Military/Combat Model 0.1

[amjayee]

What I think is best, and what I think also Chris meant, is that the player has a set of unit types (possibly created with a unit workshop). Then, he builds new units just by selecting unit types and how many of each is built. Then, the required resources are allocated automatically by the economic system, and the men required are recruited from the workforce - there could be several options for this, like volunteer conscription, forceful conscription, or even hijacking men from the countryside. The men could be paid, when money is required for upkeep, or not. If resources run out, the player is notified and the production is halted. If it seems unlikely that there will be enough resources to build units, the player is warned when he is about to start building the new units.

Training would happen automatically. For each new unit type is defined the amount of training, which affects the unit's abilities somehow. Then, when the unit is built, certain amount of time goes for training. When the training is done, the unit is ready. Of course, if we use real people, the soldiers grow old, or their service period ends. Then, those men need to be replaced. So, upkeeping a unit requires also constant flow of fresh men, and also constant training for those new men. For training, you would need to spend certain amount of money per year for upkeep, and perhaps you need to build some garrisons and training facilities to make training possible.

Weapons and equipment would be considered the "resources" required to build an army. For certain unit type, you need certain amounts of different gadgets. Before the unit can be built, you need to produce that amount of the gadgets in question. The gadgest can include spears, swords, shields, armors, rifles, tanks, jet planes, sapper equipment, electronic interference equipment, anything. The built weapons would be stockpiled, and they could require certain amount of resources for upkeep. Also, you could buy things from enemies, and after winning battles, you would gain certain percentage of the equipment from the killed or captured enemies (quite high percentage I think, 80-90%).

[S. Kroeze]

Originally posted by amjayee
What I think is best, and what I think also Chris meant, is that the player has a set of unit types (possibly created with a unit workshop). Then, he builds new units just by selecting unit types and how many of each is built. Then, the required resources are allocated automatically by the economic system, and the men required are recruited from the workforce - there could be several options for this, like volunteer conscription, forceful conscription, or even hijacking men from the countryside. The men could be paid, when money is required for upkeep, or not. If resources run out, the player is notified and the production is halted. If it seems unlikely that there will be enough resources to build units, the player is warned when he is about to start building the new units.

Training would happen automatically. For each new unit type is defined the amount of training, which affects the unit's abilities somehow. Then, when the unit is built, certain amount of time goes for training. When the training is done, the unit is ready. Of course, if we use real people, the soldiers grow old, or their service period ends. Then, those men need to be replaced. So, upkeeping a unit requires also constant flow of fresh men, and also constant training for those new men. For training, you would need to spend certain amount of money per year for upkeep, and perhaps you need to build some garrisons and training facilities to make training possible.

Weapons and equipment would be considered the "resources" required to build an army. For certain unit type, you need certain amounts of different gadgets. Before the unit can be built, you need to produce that amount of the gadgets in question. The gadgest can include spears, swords, shields, armors, rifles, tanks, jet planes, sapper equipment, electronic interference equipment, anything. The built weapons would be stockpiled, and they could require certain amount of resources for upkeep.

Also: you could buy things from enemies, and after winning battles, you would gain certain percentage of the equipment from the killed or captured enemies (quite high percentage I think, 80-90%).

I almost completely agree with this post! I also like the idea of buying (and selling) weapons and the introduction of the spoils of the battle. Realistic and fun!

Yet especially for Prehistoric and Ancient times there should simply be the possibility to draft recruits into the army and to equip them with all available weaponry.
Let's assume you decide in February that you need to defend some province of your kingdom, because something unexpected has occurred. In this province (Tuscany, why not?) live about 200,000 people, of whom 40,000 are adult males (=15 years or older). You decide to summon 5% which is a lot, so 2,000 recruits appear next turn. Next month -March- would be most realistic in my opinion, but others will doubtless disagree.
Then you can inspect your regional armoury. It contains 200 Stone axes, 1,000 Hunting spears, 500 Primitive bows, 100 Bronze spears, 50 Bronze swords, 400 Wooden shields, 100 Chariots and 200 Light Horses, which could pull your Chariots.

