[Gameplay Idea] Separating Parties & Armies

from Elemental Forums

I've been playing around with this idea since the first night Elemental launched, though I'm not sure if it's been raised here before now.  If so, I apologise.

 

Like everyone else who has ever played this game I've been frustrated by the lack of balance between individual champions and stacks of soldiers.  I've read some well thought out posts on this board regarding ways to balance stats, or use a new 'to hit' mechanic, but I think that the most elegant way to solve this issue is to have 'adventuring parties' and 'armies' as separate entities in the game.

Allow me to elaborate through story.

In the early game I have a great time exploring with my soverign and early summons and weak champions.  Taking on wolves and darklings for small rewards is fun, the sort of fun I expected from this game.  What is not fun is when the game rather awkwardly transitions to the point where a full army is needed to complete a 'dungeon crawl' sort of quest and even moving about the map with a party of only adventurers will result in death.  At this point champions become irrelevant, and the fun of having high level heroes evaporates. 

Why not make a party of individuals a separate entity to an army of brigands? They can have slightly more movement than an army, to account for them moving about easier.  If a hostile army detects a band of adventurers and moves onto their square they should not automatically surround and attack them.  Depending on some skills maybe the party could attempt to evade capture.  If they are captured they could be ransomed back to the player.  Perhaps individuals could take on some of the gameplay roles that agents have in Total War games.  Hiring a thief would allow you to sneak into enemy cities etc... In my opinion this would give the champions much need flavour.  This way champions would be relevant for the entire game, and new ways of putting them to use would become apparent over the game.

When it comes to sending your champions into large battles why not allow them to attach themselves to a group of soldiers, like a bodyguard?  It fixes the imbalance between champion health and unit stack damage in a cleaner way than just quadrupling everyones health, while giving fairly generic soldiers more flavour by giving them leaders who could give them new abilities, depending on the champion's talents.

Here's a playthrough:  My sovereign heads out into the wilds to battle a party of brigands who've taken an inn hostage.  On the way home he notices that a proper army of brigands has been gathering in the woods near his capital.  On reaching the city he uses the 'join an army' action, bringing up an interface where he can attach himself to his personal bodyguard unit (which each sovereign starts the game with) and attaches his famous gladiator friend to another group of soldiers (which gives them a morale+attack bonus maybe).  Heading out into the woods he meets the bandit army in battle.  Here is where I can see one flaw in my idea.  Balancing the same set of spells so that they are powerful in both 'adventures' and 'epic battles' would be difficult.  I believe many people have suggested that shooting a fireball at an army should really make an attack against each unit individually.  If this was implemented then most balancing issues would fix themselves, as spells would naturally scale depending on how many units are targeted by it.

So, facing the bandit army my sovereign casts a firestorm spell.  Considering that he is supposedly an all powerful channeler, in command of a rare shard of fire, he doesnt roll: a miss, a two and a 79.  He scorches half the army and half the forest.  When the bandit king and his bodyguard unit approach my gladiator's company perhaps he could initiate a champion duel.  This could be a decicive moment in a battle, that turns the tide of morale.  When the battle is completed the sovereign detaches from the army again and sets off to find a legendary spellbook he has heard rumours of, without the fear of being unexpedly ambushed and forced into tactical battle with a CR 74,000-seething-horde of mobs.

 

I apologise for how much I've rambled so far, and I hope my incoherence hasn't hurt my chances of getting this noticed by devs.  I'm aware that these are changes that require then entire game to be reworked, but I'm convinced that they will improve Elemental immeasureably.  But then again, I'm a lone fan who has never made a video game in his life and these are possibly all awful ideas.

 

Discuss!:

7,372 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Separating the systems feels too artificial and means balancing yet another game on top of the current one but the "bodyguards" idea has been brought up a few times already
And it has potential.

 

The easiest way to implement it (from a user's point of few) were if a "hero" unit would only have to stay adjacent to regular troops.
No more complicated than that.
Any hugely convoluted system will not be useable by the AI, making it worthless.

Then these toops would automatically protect the hero, soaking up the monstrously scaled damage numbers while the hero only took the same percentage in damage.
(as a rough outline - the actual number crunching would be a bit more advanced)

Units with shields would be more effective for that, soaking a greater percentage of damage and "tanking better" for the hero.
That would make it very useful to have at least one "tank" unit in your army, sacrificing the currently all-powerful 2-handed weapons of buttkicking for... boring shields.

Such dependancies would even improve the tactical aspects of battles because right now, all the wind spells that blow units somewhere else are completely pointless.

 

That could be fleshed out so that (for melee attacks) the shielding unit must be adjacent to the hero and the attacking unit.
That would would make fast units (cavalry anyone?) useful for actually outflanking the enemy!

Or what about death magic? It's not very dark and deathly atm. There could be a spell that links a friendly unit to the hero, making it soak damage but less efficiently than if it were doing that in melee range - only it would work at any range. A death pact spell.
Horribly despicable death magic. Yeah baby!

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I like the idea of separation. One outcome could be to apply organized only to parties, to make parties cross forests faster. Parties that can use mountain passes that armies cant etc.  Make armies slower but more powerful (epic)

That would also mean that if someone slower attacked someone faster there should be a chance to escape. That would also make scouts actually useful.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Robert, reply 1
Separating the systems feels too artificial and means balancing yet another game on top of the current one but the "bodyguards" idea has been brought up a few times already
And it has potential.

