Military Model IV

[LDiCesare]

I am unsure about what you mean by command.
Command is currently a TF. command would allow for bigger things like brigades etc? Well... I have a (useless by now) General interface which looks like that. What methods would this command object have? I thought General as either a player or AI, whose job is to give orders when there are no orders.

A TF somehow changes the physical abilities of its components, since for instance all units in a TF move at the slowest unit rate:In that sense, a TF is not purely a command.

Also, the difference between Unit and TF is quite artificial since it is just a level of scale. We don't show the Elements to the player so they can only handle Units, but Units are TFs of Elements. In real armies, a TF - brigade would probably have several units (companies -sorry, French military vocabulary-) plus one or two elements like a merchants section, HQ and a radio section which are not in terms of commands part of a Unit:
TF (brigade)
|
C1 C2 C3 Radios HQ merchants
Each of C1,c2,c3 is a Unit made of several elements (as far as French army is concerned, you'd get for infantry 4 infantry elements + 1 radio element or something like that), radios, HQ and merchants at the brigade level are also elements (radio is the same element as the units') but they don't have another cap C4 on top of them, they are directly under the brigade (actually this is a regiment, thus much smaller than a brigade, but is is the same at various scales).

The problem seems to be square and location handling. If I don't check location in TF/command, it means units may end up being very far away one from the other? How do you display a scattered TF, and how does the player give orders to the TF? Like "move there" becomes an order dispatched to all units, but during the dispatch, I need to check the army speeds. On a higher level command, I wouldn't have to do that check.

From the player point of view, a TF is a something physical, so I am not sure I can drop the location controls from it.

I can see the point in grouping TFs into higher level commands (Generals), but the physical TF I think still remains.

Gary, can you elaborate on that?

[Gary Thomas]

I am unsure about what you mean by command.

I mean an organizational structure. It hasn't a physical reality in the sense that a unit has - it is an assignment of units to some directing structure.

Command is currently a TF.

No a TF is a composite unit, not a command.

command would allow for bigger things like brigades etc?

Yes, right up to the whole army. Historically that is how the armed forces of any political entity have been organized. I would much rather tell the army commander "Go on the attack in the West" rather than having to give individual orders to every unit.

Well... I have a (useless by now) General interface which looks like that. What methods would this command object have? I thought General as either a player or AI, whose job is to give orders when there are no orders.

Again, a general is a physical object, a person or character, who might be assigned to an existing command without changing the nature of the command. In a sense a general is external to the command, and, as a physical object, has a location and can be attacked. The command, as such, cannot, though, of course, its components can.

A TF somehow changes the physical abilities of its components, since for instance all units in a TF move at the slowest unit rate:In that sense, a TF is not purely a command.

The movement restriction is not a necessary part of a task force. There are plenty of examples of a force being given an order to get there as fast as possible, thus causing straggling of the force. My suggestion would allow an ordinary movement order (move at the command speed - the speed of the slowest) or a forced march order (move as fast as you can), or, in fact two other types of movement - 1) rendevous at a particular spot, or 2) wait for the rest of the force to catch up.

Also, the difference between Unit and TF is quite artificial since it is just a level of scale. We don't show the Elements to the player so they can only handle Units, but Units are TFs of Elements.

To be honest, I can't see the utility of elements. Since the player can't see them, they do not seem to be a functional part of the game.

The problem seems to be square and location handling.

It is indeed.

If I don't check location in TF/command, it means units may end up being very far away one from the other? How do you display a scattered TF, and how does the player give orders to the TF?

For a start, scattered units in a force is just how it works in the real world. It is only the extremely artificial context of the original Civ games that has forced this restriction. A great many strategy games allow dispersed organizational units. For example (and rather off the top of my head) I would arrange GUI so that if a unit of a force is selected, all the other units (in other squares) of that force get a light red square around them (similar to the movement line now). There would be provision for giving the orders to just the selected unit, or to the whole force.

Like "move there" becomes an order dispatched to all units, but during the dispatch, I need to check the army speeds. On a higher level command, I wouldn't have to do that check.

I am thinking a little ahead to the time when a high level AI is implemented. At that level, generalized orders will be issued. This will filter down the command structure to the actual units, with levels of AI intervening at each stage. Each unit that actually moves will check the speed, getting it from its command object, if the command is moving together, or using its own maximum movement if so ordered. It also allows things like "cautious advance".

From the player point of view, a TF is a something physical, so I am not sure I can drop the location controls from it.

I agree - as I said above, a task force is just a composite unit, restrained to a single location.