Use all availabe arms? Yes/No
When choosing 'No' you could further specify your selection
Generally some advisor would decide in what manner the equipment would be distributed. As you can see, in this example many recruits would not have any weapon or body protection at all, which is quite realistic. (Many Chinese in WWII went to battle without having a gun. They just took over when a comrade in arms was killed)

Do you want to train these recruits? Yes/No
In Ancient times a month of training would do, while you could even send your army into battle without any training. This would make the difference between Green and Very Green recruits. So in March or April you could start your military expedition!

I still think my former post on wastage/attrition makes sense:

I also would like to make some remarks about warfare in general. Most games -and Civilization is no exception- present a completely distorted picture. The units in CivII seem to possess some 'divine' immortality. In reality most military campaigns were relatively short and armies disintegrated as quickly as they were recruited.

"Disease was a greater threat to the health of Civil War soldiers than enemy weapons. This had been true of every army in history. Civil War armies actually suffered comparatively less disease mortality than any previous army. While two Union or Confederate soldiers died of diseases for each one killed in combat, the ratio for British soldiers in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars had been eight to one and four to one. For the American army in the Mexican War it had been seven to one. Only by twentieth-century standards was Civil War disease mortality high. Nevertheless, despite improvements over previous wars in this respect, disease was a crippling factor in Civil War military operations. At any given time a substantial proportion of men in a regiment might be on the sicklist. Disease reduced the size of most regiments from their initial complement of a thousand men to about half that number before the regiment ever went to battle.(!)

Here are some hard figures about the Thirty Years' War(1618-1648), underlining this same point:

'One might wonder why any man would freely join such a force; and indeed, many soldiers served in the ranks against their will. The troops from Sweden and Finland, for example, were recruited by a form of conscription known as the indelningsverk, which obliged a specified community to provide a certain number of soldiers. Most of them were peasants: in the voluminous (but as yet little analysed) records of the Swedish and Finnish forces serving Gustavus Adolphus and his daughter, bönde (peasant farmer) is by far the commonest entry in the enrolment lists. They came from villages like Bygdeå in northern Sweden, which provided 230 young men for service in Poland and Germany between 1621 and 1639, and saw 215 of them die there, while a further five returned home crippled. Enlistment was thus virtually a sentence of death and its demographic impact was profound. The number of adult males in Bygdeå parish steadily decreased -from 468 in 1621 to 288 in 1639- and the age of the conscripts gradually fell as more and more teenagers were taken, never to return. The social impact was also high: at first, the 'idle poor' tended to furnish most of the recruits, but after a while it became the turn of the younger sons of more prosperous families, and finally the only sons of even rich peasants were called to die away in Germany. In some smaller settlements, by the end of the 1630s, every available adult male was either on the conscription lists, already in the ranks, or too crippled too serve. Total losses in the Swedish army between 1621 and 1632 have been estimated at 50,000 to 55,000; those between 1633 and the war's end were probably twice as high. Clearly the war was causing depopulation in Sweden and Finland on an unprecedented and -ultimately- unbearable scale.
(NB.: Since the population of Sweden in 1600 is estimated at only well over one million these were unbearable losses indeed; Finland had only about 200,000 inhabitants)

Wastage rates in selected regiments:
4 English regiments:
1627 June: 4,913
1627 Oct.: 3,764
1628 Apr.: 1,882
1628 May : 1,630

4 Scots regiments:
1630 Jan.: 1,900
1632 Mar.: 1,300
1634 Oct.: 200

3 Swedish regiments:
1631 Sept: 2,577
1632 Mar.: 1,212
1632 Dec.: 828
(source: G.Parker: 'The Thirty Years' War',1997)

Parker arrives at a monthly loss of lives ranging from 2 to 20%.

Thus, despite the legend of the subsequent retreat from Moscow, it was the advance which caused most damage to the invaders. There was never any need for the Russian army to fight a set-piece battle, for Napoleon's forces were disintegrating day by day. However Kutuzov was persuaded by public opinion, pressure from St.Petersburg, and the enthusiasm of his junior officers, to make one stand before Moscow. So in early September the Russian army stopped retreating and formed up in a defensive position on high grounds near the village of Borodino, commanding the Smolensk-Moscow highway about seventy miles west of Moscow. The Russian forces numbered about 120,000, of whom 10,000 were hastly raised and half-trained militia sent out from Moscow.

By this time the French army had shrunk from the half-million, with which it had begun the campaign, to a mere 130,000, and was already slightly inferior to the Russians in artillery."