 

The easiest way to implement it (from a user's point of few) were if a "hero" unit would only have to stay adjacent to regular troops.
No more complicated than that.
Any hugely convoluted system will not be useable by the AI, making it worthless.


End of Robert's quote

Hmm, I still disagree.  In my opinion creating a system where individuals are matched up against individuals, and armies are matched up against armies is the opposite of an artificial system; it’s the natural way to resolve the imbalance between unit strengths.  I would also argue that far from being hugely convoluted, such as system is actually more intuitive for a 4x strategy, though I acknowledge that this is just my own personal perspective as a gamer.

And besides, if you implement the bodyguard system without separating ‘adventuring parties’ from ‘armies’ then you still reach the awkward point in a game when it’s too dangerous for your sovereign to wander his own kingdom alone, and if your only option is to put all of your champions into armies then only fighters and casters are important anymore, which limits the potential for Elemental to have interesting and fun champions in the late game.

Perhaps it would require too much effort to reconfigure the AI’s strategy, but in the end I’d really be delighted if this just became something that Stardock considered for the expansions, I don’t expect it immediately.  Now that I think about it though, I pretty much always encounter enemy sovereigns wandering by themselves in my territory, so maybe they already work this way!

Your other points on tactical battle mechanics are beyond how far I’ve thought, though I agree with all of them.

Quoting buchecker, reply 2
I like the idea of separation. One outcome could be to apply organized only to parties, to make parties cross forests faster. Parties that can use mountain passes that armies cant etc.  Make armies slower but more powerful (epic)

That would also mean that if someone slower attacked someone faster there should be a chance to escape. That would also make scouts actually useful.
End of buchecker's quote

Yes, this is exactly the kind of stuff I was trying to describe!

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Hmm, I still disagree. In my opinion creating a system where individuals are matched up against individuals, and armies are matched up against armies is the opposite of an artificial system; it’s the natural way to resolve the imbalance between unit strengths. I would also argue that far from being hugely convoluted, such as system is actually more intuitive for a 4x strategy, though I acknowledge that this is just my own personal perspective as a gamer.
End of quote

The problems are in the details. If a "party" cannot be engaged with an army then what if that party goes around in your rear areas, conquering undefended cities but skipping those that have a squad (effectively an army unit) in / near them?
Should you have to draw all your army generals together just to be allowed to attack such a party? That's a lot of micromanagement considering you have to get your champions back to all their respective armies afterwards.

And with separate systems, the AI must learn to play 2 different games at the same time, further increasing the odds of failure.
And it must work in multiplayer where you will have such "uncatchable" parties on guerilla duty. A single fast "adventurer" champion with horse and other movement buffs could do a number on your shrines, resources, caravans, while your guard units would not be allowed to catch it...

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

 

Quoting Robert, reply 4

The problems are in the details. If a "party" cannot be engaged with an army then what if that party goes around in your rear areas, conquering undefended cities but skipping those that have a squad (effectively an army unit) in / near them?
Should you have to draw all your army generals together just to be allowed to attack such a party? That's a lot of micromanagement considering you have to get your champions back to all their respective armies afterwards.

And with separate systems, the AI must learn to play 2 different games at the same time, further increasing the odds of failure.
And it must work in multiplayer where you will have such "uncatchable" parties on guerilla duty. A single fast "adventurer" champion with horse and other movement buffs could do a number on your shrines, resources, caravans, while your guard units would not be allowed to catch it...
End of Robert's quote

Fair enough, I didn’t explain the details very well.  Parties would definitely not be able to capture cities, that would defeat the whole purpose of making them a separate entity on the strategic layer.  The point is to create an entirely new context for champions to be useful in, which balances their usefulness with armies without just artificially bumping up stats so they kill more.

The kinds of activities I imagine parties/champions would be capable of doing are the same things I hear echoed on this forum again and again such as espionage, scouting, more complex adventuring, more interaction with city building and resources etc.  So yes, if another player has hired a legendary assassin to wreak havoc in your cities you will have to devote resources to combating such a threat, which could include taking a powerful general from the frontlines to deal with the infiltrator.  It can’t be too convoluted for the A.I. if it works in most other strategy games to have separate military and non-military entities.

What I haven’t explained properly is that I don’t expect these changes to happen in the next release.  In fact, if this was tacked onto the existing game it would probably just make it worse.  What I’m hoping is that the devs are currently re-designing Elemental from the top down, the way that Wit described in his excellent post earlier on this forum.  I’m hoping that for the upcoming expansions they include a system similar to the one I’ve outlined, which could be made interrelated with other game mechanics in very clever ways.

If they don’t change the current system where all units are combat entities, that only interact with the world through the tactical battle mechanic then:

-Champions will only ever compete in both large-scale battle and adventuring contexts with artificial and messy stat tweaking.
-& they needlessly limit the scope for fun and depth with the entire champion/adventuring system.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

I like the OP idea. Yes, Adventurer should go adventure, while Army should take over the other cities / destroy the enemy. The Adventurer should able to command an Army too. That's how we balance the RPG and CIV type strategy of this game.

 

The Adventurer can go everywhere, even cross the enemy border without any restriction, but they can't capture a city. These people should be considered as stealth unit until other adventurer / Heroes spot them. Of course, your Sovereign should not be able to do it.