Say you're designing a Civ game. How do you make the combat system?

[luddite]

One aspect of MoO (and Alpha Centauri) that I really enjoyed was designing your own units based on the technology you had available. Granted, it's kind of a game within the game, so maybe "expansion pack material".

I dunno... designing your own units was fun for a while, but after a while I found myself designing the same units over and over, and it just became tedious. It would also make things a lot harder to balance.

I like the generals idea. Maybe you allow "unled" units to move only within your cultural borders, so that they could still move to a rally point, or clear out barbarians.

[chaunceymo]

A problem I see with the combat is the way the combat would be "calculated" if you don't want to fight it out yourself. As not fighting it out yourself would probably be the most popular for MP, the way it's calculated has to be very precise and non-random. Maybe that's something very easy to do, but for me, someone who has no experience of any programming of any sort, it sounds like a hard thing to get right. And it's an integral part of the game. But as I said I have no idea what i'm talking about :P

There actually is a fairly easy, mathematical way to do something like this. I forget the exact technical name, but I've used it in Risk and tabletop wargames like Ogre. You essentially use the odds to figure out the result of battles, making it non-random and predictable. It eliminates swings in luck which make things a little less exciting but also a lot less frustrating.

It works very well in large stack-based combat like Sulla proposed. If I have a stack of 100 warriors who are each 30% chance to hit for 2 damage, and a stack of 50 archers defending with 2 HP each, every time the warriors attack the archers you'd get the exact same result: 60 damage done to the archers, with 30 dying.

There are all sorts of ways to still allow for tactical combat, of course. The attackers should deal damage first, while the defenders should always get the best match-ups (as they do now in Civ4). This would make balancing between smaller skirmisher/harassment stacks to soften up the enemy and a main stack strong enough to eventually bowl them over important for the attacker, while the defender would need to have a good mix of units and use their own attacks smartly to take advantage of the attacker's initiative.

This also lends itself to easy ZoC and special ability mechanics. If a stack is X% stronger than the defender, they can ignore their ZoC. Similar strength or weaker, the ZoC slows/stops them.

Fortified archers or machine guns can have a "suppressing fire" ability that damages any non-ranged enemy units as soon as they move into their ZoC. Attacking cavalry not defended against by anti-cavalry measures (pikes or fortified spears) reverse the best match-up mechanic, hitting the most vulnerable defender instead. Skirmisher units can do mild damage without getting counterattacked. Etc etc etc.

While I like the idea of stacks of unit types within an army stack, I'm not sure about a tactical combat screen just because it feels like it would divert the game from its 4X roots a little too much. It's moving a more towards the Heroes of Might and Magic genre, and while I enjoyed those games for a while the overemphasis on time spent in combat got tiresome for me pretty quickly. Unless it's absolutely needed for balance, and I don't think it is, I prefer to stick with a KISS approach.

I definitely think that a "smarter" stacking option, allowing you to put together diverse armies but without the tedium of having to attack or defend 200 times per turn, is the right way to go.

Also, as a point of balance, I think the modern-era unit bloat in BtS and Civ5 was ridiculous. Sure, there's a lot more exciting combined arms stuff going on in 20th century warfare, but there's also a lot more stuff your cities can be building in general. From a game design standpoint, I think there need to be more early units and, if anything, fewer modern era ones.

[chaunceymo]

I see a solution to these problems in borrowing from Heroes of Might and Magic.

Hah, dangit, I wasn't the first to mention HOMM.

Regarding the scouting fear, re: being able to crank out several tiny stacks per turn and sending them off in every direction, just takes an adjustment of barbarian and scouting rules.

Limit visibility severely of main line troops. One square, and unable to see into forests without moving onto them. Change scouts into explorers, and make them much more expensive than normal military units. This makes perfect sense: military scouts might be lightly armed dudes picketing the main force, but folks actually scouting new lands have always been large, well-equipped groups. Make them cost the same amount as 5-10 warriors, but they also move faster, have good visibility (2 squares or one square into a forest) and get a huge bonus to defend against barbarians.

