger weapons (like a mace or 2 handed sword, which require a big area to swing them) useless in formation combat, and is why most of the soldiers in formations would have short swords and daggers. Hehe, come to think of it, battles would have been rather like shopping the morning after thanksgiving, except instead of women they had really smelly, often drunk, men with weapons.

Units really need multiple weapons to deal with formation fighting; a longer ranged weapon such as a spear for the first contact and for fighting from rows 2-4, and smaller weapons for close quarters fighting in the front row. A spear is pretty much useless when you are standing in the front row, a fact which is not really seen in many games.

Hmm... I guess it would not work as well for Elemental. If someone pushes 'Auto-resolve' they don't want to wait 5 minutes for the computer to do all the necessary calculations.

If I understand your idea right, you'll probably have longer to wait than that. It seems like you want a game that realistically simulates chemical reactions and the effects of weapons hitting armor. Even carrying out one of the latter simulation (which is simpler than the first) would probably require more computing power to do in real time than an entire, maxed out Medieval II:Total War battle. Not to mention it'd require significantly more detailed geometry if it were to be at all realistic...

No, I'm not talking about visually. It just seems like the slider game would result in armor effects feeling generic to me. I also can't think of how it would fit in with technology. I'm having trouble putting this into words, so I'll just concede my skepticism might be irrational.

Again, I still think that having so many different factors is overkill if the emphasis is large scale combat, especially in a 4X game. Like with calculating hit locations, I think narrowing down the relevant armor characteristics to a much smaller number can be done in such a way as to result in, on average, the same thing.

There's another type of bad complexity: the type of complexity that doesn't really add anything over a much simpler model. The result is just higher system requirements (or smaller scales) for no added effect.

See I don't understand. If armor will be summed up by its class, then why the heck do you need nine sliders within that?

You apparently missed the part where I said that it might make sense but that's no justification for it . No, I don't like the idea of having to deal with equipment breaking in a 4X game. I am convinced that breakage cannot be implemented well in a game where you'll be fielding thousands of units, especially when that is meant to be just one small aspect of the game. No, I'd much rather this be abstracted away into upkeep costs.

Yet another complicated scenario the devs would have to code, and yet another bit of micromanagement players would have to deal with. No thanks.

But who is getting hit and when? If you do combat physics calculations for two battling units of soldiers 1000 strong. It does not mean that you end up calculating physics for 2000 people at once. When both sides meet the amount of people actually hitting each other with swords is quite limited. Depending on the formations involved the percent of active soldiers could be as little as 10%. The vast majority of the soldiers will simply stand around until it becomes thier turn.

Now on the other hand if you had a unit of 1000 archers all shooting arrows at once then you will start to have problems with scale. But if you realistically model armour you could cut that down to less than 500 hits in an instant. The majority of arrows will miss or get deflected. If the target lacks the armour to survive arrow showers, the problem of calculating too many hits against them becomes moot, all of them will be dead after the first volley.

The whole idea is based on what we know of the unit creation system. Want armoured knights? You need armour and a horse for every rider. From there its not much of a stretch to have to choose between making your plate armour out of copper or expensive steel (in comparison). If you had no access to metal at all you might end up using something exotic like bone instead.

Sure why not? If a soldier steps on a spike out in the battlefield, all you really need to know is how sharp the spike is and how tough is his boot. Not tough enough? You then have a wounded soldier. Even if the soldier does have one, you don't need a seperate detailed hitbox for spikes. When you figure out the angle at which he steps on it you can simply roll a dice. When soldiers fall into a spike pit trap you can simply shotgun them with random spike hits spread realistically over thier body. Targetting is not an important issue in this case, its *just* a trap. Save that proc power for something more important.

For appearances it would be worth it for any ragdoll effects to interact realistically with the traps, but otherwise this event is very incidental to what is going on. Unless a large portion of your army runs into traps at the same time you can simply sum these things up as "here be dangerous terrain". Its worth noting that once soldiers know traps are there, they would become far less effective.

