Hello Frogboy, 

I've touched up (& added a bit) a summary of my rumble in the thread [Tactical Combat] How to make it simple and provide variety

Thank you

For me MoM is the gold standard, I would start there.  MoM had some balance issues and did not have a small enough granularity (Mostly in To Hit).

What I would like to see is all the MoM attributes with better granularity, and statistic modifications for height and terrain, and Damage Types.

Height

I would like to see units defending higher ground then their attacks get +1 Attack and +1 Defense (A very small bonus)

I would also like ranged ballistic units to gain additional range when firing at targets lower then themselves (But for to hit calculations to use the full distance).

Sammual

I know there is a lot of replies, wondering if mine is going to be read. I decided to post here because I think it is the best place to talk about it. Here is the various factors you should consider:

Tactical VS non-tactical battles: Tactical battles has the desadvantage of being long, creates downtime in multiplayer and makes AI harder to devellop. But it makes combat more interesting and allows some micromanaging during the battle. First, I think the game should offer both options like in MOO/MOM, tactical or non-tactical. This way, you can speed up the game by using simple battles. I would even add the option to skip battles during the game if you want a fast resolution.Non-tactical battles could also be used as a temporary combat system for testing the game.

Second, since you can cast spell, even if you want to resolve battles fast, you need to be able to interfere. In MOM, you can't if you skip battles, it assume you cast spells. But for a non-tactical combat resolution, I would prefer be able to see each turn of battle where I can decide to cast more spells before clicking next turn according to how the battle goes.

Non-Tactical battles could be resolved "a la Ogre Battle". Units are placed in a certain formation  and during the combat  each unit target a unit by themselves according to the priorities (attack weakest/ strongest, etc) you have set. An Idea I had is to use the Infantry, cavalry, archery structure which I wanted to use in some of my games:

Archers attacks first but defender choose casualties

Infantry attacks second, but can only target ennemy infantry unless there is no ennemy infantry.

Cavalry attacks last but can target any unit.

This kind of combat system could be adapted to a computer game. The computer will choose the target according to the priorities. So the only thing the player would need to do is "Set Priority to attack and protect", "cast spells", click next turn, retreat or not, start a new turn.

For tactical battles, I think there is enough suggestions in this thread to make it interesting but you can still consider the following elements:

Army Structure: I presume armies are going to be structured by units. There are other structure possible like in Romance of the 3 kingdom (refered in this thread later on as R3K) which manage a number of soldiers which could be distributed in various units. Personally I prefer the unit structure since there is a so large variety of units.

Area Covered: Do you want the map to cover and area of the world (ex:territory), or cover the city and it's immediate surroundings. In most Civ types of games, Battles are focused around a city rather than a territory. In R3K 11, they had the unique idea of fusioning the tactical map with the world map which creates 1 big map that can manage battles and non-battle actions.

Map types: Everybody knows there are square and hex map. But have you considered the Graph Map ( a series of dot connected by lines). Units would move from dots to dots. You can also make joined attacks by making 2 group of units attack the same target. Graph map could also make the AI easier to design and make the combat faster to resolve since you do not have to move units individually, many times on many square. It also make the player focus on the resulting action. ex: I want to outflank my opponent, I make 1 move and it's done instead of making a series of moves to get the result.

Victory condition: How do you win a battle? That must be weird to say, most of the time, the battle are won when one side is destroyed or when 1 side retreats, but there are other ways to do this. For example, in shaterred union, you fought in an area which contained many cities and you need to control a certain number of cities in order to win. So the idea is that you can win without killing everybody which allows them to retreat and eventually retaliate. I also used the concept of tactical points that you need to capture in order to win. It's a bit like the capture HQ mechanism. Still in a fantasy game, some units like flying and burrowing units can make it easier to capture tactical points due to their high mobility or defense bypassing.

Leaders/Heroes: Everybody likes heroes, and besides questing, I think they would like heroes to participate in battle. I really did not liked how MOM managed heroes in battle because most of the time, it became a unit easily targetted which died easily. I think heroes should lead the battle and be placed outside the map of the battle. If you loose the battle, it could have some chances of beign captured. Heroes should give your army some advantages. You can give him passive advantages like all archers gain bonus, because he is better with working with that type of unit. You can give him some magical abilities: He protect his army from certain types of spells or give him special strategies (see next topic).

Special strategies: If you have few square/hex on the battle map or use a graph map, you could make units or leader have strategies which can allow units to attack and move in various ways. In R3k XI, there are tons of special move that you can use which makes battles more living. But if the map is too large (too much hex) planning the strategic moves becomes overwhelming (which is the problem if R3K XI).