And I agree with Chrispie that supplying your army in a fertile region should be quite easy, especially during the harvest, though it would truly be a disaster for the inhabitants. Hannibal succeeded in more or less maintaining a formidable army in Italy from 218BC to 203BC, though all direct supply routes out of Carthago were cut off. Historians have often wondered why Hannibal did move around as he did. Now it seems supply of his forces more or less dictated his movements. As soon as a province was sqeezed dry he had to move on!
A modern example is the expedition of general Sherman through Georgia and the Carolinas during the American Civil War.

Oh, and just to add - S. Kroeze, just wanted to say that I consider you very much a part of the team with all of your excellent contributions - so please feel free to use the word "us", I'm sure everyone else agrees.

Thank you for your these very nice words! You are truly kind.

Sincere regards,

S.Kroeze

[TempLeland]

I am getting fairly excited about the wonderful ideas presented here, but I'm a little bit uncertain how to do all this in practise. To me, it seems that there are no more "units" in this model, just armies. I think that it will get very confusing for the players if they need to build whole armies from raw materials and recruits, because in a fairly sized civilization that will be an enormous job: you might have dozens of different types of weapons, a few different levels of training and several things that the armies can do. This is why I believe we need to define the relationship between units and armies explicitly, because at least in my vision the units are essentially production units, which partition the armies to manageable chunks.

To clarify my point:

Units are the building blocks of armies, and they have a fixed amount of resources they need. Here, resources are weapons, recruits and food. Weapons are relatively persistent and can even be used after battles, recruits will die at a slow rate for diseases and as casualties, and food is the resource that needs to be supplied to the army continuously to keep it running. The player would have a unit workshop at his disposal, where he could create new units, but there should be a cost involved in designing (and testing) new unit types, so that the number of different units doesn't explode (in the worst case scenario, every unit would be tweaked independently and that would really be a micromanagement nightmare.

Units have a number of abilities like "transportation", "melee", "ranged combat", "biological warfare" or "scouting". New abilities can be discovered with new tech, and they represent a qialitative change in units. For every ability, units have a level which determines how good they are at that one thing. This could be a number between 1-10 or something to that effect. Abilities would correspond to different weapons, armour, engines, chassises (sp?) and so on.

I believe that this would make it easy for the player to create armies. Here's how I think it could possibly happen:

1. Player starts the unit worshop, and starts to build a new unit.
2. The Worshop shows a list of accessories that can be chose, categorized based on abilities. For example swords and guns would be under close combat, missiles and catapults under ranged combat and chariots and jeeps under transportation.
3. Let's assume that this is a primitive or ancient civilization, which needs just regular grunts. The player selects swords from the list, and no transportation (meaning, bare feet).
4. The combination of accessories will determine the number of people needed in the unit. It is not meaningful to have an exact number of swords, instead an approximation of a hundred or a thousand swords should be enough. Consequently, since one people can hold one sword, the number of people in the unit in this example would be the same as the number of swords.
5. Player would be shown the cost to design the unit. This may not be entirely realistic, but I think we can assume that there is some effort made in organizing a new type of soldiers. Some of the most primitive armies might be defined beforehand, so that the player doesn't need to pay money for glorious units like "angry men with rocks".
6. If player accepts, the new unit is added to his selection. This needs to be just once, from now on the player can build all the swordsmen he wants. He can also update the swordsmen into something else, if there are some specific technological advancements.
7. Now, the player would produce units the same way as was suggested by many people in previous posts. He'd choose the place where they're built, and the army to which the units are attached (or create such an army). The rest is up to the game, and the player would receive information on how many units can be produced in a certain place. This can be tweaked many ways, for instance by buying weapons elsewhere or using stockpiled weapons.
8. The armies consist of units, and each army would serve as a supply node for the units. If an army doesn't get as much food (or ammunition, or whatever) the units in it need, it will get weaker due to people dying.

Hmm... I'm not at all certain if that made any sense. Comments are welcome.

[ElmoTheElk]

Hum, I hadn't really had the time last few days to reply, but just a short reply here:

I like your system in the way that it is relaly realistic, and it might be fun as well too. However we have to face our goal for the game. I really, really think we are going into too much detail when we let the player desgin units.