There are numbers in the background but you don't get to see them. The bars are simply a visual to give you some idea of how the armour will perform in combat. If you could see those numbers you would be obsessed with optimizing them and the micromanaging comes back in full force. Its sort of like a pressure gauge with no numbers. You can watch the needle climb into the red zone indicating danger, but you don't need to measure the exact degree of danger, you should be running away.

This is the wrong way to think about it. Simple systems shackle us to simple mechanics. If you have the ability to imagine better mechanics and a better game, only then will you have the information you need to make a better system. Right now we are basically lighting our campfire with flint and steel. The amount of effort it takes to design and manufacture something like a zippo lighter seems like so much work when you already have the ability to make fire. But once you have that lighter in your hand you will wonder how you ever lived without it.

Because without those sliders, what would differenciate heavy armour from other heavy armours? Nothing! If you rely on "class" to define what an armour is and how it works, no matter what you make of it they all end up the same. Instead of being able to create simply better heavy armour, you get stuck trying to attach buffs and bonuses onto the same vanilla crap that everyone gets. And I thought you hated micromanagement.

That said, what about equipment breakage in combat? Assuming free replacements once the battle is over. It would be realistic for units with broken shields no longer get protection against arrows. How is this any different from archers running out of arrows in the first place?

But then what happens if the upkeep gets cut off? The effects of a realistic supply shortage take time to happen. Current systems don't model those effects at all, if you fail to meet your quota, then whole units simply desert and evaporate. Doesn't it make far more sense for the decay to be gradual?

A well supplied unit will eventually degrade to the point where it can no longer act as a cohesive fighting force. If that force simply ran out of food, why not just order it to raid a village or something? Supplies don't have to come from home.

That is exactly what I meant. It doesn't matter how the "upkeep" gets to the soldiers, running out should not cause them to desert on the spot or starve and die overnight. In most wars soldiers got paid regularly on the spot. They then took this money and either spent it at home or locally. In Elemental, who said you soldiers were getting paid at all? They are essentially fighting for thier nations survival under your banner. Sure they might draw a wage of some sort, but why would you pay them hundreds of kilometers from home in the middle of hostile territory? They have nothing to spend it on and coinage would just slow them down and increase the chance of getting killed.

In this kind of setting money would either be paid when the surviving soldiers return home or directly to the families who have members in the army. This means that you still have to pay some sort of money upkeep, but running out for a short time will not make the army desert. Besides where the hell would they go? People are unlikely to defect and good luck surviving alone in this crapsack world.

Now on the other hand, if you were helping to defend a fort a couple blocks away from your home and are told one day that you boss can no longer pay you... In such a situation you would probably quit on the spot right? You do need that money and you can find another job without too much trouble. That doesn't mean you wouldn't pick your sword back up and fight as militia if duty calls. Even if you were not being paid to be a soldier.

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Why is this all relevant? Simple. Realism is no free lunch. This has multiple meanings.

First of all, food is not free. When you deploy armies to the field you must feed them, and they can only march so far with supplies they carry themselves. This is very important because it limits where armies can and can not go. In games like master of magic food upkeep must be met per turn or else the unit will desert on the spot. Delivery of that food is abstracted, there are no supply lines or caravans involved. What this means is you can found a gigantic army and plop it down in the middle of enemy territory. You can keep it there as long as you want and they can do NOTHING to get you to leave short of killing your units with another army of thier own.

This is horribly unrealistic. Normally the focus is defending the borders of your territory. If something manages to get inside your defensive cordon, you can seal the gap behind them and cut off home support. For most armies this is crippling. A major cornerstone of offensive strategy needs to be making that gap and holding it open to allow the logistics flow of supplies and men into enemy territory.

Even if you modeled this mechanic to a heavy abstracted degree. What it lets you do is amazing.