Occurence: How many times will battles occur? This is important, especially in multiplayer for downtime, to know how much time a battle will interrupt the game. It is also important to know the quality of battles, are there few/lot of interesting/meaningless battles. In a game like R3K, Since invasions was from territory to territory, generally an invasion took place with a considerable amount of units and there was not too much battles which give and interest for other players to watch. But for example, in MOM, it happens many time where you have a few units spreaded on the map which happens to have a fight. It creates the problem of having many battles to resolve, which slows the turn, and makes them uninteresting to watch and manage.

This is all I have right now regarding battles. Hope it helps

I think it was said best that tactical battles are done well if a well-led inferior force can defeat a poorly led superior force.

Also, simultaneous orders for both player n player, or player and enemy ... sounds like a must ... so that skill in battle-formation and battle fluidity will shine through, as opposed to min/maxing on turns.

No damage types?

/sadpanda

Larienna,  your Reply #155 is one of the most insightful post I’ve seen in this thread, +1 Karma.

Army Structure: I understand you meant that existing equipment is distributed to soldiers just right before they leave the city for combat, without training.   I can see the beauty of simplicity here (which reduces micromanagement).  SD developers talks about training the soldier with their equipment, so they will have some bonus.  Personally, I don’t see there is much value in doing the training part; because I do not expect there is much decision needed here, all gamers will train their soldier when circumstances allows.  I’ll have a slight preference on the simpler way of Romance of 3 Kingdoms (R3K).

Area Covered: Fusing the tactical combat map reflecting global map terrain is an excellent idea, especially there will be RNG in EWOM, making tactical combat extremely variable.

Victory condition:  Is “capture the flag” the 3rd alternative to Fight or Flight?  I am not sure if and how that fits in tactical combat of EWOM.

Occurrence & Tactical VS non-tactical battles: How many battles will occur?  How long is those battles? I share the same concern, so I did proposed two things already.  Make combat short & finish in 10 minutes at most.  Make TWish plausible realtime tactical combat more turn-base-ish by skipping animation.

Hi,

I agree with the crowd asking for elemental damage types. A fire attack should cause more damage to a water elemental than a cold attack. This idea has been used in lots of fantasy games and settings, from CRPG's (Might & Magic saga, Ultima Saga, etc.) to JRPG's (Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, etc.) to roguelikes (ADOM, Crawl, POWDER, etc.) to strategic combat games (Ogre Tactics, MoM to some extent, etc.). Practically all the good old and new fantasy games have this, it's an idea that has been proven fun and Just Works(tm). Please include it.

As for weapon damage types, I see that as less fun, they tend to add complication (unlike magic/elemental damage types, which are more obvious and whose relevance doesn't extend to all units). However there are other ways of having different weapon types do different things without necessarily adding damage types. Check the weapon system in POWDER the roguelike, for example. In that game, different weapons give you access to different abilities: I don't remember all the abilities right now, but the idea is something like that with longswords you can learn to parry, with rapiers you can lead to disarm, with spears or maces or something you charge, etc. Perhaps it's not the most realistic system but I find it fun, and wouldn't mind seeing something like that in a strategy game.

Finally I would really like to see a turn-based combat option... I always find that in real-time combat my clicking order tends to have a bigger influence than actual tactics, even if I am able to pause the game. Have a look at Might and Magic VI/VII/VIII (not Heroes, just plain Might and Magic). They have real-time combat, probably because it sells more to younger people; but they keep the turn-based option for old-school Might and Magic players. The turn-based option is actually little more than a mode where the real-time combat is automatically paused on a regular basis. It seems to include some further adjustments to make it feel like real turn-based combat, but not many, I think it should be easy enough to code that once you have the real-time mode. And it worked for me. It didn't feel exactly like playing a pure turn-based game, but it felt good enough that I loved those games (if they only came with the real time mode I don't think I would have even bothered to play them to the end).

I would like you to see working more on demigod. the game has almost died now...

Where is promised modding tool?

Where are promised 2 new demigods?

delete.

While this is a fantasy game, morale is [should be] a very imortant gameplay feature imo. Example: You attack a dragon with 200 peasants. I think that most of these peasants should try to flee when they spot the dragon, IF they don't have some serious morale boost at least. [via spells/items etc.] It's realistic like that. Fantasy games needs to have some realism in cases like this.

Those of you worrying about complexity.  Is it because you don't want to think, or because you're worried about how long it will take you to do the combat?

Anyone here that has ever played a TW game, or any of the good table top war games, knows exactly how important morale is to the flow of them.  With morale, your 20 guys either win or lose, usually with most of them still alive, and the victor runs down the enemy or they successfully flee the battle.  Without morale, you have to grind each other down to the bitter end.