Next, change the barbs to start on the map on turn 0. Start them in stacks of 5 or so, and have them slowly grow. They only move to attack units that come nearby (maybe demanding gold if the unit is weaker, otherwise attacking?), making scouting with a single warrior a very short-lived venture. Once they get to some size, they start roaming around looking for cities/tiles to pillage. This is sort-of what they did in Civ5, but the #%$* encampments crop up way too frequently and the barbs themselves are too stupid to be anything other than free XP/City State influence.

[kalin]

What do people think about the Europa Universalis model of combat?
Kalin

[antisocialmunky]

Thread necro! If were designing a Civilization-style game, here's how I would do it: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/designingciv.html

I was tickled by the intentional or unintentional HoMM references.

HoMM tactical combat did have its limits though. Namely the limited size of the map and the limited number of stacks. It would have been interesting to play on a hybrid system with instead of 1 unit per tile, 1 unit type per tile .

Still reading it but had to comment already. Reminds me of patching together a best of game-mechanics as SS said.

[luddite]

I've been messing around with a civ 4 mod to change combat. It does what I talked about earlier- weakens siege unit strength, but also gives them a 100% withdrawal chance, and let's them do collateral damage to all units on a tile.

I also gave a defensive boost to open terrain, so that an equivalent unit will have only a 27% chance to win:

I think that gives a more equal balance between attacking and defending. on average, you'll need two units to beat one defender that way, but then you've both lost 1, and the winning attacking unit will get experience.

However, I also boosted the fortification bonus a lot. Now units fortify 20% per turn, up to a maximum of 60%. The idea is that siege units are almost mandatory in order to break through fortified troops. Since you don't have any siege units at the beginning, I changed archers to give a weak collateral damage attack. That way early fortified defenders aren't completely invincible.


With the changes to siege units, you'll need roughly two siege hits to get equal odds against unfortified equivalent units, and 4 hits gives you odds above 70%. I haven't tested this in a lot of situations, but it seems to work pretty well for catapults and early units, at least. It takes about 4 hits to get equal odds against fortified units.


With these changes, if you can surround an army you'll have a big advantage. In the image above, both sides have equal numbers- 8 infantry and artillery each. However, the indian artillery will damage every single german infantry, but the german artillery can only damage one indian infantry at a time. Despite equal numbers, the positions here mean that the german army is screwed (this would be more clear if the numbers on both sides were larger, but I'm too lazy to make large armies with world builder).


My hope is that these rules would lead to line formations, like this image above. As long as you're in a line, the enemy can't concentrate too much seige on any part of your army. And if units get weakened, you can pull them back behind the line to heal, because the strength of your line is determined mostly by having a few strong fortified units, not from having lots of weakened units. If your line breaks, you're in serious trouble, because the enemy will start to surround your armies next to the break, and if you retreat you'll lose the large fortification bonus. 2-movers would be perfect for breaking the line somewhere, or to counterattack an enemy breakthrough.

I haven't done much balancing yet, and I'm sure there's a lot of issues I haven't thought of, but so far I really like the strategies that this offers.

[Rik Meleet]

I'd like Sullla' New Civ very much.

Small point of criticism: I am not that thrilled with Sullla's ideas on great-people <-> gapped-tech-tree <-> gapped-tech-trading etc.; I think that could benefit from more thought.

[luddite]

Has anyone tried this mod: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=372884 ?

It incorporates some of the ideas Sullla suggested, like larger cities and building multiple units per turn in one city.

[SevenSpirits]

Has anyone tried this mod: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=372884 ?

It incorporates some of the ideas Sullla suggested, like larger cities and building multiple units per turn in one city.

No... reason is, it's based off of Rise of Mankind, which is one of those mods that just adds a million things for the sake of having more things.

[luddite]

No... reason is, it's based off of Rise of Mankind, which is one of those mods that just adds a million things for the sake of having more things.

yeah I know. But it should be possible to turn off a lot of the extra things, and just use it to see how combat might work with much larger army sizes.