I can see the point in grouping TFs into higher level commands (Generals), but the physical TF I think still remains.

I wasn't suggesting otherwise. I have no problem with composite units, provided that the composite parts the have no autonomy. I do rather have a reservation about the name task force. A task force is a group assembled for a task. It is not an enduring organizational unit.

On the other hand, with a defined command system, it is unlikely that composite units will be required. That, however, is a play testing matter.

One of the factors that I have in mind is that if subdivided squares are introduced (and I am quite keen on that) to give more realistic micro-terrain then necessarily the military units will be spread over a numbe rof squares. This is an area where elements might come into their own.

Cheers

[Gary Thomas]

To relate this to something in another thread, a command could be assigned shipping in order to cross the English Channel, for example. It would be unrealistic to expect the shipping to always be in the same square, especially if a ferry system (multiple trips) is required to transport the troops.

One of the (many) maddening aspects of Civ is using triremes to transport an army across a stretch of sea. The player should not be forced to that level of micro-management. I would expect a command to recieve an order to move across the water, and have the internal AI manage it.

Cheers

[Gary Thomas]

The possibility of command control radius and command control efficiency is also there. On the other hand maybe that is getting a bit too close to a wargame.

Anyway, the main purpose of this post is to bring me up to 200 posts.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

What Gary has to say about hierarchical AI and avoidance of micromanagement is pretty much Clash standard, though I'm not sure Gary has read the previous discussions on this. (did'ja Gary? Like the hierarchical AI thread?) And I certainly think the military structure should be able to support those ideals.

The purpose of Elements are two main ones:
1. Allow creation of units that have combined-arms character, and will have the right feel in terms of battle results.
2. Provide a way for the player to create their own unique units out of a 'palette' of elements. The tech of a civilization will determine which elements are available. This of course assuming we have a Unit-design workshop in the game.

[Gary Thomas]

What Gary has to say about hierarchical AI and avoidance of micromanagement is pretty much Clash standard, though I'm not sure Gary has read the previous discussions on this. (did'ja Gary? Like the hierarchical AI thread?)

I did read them and had them in mind. That was why I felt that the single level command structure is inadequate.

1. Allow creation of units that have combined-arms character, and will have the right feel in terms of battle results.

This is valid only if the "combined arms" part is detectable to the player. At present it is not. However, if a more sophisticated version of the tactical combat of CTP II is introduced (and I am in favour of that) then it could give real character to combat. Otherwise it is just carrying excess weight in the code.

2. Provide a way for the player to create their own unique units out of a 'palette' of elements. The tech of a civilization will determine which elements are available. This of course assuming we have a Unit-design workshop in the game.

I would think that unit design goes beyond just switching unchanging elements around. Presumably the editor will allow the creation of elements, and could just as well create units.

Cheers

[LDiCesare]

My "General" interface was actually meant to be what your "command" would be. The reasoning was that each command is generally held by a General, hence the name. Command could be more appropriate.

Now I understand better, I agree with Gary's point of view, except for elements, which I think are useful in order to produce more units out of less types. For instance, you can have with infantry and cavalry elements many different units: pure infantry, pure cavalry, and mixed, which IMO is a good thing since you don't have to redefine as many figures on the unit level as on the element level.

If you can find a way of showing all units of a given command and give them orders in a single way even though they are scattered, I am all for it.

[Gary Thomas]

My "General" interface was actually meant to be what your "command" would be. The reasoning was that each command is generally held by a General, hence the name. Command could be more appropriate.

I would assume that commands are hierarchical, in the sense that you can lower level command within a higher level command. The thought of a General within a General boggles the mind.

Now I understand better, I agree with Gary's point of view, except for elements, which I think are useful in order to produce more units out of less types. For instance, you can have with infantry and cavalry elements many different units: pure infantry, pure cavalry, and mixed, which IMO is a good thing since you don't have to redefine as many figures on the unit level as on the element level.

I tend to think of a unit as a homogeneous entity. In which case it cannot have different types of component. A unit that is part cavalry, part infantry still seems to me to be two units, one cavalry and one infantry.

If you can find a way of showing all units of a given command and give them orders in a single way even though they are scattered, I am all for it.

The game Stalingrad (if my memory serves me correctly) does it rather nicely.

Cheers

[LDiCesare]

The thought of a General within a General boggles the mind

Actually, generals give orders to other generals so that was the idea.

About units, they are made of various elements. For instance, in WWII, France had a few tanks, but used them not in Panzer companies like the germans, but as 1 tank for many infantries, which was a mixed unit infantry/tank. OK this was really not a good idea, but that is what they did.
Additionnally, elements like engineers can be added to units like legions so legion is basically a mix of infantry and engineers, whereas celtic or greek infantry could have the same infantry elements but no units.