THe player is the goverment of your civ. We all agree with that. And also you have no full control over your civ. I think we all agree on that too. But why would the goverment of a civ, the player, have to much control over the type of units? I think you can choose what type of units a civ buys and also how many etc. But to manage if some army contains 20 bowman with a heavy sword on there back and an wooden shield in there right hand is really far too detailled.

I never liked the unit workshop from SMAC too, so I might be somewhat conservative, but we are going to micromanage things in Kroeze's/Leland's system. And that's just what we didn't wanted it to.

Therfore, I'll try to explain what I like to see. Just give me some time... (Wanted to descipe it here, but I found out it isn't that easy.)

ELmoTheElk

[Darkstar]

Ok...

I know I'm the new guy and the new village idiot... but, here's something for you guys.

1) This unit design and army system sounds very much like Destiny. Have any of you ever tried that or played it? Not that it is bad, just that I found it stupid to design an army like this:
Unit Workshop: 10 men with big sticks, 10 men with long, pointy throwable sticks. Name: Half Angry ******.
Army Queue: Build 10 units of Half Angry ******, 1 of basic light cav, 1 of early lancers.
If you guys HAVE Destiny, fire it up. It failed as the "ultimate" civ game for a couple of reason. But the unit and army stuff wasn't it.

2) Armies unsupplied should shrink (due to desertion, diseases, accidents, and whatever else, like possible starvation) and lose morale. If their morale doesn't break, the army vanishes when it drops below min % to qualify(5, 10, whatever). If morale BREAKS first (drops below a certain level), the whole thing goes rogue, deserts to another, or dissolves and joins the locals.

3) You need training facilities to TRAIN troops. I'd suggest Barracks, Military Academies and the like. You, the government, may say, hey! Make me 20,000 armor cleaving swords! But that doesn't get you 20,000 men to USE them. Armies are the men... building a tank doesn't get you a tank commander, a driver, and a loader.

4) Disease... And not just the killers, determines an infantries (and to a lesser extent, every other fighting unit) strength. VD put down more soldiers in Civil War then all the bullets EVER did. Anywhere you have SOLDIERS, you get the social diseases. And it's a long time in history before there was anything that could even offset it, let alone make it go in remission or go away. In the American civil war, they dosed the heck out of soldiers with a sulfuric compound.

5) Supplies... I love this. But... It takes more then FOOD to keep an army up. You have a whole collection of (camp) followers that generally looked after an army. Whether it was wives and lovers, or merely profession taylors, ferriers and what not. The more EQ you have, the more time and support is required. So an army requires: New recruits to replace the out mustering or dead men, food, material (to replace worn "perishables" such as shoes, uniforms, glasses, whatever), and currency (to pay the non-slaves).

related tangent... wherever you position an army for a decent time, you will get a town to support them. It will spring up around the needs of the army. After crossroads (supporting the trade and traders/travellers), this was one of the reasons to found a town.

6) Supply lines... This is something that has been needed forever and a day in more TBS games. I would think that ultimately, you would found "depots" or supply stations. Towns (and bigger) can act like one, but founding an actual supply base would be more efficent (game effect cheaper to transport any and all to the army). The further an Army is from a depot, the more it costs to TRANSPORT 'supplies' to it. This cost would be modified on technology... so certain advances would HELP you more economically field an Army. There is a maximum range at which you can supply an Army as well. At that point, either a new supply depot has to be built, or your army suffers from lack of resupply. With Alliances and what not, your Armies could use your Allies supply chain.

Depots would then play 2 roles on the players map...
they make real military targets that have to be protected...
and wherever you have a depot for a time, a town will grow. (Jobs, economic opportunity to service the military service sector).

7) Training, War Games, and Military Exercises.
I think you would want these in the game. To help keep your Armies trained at a higher skill level. Over time, without use, Armies loose their experience. This is just a fact. The BEST experience is in the field, but lacking that, you can keep them at a higher level then never doing anything. I see barracks and what not as training your raw personnel into your basics. Mil. Acad help train your leadership and special units (medical, pilots, navigators, whatever).

Just some thought for you...

[Nath]

A few suggestions and comments (some might already have been thought of elsewhere):

Armies shouldn't lose morale with time, only with distance from the kingdom.

You need training facilities to TRAIN troops.

