[Suggestion][Gameplay][Combat]How to eliminate the tactical dogpile?

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.

I definitely agree that outnumbering someone and dogpiling should be extremely effective.  I would even suggest adding attack bonus for flanking or coming from behind. 

My point is that these bonuses should not outweigh the bonus from spreading out your attacks.

For example, suppose you have a 3 on 3 swordsman fight. Now assume they are lined up so that they are toe to toe. I'm picturing a small section of two lines of Roman phalanx when the come into contact head on.

Now, on one side, each of them attack the person across from them.  The otherside concentrates all attacks in the middle.  Who should win that fight?  I think in the real world, the ones attacking across would win.  The middle guy might get killed first, but the two outsiders on the other line should drop pretty quickly after that.  In most computer games, the concentrating strategy would win hands down. 

The concentrating strategy can be fun, I guess.  It turns into a puzzle of who you need to eliminate first, it's just pretty tired at this point since most games do this.  On the other hand, I would rather see individual fights across the map were all your forces are getting whittled down.  That way your favorite guy doesn't go down right away because that's who the other team decided to pick on.  It will also give you more time to adjust your strategy since guys won't drop so quickly, so you can get your healing in reinforcements there in time.  It will also mean whole sections of your line couldl crumble at the same time, which could be fun and interesting.

I haven't played Blood Bowl, but that sounds interesting.  The attack of opportunity could be cool too, but it gets complicated pretty quickly (at least based on my experience with D&D). 

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.

Wounds wouldn't really work, imo. Using wounds to that extent suggests that units are more than human - they can possibly receive full-round concentrated attack (like, multiple hits by spears/swords and what have you) and still live. And besides, even if weakened, there's usually no reason why you shouldn't just finish the unit off. It has fewer health left than other enemy units, and still can do damage. Unless wounds mean the unit is weakened enough to be a non-threat, in which case you'd want to concentrate attacks long enough to effectively eliminate the unit anyway.

I haven't played DnD, but I somewhat know the rules, I think. Anyway, I don't believe there's need for any compex implementation for attacks of opportunity. Like, moving away from or passing by an enemy unit that's not in some way disabled (like stunned) always triggers attack of opportunity, or something like that.

Age of Wonders's tactical combat also has similar mechanic, and it works well. Dogpiling in AoW is effective, but a bit harder since you can't freely move units after they're near enemies.

Oo.. duels might be nice to have, btw. As in, champions and sovereigns can challenge opponent's leaders, refusal means morale loss for every unit in that army. The dueling heroes couldn't be attacked or be attacked by other units until one of them is dead.. possibly they can't move away from each other anyway. Dunno, that just seems cool.

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.

I don't understand why reducing incentives to focus-fire is a desirable design goal.

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.

That's why wounds would do well Healing would just give HP back, not heal the wounds. Only time and sufficient magic/surgery can.

So a unit witha  wound of -25% that gets its full health back would still have a -25% effectiveness in battle. So first strike would be really really important.

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 being able to run by enemy units:

When the run-by is is allowed, I definitely think it is something that reduces overall enjoyment and negates the potential for interesting tactical situations.  I love forming lines of defense, and also attempting to outflank the enemy.  It's enjoyable as the combat goes on to see these lines warp and reform, and then when they are finally broken you can mop the enemy up.

Attacks of opportunity is one way to mitigate this.  It creates a big penalty for just running by an enemy.  On the downside, it is pretty complex to implement and to understand.  Also, if the attack to enemy ratio is not good, then in most cases it might be worth just running by to get the positional advantage.

I would prefer that you simply can't run next to an enemy unit.  Each unit could assert a small area of influence.  The enemy movement is reduced to a single step inside of that influence.  This is not entirely realistic, but from a game mechanic it is really good.  Also, if you assume trying to run by a guy with a sword would lead to an instakill (which I imagine it would), it makes sense just not to allow that situation to occur

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.

Also, on a side note.  I am glad I am not the only one who is tired of the focused fire being the top strategy in all games.  

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.

How are attacks of opportunity harder to implement/understand than limited movement near enemies?

Though that could also work. I like attacks as penalty more though. Especially if pushing enemies away with spells can trigger them.. and other silliness :>

Agreed on AoW-style ranged combat. Ranged weapons are simply too good as focus fire, and they really need ranged penalties too.

Adding some mechanics mentioned in this thread would open lots of new possibilities for special abilities too. And maybe uses for stats.. like agility.

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.

It's in fact the other way around : once you're wounded your defense is lower, so you will take even more damage in combat In fact it speeds up things.

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.

Acceptable world -> company of soldiers has a shared HP, single defense stat (equal to defense of 1 soldier), and separate attacks.

example: 10 soldiers of 5/2 ... 100 HP, 2 defense, 10 attacks of 5.

Perfect World -> company of soldiers have separate HP, single defense stat, and separate attacks

example: 10 soldiers of 5/2 ... 10 individual "plates" of 10 HP, 2 defense, and 1 attack of 5 for EACH plate that is alive.

Most basic implementation would be requiring a flat training time for all new plates (advanced implementation would be a balanced and varied training time for plates depending on the unit complexity) ... and re-filing plates would cost population and time (but not equipment/money).

Advanced Wages implementation could have unit wages slightly dependent on how many plates are currently alive, but that is just polish.

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).

Anyways, for a unit that is more than one soldier ... the defense should ALWAYS be the same (equal to one soldier), while the number of attacks will go down.

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.

How about any unit that's attacked by any other unit than the one it attacked take more damage from those "alternate" attacks.

That would seem to play out the 3 on 3 line of swordsman scenario. If all 3 on one side focus on the middle guy, the two outer guys on the other side would do extra damage.

A B C

X Y Z

A-C attack Y. X attacks A, Y attacks B, Z attacks C.

Y takes extra damage from A and C, but A and C take extra damage from X and Z. If the bonus is high enough, maybe A and C also die. After all, they have no defense other than hoping X and Z happen to hit their armor.

That would leave B vs X and Z. I would think that would make focused attacks a risk choice in melee.

For range, it would be harder to stop because there's no one attack an archer (unless it's another archer or a melee that happened to make it back there. I suppose stealing...er...borrowing the AoW mechanic of a chance to hit friendly on range attacks would help. Of course, if the archers aren't obstructed, it doesn't do anything, but at that point, maybe the risk is in the position (putting your archers in the open so they have no chance to hit friendly troops).

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.

It is clear to me that archers are the biggest problem in the current system we see. You guys seem to be talking more about complex modding and less about a presentable idea to give to the devs. I suggest that we accept their usage of grouped units and ask them to look at the ability of an archer to assassinate one's Sov in the first round. Obviously AoW handled this VERY well, but that kind of system will never be in the build they are making for release and would seriously be a headache to code.

What we need is to make sure that a Sov can enter on the front lines and not die from piling archers and heavy tanks. The promissed dodge ability could solve this problem by making the Sov a waste of time for archers (i.e. he could be so adept at dodging that only 1 out of every ten arrows would hit due to a basic enchantment we can all use). They could then be set back to the orginal role of an archer, hitting the dudes without shields. The counterattack function already makes it difficult to best a Sov at hand to hand, leaving him to only fear magic and failing a defense roll. This is how I feel the basic use of a fighter-Sov to function.

Shields could very logically be the deterrent for an archer. They should give us a 60% chance to block an arrow. This would mean that four out of ten arrows would actually strike and then they have to make it through the armor. Realism and fun functionality can sometimes coincide.

Any objections?

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)