Military

Discussion on game mechanics, balancing etc.
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Trilarion
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Post by Trilarion »

I can only speak about me, but I almost always played Imperialism with tactical battles and I was immensely proud of myself when winning on a high/impossible difficulty level. Of course it is cheating and the AI was cheating too - I knew that. The challenge was then to win from a difficult position with a small army like Sardinia or Ottoman empire. Playing England instead was piece of cake, almost like a tutorial.

Actually I yet have to write the After-Action-Report for my recent game with Prussia where Prussia alone took one half the world with tactical battles. Still it was fun in a way, although I also hate it and want to improve it.

Another game that had tactical or strategic battles was Master of Orion 2. Considered a master piece of strategic gaming. Did you play it with tactical battles? Also there the AI was cheating and the capabilities weren't so good, but I didn't have the feeling the AI was fighting completely stupid. Surely I couldn't cause 10 times the damage.

Another game is the Civilization series. The AI was dumb in that it came with small stacks always attacking at the same position, still many, many people play it. They must enjoy it somehow.

I would say the following. We'll have strategic battles included, where this problem you describe is not occuring. Nobody will force the player at any time to use tactical battle mode. Maybe this should be an scenario option instead of a battle-by-battle based decision. That should satisfy all the people who want a challenging AI and do not like tactical battles. And those games should not be compared with games playing with tactical battles.

Then (maybe as a second step) I want to include tactical battle for those who like tactical battles. To some extent it's a wargame. It might even become a multiplayer game where again this problem is less prominent. Of course all what we discuss here means that the tactical battle part should be kept simple. The reason I like tactical battles so much is that I like them also in other strategy games and that moving troops around on a large scale is just too abstract for me. For me immersion looses.

The programming design (server-clients) allows multiplayer games right from the beginning.

For those who want tactical battles and a challenging AI - we'll have to say sorry folks, we cannot deliver such things. You have to choose and accept a certain amount of cheating then. For example I could imagine that AI units in tactical battles against players get a strength bonus (if you haven't the brain, maybe you have it in the muscles :) ).

Anyway, if we want to have higher difficulties for both modes beyond having a bad starting position (handicap) we'll start introducing cheats in the AI as everybody else because there is no alternative currently.

In Summary: I'm for having maximal freedom and openness. People who want a non-cheating AI and strategic battles will get them. People who want tactical battles will also get them (maybe later) and people who want a challenge and accept a cheating AI will get that too. The rest we cannot fullfill. What do you think about this?
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Re:

Post by Xylander »

Trilarion wrote:In Summary: I'm for having maximal freedom and openness. People who want a non-cheating AI and strategic battles will get them. People who want tactical battles will also get them (maybe later) and people who want a challenge and accept a cheating AI will get that too. The rest we cannot fullfill. What do you think about this?
Sounds good enough for me, I take it. :-)
Don't repeat yourself. (DRY)
Keep it simple, stupid. (KISS)
You ain't gonna need it. (YAGNI)
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Trilarion
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Post by Trilarion »

Then let's talk about strategic battle resolution. Given two armies (one attacking) and a province with certain fortifications what should be the outcome of the battle?

What would probably happen in a real battle is that first the attacker estimates his chances and flees if chances are close to zero. Otherwise he attacks and the defender's artillery can have a first shoot on the attacker's advancing infantry, then the attackers artillery reacts and shoots at the defender's infantry, then the defender's infantry on the attacker's infantry and then it comes to melee where everybody can hit everyone. Each unit could select it's aim as the most dangerous enemiy's unit in order to minimize the offensive capacity of the enemy. Depending on the general attitude (cautious or bold) one of the armies might retreat at some point some or all of its units.

An alternative would be since we want to have tactical battle too at some point to start implementing it even in a dumb version that would be no challenge for a human opponent and to let two of them play against each other. Since they have the same strength the outcome could be called fair and it would help in developing tactical battles and would remove the work associated with developing a separate strategic battle outcome as described above. However it would mean more work until the first successful implementation.