A more complex, more realistic tactical battle, will not take more time.  Your computer does all the irritating things, like rolling dice for each unit in a regiment.  All of the drawbacks are gone, all of the advantages still present.  The better you are at exploiting your advantages, the faster the combat would come to a close.

Now, if you really don't like to think, well...

I agree with Morale and Flanking.  In so many games like AoW or HoMM, you can surround a unit with 2,3, even 4 of yours, and it's has no advantage what so ever.  Not only is that really unrealistic (unless your fighting a 100 eyed giant octopus), but it takes away a wonderful part of potential stratagey mechanics.

I had never condsidered Endurance before, but it brings up many possibilites, like how fast do you march on the map (on one game I had, Kohan, you could move units much faster, but only in a collum formation, and you would lose endurance too).  It also brings up the possibility of supplies, and supply lines.  If units have no line of supply, perhaps their Endurance could go down a tiny bit every turn.  And it also prevents a "Stack of Death" from attacking over and over, if they have to regain their Endurace after a battle.

And as for damage modifiers vs Elements, Fire could lower morale (most people on fire don't quite feel up to fighting); Cold could lower speed; Water could lower Endurance (hard to fight and not breath);  Wind could, do extra damage to flyers maybe.

I agree with Psy, this game seems to be aimed at the TBS crowd.  And the TBS crowd likes the "S"tratagey part of any game the best.  And the main reasons for all the economics; building construction; resourse collection; diplomacy; and logistic are all really for just one reason: Battles.  Strategic battles. 

I didn't read any of the previous posts, so some of this may have been mentioned. I will haphazardly arrange my thoughts by vague categories; it may not be very organized, but at least you'll know what I'm talking about.

1. Victory Conditions- This should be about breaking enemy morale. Destroying an entire army is somewhat unrealistic and rather silly. Also it makes investment in an army somewhat haphazard; all of it could be swept away in a single poorly arranged combat. Someone mentioned CTF motif. A possibility is capturing battle standards, which could affect opposition morale severely. The details are unimportant to me from here, save no tactical control points or anything like that. And no real CTF, because that's also very silly.

2. Mobility- Make battlefield terrain make a difference. Agincourt is an excellent example of this. The heavily armor french knights found it difficult to maneuever in the muddy ground and as such were much deaded. This is a simplification, of course. My point is that you make a better distinction in mobility by paying attention to terrain factors than you do by actually looking at "speed" factors. A man who fights in heavy armor is trained to move in it; the idea that people in heavy armor move arbitrarily "slower" than other troops in actual combat is somewhat silly. The difference wouldn't be that huge excepting the heaviest of armor types (which were never very common anyhows). It is better to reflect mobility in terms of how terrain affects a unit.

3. Tactical Control- This is easy to overlook. Assuming your battle maps are different from your main map (which I favor instead of the RTK11 approach), it is important to allow player control of where battles take place. A good general picks their battlefield if they have the choice. A player whose leader/Hero/Sovereign is skilled in battle should be given a choice of battlefields, thus picking to their advantage (ie muddy fields if the enemy has cavalry ala Agincourt, open plains if the player favors heavy cavalry, hilly areas for archers and the like). This is a simple, yet oft neglected dimension.

4. Damage Types- I'm pretty sure you're not talking about what everyone thinks you're talking about. Everyone seems to be thinking "no fire damage type!" whereas I'm relatively certain you meant "Should blunt weapons be good against plate, but weaker against chain, and piercing weapons good against chain but weaker versus plate" and so on. Obviously, fire damage will be different from metal damage. The question is whether stabby damage will be different from slicey damage. I fundamentally agree that this gets too complicated too quickly. But if you want to approximate it, I would focus more on how weapon ranges interact with one another. This is a good way of making different weapons significantly different without having to make a million sub-types of damage (and accounting for weapons that can be used in more than one way). Simply put, longer weapons almost always have the advantage. Exceptions could be extremely long range weapons versus enemies with defenses specifically appropriate for them; I have the Spanish bucklermen against pikemen in mind here.

5. Formations- I do think the system could use formations. IE, you make 5 swordsmen and then group them into a formation that then moves as a single unit. They could adopt particular variations as a formation which could give them particular advantages. Of course, this has the possibility of becoming exceedingly complex, but it's also a good way to get a hand on battles with tons of units.

6. Experience- From the original journal, the question was posed as to how to make experience more than just about stat boosts. Two things can be used. Firstly, morale. If units have the capacity to break, then the more experienced a unit is the harder it is to break them, which makes a huge difference without being directly attack/defense stat related. If you combine this with the formation idea (of some kind) from above, then you would see a huge difference in an experienced army whose formations hold and whose men don't break as opposed to an inexperienced army whose formations are sloppy and inefficient, and who wither away under pressure. Of course, better training should give better starting morale, but only experience should make truly battle hardened soldiers.