Elemental Forums
Has there been any talk on what type of weapons will be in the game? Swords/bow&arrows are obviously in judging from the screenshots. What about staves, halbreds, spears, daggers, crossbows, hammers, axes etc.
Well lets see.
As far as a blanked movement debuff goes. Sharp objects on the ground like broken glass, thorns and caltrops will force anyone moving over them to slow down. Assuming they realize the danger is there to begin with. So dangerous terrain like this could be used in two ways. An obviously trapped portion of ground will be avoided by enemies. Ground that doesn't *look* trapped may not be discovered until its too late. This "area" effect will slow down a hostile force, regardless of what size it is. If the danger zone is only 5 feet wide, people carefully stepping over it will slow down the people behind them.
Measuring the effects of these obstacles on the individual soldier is not that hard. Lets say for every step over a patch of ground has a 25% chance of landing on something sharp. The % chance depends entirely on how "dense" the sharp things are. Whether or not the entity actually gets hurt would depend on the strength of thier boots.
Lastly, how much of an effect any injury has depends on where it came from. Stepping on a thorn will make you limp around in pain and force you to stop and remove it. It is certainly not dangerous enough to cripple or maim. But a spike trap would certainly fit the bill.
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So to sum things up. Dangerous terrain slows down people who can't deal with it. In the case of thorns that means posessing strong boots. Troops can ignore the danger and move over such zones at full speed, but this increases the chance they will get hurt.
Individual members of a unit will react separately. One soldier out of 500 who injured his foot will start to limp. This reduces his speed for a while until the pain fades at least. This effects the group as a whole exactly as you would expect. If the group is ordered to move faster than the limping man he will not be able to keep up. If he is in formation the pattern will get disrupted as he falls back to the rear of the group.
Once he reaches the end you have to make a decision. Leave the guy behind (with all the risks and problems that entails). Slow down the entire unit to match his speed. Or use members of the same unit to help move the injured guy along, at the cost of none of them being able to fight.
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As far as player feedback goes, this kind of thing is very intuitive. Troops crossing dangerous terrain will slow down, unless ordered to continue ahead. Units which are immune to the danger will act normally. But they may not realize the danger is there which could be inconvenient for anyone following them. Individual soldiers in a unit will start to limp if they injure thier feet and they will slowly drop to the rear of thier formations. Even if you don't get little text warnings that these things are happening you can still figure out whats going on just by observing the situation.
Well, I could see a "boot strength" variable for equipment that decreases movement buffs...... but that would probably not be used by the player, because the amount of effort required to make them would be more than the potential payoff of higher speed that only works in certain cases.
Tamren, I can see your point and I understand that there are, in reality, a lot of variables governing how many soldiers are affected by difficult terrain.
However, what I am proposing is that all this is treated in a more simplistic, insightful manner. You describe into detail a system where there is a 25% chance per step to be affected by dificult terrain. While I do not opose a system like that - it seems sraightforward enough - I prefer a system that would just make this less complicated and more straightforward.
If we can agree that a single soldier walking in difficult tarrain of some kind has a chance of x per step to hurt himself, we can then calculate how big the chance is that the soldier gets hurt. We can then correct these calculations for the depth of the terrain and such. If a soldier has a 10% chance to get hurt in terrain five foot deep, then we can calculate how big the chance is for him to get hurt in the same terrain that is ten foot deep.
If we can find a system that is elegant in it's simplicity yet is yields results similar to a more complex system, would you then still prefer this more complex system?
Well yes. In the end you can sum up everything to be a % chance per crossing. But what would happen if you countercharged the enemy so that they were stuck and had to fight on top of the dangerous ground?
The problem with having a visible formula for per-step is that it would have so many different parts. Too much to expenct someone to take in all at once. And once its calculated you have to plug the result into a whole different formula to see if that step actually hurts. Thought to simplify things we could condense the formula into a series concepts that are intuitive to the player. These are used to give the formula a "face" that is easy to understand.
Some of those concepts are simple such as "people get hurt moving over dangerous terrain". Others would be things like "moving faster makes the chance of getting hurt rise". But some of them are a little more convoluted, even if they make sense in the end. Using that thorn bush as an example. Once you chop the bush down you have a lot of fallen vines. Not all of those vines will have thorns facing up. As people move over the vines, those upward facing thorns will get broken and flattened. So in effect certain types of dangerous terrain could degrade or be negated using special tactics or tools.
Also where would the cutoff point be where we will stop adding variables? If boot strength is taken into consideration, would we also need to correct for slippery surfaces like when fighting in a muddy field? Would there be a need to correct for winter cinditions where the musles are more stiff then in mid-summer?
