Dogpiling should be effective, it is kinda hard to defend when attacked by multiple sources. But I agree, unit that's not being attacked or otherwise occupied should be more effective. Some kind of attack of opportunity - mechanic would also be cool - like, disengaging / moving away from unit creates an opening for attacks. This would help prevent dogpiling by making unit placement more meaningful.

Actually, Blood Bowl has nice mechanics for that. Surrounding nearby units that have no enemies in adjacent tiles give bonuses to attack/defense for attacker/defender. And moving away provokes a tackle (i.e attack).. can't just run past units.

The real answer top dogpiling is wounds. A unit with full health attack at full power. Once they have even a little scratch they are less efficient. And with big wounds units would be even less usefull.

For instance if a unit has 50% health then it gets a -25% in every stat it has. So full health units would be really dangerous and you would need to keep reserve units to help finish a hard fight.

Heroes would get a skill that let them reduce the penalty.

You have two enemy units. one with 10/20 hp and the other with 20/20 HP. Each of them have an attack of 10.

The first unit can do 5 (10 / 2) and the other 10. IF you kill the weakened unit you'll have a 10 attack in front of you.

If you weaken the other you woul dthen have 10 (5 from the first, 5 from the second). BUT ! The system is uniform. So Two dice that range from 1 to 5 is  a better thing than one unit that can range from 1 to 10 (because you have 1/10 to be hit with 10 damage, but with 2D5 you have 1/25 to be hit with 10 damage)

And if you add armor that negates damage then 2D5 are less effective than 1D10.

Moreover with two weakened units you won't attack straight away, you'll try to back up them and heal them. With one unit at full health you'll try to do damage before backing it up.

Because it doesn't seem logical that everybody in an army attacks one man, ignoring all the other enemies. Especially enemies that are behind their backs.

Besides, focus fire is getting really boring and annoying. There are few games where it isn't the best option if it's avaible. I don't have anything against focus fire as such, I'd just like if it was harder to do / carried also penalties. Imo any tactic that has become the obvious choice should be.. well.. nerfed. Focus fire without limitations (well, other than target running away..) means battles become that much more damage races.

That reminds me.. how come archers are so well coordinated? They also seem really, really good at it. Or otherwise they just really don't care about friendly fire. Firing at melee :>

vieuxchat, yeah, that could work. But you'd still want to focus on one unit long enough to eliminate it's battle effectiveness. And of course if there's plenty of healing in battles, focusing on one unit until it's dead is still the best option, otherwise it will just come back with full health/attack.

Dogpiling is one of the things I really hated about tactical combat in the AoW games. I loved those games, but every time I did it or it was done to me I cringed a little. I mean, would a soldier really think 'Hey, lets forget about this guy with the huge battle axe behind me, I'll just go throw myself at that dragon over there and hope it sprains it's leg when it rips me apart'. I thought it was a real shame when they decided to go with the classic turn based combat, as I new it would probably lead to this.

So I agree that something should be done about it. The 'no move after attacking' rule is a small step in the right direction, as it prevents kitting and making room for new units to attack the target.

How about expanding this a little; how about if you try to move an unit past an enemy unit without attacking it, that unit gets an attack of opportunity against your unit. If the attack is successful, the two units are then considered engaged in combat, preventing your unit from moving any further that turn. This could at least prevent units from just moving past defenses and heading straight towards the most valuable targets (if defenses are placed properly).

I did like how AoW handled ranged combat. Archers could shoot over troops and some objects, but if they were directly in front of the target they had a chance of being hit rather than the target, including your own troops. Perhaps this could be included, maybe combined with reducing accuracy over long distances, so that there is a chance another tile it hit rather than the target.

Regarding reducing damage output based on HP:

I think this could be an interesting mechanic.  The downside that I see is that combat will go on for longer.  Another way to look at it, is that the first 1/2 of HP would be lost much quicker than the second half.  

For example, two fighters are slugging it out:  As they hit each other, the amount of damage they output will drop.  So, it will take longer to reduce an equivilent amount of HP.

I don't know if this is entirely bad, but it means you could end up with situations where two exhausted armies and flailing ineffectually at each other.

Also, if armor/spells offer any type of pure damage reduction, then you could get into a situation where people couldn't actually kill each other because their damage output has crossed below the damage reduction amount.  Likewise, if you have healing units, you can cross a threshold where healing rate is higher than the damage rate.

A similar mechanic could be that after taking a hit, you have a temporary damage output reduction.  This would be from being knocked back or stunned from the hit.  This should reduce the opposing team's damage per minute (dpm) more for spread out fire than for focussed fire.  Especially if you put a limit on the effect.  For example, only counting the biggest hit per turn for a given unit.

I would definitely like to see penalties for firing through/over troops.  Perhaps a minor to-Hit reduction.

This would give you incentive to put your archers off to the side, or to create firing lanes in your front line troops.  Which then can be exploited by cavalry, etc.  In which case you need to be prepared to close the gaps.   This would be fun to coordinate.