Both or anything else is okay with me.
Veneteaou
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Re: VII. Military

Post by Veneteaou »

I like the idea of initially setting the AI stupid and seeing what happens. Allow us to play some battles out both attacking and defending against the AI, and see what really needs to change.
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War at sea

Post by Trilarion »

Now let's focus on the war at sea. It's mostly clear. You have a numbe of ships, conveniently combined in fleets and you either protect your trade, disturb other trade, invade coastal provinces or protect from being invaded. So far, so good. However as can be seen in the recent Play of the Original by Ven (Link) the navy was a bit overpowered in the original, at least when playing against the AI. Therefore I would like to discuss some issues:
  • Do we want tactical sea battle? I guess not. I can do without and my judgement is that it would importance on something that is not meant to be important.
  • Do we need sea zones? The disadvantage is that fleets can hop between them and so it's random if you actually meet an enemy's fleet. Without sea zones we could just have a range criteria and define an engagement probability based on distance which goes smoothly from high too low. But if you want sea zones, you'll get sea zones.
  • What do we need to do to balance the importance of the navy? I think about reducing the chance to actually disturb trade or prevent an invasion together with having upkeep for a navy.
  • How would you do it?
Strongly related is that all trade goes over the seas. Now this is a bit unrealistic but clearly due to gameplay considerations. I think we can and should keep it for the sea operations to keep making sense, but where should trade routes take course? For example between Switzerland and Austria which has a direct land border? Or between France and Russia? There would be at least two possibilities (baltic or mediterranean route). Probably trade taking different routes is more realistic.

What do you think?
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Re: War at sea

Post by Xylander »

1. I like sea zones because wqe have them on land and this way we have the same rules on land and on sea.
2. I don't like that we need ships to trade with land locked nations. Your are dead if your enemy controls a bigger navy. Most of the time there is no chance to recover once you are in the situation, because you are cut off all markets. Having routes over land (of course not through enemy territory) might be a solution to this.
3. You can't reliably protect your navy from being attacked. If you have ships in port they'll automatically escort trade ships. If your oppnent blockades you with Ship-of-the-line and you have clippers you have best chances to break the blockade and you just have to replace lost clippers (cheap). If you have two or three Ship-of-the-Line left from battles - what can you do? Leave them at sea? No, they get killed. Have them in port? No, they'll escort and get killed. We need a solution to this.
4. No tactical battles on sea. I hate this!
5. Ships must have some sort of upkeep like other military units. If we employ my economic model assigning workers will do the job (like in Imp2). Please don't lower the chances of intercepting enemy fleets. This doesn't sound satisfying.
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Trilarion
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Post by Trilarion »

Sea zones: I am fine with them. However what if there are two adjacent sea zones (A, B) and one fleet cruises from A to B, another hostile fleet from B to A. Should they encounter each other? Should they miss each other? How was it in the original? One way of reducing this effect would be to count your presence half in both sea zones when calculating encounter probabilities for travelling fleets.

Land locked nations: Would have a big advantage because they could trade with other land locked nations without the fear of being intercepted or loosing ships while on the other hand if all nations around are hostile being completely cut-off, of trade posibilities. Do we want to cut somebody completely off from trade? It's more realistic but less balanced. Difficult.

In the original every nation had a home port (Switzerland somewhere in northern germany iirc) and from that all trade went but also ships were there initially. Where should ships be built for land locked nations, if they decide they need a navy?

And what if trade is between a land-locked nation and another nation on another continent. Which trade route would make sense when there are several combinations of land and sea trade routes for the very same thing?? I have no good idea for this at the moment.

Protecting your navy I think this was possible in the original at least in the home port. It should be able to leave it in a friendly port and giving it orders to stay there. For this we need to define where and what ports could be (not in every province but more than in the original).