1. Small units capable of living off the land can infiltrate enemy territory and stay there. The lack of a supply caravan going to them allows them to stay hidden anywhere. This is the entire point of having scouts and rangers.
   
2. Armies too far from home will stretch supply lines to the limit. To negate this they could raid or capture existing supplies in enemy territory instead of just burning them or looting them as "gold" which is completetly useless to them given that it can't be eaten.
3. An invading army that breaches the "great wall of pidgeon" could be halted simply by recapturing the wall behind them. An army without supplies from home might be unable to travel far enough to threaten any of your cities.

And so forth. Don't be so quick to discard the concept, a lot of things appear useless on paper but will dawn on you when you hold themi n your hands. And don't forget that anyone who accepts a free lunch forfeits all right to complain about its contents and quality.

Sorry! I use a program called Pidgin for chatting and the internet as a whole has pretty much corrupted my book learned vocabulary. Thats just the way the internet works.

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Your completetly right in that development should happen in steps. You can't simply reach for the stars and get there tommorow. But then again, no matter how far you go, you will never get closer to anywhere without a destination in mind. Man would not have walked on the moon if he hadn't dreamed of doing it first.

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The funny thing is that both of us are equally correct. You make the point that it could go horribly wrong, and I hold the opposite view. But that said we will never know how things turn out until we try. Innovation is like this, you have to push on through the doubt because the end result *just might work*.

Games have a long history of stagnating because no matter what you change it will make someone happy and piss someone else off. Pretty much the only way progress can be made at this point is to say "screw you all! I'm going with plan C!". Thought of course, not in those exact words.

So whenever people tell me me "that probably won't work", the most I can allow myself to say and think is "duly noted". Anything less would quite literally defeat the purpose.

So I was thinking about equipment breakage. There are varying degrees to which you can implement such a system. The first is to have no equipment breakage at all, the second is no equipment breakage outside of combat and so on. Having to deal with the weapons of your troops rusting away is far more attention to detail than players need or want. And even if we wanted that level of realism we could not get there in a single leap.

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So whats the advantage of equipment breaking? Im not convinced that equipment breaking outside of combat would add anything useful, so by breakage I am talking about weapon damage inside of a combat situation.

The first advantage that stands out in my mind is relatively simple. If your equipment has a chance of breaking you need to know how strong it is so you can measure the chance of that happening. Meaning in other words, there has to be some sort of statistic governing how strong your equipment is.

If you add such a score you would add depth in that the person with the stronger equipment has a quantifiable advantage. The material you make your equipment out of determines how it performs in combat. For example swords made of copper can hold a sharp edge. But if you go banging that edge against solid steel plate armour it will quickly become dull. On the other hand if you start using hammers made of stone, the plate armour will be the one to break and deform.

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A good example of this in practice was the spanish conquistadores versus the aztec warriors. The warriors used wooden clubs set with shards of obsidian. Historical recounts describe these clubs as capable of decapitating a horse in one blow. Whether or not the recount is true is up to debate. But consider that a fractured obsidian edge can be several orders of magnitude sharper than the best surgical steel scalpel we can manufacture today.

When the aztec met the spanish in battle they soon discovered that thier obsidian weaponry was not all that effecive against plate armour. A wooden club simply can't transfer enough force to be damaging against solid metal and the obsidian blades would chip and shatter on contact with metal plate armour.

Depending on who you ask metal armour (along with gunpowder and horses) is cited as one of the main advantages that led the spanish to victory over the aztecs. Even thought they were ridiculously outnumbered.

Thats a great book! When I first read the book it suprised me how much of it didn't actually deal with any of those three.

When I brought up the example of spanish vs the aztec I was specifically talking about combat between the two parties. It could be that disease allowed them to "win the war". But without the advantage of guns and steel the spanish probably would have gotten fubared after the first battle or two. The aztec had more than enough troops to simply suffocate them by weight, but for whatever reason they didn't.