I'm not saying it is too difficult, but it definitely complicates a game system:

1.  How many attacks of opportunity do you get?  If limitted, how do you decide which ones get triggered?

2.  Can you use special abilities during the AoO?

3.  Can those abilities trigger other people's AoO?

4.  When do they occur? Does it count against action points for your turn?  Is it a special out of turn phase?

5.  What order are they resolved in?

On the other hand, the game could be:  when you are close to an enemy (engagement range), your move = 1

It's simpler, and I think makes the game more interesting.  Definitely less realistic, but creates much more need for tactical movement.

Unfortunately, that'd only encourage focus fire - sure the wounded unit is doing half as much damage, discouraging you from wanting to finish him off, but his defenses are half as much too, encouraging you to finish him off since you can do more damage to him than to a full health/defense unit .. it more or less cancels out, depending on the numbers.

Personally I like the temporary debuff, "stunned" or "shocked" or whatever, reduce damage for units that were recently attacked. Make the amount depend on damage done and limited to the biggest hit a unit receives on a given turn - i.e. get hit for 10 and your next attack does 5 less*. It makes a lot of sense - the reason why spreading out damage beats focus fire in the real-world 3v3 swordsmen scenario is because having some guy trying to kill you is a pretty big detriment to your ability to do damage. The two guys who aren't being attacked at all are free to attack, i.e. do full damage with no penalty, while the guys who have to worry about not getting killed spend time parrying and can't attack as much (i.e. damage penalty).

Technically an action point penalty would be more 'realistic,' it's not like you're swinging your sword with less strength, you just have less time to attack back if you're also defending against attacks, but I fear that messing with action points would make the balance a nightmare (it just reintroduces the counterattacks-cost-AP problem) - a damage penalty is simple and effective.

*To reduce the impact of first-guy-to-hit-wins, you could have the counterattack do full damage (that is, not affected by the penalty, it happens before the debuff gets applied) and be able to apply a similar debuff to your attacker.

The archer problem is a more difficult issue - a big reason focus fire works so well is that ranged units can focus perfectly all on one unit with no danger of friendly fire or even hitting the wrong enemy. Dominions 3 has an unusually realistic way of handling this: all ranged attacks (spells, arrows, etc) were slightly random on where they'd hit, instead of hitting a particular square you'd hit somewhere within a 3x3 grid centered on your target, with the possibility of hitting a nearby friendly/different enemy or nothing at all. It's been a while but I think your caster/archer's stats and range to target had an impact on accuracy, i.e. a skilled caster almost never missed at point blank, but tell a noob archer to hit someone across the map and anything in the vicinity of the target was at risk of getting hit.

The end result is perfect, it means that trying to focus fire is still possible but not necessarily practical - you can tell your archers to try and hit the caster standing alone in back, but most shots will miss, whereas if you target a mass of infantry you'll likely hit something (although any nearby melees of your own are at risk). It looks just like a massive battle with archers should, a rain of arrows landing amidst the enemy, few actually hitting the same guy. Focus firing a valuable unit or firing into a mass of enemies both seemed to be effective tactics, depending on the situation - how much you want to get rid of that one unit vs. do more overall damage to a larger army.

Dominion's solution may be too complicated to implement into Elemental at this point, my point was just that there are effective (and even realistic) ways to limit ranged focus fire, there must be a more straightforward way to accomplish something similar for Elemental. Maybe a percent chance (depending on, say distance to target and archer's dex) to hit a random nearby enemy instead of your target? It affects the game balance less because you needn't worry about missing entirely or hitting a friendly, but still reduces the ability of a crowd of archers to focus fire perfectly.

And that would be a bad choice. Because you would then be facing a unit at full sterngth. In this system it's better to face two wounded units than to face a full health unit (that was what showed my example).

I have been hoping that combat would be something like Tasunke mentions.  As long as the method works fairly then situations should vary enough for focus fire methods to be the smart thing to do at times, and in other situations it might not work as well.

Bonuses to ganging up against one guy ? We are talking here to use penalties !

In real fight it's extremly hard to attack a target with several ones (when there's weapons) because there's a high chance to wound your friends. Only good warriors can coordinate their attacks.

And when you're facing one unit (like X attacking B ) then you show yourflank to others (like A in your diagram). So if you gagn up (X --> B ) A would get a huge bonus for attacking X (because X is doing something else than defending)

So that would lead to X, Y, Z are dogpiling B that will surely die. A attacks X and severly woudn it cbecause X is focusing on B. Same thing with C and Z.

End of turn : B died and X and Z are severly wounded, A and C at full health. With my wounds system, A and C, even in minority have now a better chance to win the fight.

Heh, I've never disagreed with Shields blocking arrows.

Bigger shields should add more defense, have a higher arrow block percentage, and a lower melee block percentage.

smaller shields should add minimal defense, have a low arrow block percentage, and a relatively high melee block percentage.

The "holy grail" of melee parry chances should be short sword/ rapier + buckler imho

while the tower shield should be best shield for blocking arrows

If we have formations ... a unit with Tower Shields + Testudo Formation would be the holy grail for blocking arrows (but lowers Attk and nullifies melee parry)