[Gary Thomas]

I realize that units are not nexessarily homogeneous, though in the ancient world most were.

If the element idea is pursued, many second world war units had a few individuals with automatic weapons, a mortar section, and perhaps some AT weapons, not to mention cooks, drivers, and whatever. Elements at this level essentially devolve to the individual soldier.

The ability to shuffle these elements around seems a level of detail that is not visible to the player and, while conceptually elegant for the game designer, with I cannot help feeling, seriously detract from the playability and enjoyment of the game. It is after all a game.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Gary:

If the unit workshop is used, then the effect of elements Will be both controllable and visible to the player. (We plan to have descriptions of battle results given to the player that would ideally say what the key component(s) of victory/defeat were. Not sure you knew that, its buried in one of the mil threads.)

There will be stock units for pretty much every period of history and broad type of unit. Players need never even know about elements. So how can elements Possibly detract from playability and enjoyment??? You can certainly raise the criticism that it raises the Complexity of the system, and potentially without getting enough bang for the buck in terms of fun out of it. But as with much of the rest of clash, a player not concerned with the military will have plenty of tools to execute their strategy without getting down into the small details.

We could decide among us to kill elements in the design, but that basically elimiates the most straightforward (and true to history) way to handle a unit workshop. It would also require redoing much of the mil model, since battles are based on elements as the model currently exists.

However, I agree there may be a case for eliminating elements due to the extra complexity of the system. I'm not a big proponent of elements, and the D4 mil model's fundamental component was the unit. But if we are going to get rid of them we would need Laurent's agreement and an understanding that a unit workshop is probably out. (Krenske was the one who originally put them inthe design, but he's long gone, and so doesn't get a vote.)

[Gary Thomas]

I wasn't actually suggesting that we get rid of elements, merely recording the difficulty I had in accepting their usefulness.

One aspect is that we will have a limited number of icons for troops, so we must accept that the same icon represents different forces, even in the same game. Here I see potential problems.

Cheers

[LDiCesare]

Elements allow for some variety in units. I thnik they can be interesting insofar as they allow to add some scouting abilities to units, and engineering and so forth. They also allow to diminish offensive power based on numbers so the model of fight will probably yield more realistic results than without them.
I think the only concern I have with elements is that the fights may take too long to process, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Also, they might be a problem in terms of memory. Aside from that, I'd rather keep them because it can allow designing of special units, at least through tweaking the xml file, without needing extra unit types or images.

[Gary Thomas]

To change the subject. I was running D5 and ran a Carthaginian cavalry unit through two Roman cities, each with a population of 100,000. The citizens didn't object or raise a militia or anything.

Should cities have an intrinsic defence?

Cheers

[LDiCesare]

It could be done, but the main concern is: What economic consequences would that have? I guess raising a militia would cause loss of productivity for the given turn.

[Richard Bruns]

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
One aspect is that we will have a limited number of icons for troops, so we must accept that the same icon represents different forces, even in the same game. Here I see potential problems.

Have you seen my ideas for displaying the unit elements as small icons? This allows us to have a large stock icon to represent the general army type, with detailed icons to display the elements. Obviously I'm not an artist, and this extra display would be optional:
http://wcuvax1.wcu.edu/~rb22393/taskforces.html

Would this make it any easier to implement a "task force workshop"?

[Gary Thomas]

The map is almost unreadable as it is. Trying to add more information will just make it worse. The unit details box will give detailed information on the selected square (or it will when I get the !@#$%#&! scroll bars working).

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Yes, cities should have an intrinsic defence from the population. But it depends Heavily on the culture, tech level, and probably some other stuff. For D5 I'd say we should just forget it. For D6 we can fake up something.

[Gary Thomas]

On a more general note.

The original Civ games and clones all had all their military based on standing armies. Without actually doing the calculations, I suspect that about 5% of military activity in the history of the human race has been carried out by standing armies.

The four great wars of recent centuries (the American Civil War, the Great South American War, the First and Second World Wars) were all fought largely by conscripts or volunteers, with only cadres of professional soldiers. Except fo rthe South American war, each lasted only one economic turn.

Rome had no standing army until the reforms of Marius. Greece (with the possible exception of the Sacred Band) none until Phillip of Macedon.

Asian armies, except for royal bodyguards, tended to be ad hoc organizations.

In the early middle ages, the only standing "armies" were royal bodyguards (housecarls). In the later middle ages, the Spanish Tercios were a standing army.