Agreed.

You have a whole collection of (camp) followers that generally looked after an army.

I've never heard of this. Can you give a few examples?

Over time, without use, Armies lose their experience.

Agreed, but experience shouldn't fall below a certain percentage of its maximum level. A former war veteran is always more experienced than a new recruit.

Nath

[chrispie]

Armies shouldn't lose morale with time, only with distance from the kingdom

I can't see why this would be the case - surely a medieval army wouldn't know the difference between somewhere 300 miles from home, and somewhere 1000 miles from home.

In my opinion morale should be based on distance travelled (even in a circle), time spent out in the field, supply and how often they are fighting.

As for needing to train armies, I think that is more of a luxury than a necessity - the better trained army will almost always win, but that doesn't mean than you have to train them.

Agreed, but experience shouldn't fall below a certain percentage of its maximum level. A former war veteran is always more experienced than a new recruit.

Well, that depends on the time scale involved - after 30/40 years of non fighting, any unit would lose experience of any level surely.

I liked Darkstar's idea about the supply depots (but only cos I was going to use that idea myself a while back ). It makes the game more tatical - but keeps a good feeling on simplicity IMO. I've always been a bit uncomfortable with the idea of having to acutally trace a solid supply line - it seems too fiddly.

Maybe the supply depot or similar named could be the pre-cursor for the town in GGS, where towns wouldn't just grow from nowhere, but instead need nurturing right from square 1.

[Darkstar]

A vet will always be more experienced. True. But that vet can't live for 100 years. Eventually, he's going to be gone and replaced with a recruit.

Camp followers? There is plenty of this documented for the American Civil War. And some references to the American Revolutionary War. Basically, it's just part of the Army's logistics. Family of the soldiers following along, earning money by providing services such as laundry and what not. But from my past readings, it tended to be pretty big (around the size of the army itself). These days, our modern army has effectively eliminated this thanks to taking care of its logisitics itself. Aside from some MINOR exceptions. And the common soldier's wife won't have the same means of transport as the army, either. So that helps cut down on it. But when the army used wagons and feet... and the army didn't worry about very much in the way of supporting the soldier, that left a great amount of logistical services that people could fill. And did. Whether to just make a living, or follow their family. It wasn't THAT uncommon that a retired soldier on hard luck would become part of the non-government "wagon train" that followed. Serving the current crop of soldiers as whatever.

[S. Kroeze]

Originally posted by ElmoTheElk
I like your system in the way that it is really realistic, and it might be fun as well too. However we have to face our goal for the game. I really, really think we are going into too much detail when we let the player design units.

THe player is the goverment of your civ. We all agree with that. And also you have no full control over your civ. I think we all agree on that too. But why would the goverment of a civ, the player, have to much control over the type of units? I think you can choose what type of units a civ buys and also how many etc. But to manage if some army contains 20 bowman with a heavy sword on there back and an wooden shield in there right hand is really far too detailled.

I never liked the unit workshop from SMAC too, so I might be somewhat conservative, but we are going to micromanage things in Kroeze's/Leland's system. And that's just what we didn't wanted it to.

ELmoTheElk

Dear Elmo, Leland, newbies and others,

Of course everone is entitled to have his own opinion, but would it be true that an order like: "Recruit 2% of all adult males in province X (and why not Tuscany?) and equip them with all available weaponry" inevitably causes micromanagement?

I don't think so.

Another point:
I already showed that wastage/attrition rates ranging from 2 to 20% a month would be most realistic. Assuming an average wastage of only 5% -which is rather low- this would result in a rather swift disintegration of military forces. A battalion starting with 1,000 recruits would contain only 540 healthy soldiers after only one year of campaigning.
Think about it!

[DrPerrier]

merging, naming, simplification

On another note:

1) It's probably been mentioned but let me add that the player should have the ability to merge their armies at will. It's annoying to play a strategy game where a weaker army can't merge with a stronger army and thus is doomed to fail in its task (remember Robert E. Lee?).

2) Customization of the armies by allowing them to be named but in addition I'll suggest the player can also name a general to any army they wish. Now I'm not looking for something that requires allot of coding or any kind of module (not like NewGame's The General) but merely having it where when the player builds a new army and they have an icon they can click on to name the army there will also be a second field in this pop up box where they can list a name of a General. Merely a simple customization kind of like all those flight sims that let you paint your plane - they don't affect game play but just add to the level of control and customization for the player.