So maybe you can build and let ships stay in all friendly ports. If you build or let ships stay in friendly ports that are not on your own territory you have to pay a fee. Friendly means that relation is above a certain level.
Veneteaou
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Re: VII. Military

Post by Veneteaou »

First off, the most annoying thing about Imp1 for me right now is that ships can be making landfall and invading, and with patrolling ships in the same ocean I still can't run them off with my navy.
Do we want tactical sea battle? I guess not. I can do without and my judgement is that it would importance on something that is not meant to be important.
No, it's another battle system and set of units we would need to test and balance.
Do we need sea zones? The disadvantage is that fleets can hop between them and so it's random if you actually meet an enemy's fleet. Without sea zones we could just have a range criteria and define an engagement probability based on distance which goes smoothly from high too low. But if you want sea zones, you'll get sea zones.
Zones makes the sea strategy function just like the rest of the game. I say we keep them.
What do we need to do to balance the importance of the navy? I think about reducing the chance to actually disturb trade or prevent an invasion together with having upkeep for a navy.
I think naval units should have an upkeep cost. But in terms of balance, we have to ask if we are balancing against an AI like Imp1 had, or balancing for multiplayer play. The navy in Imp1 wasn't the broken part, the AI was. At the end of the day, nations will have roughly the same access to resources, to colonies, and to warships. If they cost the same for everyone, then they aren't really broken.
3. You can't reliably protect your navy from being attacked. If you have ships in port they'll automatically escort trade ships. If your oppnent blockades you with Ship-of-the-line and you have clippers you have best chances to break the blockade and you just have to replace lost clippers (cheap). If you have two or three Ship-of-the-Line left from battles - what can you do? Leave them at sea? No, they get killed. Have them in port? No, they'll escort and get killed. We need a solution to this.
This is a huge issue. In my latest Imp1 game, I lost the largest fleet of any nation in the game because they healed up 2-3 at a time in port and would automatically escort and get their asses kicked in small groups. Escorting needs to be different from sitting in port.

Also, if we want to talk about historical accuracy, I'd like to see naval units in port bolstering the military defense of the province. Perhaps each ship in port represents an artillery in a land battle? I know we were trying to make ships less powerful, but this seems reasonable to me. Alternatively, ships could blockade a port and act as attacking artillery as well.
2. I don't like that we need ships to trade with land locked nations.
I guess we could use railcars instead of merchant marine, and it does greatly annoy me that the largest navy controls the trade. I think if we handle upkeep costs right on ships we shouldn't run into a naval superpower that owns the game. My only issue is that the game has a rail system, and we'd be ignoring it when we establish overland trade.
However what if there are two adjacent sea zones (A, B) and one fleet cruises from A to B, another hostile fleet from B to A. Should they encounter each other? Should they miss each other? How was it in the original?
In Imp1, I believe that the game counts your fleet as present in every zone they have sailed through in that turn. I don't think it fiddled with probabilities though.
Would have a big advantage because they could trade with other land locked nations without the fear of being intercepted or loosing ships while on the other hand if all nations around are hostile being completely cut-off, of trade posibilities.
At the same time, they would share borders and hence would need standing military forces to defend themselves. As long as we make sure we don't have landlocked major powers with only one or two bordered nations we should be fine. What we don't want is a nation that can make two alliances and then be invincible.
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Post by Trilarion »

So if we have trade by country and trade by sea and both is possible, eg. France and Russia trading, which form should be the preferred form of transport? How to decide what is best in these cases?

We could make it simple and say that all transport always uses trade ships but if a direct land connection through peaceful nations is available, these trades cannot be interrupted per definition and if not connection either per sea or land without crossing hostile territory is available these trades cannot be made.

I know this might feel unrealistic especially for land locked nations (they must have a trade fleet) but since trade ships anyway aren't positioned on the map we can maybe generalize this and combine sea and land transports to general transports but for simplicity mostly depict them as ships.

Otherwise my opinion is that with land transports and home markets and friendly ports to park your ships the devastating effect of a hostile fleet should be already greatly reduced and I would be rather satisfied with it.
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Re: VII. Military

Post by Alias72 »

I was wondering if we will have actual naval combat, unlike the first game in which everything was handled behind the scenes. It may be interesting to have to manually plan out Anaconda and Tsushima. as well as being able to run blockades as the confederacy and raid convoys with the Kaisers navy.
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