There were small standing armies in the period from the Thirty Years War to the Napoleonic era.

It concerns me that the Clash military model has ONLY standing armies provided for.

Cheers

[Richard Bruns]

I don't know much about the military model, but there seems to be an easy way around this: make the military units cheap, able to be produced quickly, and give them high upkeep. To model reality, a turn of upkeep should be about as expensive as creating the army in the first place, but we don't have to go that far. With this system, large conscript armies could be thrown together quickly and then disbanded after the fight, like they usually were in real life. Obviously these rookies would compare unfavorably to professional corps, but the sheer numbers of these short-term standing armies would make them important.

I think that it would be good to model the scramble to militarize that most countries have historically faced when they start a war. Large chunks of the enonomy would be used to support the army, and then when they are no longer needed the army would be disbanded to allow the economy to return to normal.

[Mark_Everson]

What is currently coded has only support for standing armies. There has already been a fair amount of thought put into mobilization and demobilization including economic effects. However I can't find the relevant threads right now, and we never achieved a real spec on the issues anyway. What Richard says is certainly a decent way to handle the issue broadly. Certainly my ideas on the topic are that the very large costs of standing armies should be strongly reflected in the game. IMO this is probably a D7 issue, so I'm not going to try to put forward a detailed model at this point.

[LDiCesare]

Note that you can toy with the cost for building and supporting armies in the xml file that defines units and elements, so Richard's approach is testable. It could also be used as a way to trigger defense of a city:
If a city is being invaded, all its production could be used to fuel one kind of unit (to be determined - which kind - how?). That would require some coordination between econ and military turns, but that would solve the problem that invading armies don't lower the production of invaded squares.

[Richard Bruns]

Gary Thomas

The known bugs:
....
7. Sometimes an overwhelming force doesn't damage a vastly inferior force in combat.

Richard Bruns

It occurs to me that #7 may not be a bug at all, it might be an intended result of the mil model. Even if it isn't it could be a useful feature. In many cases, especially guerilla war, a tiny force has the ability to evade detection and direct confrontation while harassing a larger force. Even if we do find this bug, it might be good to save it and isolate it and allow partisans, guerillas, and commandos to exploit it.

LDiCesare

Point 7 may be a consequence of the fact that outnumbered armies flee in the model. I probably didn't change the square they were in, at least for defending armies.

Gary Thomas

I have a feeling that the unit was a cavalry unit, so it probably got away.

Richard Bruns

So normal units run away when outnumbered, presumably moving to some other square. I like that; it is much better than the "fight to the death" in so many other games.

It seems like it should be easy to set a flag for partisan or guerilla type units to let them stay in the same square when they "retreat" from a fight. That way they can stay around to harass the invading army, and cannot be dislodged easily.

Mark_Everson

That's a good idea on partisans Richard. You may want to stick it in the mil thread so it doesn't get lost here, though I think we'll probably remember it since it makes sense.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi all:

Laurent sent me an issue in an email a ways back, and I thought it should be addressed here.

The model gives a very
important advantage to high numbers, so it should be
tested whether it seems unbalanced: Lots of small units
will always win against same firepower but less armies. I
already biased Krenske's model somewhat, but that may not
be enough.

My take on this issue is that the asymmetry Laurent states isn't necessarily fatal, but that what we present as military power (FE what is shown in Power Circles [PCs] that the player sees) Must represent the real combat power of the Task Force. Because when the player sees two equal-sized PCs it should tell the player that any battle would likely be a tossup. Otherwise the PCs have no real usefulness! Perhaps we can come up with a simple function of firepower, unit number, etc. that can be used to show the player the real effective power of the units.

[Gary Thomas]

This thread is getting full, but I am not sure what is involved in starting a continuation thread.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

I can do it when I get a bit of time. If you want to do it, be my guest. Basically the formula is:
1. a link to the preceeding discussion
2. links to any other critical discussions or web pages
3. Ideally a synopsis of any new model, though in this case not much has changed.
4. Status of coding for the model

You can look at the first post in this thread to get the idea.

[Gary Thomas]

How do you create links?

Given that information, I will have a go at it.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Use the little http:// box on the toolbar just above where you enter the text for a post. Or you can use html assembled by hand.

[Gary Thomas]

Sorry, that is not an adequate description. The http: button asks for an URL, and I don't know what to type at that point.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Gary: I've gone ahead and done it... You can now see by example what happens. The thing I forgot to say before is that at the end of the old thread you need to put a link to the new one.

This Thread has gotten too big, and is now Closed. The discussion continues in the Military Model V thread .