In the end we just need a system that does what it is supposed to do in a believable way, it matters very little if the method of getting there is realistic. In the game we can just look at the end result and say 'yeah I can see that happening in real life too.' Whatever method can get that result with miniml processing power and minimal code is the preferable one imo.
I think an ideal system should reflect the Civ IV system. Of course n civ you do not play the combats out, but what the system does is providing you with info on the terrain. On a hill you get +25% defense, in a forrest +50%, when crossing a river the defender gets a +50% bonus, etc. That way the difficulty lies not into grasping an obscure system. It lies in knowing exectly what the consequences of every move will be, what the ideal moves for the AI will be, what moves you should allow th AI to make and which moves you should prevent, all this while moving to the enemy cities to conquer them asap. I is simple enough to understand, but sometimes it can be very interesting what paths to choose to get there.
What I very much dislike is some system that in the end is somewhat realistic yet very hard to 'get.' I want to fully undrstand what my options are at any given moment and I want to see what consequences the choices I make will have. Only when I understand that can I make informed decisions, which is way more fun than working with some obscure system that works in theory but in which it is very hard to see what the consequences of my actions will be.
Yeah I agree with you, I think. Keeping track of status effects on every individual unit would get out of control way too fast without doing something like Tamren's suggestion, but I think Tamren's suggestion just opens up a whole new can of worms that's even worse than the original (keeping status effects for every individual unit getting hairy with large numbers).
It would probably be simpler than we think it is. A patch of sand for example slows movement. But you don't have to calculate anything convoluted to arrive that conclusion. You are either standing on sand or not.
I think we need to separate traps and dangerous terrain. Terrain doesn't go away, but traps are expendable and break. Terrain will remain a threat until you modify it or it degrades. It could be anything from a moat to a river of lava. Traps on the other hand are objects, caltrops, spikes in the ground.
So terrain could be handled in the simple way you describe. It has X effect when you move over it. It has X effect if you stand in it. It could also have a % chance of X effect that rises the longer you stay in it.
Traps on the other hand only work a finite number of times. Thorn bushes, as with razor wire, are only a threat as long as they remain sharp. Giving your front 4 ranks of soldiers steel shod boots would break and flatten so many of the thorns that the danger no longer exists. Spring loaded spike traps would only trigger once, after which they can be broken or disarmed. Caltrops sprinkled over dirt that fail to pierce your boot will be driven into the ground. Caltrops on stone are a different matter.
So really all you want is a "decay" function used by some (but not all) terrains. That seems doable.
I'm all for complex terrain modification on unit performance and traps that modify the modifications sounds just fine too. Caltrops is for horsies though. 
Well, accoridng to Wikipedia, they can be used against most any type of walking or rolling thing. Even if the article is wrong, just the appearence of the thing indicates that it can be used against foot units:
Terrains can decay too. But "traps" like caltrops are pretty much one-use objects. After all once a caltrop is stuck in someones foot its unlikely someone else will step on it too. Caltrops are just devices that impede movement. Specifically they are design so that no matter which way is up they remain effective. They don't always take the form of tetrahedral spikes. Giant caltrops made of I-beams can function as tank traps.
Tanks of course wouldn't make it into the game. But it would certainly stop a wagon cold.
A use-deacy system as well. Again, doable, but with a slightly smaller payoff. In any event, that sort of thing would soon be modded in if it wasn't in by default.
Stab yourself in the thigh with a pencil, then stick a needle underneath your finger nail, see if the larger injury hurts anywhere near as much.
A split hoof means a dead horse rather easily, at best it will be useless for months. They're minor nuissances for infantry by comparison. What ground the caltrops are in has some relevance, but much more important would be what was stepping on them. With the adrenaline pumping and a battle going on, you might not even notice it in your foot.
Well, I would argue that it depends on how big the caltrop is. Make it a foot high and put it in a shallow pit...
Well, after a certain size the effect is rendered rather moot on account of the fact that people won't go anywhere NEAR the giant spike sticking out of the ground. I would say that the optimum size is three inces or so: it can still cause MAJOR pain, but you could concievebly ignore it in the field of battle.
Well alone it would not be very effective. But you could improve on its use in a variety of ways:
And so on.
Niiiiiiiiice. Giant "morning stars" also spring to mind.
No. Heat them to a nice, yellow glow, then drop them on the enemy along with the coals you used. 
Heh why not use fire magic to craft red-hot caltrops that never cool? Its hard to ignore one if just being close to it is enough to cook your feet.
Now you're thinking like a channeler!
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