Imperialism Remake Community

Sorry, but currently not. Afair all people posting so far didn't want tactical naval battles since it would put too much emphasis on the military part of the game. And surely we have to balance economical, industrial, diplomatic and militaric activities. It's always difficult to exclude a good idea, but too many features can also kill the fun. Tactical naval combat might be a game by itself.

Trilarion wrote:Sorry, but currently not. Afair all people posting so far didn't want tactical naval battles since it would put too much emphasis on the military part of the game. And surely we have to balance economical, industrial, diplomatic and militaric activities. It's always difficult to exclude a good idea, but too many features can also kill the fun. Tactical naval combat might be a game by itself.

Something I was thinking on to help satisfy more naval interest, as it's a huge sort of hobby study of mine, has to do with perhaps enhanced unit behaviors. In the original and Imp II, you could set your ships' behavior in a seazone as either 'cautious', 'normal' or 'aggressive' and then calculations at the end of the turn would run whether or not there would be a battle, what kind of battle and it's results.

I'm thinking perhaps adding more on to the behaviors at least, especially at what scale we model navies.

If you want to add a bit of realistic behavior then I encourage you to make propsals provided that they do not make naval combat a complex and time consuming task. One could for example have the following set of attributes

How to engage? (avoid at all cost, only engage if a victory is likely, engage aggresively)
How to lead a battle? (defensive=save your own ships, aggresive=not saving own ships in search of victory)
How to distribute in the seazone? (distrbuted=higher chance for intercept trad but risk of engaging an enemy fleet with part of own fleet, concentrated=other thing)

But I'm curious about your ideas?

Trilarion wrote:If you want to add a bit of realistic behavior then I encourage you to make propsals provided that they do not make naval combat a complex and time consuming task. One could for example have the following set of attributes

How to engage? (avoid at all cost, only engage if a victory is likely, engage aggresively)
How to lead a battle? (defensive=save your own ships, aggresive=not saving own ships in search of victory)
How to distribute in the seazone? (distrbuted=higher chance for intercept trad but risk of engaging an enemy fleet with part of own fleet, concentrated=other thing)

But I'm curious about your ideas?

I was thinking about having ships perform certain duties - such as scouting and spotting for a line of battle, escorting commerce or troop landing ships, commerce raiding, or screening capital ships.

Something similar to generic behavior, however these standing orders I think would give slight modifiers in terms of naval combat. They're active instead of general seafaring behaviors.

Please execuse me for not reading all of these posts, but I have one major concern about military/combat in Imp1/2/ Remake:

The light artillery.

It seemed greatly overpowered... All other units are worthless in comparison to it...
In my experience, an army of several units of light artillery (and nothing else) seemed unbeatable - unless the enemy had the same idea, or is defending a fort with several units of heavy art.
This resulted in my game sessions, in the AI building mostly light artillery.

I hope this will not be the case with this remake

In Imp1 it was the heavy artillery. It was the only unit you needed to build really. The biggest issue with light artillery in both games is that, for the benefit they provide (a unit that can move and shoot at range in the same turn), they weren't expensive enough to be balanced.

That said, it won't be a problem here if we support multiplayer tactical battles. Multiplayer battles will give us mountains of feedback as to what strategies work and which ones don't. Ultimately, our main concern is that defenders get the right defense bonus, one that is useful but not over-powered.

Was it really the heavy artillery? (Maybe I am confusing something, because I played Imp in German...)
I thought of the unit, that can move and shoot in the same turn.
It could move quite a bit, shoot at long range with devastating damage and took quite some damage...

In my opinion, the cost is a good factor to balance it, but it should also have less hitpoints, so that you have to take care of it not being too exposed to enemy fire...

Well, actually I am not the person to abuse such... weaknesses, so for me it would be ok, if the AI tried to build a well balanced army and doesn't go artillery only...

I never played Multiplayer in Imp, and actually I don't plan to do so in this remake, but just having the option and the feedback via it would be great

Walls are also a bit of a problem for me, as only artillery could shoot it (and there was a unit, which I don't know the English name of^^, he could use dynamite or something like that), as far as I remember other units could not even shoot the enemies behind the wall... maybe find a way to balance that, without giving artillery too much power again... at least wooden walls should be destructible in some other way (torches maybe?^^)

Disclaimer: All above is just my humble opinion

userrr3

Walls should be able to be melee'd by any unit, at least the wooden walls. Seems realistic to me. Stone and metal would be less realistic, so maybe at that point we do implement a sapper unit that actually works.

For me it was both, heavy and light artillery, that was overpowered. Basically I would go forward with an infantry unit and attract the the fire from the big guns of the enemy, then moving forward with light artillery and hitting each big gun of the enemy until it won't shoot back anymore. Alternative you can also use a lot of big artillery for this.

A better balance could be done by higher costs of artillery, although at the moment I would probably just prefer a lowered effectiveness.

What I tend to do in every NOI game of IMP1 I played: build heavy artillery, get generals. Use generals to take initial hits from defending artillery, move all of mine into range, and the enemy only gets one turn to fire on my artillery. Between the Regulars I started with, and the Regulars I'd get from absorbing colonies, I never built infantry units.

I would eventually build Carbineers and Mobile Artillery, because in large battles they make huge differences. Plus, if you make it to the third level upgrades, they are the most powerful units.