3) Back on supply and recruitement. I agree it should take 2-3 turns of an army being without its supply lines to have any affect on its performance. I also agree that an army should be able to foriage the land which it occupies. All the depth and complexity mentioned in this thread I would suggest that they be included in the backend (or background), or allow the player to turn them "off" so they don't have to fiddle with it if they don't want to.

my two cents,

DrPerrier

[ElmoTheElk]

It's been to long I replied in this post... I am pretty busy lately, but here some quick remaks for all of you...

Simplification
Sorry Kroeze to say this, but I still cannot beleave why such great detail is needed.
First of all the player needs to manage his armies as quick as possible since he will not have endless time to do say. There are more things to do to keep up his empire. Espacially compared to civ2.
Second, what makes you thing the player wants such detail. I know there are a lot of die-hard silmulation fans who want absolute control, but I'm thinking more large personally. I really hope someday, there will be as much regular players of ggs as a commercial game has these days. It's not realistic that ggs will be the top of strategic computer games, but we might give it a try! I am more wanting to make a game that is actually played then a game that is played by a group of 200 die-hard sim-games players.
Third; is the player really going to use such detailled functionality? If we give him only limited modification control, we are back to civ2 or smac or so style and the player will never know it's so detailed. And we wasted our time on it then...

Supply and recruitment
As I said earlier, I agree on the term of 2 to 3 turn before an army suffers from it. I don't think tough we have to hard code any kind of detial with it, like increasing hunger, diseases and weaker morale. It's just 1 very small feature after all.
If an army is foriaged it would take longer. About 4 or 5 turns seam reasonable to me.

Army management
I agree with you DrPerier on this issue. We should make it possible to add, merge, delete, etc. armies as the player likes and sees fit.

Losing experience
Don't really care about this, but if you guys want to see this feature in, I won't disagree. I am not the one who will have to program it.

Depots
I think I like this idea. I say we go for it. Depots can (has to?) be build by the player like improvements I think. That will be queit fun.

But, as always, try to convince me! I am easily convinced by difficult words and programming slang, so try me... Enough for now.

Elmo

[Nath]

As I said earlier, I agree on the term of 2 to 3 turn before an army suffers from it. I don't think tough we have to hard code any kind of detial with it, like increasing hunger, diseases and weaker morale. It's just 1 very small feature after all.
If an army is foriaged it would take longer. About 4 or 5 turns seam reasonable to me.

I thought the 2-3 turns was to take into account the fact that the army would be able to forage about for its food for a while. Isn't one turn meant to be a few months or years or something? If so, 4-5 seems like a lot.

[Darkstar]

Nath, as I understand it, the Player Turn is 1 year. There might/will be sub units in a turn for how things are handled internally, but that's nothing to worry about from the Player/User point of view.

Yes, I would think that 4 or 5 YEARS with no resupply or replacements is asking for a bit much.

Elmo... Depots are just one more nodal system. No problem.

Customizing Armies is a good idea. Easy merger and splitting, sounds fantastic. A definate must.

And you should make the game you WANT to play. Allowing the player to set his level of involvment is always welcome... allows you to play different kinds of "games" for your different moods.

If only 200 people play the game, Elmo, that would be a good success, for something that is FREE. Shoot for fun. Not bragging rights or pride. Games are meant to be fun.

But what do I know? I'm just the newest village idiot.

[VetLegion]

NewGame's The General)

I am glad someone else then me played it. You just reminded me to download the newest version now.

[ElmoTheElk]

Hum yeah, 4 years is too much. Let's keep 1 year (turn) for non-foraged armies and 2 for foraged ones. But we can always change that later now. Let's rather discuss something usefull...

I don't know or any of you ever played cEvo (civ evolution)? It's a civ2 clone that has sme nice extra features. Why I mention it is that it already includes unit development as we were discussing it now. And it seems a very good system. It's open for the plyer to design, but with sincere limitations to it. You give 'points' to some features (we could make them melee/etc.) and the tech level specifies the multiplier, so you are somewhat limited in that. It seems very good. As attachment is a view of the sceen with some explanation (ripped form the help file).

Let me know what you think about it.

Elmo